Jew Eat Yet?

President Bush’s Enormous Sacrifice

I do not seek out information about George W. Bush. I guess if I were a really good citizen I would follow his every move, listen to every broadcast, and read up on every decision he makes. But the truth is I’ve been avoiding any mention of him for years because I just can’t take it. I hate to sound like one of those hysterical liberals who start frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of our fearless leader’s name, but I guess that’s what I’ve become during these last seven years. The sight of Bush or the sound of his voice instantly raises my blood pressure and makes my skin crawl. It was George Bush’s presidency that ultimately made me stop watching TV news for fear of getting too big a dose of his preening stupidity. I now get most of my news from various Internet sources, I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched a morning or evening news program.

Every time I clicked onto my various news sources yesterday, I kept seeing this crazy headline about Bush. I avoided it all day but I finally bit the bullet and read the article in full last night. Oh. My. God.

Titled “I Quit Golf Over Iraq War,” the article relayed information from an interview with the President that was released yesterday.

US President George W. Bush said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year. “I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal,” he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf,” he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them.”

Are you fucking kidding me? If he wasn’t such a detriment to this country in every way I’d almost feel sorry for the guy. Even when he is supposedly trying to show compassion and empathy for people whose lives have been horrifically altered because of his own mistakes, his efforts are so misguided that they seem like a cruel joke.

When pressed further, Bush said he traced his decision to the August 19, 2003 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the UN, got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life. And I was playing golf—I think I was in central Texas—and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it anymore to do,” said Bush.

His last round of golf was apparently on October 13, 2003. What an incredible history-making gesture. What an awe-inspiring leader. What a crock of shit. At first I thought this report had to be a fake item from the editors of “The Onion” but no, it’s as real as can be, this is Bush’s noble sacrifice to the countless families who have lost their loved ones during his ill-planned crazy war. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that it would be impossible to find a single family member of any man or woman killed in Iraq who would feel even slightly moved by Bush’s sacrifice. Not one. In fact, I would guess that many feel insulted by this ridiculous gesture.

On the other hand, I’m sure there were many people in the Bush administration who were relieved when he decided to abandon the golf course since he often made a fool of himself there, and not just because of his speedy golf games.

For example, just before beginning a game at a Kennebunkport golf course in 2002, with his driver in hand, Bush took a moment to condemn an overnight suicide bombing of a bus in Israel that killed nine people.

“I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers,'” Mr. Bush said on the first green of Cape Arundel, at 6:15 a.m. '”Thank you. Now watch this drive.” Without the slightest pause, Mr. Bush turned to his game—and hit his first ball into the rough. Mr. Bush then took a mulligan, a free shot, teeing off nicely. The president let out a sigh of relief.

Too bad he can’t give the dead soldiers in Iraq a “mulligan.” There were some other pearls in yesterday’s interview that made my stomach turn such as the ass-kissing reporter’s question about the President’s so-called faith:

Q: Mr. President, we know you're a man of intense faith. And I wonder, what was a moment in this room over the past eight years when you needed that most?

A: Michael, I'd say daily. I mean, part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord. And that's a daily occurrence. Obviously there's been some tough moments in here. When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that's a tough moment. If you're a faithful person you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through. On the other hand, there is a knowledge that the good Lord can comfort during these moments of grief. And that's what I ask for in my prayer.

There’s more, but I can’t go on. I’m not proud of the contempt I feel for the man in the White House. I’ve lived through all sorts of troubled administrations but I never had so little respect for someone in such a high position. It saddens me when I hear Leah and my young nephews disrespectfully deriding the President in no uncertain terms even though I realize that they’re obviously getting those views in part from the adults in their lives. Sometimes I give them a half-hearted speech about respecting the office, if not the man, but it’s hard to rebut any of their anti-Bush tirades. When I was my daughter’s age I’d often rail against President Nixon, but Tricky Dick was certainly a political genius and great world leader compared to Mr. Bush.

Oh, how I look forward to January 20, 2009, when our sacrificing commander-in-chief can return to the golf course where he belongs.

“FORE!”

The Judy Miller Show: Season Four

Today would have been my mother’s 74th birthday. I never meant to make her birthday an annual event on this blog but she is always on my mind on May 10th, just as she was for her 71st,  72nd, and 73rd birthdays. All three of the photos above are of my mother and my grandmother, the first one taken in 1937, the second one ten years later when my mom was the age my daughter is now, and the third ten years after that in the late 1950s. My grandmother died in 1990 and my mom in 1999.

I’m feeling particularly sad today and part of me is quick to judge those feelings as somehow dysfunctional, that it must mean I’m living in the past and refusing to move on. Can I please give myself a break? Especially since tomorrow is also Mother’s Day? Not to blame my mom, but I do believe this tendency towards self-criticism and especially my reluctance to accept my feelings is part of the legacy I inherited from Judy Miller. Though extremely beloved by her family and friends (and my mom had more close friends than anyone I know), she was terribly self-critical and very uncomfortable openly expressing any “negative” emotions. When my mother was feeling sad or scared or in pain, she didn’t like to show those feelings, even to her loved ones. As I write that I suddenly wonder if maybe this was more true with her family than her friends, maybe she was more comfortable expressing those parts of herself with other people in her life.

It was only in the last few weeks of her life that my mother and I broached topics that she never wanted to discuss such as what was going on for her in the early 1970s when her marriage ended and we ended up living with my dad. Throughout most of her life, we all colluded in the steadfast avoidance of this topic. I, for one, never wanted to acknowledge my own feelings back then, partly because of my strong desire to “protect” my mom from her own sadness and guilt about a really difficult period in our lives. I mistakenly thought, as I think she often did, that acknowledging the existence of certain feelings was tantamount to a condemnation of others, that I didn’t have a “right” to my actual feelings and just needed to suck it up. “Everyone did the best they could” was my whitewashing mantra, and while that was certainly true in the bigger picture, it was a convenient way to erase all of my feelings like a magnet being held up to my internal hard drive.

Even as I write this psychobabble, I can see how my thoughts about my mom travel through the careening twists and turns of my own screens and lenses before they are able to make their way into print. I’m aware that nothing I say about my mom or my family or my childhood on this blog could ever be considered any kind of expository “truth.” If I were reading such ruminations by other family members I’m sure I’d be fascinated but I know I’d also be horrified by the “inaccuracies” or assumptions they make as they interpret past events. So be it.

Still, there’s one bit of expository truth that I have no trouble imparting and I know I’d get no arguments from anyone on the planet. And that is how much my mother loved all of the people in her life and how much she was loved by us. No interpretations necessary on that front, thank God. A big part of my sadness about my mom’s absence is the lost opportunity to get to know her in a deeper way. As I see my thoughts about her changing over time, I find myself wondering what it would have been like to have other frank conversations with her, I find myself longing for the opportunity to more fully understand her. But maybe that concept is just as illusory. Maybe if my mother had lived to be 100 years old we still never would have been able to cross certain emotional chasms.

There are so many questions I’d like to ask my mother if she were still here, so many things I’m curious about. Being an archivist at heart, I pore over every image and document that pertains to my mother’s life looking for clues about what made her tick. They are of limited use, of course, and without her here many of them are dead ends because no one else remembers anything about the photos. I’ve shared many of the choicest pearls of the finite Judy Miller Collection on this blog, but every once in a while a new document appears that provides a tantalizing glimpse into another part of her life and brings up many more questions that I long to ask her.

After my computer was stolen last month (containing a big chunk of my family archives), I did a firewire transfer from my sister’s MacBook of many of the photos and documents we scanned last summer. Included in that cache was a letter from the early 1950s that I don’t remember seeing, a letter that my mother sent to her sister, my Aunt Bobby, during my mother’s brief stint as a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It’s pretty benign as far as such letters go, but to me it’s like a Holy Grail in its banal depiction of a day in the life of 18-year-old Judy Karoll. I made a vow last year that I’d never again print a letter from one family member to another without permission but I’m breaking that vow since I can’t imagine that my aunt or mom would object (slippery slope alert!).

What a thrill it is to see my mother’s distinctive handwriting. I’m also struck by her use of green fountain pen ink, an affectation I adopted as a kid without realizing where I got it from. My grandmother, no OCD hoarder like the rest of my clan, threw out most of her children’s papers decades ago. I have no idea how this letter survived and I am riveted by every word:

Dear Bobby,

You don’t know how glad I was to hear from you. I never realized how much I could miss you.

Doll, I’ve got so much to tell you I don’t know where to begin. Here goes—

Even tho I’m homesick I still think C.U. is wonderful, the kids around here are just the greatest. I’ve never seen such friendly people in my life. Of course, sometimes they can be a little bit too friendly! I’m still recovering from a dose of campus friendliness (?) I experienced yesterday. My girlfriend Diane (more about her later) and I were calming walking down “Frat Row”—the block where most of the Fraternity houses are located—when all of a sudden we were grabbed from behind by six boys screaming “Moat Party” at the top of their lungs. Before I relate the rest of this sad story I’ll have explain the lovely moat system at C.U. As you well know, Colorado is very dry country and they’ve got these little irrigation ditches running through the ground to keep everything moist. In some places the ditches are very wide and these deals are called moats. Unfortunately, most of them are located near the frat houses and the boys have a simply peachy keen time with them. To continue, these six boys grabbed us and threw us face first into the moat. We were just drenched and both of us had on white blouses you could see right through. Before long there were about 50 boys just standing there laughing at us!! That was enough for one day but no—as we walked past the Zeta house a whole bunch of Zetas grabbed us, sat on us, and painted big “Z.B.T’s” on our Levis. (I’ve already got one pair with ZN, Sigma Nu, on them.) We found out later that all this roughhousing is only allowed during the first month of school—cute!

Why is it so thrilling for me to get this funny glimpse into a typical day in the life of my 18-year-old mother? I wonder if she’d remember this incident today. How weird is it to imagine my own mom being “attacked” by these obnoxious Frat boys (and obviously enjoying it!) with the knowledge that all of those raucous boys are now in the mid to late-70s if they’re alive at all. What would my mother’s life have been like if she had stayed at the University of Colorado (which, true to this description, was voted the country’s #1 Party School in 2003)? Instead, when she went to Chicago for spring break that year she met my dad, fell instantly in love, and never went back to Boulder. My parents were married that summer and had my brother Bruce nine months later, all before my mom turned 20. And so it goes.

What am I hoping to extract from all these documents and photos? Do I view them as talismans that will help me reach into the portals of time and touch a world that no longer exists? It doesn’t work, of course, and yet I remain grateful for every morsel I can find. I wish I could ask my mother about her past experiences but what’s way more painful to realize is the fact that we are no longer creating new memories together, that she is not able to have a physical presence in our current-day lives and the lives of our children. Maybe we can never really understand our own parents, especially while they’re alive and we’re still interacting with them in the physical world, but I know I will continue my quest to know myself a little better through my evolving understanding of my mother.

I miss you, Mom. Happy Birthday and Happy Mother’s Day.

The Most Famous (But Forgotten) Woman in the Movies

I accidentally found a connection this weekend between our neighbor’s house and one of the most famous women in the history of the movies. You probably know very little about her, but if you’ve seen a lot of old movies her name should sound very familiar—it was featured prominently in the credits for literally hundreds of films during the 1930s and 40s. I’m not talking about obscure films, either, this dame was intimately involved in the production of many A-list classics including “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” Can you guess who I’m talking about? I’ll give you a hint by mentioning a few of the other films in her credits. See if you can figure out the common link between them: the 1937 version of “A Star Is Born,” Marlene Dietrich’s campy “Garden of Allah,” Shirley Temple’s “The Little Princess,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, John Ford’s “Drums Along the Mohawk,” “Northwest Passage” with Spencer Tracy, Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” starring Judy Garland, “National Velvet” with Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney, and the June Allyson/Margaret O’Brien version of “Little Women.” Got it? What do all these movies have in common besides stellar casts and superb direction? I’ll give you one last hint—she also worked on “The Red Shoes,” “The Boy with Green Hair,” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” That’s right. These were all movies made in brilliant three-strip Technicolor.

In 1902, Natalie Dunfee married Herbert T. Kalmus, a physics student at MIT. Over the next ten years, the couple moved to Berlin, Zurich, and then back to Boston. Natalie studied art while her husband began experimenting in their basement with the newfangled notion of color film. Up until that time, of course, all films were in black and white except for some hand-colored sequences that were very expensive to produce and not that effective. Using her art background, Natalie helped her husband with his project. In 1915, they formed the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation. A few films were filmed before 1920 using Kalmus’s two-strip Technicolor process but these were difficult to make and project and the company lost a lot of money. They stuck with it, though, and ten years later Herbert and his partners devised a much more successful process where three separate strips of film were used to record color. Unfortunately, the Kalmus’s marriage had collapsed in the early 1920s but for some reason Herbert and Natlie kept their divorce a secret and continued to live together. In 1927 they moved to Hollywood to try to sell Technicolor to the studios. The first full-length film to be shot in Technicolor was the costume drama “Becky Sharp” in 1935. It was the best use of color up until that time but they hadn’t yet worked out all the kinks. One critic at the time said that the actors in “Becky Sharp” looked like “boiled salmon dipped in mayonnaise.”

From the beginning, Natalie sold herself as the “color consultant” for the tricky Technicolor cameras and as part of the contract with Technicolor, the studios were obligated to hire her for every film that used the process. Herbert Kalmus continued perfecting his invention and just a few years later the Technicolor cameras were photographing some of the most vivid and gorgeous colors ever seen on celluloid.

My personal favorite from this era is “The Adventures of Robin Hood” starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. In my opinion, this film epitomizes the glory of early Technicolor with breathtaking, almost surrealistic hues. If you’re in L.A. in a few weeks, you might want to attend a special screening of a restored print of this film by the Motion Picture Academy. I’d like to give Natalie Kalmus all the credit for this exquisite use of Technicolor, but it turns out she was a constant thorn in the side of director Michael Curtiz since she kept insisting he tone down the color palette used in the film. She constantly railed against a “super-abundance of color” and warned the director that the colors he was using would make the film look like a comic book. “But that’s what we’re going for,” he replied.

While she clearly had expertise in the area of color, Kalmus did not always ingratiate herself to the creative community in Hollywood. The all-powerful directors couldn’t handle the fact that they were supposed to take advice from this woman. According to one reporter writing about Technicolor in the 1940s, “It seems to many of them that she is too interfering, too insistent on things being done the way she wants, and determined not to allow experiments to be made.”

“Natalie Kalmus was a bitch,” movie pioneer Allen Dwan said bluntly in a 1980 interview. But he also added that many people complained about color in the early days. They said it hurt their eyes. The Technicolor cameras were so unwieldly and the process so tricky that it made sense to have consultants from the company that would help the filmmakers get what they wanted. The problem is, the talented folks in Hollywood soon caught up with the challenges of Technicolor and yet Natalie was still around telling them what they could and couldn’t do.

Producer David O. Selznick had already worked with Technicolor by the time he made “Gone With the Wind” and he couldn’t stand Natalie Kalmus’s interference. “The Technicolor experts have been up to their old tricks of putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of real beauty,” he wrote in one of his famous memos. “If we are going to listen to the Technicolor experts, we might as well do away entirely with the artists that are in our own set and costume departments and let the Technicolor company design the picture for us.” Kalmus tried to have her way with Selznick but he resisted at every turn. The final straw came one day when Natalie insisted that the mulberry wallpaper in Scarlett O’Hara’s bedroom set wouldn’t work in color. Selznick used all his influence and forced Technicolor to send Natalie to England to work at the company's English headquarters for the duration of the film. But she still got a big credit on “Gone With the Wind.”

Vincente Minnelli was a master visual stylist in his own right, and he clashed horribly with Kalmus on the set of the vividly colorful “Meet Me in St. Louis.” “My juxtaposition of color had been highly praised on the stage, but I couldn’t do anything right in Mrs. Kalmus’s eyes,” Minnelli wrote in his autobiography. After Natalie interrupted the shooting of the Christmas dance with the edict, “You can't have one sister in a bright red gown and another in bright green,” he just rolled his eyes and ignored her. “I depended on my own instincts from then on,” he wrote.

Besides alienating directors and studio art departments left and right, poor Natalie’s personal life was imploding faster than Scarlett O’Hara’s. When she found out that her ex-husband Herbert was planning to remarry, she launched a public campaign of vilification to get more money out of him. She admitted to their 1921 divorce but then claimed that they secretly remarried in 1923 and were still legally wed. In 1948 Natalie was still pulling in a $32,000 yearly salary from Technicolor. She received an additional $7500 a year in alimony and a monthly stipend of $675. Not bad. But she claimed she needed $3000 a month from Herbert to live properly.

Natalie’s lawyer was a young ambitious attorney named Paul Loewenthal who lived in the house directly next to ours. He fought vigorously for his client but the judge had little sympathy for Kalmus’s plight, especially since she was never able to produce proof that she and Herbert were still married. Loewenthal claimed that his client was in “dire distress,” unable to meet her living expenses, and had to pawn a lot of her jewelry and other possessions. She claimed that her husband was guilty of cruelty, desertion, and infidelity, and that she deserved half of his $3,000,000 estate. Kalmus’s complaints got more dramatic with every passing week and the papers ate it up. She claimed that Herbert predicted that he’d one day “see her crawling in the gutter begging for food.” She named at least five women she said he was carrying on with while pleading with the court to recognize her as Kalmus’s legal wife. They wouldn’t, and Natalie went ballistic, carrying on in court, claiming the case had given her a heart attack, and exhibiting frequent histrionics. Herbert soon went on the defensive, publicly stating that his ex-wife had repeatedly threatened to ruin his business. "She called me a stinker, a liar, and a crook, and she insulted the women I had a perfect right to entertain. She continually threatened to murder me. She said she would shoot me in a dark alley."

After another appeal was rejected, Natalie lost it in court. “I can’t stand it!” she sobbed to the judge. “Oh, God! Oh, God! Won’t any court dare to give me justice?” She continued fighting the court’s decision for several years and kept losing case after case. In 1954 she was back in court when our former neighbor, Paul Loewenthal, sued his former client for $250,000 in unpaid attorney fees. Oy, poor Natalie could not catch a break. Several months later things got even worse for the one-time Technicolor maven when she wrote a nasty letter to her judge in the Loewenthal case and he cited her for contempt of court, sentencing the 73-year-old woman to five days in the county jail. “You can get neither justice nor sympathy in these courts,” she cried. “I’d like to go to jail so I can publicize the injustice that has been done to me.” Way to get on the judge’s good side, Natalie! “You’ve had justice,” the angry judge roared in response. “You won’t believe me. You won’t believe your own attorneys. You won’t believe the District Court of Appeals, so I will have to take heroic measures.”

What a saga. Does it sound like I’m joining the anti-Natalie pack? I’m not, really. Some people have suggested that Natalie’s entire role in Technicolor was bogus, that she was just Herbert’s albatross and he insisted she be hired on every Technicolor film just to get her off his back. I don’t think that’s true. This weekend I went to the research library at the Motion Picture Academy and read through a bunch of material Kalmus wrote in the 1930s about the use of color in film. I believe the woman did have expertise to offer in this area but unfortunately had other problems that prevented her form being flexible or changing with the times as the creative talents in Hollywood figured out how to use Technicolor to its best advantage. I understand why the directors in the 30s and 40s came to dread Kalmus’s interference but I’m sure they also had their own biases against women in any position of power. Early on, Natalie served as the cinematographer on several films with the clumsy Technicolor cameras and did a great job. It would be many decades before another woman assumed that role.

Following her series of lawsuits, Natalie Kalmus was summarily dismissed from all Technicolor activities. She then dabbled in designing wallpaper, furniture, and for a few years in the early 1950s, a collection of strange and beautiful television sets made out of fine wood with names like La Traviata, Rio Rita, and Madame Butterfly. She even produced a short-lived TV series starring Gloria Swanson.

Sadly, Kalmus soon slipped into obscurity and wasn’t heard from again until she was spotted at the age of 85 in a hospital near Boston. A 1964 article in “Variety” described Natalie’s birthday celebration in the hospital as a sad affair “with no one on hand to share her birthday cake except the corps of sympathetic nurses who presented it to her.” Kalmus reportedly “wept tears of joy” when the cake was wheeled in. “There were no cards, no messages, no calls from her many friends and onetime associates in the film business.” She died a year later.

Why do such stories fascinate me so? My interest is only heightened when the subject is almost completely forgotten, as Natalie Kalmus is. My Dream Job would be spending whole days in libraries and special collections rooms unearthing such stories. This one’s got it all—young love gone bad, innovation that affected the entire movie industry, a secret divorce, encounters with the most brilliant artists in motion pictures, a series of salacious trials, and a once powerful woman tossed out onto the junk heap. I can see someone like Kate Winslet masterfully playing Natalie Kalmus in a biographical film from her marriage in 1902 to her death in 1965. What a “comeback” that would be for Kalmus to find one of our best actresses winning an Oscar for playing her. Natalie herself supplied the perfect title for such a film. She once told a reporter that in her work with Technicolor, she was playing “Ringmaster to the Rainbow.”

Daughter of the Commandment

My daughter became a woman over the weekend. Oy, that sounds wildly inappropriate. What I meant to say is that she became a Bat Mitzvah, literally a “Daughter of the Commandment,” and thus a full-fledged member of the Jewish community. Between preparing for Leah’s Bat Mitzvah, recovering from my computer theft, and trying to tread water with some crushing work deadlines, I feel like I haven’t written in this blog since my own Bar Mitzvah in the Summer of ’72.

Poor Leah. She had to hear endless horror stories about my Bar Mitzvah every step of the way as she studied for her own Jewish Coming of Age. Happily, the contrast between the two events could not have been more pronounced. I attended a fairly strict Hebrew School for four years and studied Torah with an elderly rabbi who scared me to death and constantly yelled at me that I wasn’t up to snuff. Leah never went to a single day of Hebrew School. She only decided late last fall that she wanted to have a Bat Mitzvah and started working with our wonderful rabbi, Lisa Edwards, and a private Hebrew tutor last December. But this wasn’t your typical Hebrew tutor, this was a young woman who was part Auntie Mame, part Sarah Silverman, and part Hannah Montana. I’d often come home during a lesson to find Leah and her tutor Abby laying on her bedroom floor screaming with laughter and talking about boys.

Leah learned how to read Hebrew in a miraculously short time and chanted her Torah portion beautifully on Saturday morning. I have no words to describe how moving it was for me to watch Leah up on the bima (the “stage” of a synagogue) reading from the Torah. It was hard not to think of her ancestors in the shtetls of Poland including her great-great grandfather Itshe Meyer. Of course Itshe Meyer and his generation would no doubt have been horrified to see a 13-year-old girl touching the Torah (my orthodox family did not go in for Bat Mitzvahs), not to mention the fact that the service was being officiated by our lesbian rabbi. But as much as I respect my ancestors, I say pish-tosh to that Old World thinking in this case, Leah’s Bat Mitzvah was one of the most moving ceremonies I’ve ever witnessed.

One incredible moment came during Leah’s speech when she was talking about her Torah portion. Because her Bat Mitzvah was held on the last day of Passover, it veered from the chronological reading of the Torah and included a retelling from the Book of Exodus. As Leah was relating what that story meant to her, she started singing a song from “The Prince of Egypt,” one of her favorite films. As she sang Miriam’s words, “There can be miracles, when you believe…” she was suddenly so overcome with emotion that she broke down in tears. After several moments passed and she saw that Leah was having a hard time going on, our cantor Fran burst in from the side of the bima, continuing the song exactly where Leah left off. The rest of the congregation then joined in, and Leah soon followed and was able to continue her speech. It was one of the most beautiful shows of community support and love I’ve ever seen. Kendall compared it to the scene in “Casablanca” when the French people sing “La Marseillaise” at Rick’s bar.

At Leah’s insistence, all four of her parents spoke: me and her mom Sophie, as well as Kendall and Sophie’s husband Mark. I wish I could reprint all of their speeches in their entirety, they were so moving and beautifully delivered. The rabbi noted how most kids at our synagogue have either two mommies or two daddies, but Leah was especially lucky, she had two of each! Members of all our families were present. The largest contingent flew in from France and it was the first time I saw many of Sophie’s relatives since our 1993 wedding in Paris. But on this morning we were all one joyously diverse village—multi-lingual, living on several continents, Jewish and Gentile, gay and straight, Democrats and Republicans (well, okay, mostly Democrats).

I came clean during my speech about how I constantly tormented Leah with tales from my own Bar Mitzvah and how grateful I was that her experience was so much more memorable and positive than mine had been. In truth, I remember very little about the day of my Bar Mitzvah except that at the last minute someone handed me a speech to read at the synagogue, that there was a slab of halvah at the party in the shape of Mt. Sinai, and that President Nixon went on TV that night to say that John Dean had investigated the Watergate matter and found that no one in the White House was involved in any way. Oy on all three counts! I truly believe it was the trauma of being forced to read someone else’s words on my Bar Mitzvah that led me to become a writer and that this even played a role in my decision to start this blog.

For me, becoming a Bar Mitzvah was an ending. “Thank God that’s over,” I said to myself, “enough with the Judaism already.” It wasn’t until I was an adult in my late 20s that I rediscovered how much I love being Jewish, and how much participating in Jewish ritual means to me. I hope that Leah sees her Bat Mitzvah not as an ending, but as a beginning, an entry into a world that connects us to our ancestors but also resonates to everything we are about today. Leah chanted her Torah portion in her bare feet and our rabbi pointed out how Miriam went barefoot so that she could be closer to holy ground. I love how comfortable Leah has always been in our synagogue—that’s it’s a place for her to take her shoes off and relax, not a scary building where she has to wear shoes that are too tight and be on her best behavior.

The party was great, too, Leah’s mom did an unbelievable job of planning a very classy event that beautifully reflected Leah’s sensibilities. And the food was extraordinary. I think I’ve had two dreams since then about the cheese table alone. Mmmmmm.

I chanted part of Leah’s Torah portion with her on the bima and I so enjoyed it. Instead of my constant kvetching about my own Bar Mitzvah, which had the misfortune of coming smack dab in the middle of my parents’ divorce, I want to reclaim that ritual and have a new Bar Mitzvah some time in the next few years. Wanna come? I can’t promise a gigantic slab of halvah or the chopped liver ferris wheel I saw at one terrifying Bar Mitzvah many years ago, but I can assure you I’ll be way more into it than I was in 1972!

The Eighth Commandment

Can anyone name the Eighth Commandment? I’ll give you a hint: it comes right after “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and before “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Maybe you recently watched Cecil B. De Mille’s gloriously campy “The Ten Commandments” to honor the late Charlton Heston or to prepare for the Passover holiday which starts tomorrow night. I always loved the scene in that film in which God hands down the commandments to Chuck via a very flashy Technicolor lightning bolt that carves the words into stone tablets hewn from Mt. Sinai. Give up? The Eight Commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.

I was at a meeting in our synagogue on Tuesday night. Our rabbi had pulled out two of the synagogue’s Torah scrolls including one that had been pilfered from a synagogue in Czechoslovakia by the Nazis and was recovered after the war from the storehouse of Jewish items that were destined for the massive museum Hitler had planned (and had Albert Speers design) that was to showcase the artifacts of a completely extinct culture. We were reading from the Book of Exodus that tells the story of the Ten Commandments being given to Moses. At about 9:00 pm I went to my car to get a book of Torah commentary that was in my back seat. My car was parked on the side of the building in a well-lit side street just off busy Pico Blvd. At 9:30, I left the synagogue and went to my car, only to discover that in that short time, someone had smashed in the driver’s side window of my car. There was so much glass on the street it looked like one of the Ten Plagues had hit the neighborhood. With a sinking feeling in my chest, I went to open my trunk. Backpack containing my MacBook computer, my daughter’s video camera, and all sorts of other personal items: Gone. Gym bag containing clothes, shoes, and expensive Bose headphones: Gone. Green canvas Marshall Field’s bag containing all of the hard copy page proofs for my current freelance book project: Gone. These proofs represented months of work and the pages were marked up with hundreds of comments written by me, the authors, and professional copyeditors and proofreaders. This was the only complete set and I was planning to copy the pages the next morning and send them off to the designer so she could enter all the corrections.

I was in such a state of shock that I just stood there gaping at my empty trunk and the glass that was everywhere. WHY was I so stupid as to leave all that stuff in my car? I never figured anyone would think there’d be anything valuable in my old beat-up 1994 Honda Civic and that parking space felt so safe right next to the building. WHY, after my computer crash last fall, had I still not adopted a regular back-up routine? The loss of my computer, with endless personal and work files, photographs, and videos was huge, but I was more worried about the missing canvas bag since that would effectively decimate the project and, at the very least, kill any chance of making the swiftly approaching publishing deadline. “Why, Rabbi, why?” I asked, but despite the drama I knew it was just “stuff” that was lost and I was frankly glad we hadn’t walked out a few minutes earlier to see the theft in progress. If I saw someone bashing in my window, I’m sure I would have yelled out and who knows what could have happened? After talking to the police, I removed as much glass as I could from my car seat and drove home to send up an S.O.S. to my work colleagues. Kendall had her own car there and she and our intrepid rabbi started wandering the streets of the neighborhood to see if any of my items had been discarded by the criminals. Sure enough, they found several paperback books, three of Leah’s undeveloped disposable cameras, and a stack of manuscript pages I no longer needed that were also in my trunk. What was the overall lesson I was supposed to learn from this experience? Detachment from things? Acceptance? Living in the moment? Stop being so trusting and start backing up my freaking computer?

Then a miracle happened. At 1 in the morning, we got a call from a police officer who had no idea I had filed a theft report earlier in the evening. “Did you lose a canvas bag?” he asked? My heart skipped a beat. “Does it say Marshall Field’s on the side?” I asked, holding my breath. “Yes it does. Can you come pick it up right away?” When I got to the Wilshire Station, Officer Chi came out with the bag that contained all of my pristine work documents and other items I had forgotten were in there like a Netflix video and several CDs. Officer Chi explained that miles from the scene of my break-in, a woman had called the police after a speeding vehicle had hurled something out of its window onto her lawn. She thought it might be a bomb so she called the authorities. When Officer Chi retrieved the bag he dug through the contents and found a faded carbon of a FedEx airbill that contained my barely visible phone number. Did I mention how much I love the LAPD?

Still no computer or other lost items, of course, and I don't expect to see them again. I’m grateful that no one was hurt as a result of this dumb crime. I will NEVER leave valuables in my car again, and finally, after my second total loss in five months, I will institute a regular back-up plan for my data. The important manuscripts are now copied and safely in the designer’s hands in New York. Maybe the thieves looked into the bag and threw it out the window because they didn’t want to keep these wonderful literacy techniques from the children of America…

Now I just wish Charlton Heston were alive and still in his prime. He’d be the perfect choice to play Officer Chi, my own personal Moses.

Happy Passover!

The Best Show on TV

Is it strange that my favorite new TV show is over 50 years old? Just last week, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin released 65 full-length, unedited videos from Mike Wallace’s groundbreaking but short-lived show, The Mike Wallace Interview.” This is the first time these amazing half-hour programs have been available to the public since they first aired in 1957 and 1958, and they are a treasure trove. I’ve watched about 20 of them but I can’t wait to see every single one.

We’re all familiar with Wallace’s “60 Minutes” persona that has struck fear into the hearts of people who have crossed his path on that show for the past 40 years, from world leaders to crooked lawyers to obtuse bureaucrats, but watching these amazing black-and-white broadcasts allows us to see young Mike cutting his teeth as an interviewer whose main objective was never to suck up to his subjects or keep them comfortable.

We tend to be smug when we compare our current sensibilities with those of the repressed Eisenhower era, but I’m here to say that Wallace’s show was far more incisive, authentic, and hard-hitting than anything on the air today, including “60 Minutes” and Charlie Rose. After listening to decades of sycophantic talk-show hosts and attention-deficit-disorder-length sound bites, some of the exchanges between Mike Wallace and his guests on this show will blow your mind.

Wallace’s very first guest was actress Gloria Swanson. “The Mike Wallace Interview” premiered on April 28, 1957, with the following words:

WALLACE: Good evening. What you’re about to witness is strictly personal. A direct, undiluted, unrehearsed, uncensored interview. My role is that of a reporter. Tonight we go after the story of a famous and controversial woman. We will discuss motives, opinions, and the record. I've asked my guest to express her true feelings. Her opinions are not necessarily mine, the stations, or my sponsors. Whether you agree or disagree with what you will hear, we feel that none will deny the right of these opinions to be broadcast. My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Philip Morris.

Oh yes, cigarette smoking was a big part of the show, thanks to Mike Wallace’s and many of his guests’ penchant for chain smoking and, of course, the fact that Philip Morris (and later Parliament cigarettes) sponsored the show. The inane commercials that Wallace reads during the breaks are preserved in these priceless kinescopes and are a marked contract to the sophisticated repartee between Mike and his guests. From the start, Wallace seemed to revel in his role as provocateur. Here’s how he began his interview with the 58-year-old Swanson:

WALLACE: The thing that I’m after, Gloria, is this: what I’m after is why you’re out of pictures. Now we’ve had other maturing actresses who have maintained their popularity, perhaps even increased it despite their age—Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford—could it be that they have made up for their loss of youthful glamour with their acting ability, while you were unable to do that?

Ouch. In the first minute of watching his show, I was ready to hate Mike Wallace for his distorted characterization of Gloria Swanson’s talents and his lack of gallantry. But Swanson held her own and it certainly made for riveting television. One common feature to the shows was the awkward moment when Mike would pull out some unflattering remarks about his subject and ask for a response:

WALLACE: I’d like to read you a criticism of your acting during your hey-day, by columnist John Rosenfield who says: “Emphatically, Gloria Swanson was not the best-dressed woman on the screen, nor was she the most beautiful, nor the best actress. She tackled her big dramatic scenes with all the nuance of Betty Hutton singing “You Can't Get a Man With a Gun.” For pique she shoved out her long under-lip, for grief she threw an arm over her face and buried both in a pillow.” What about that?

SWANSON: Well, I suppose that comes from the silent technique in which one had to express their feelings and thoughts with their face, rather than with lines and it’s quite possible that’s true. I never read all of my notices, let’s put it that way. Perhaps I should have—it might have helped me a great deal. I think I was more known for personality, perhaps. I don’t mean my own personality, but the things that I did than for my acting. It was one of the thorns in my side because I felt even when I was at the top of my career that I’d never done anything to deserve acclaim.

I couldn’t have been more impressed by the way Swanson dealt with Wallace’s cringe-producing questions. She was candid about her life, marriages, and career, and watching their very real interplay made me realize how watered-down every such interaction is today. Swanson refused to budge when Wallace tried to make her say that Hollywood was a den of iniquity in the 1920s. When Mike read a quote that he got by phone that morning from her former co-star, silent star Francis X. Bushman who said that he’d take Marilyn Monroe over Swanson in her prime any day of the week, Gloria let out with a spontaneous and hurt, “Did he say that?” But Wallace also allowed Swanson to talk freely about many of her passions and even solicit donations to help spread the word about an alleged cancer cure she was touting.

Although actors by no means made up the majority of his interview subjects, Wallace seemed to delight in putting them on the hot seat. Here is how Mike introduced Diana Barrymore, the actress daughter of screen legend John Barrymore, who was struggling with alcoholism just like her famous dad. Try to imagine Jay Leno introducing a guest in this way with the camera fixed on that person’s reaction to every word:

WALLACE: Diana Barrymore was the child of an extraordinary couple, actor John Barrymore and Michael Strange, a society woman turned actress and writer. But after a promising start on Broadway and in Hollywood, Miss Barrymore swapped her birthright for alcoholism, three tempestuous marriages, and professional failure. Now, though, she is attempting a stage comeback following the publication of her controversial autobiography, “Too Much, Too Soon.” Diana, first of all, I’d like to know why you wrote a book that reveals intimate and sometimes shocking things about yourself, your family, and your friends. Time Magazine, back on April 15th, suggests one possible reason for your writing the book. They said, quote: “If a former glamour girl is down about, shaken by the DTs, and degraded by three nightmare marriages plus numerous vulgar affairs, how can she rehabilitate herself? She simply writes a book about it all.” What about that, Diana?

Oy. Diana Barrymore’s interview is one of my favorites. I had barely heard of her before I saw this show but found her to be honest, sad, sweet, and tough at the same time. The poignancy of this interview was ratcheted up quite a few notches by the knowledge that a few years later she would fall off the wagon and take her own life. But here, Wallace’s tough questioning did not seemed to phase the troubled actress one bit, and she refused to allow the host to put words in her mouth, interrupting him when he stated that she was blaming everyone but herself for her problems. At times during the half hour, I sensed an odd sexual vibe between the host and his subject. After Diana said that cooking was one of her favorite pastimes, she invited Wallace to come to her apartment for dinner. “May I bring my wife?” he asked, coyly? “You certainly may,” she responded in a tone that implied a lot more was going on than a simple invitation.

It’s amazing that some of Wallace’s guests were allowed to talk freely on national television. They included such controversial figures as Eldon Edwards, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Earl Browder, the former head of the Community Party in the United States, David Hawkins, a young soldier who defected to Red China when he was taken prisoner during the Korean War, and James Eastland, a segregationist racist senator from Mississippi.

There are fascinating interviews with iconic figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali, Pearl Buck, Abba Eban, Aldous Huxley, Adlai Stevenson, and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Imagine the apoplexy the sponsors must have had listening to Sanger openly talk about abortions and birth control on the national airwaves in 1957. As much as Mike Wallace tried to get her on the defensive, she was unflappable.

WALLACE: Let's look at the official Catholic position on birth control. I read now from a church publication called “The Question Box.” In forbidding birth control, it says the following: The immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible—that is, by birth control—it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what’s wrong with that position?

SANGER: Well, it’s very wrong, it’s not normal, it’s the wrong attitude toward marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.

WALLACE: Well, the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?

SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.

WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?

SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship, has nothing to do with bearing a child. It’s secondary.

WALLACE: But you agree that according to the tenets of Catholicism, they rule that birth control violates not only the church’s position, they say it violates a natural law, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Now the violation of the natural law—you certainly can take no issue with natural law as the hierarchy of the Catholic Church regards it…

SANGER: Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it’s untrue and I think it’s unnatural. How do they know? I mean, after all, they’re celibates. They don’t know love, they don’t know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.

You go, girl! But considering the times, I’m surprised Sanger wasn’t openly stoned on the streets! Can you imagine a public figure in any field being so honest on television today? But Wallace also tended to bring out a sense of humor in people that were not known for it, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Frank Lloyd Wright to Margaret Sanger. During one of his ridiculous commercials on the Sanger show, Wallace said the following:

WALLACE: As much as I enjoy smoking during the interview with Mrs. Sanger, I believe I enjoy this cigarette most right now—of course, Philip Morris is easy to enjoy and the taste is natural. There’s mildness here, too. Today’s Philip Morris has what I call “a man’s kind of mildness,” there’s no filter, no fooling, no artificial mildness, because there is nothing between you and the tobacco itself. Which is why I say get with Philip Morris, probably the best natural smoke you ever tasted.

Coming back from the commercial, just before the end of the show, Margaret Sanger openly mocked him in the same serious tone she used to decry the Catholic Church:

SANGER: Mr. Wallace, I’ve never smoked, but I’m going to begin and take up smoking and use Philip Morris as the cigarette for me to take!

Kendall and I recently went to a screening of the movie “Bonjour Tristesse” starring David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and the haunting Jean Seberg in her second film role following her disastrous debut in Otto Preminger’s “Saint Joan.” Here’s how Mike Wallace introduced the 19-year-old actress on his show on January 4, 1958:

WALLACE: Jean Seberg was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, population approximately twenty-three thousand. Today, she stands on the threshold of a motion picture career that could make her an idol of millions, but Miss Seberg’s Cinderella story is more than just grist for the movie magazines. It says something about America’s dreams and values. Let’s try to find out what. Jean, first of all, let me ask you this. Last spring, after a deluge of publicity, you were hailed as a bright new star, and then, after your picture “Saint Joan” was released, you were roundly panned by the critics in your very first film. You wait now for your second film “Bonjour Tristesse” to be released around the country and a lot rides on it for you. Obvious question: How does it feel?

SEBERG: Naturally, I want people to like the film. It would be abnormal if I didn’t.

It’s amazing to hear Seberg speak openly of her vulnerabilities, how hurt she was by the response to her first film, and how unprepared she was for a life of public scrutiny. But even at such a young age, she holds up amazingly well to Wallace’s relentless pursuit:

WALLACE: You have no real professional background. You are a pretty girl, but not the prettiest girl in the world. Otto Preminger found you and in a sense played God with you. If you had it to do again, would you rather learn your job first, and become a star or celebrity second, or would you be perfectly content to do it the quick and the easy way that you’ve done it?

SEBERG: Well, first I’ll disagree with you if I may because it certainly hasn’t been an “easy way” for me, because in a sense I’ve been taking my acting lessons in the most public possible way.

Again, Seberg’s honest, vulnerable demeanor takes on added poignancy with the knowledge that her life would become more turbulent and troubled as time went on and that she would eventually take her own life at the age of 40.

WALLACE: I suppose that a good many of us, at one time or another in our lives, would rather envy Jean Seberg. She is young and attractive, she’s already had sudden fame, some fortune, and the chance for great success. What she said tonight and the way that she said it would seem to indicate that Miss Seberg’s Cinderella story will have a happy ending. In just a moment, I’ll bring you a run-down on next week’s interview with the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1957.

These shows are gems that should be preserved forever in a time capsule of American life in the 1950s. It’s fascinating to hear Mike interview people who were clearly superstars at the time but whose names and reputations have not withstood the test of time. Elsa Maxwell was one such subject. I was both fascinated by her and shocked by her arrogance:

WALLACE: Elsa, first question. You’re recognized as the “Queen of International Party Making,” you have dined with the great and the near great but just recently, you drew up a list of what you call a “Nightmare Party.” The guests include Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, and Nikita Kruschev, and I’d like to know why you think—seriously now—why you think that would be nightmarish?

MAXWELL: Well, to me they are three of the most horrible people in the world that I could imagine. They’re horrible on the eyes, they create a horrible atmosphere, these three…

WALLACE: Now, here are people of accomplishment, you may admire or not admire their accomplishment, but they certainly are accomplished people. They would have interesting chatter I would imagine to make...

MAXWELL: I would know what they’d say before they spoke.

WALLACE: Like for instance?

MAXWELL: Well, for instance, Elvis Presley would never speak, he’d just move his pelvis around, that’s all, and I’m not interested in pelvises or their movements and I’m tired of this young, utterly unattractive man without any talent whatever, with a face horrible with that lank hair that falls down that drives young women all over the country in some—some sort of an ecstasy which is…

WALLACE: Well now wait. You say he has no talent and yet I think that you’ll agree that he has been taken into the bosom of America in a certain sense and has been very, very well paid for it, apparently.

MAXWELL: Well, do you think that means talent to be “taken to the bosom of America?”

Oy, there’s someone whose bad side you don’t want to be on. Maxwell openly admitted that she often chose dinner guests for her famous parties based on their looks alone, avoiding intelligent people. “I must have beautiful women and handsome men. If you have a gathering that is gracious and lovely, they’re flowers, they’re decorations they’re living decorations. I’m a perfectionist, that's why I ask them.” At least she was honest! And despite her admitted homeliness, no one could accuse Elsa Maxwell of having a poor self-image.

MAXWELL: Eventually, I think I shall be an evangelist.

WALLACE: An evangelist?

MAXWELL: An evangelist.

WALLACE: Well—I’m—I’m not sure that I quite understand. An evangelist on whose behalf or for what development?

MAXWELL: For myself to help others.

WALLACE: This will be the new Elsa Maxwell cult?

MAXWELL: There might be, you can never tell.

Hollywood celebrities who were interviewed by Mike Wallace on this show include Kirk Douglas, Diana Dors, George Jessell, Bennett Cerf, Dagmar, Rudy Vallee, Oscar Hammerstein, Tony Perkins, Peter Ustinov, Lillian Roth, and stripper Lili St. Cyr. All great interviews but his participation with showbiz folk started to taper off as the show went on. As Los Angeles Times columnist Cecil Smith wrote on December 1, 1957:

Mike is the current reigning favorite of television’s personality kids, sort of the Howdy Doody of the moment. Riding as high as he is, Mike should be clicking his nimble heels and emitting an occasional whoopee. He’s gone a long way for a onetime unctuous spieler of the sudsy commercials of soap operas. However, he’s not. He has a major frustration. Hollywood won’t talk to Mike.

The average film and TV star of this celluloid city has no interest in facing Mike’s lethal barrage of questions. Most of them see no reason to appear on his show, despite the publicity attendant to its high national rating. Why? “What’ll it get me?” said one ranking star thoughtfully. “He’ll dig back into stuff that’s been dead for years and bring it up again. The basic commodity of his show is shock. Why should I get the Wallace hotfoot so he can titillate the public?”

Celeste Holm, who said she’s been asked several times to do Mike’s show, said: “Almost everyone has some foolish or unpleasant incident in his life he’d like to forget. These are the things Mike fastens onto. I’m not ashamed of anything in my past but there are private things that I wouldn’t like to talk about today. Certainly, not in several million living rooms.”

Too bad since the few stars that did appear with Wallace left a record that is so much more interesting than the tripe released by press agents. Ultimately, the show did prove too real, too controversial, and too dangerous for the network. In 1958, after ABC lost a libel suit and had to pay the Los Angeles Chief of Police $45,000 because of some derogatory remarks mobster Mickey Cohen uttered on Wallace’s show, and following a controversy about some cuts made to an interview with John Foster Dulles, the network cancelled the show, making these prescient 1957 thoughts of New York Times television critic Jack Gould come true:

It is because Mr. Wallace has made a notable contribution in widening television’s horizons in the realm of forthright discussion that his conduct on the air is of considerable concern. If Mr. Wallace falters, the medium in all probability will shy away from vigorous interviewing and the set owner will be the ultimate loser.

But read Gould’s further evaluation of the young Mike Wallace:

There is a tension and a combativeness which have not shown Mr. Wallace at his best; he may disown any inclination to sensationalism but his approach may create the environment in which it thrives.

Mr. Wallace perhaps should recall that his local success came slowly, not overnight. By building carefully on a sound journalistic foundation he could achieve a lasting place on national TV; his present risk is that by pushing too hard he may prove to be only a fleeting fad.

Fleeting fad? Over half a century later, Mike Wallace is still going strong. Next month, on May 9, the veteran journalist will turn 90.

Seven Weird Facts About Myself (Like I Ever Write Anything Else?)

One of my favorite bloggers, the prolific Annie Gottlieb, tagged me for a meme in which you share seven random or weird facts about yourself. As she said about herself and the bloggers she tagged, that’s ALL we already do—share random and weird facts about ourselves, it’s hardly a novelty! Still, I was intrigued by her seven facts and wanted to know more details about each one. And boy, were they random—from mentioning the decades of journals sitting in her brother’s basement (I’d be so tempted to dive into those babies every time I went downstairs to do laundry—at the very least I’d have to check out the entry Annie wrote in 1959 on “the day the music died”) to the home euthanasia of her sick cats that she performed herself (she had to shoot the stuff directly into her beloved cats’ hearts—oy!) to her mastering Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” at the age of three.

I’m still swamped with a freelance editing gig so this comes at a perfect time since I hate not writing in my blog more often and yet I can't seem to make it happen. So here are some truly random, truly spontaneous facts about myself off the top of my head. This post is going to be pure stream-of-consciousness. Can we have a therapist standing by to analyze what kind of stuff comes up when I don’t edit or censor myself? I’m going to TRY to keep it as short as Annie’s but you know that brevity has never been my strong suit. Here goes:

1. I made my TV debut in 1966 on the dance show, “Kiddie-a-Go-Go.” I was seven years old and went to the Channel 26 studios (remember those high-numbered, static-filled “UHF” channels that existed before cable?) with my sister and her friend Debby Becker. Or maybe “Kiddie-a-Go-Go” was on Channel 32? Anyway, I remember everything about that experience and thought of it when I saw the movie and play versions of “Hairspray” because it wasn’t too far off from “The Corny Collins Show.” Our black-and-white kiddie “American Bandstand” was hosted by a sexy Chicago personality named Elaine (Pandora) Mulqueen who wore (gulp!) a clown outfit but, if I recall correctly, also performed part of each show in a very hot, mod little mini-dress that was straight out of “To Sir, With Love.” I had no idea how to dance back then (or now) but was more fearless in my youth. At the beginning of the show I spied one of my fellow dancers doing a very easy number called the “salt and pepper” where you moved as if your hands were salt and pepper shakers and I stayed with this one dance for the whole hour. Oh, what I’d give to see a video of our performance. Through the miracle of YouTube, I was able to watch a “Kiddie A-Go-Go” clip yesterday for the first time in 40 years, and it was exactly as I remembered it (I can’t make the damn clip work today or I’d embed it). I was surprised by the integration (lots of black kids dancing, but of course, never black and white kids dancing together) and impressed by the psychedelic moves of Chicago’s hipster seven to ten-year-olds! Oy, what a relic. I didn’t appear on TV again until the early 70s when I modeled a purple leisure suit in a commercial for my grandfather’s clothing store. Mercifully, no record of this exists today,

2. I’ve been stopped by police and nearly arrested three times in my life, all before the age of 21. The first time was in a card shop called Harmony Hall where I was innocently shopping one day with my friend Lee. I must have been about 14 years old and was a complete goody-goody despite my best efforts to look like a hippie with my long hair and torn jeans and fringed suede jacket. I guess the local coppers thought I looked like trouble because out of the blue they pulled me over and made me empty my pockets. I was outraged by the injustice of it but didn’t feel like I could object. When they saw that I hadn’t shoplifted anything they not only didn’t apologize, they barked at me to get out of the store. Damn those fuzz. The second time I was running down the street trying not to miss the city bus that would take me to school. It was several years later and my hair was even longer. I had a backpack on and assorted ripped denim apparel and I guess I looked like I was fleeing a crime because a squad car pulled in front of me and demanded that I stop. I was even more outraged this time, especially as I saw my Kimball Avenue bus come and go without me. The cops inspected my backpack and let me go with a sneer. It had only been a few years since the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and I viewed them all as Mayor Daley’s thugs. The third time I was stopped I was in college and waiting for a friend on a street corner near downtown Chicago. I was leaning up against a building and looking for my friend among the people who were walking by. I guess the police thought I was looking for a different kind of “friend” and told me to get lost. This was just after some born-again Christian had stopped to try to talk me out of a life of prostitution. OY. I wonder what I was wearing that day.

3. I didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 27 years old. Because I was younger than all my classmates, having skipped third grade, I wasn’t old enough to take Drivers’ Ed with my high school class. I meant to take it the following year when I turned 15, but never got around to it. With every passing year I felt more awkward about learning how to drive with those “kids” and it never happened. At one point my dad tried to teach me in his giant black Cadillac and that traumatic experience set me back another 10 years. I was very embarrassed about my lack of a license and just didn’t want to discuss it. Besides, I could get anywhere on Chicago public transit. It wasn’t until I get a job out here in California in 1986 that I had to learn how to drive, buy a car, and drive clear across the country all in a span of SIX DAYS!

4. I have a pathological fear of large flags. It’s crazy, I know, but whenever I see huge flags I get extremely nervous and feel like I’m having a panic attack. Regular-sized ones don’t bother me, just the oversized display flags. Needless to say, I haven’t attended any opening ceremonies for the Olympics. Is this some memory from a past life when I was taunted at a Hitler Youth rally? I pretentiously named my fear “drapeauphobia” using the French word for flag.

5. I’ve fainted dead away twice in my life. The first time was when I was in 8th grade and volunteering at Channel 11, our local PBS station. My friends and I got a “job” blowing up helium balloons for the fundraising auction that the station was having. We were thrilled to be inside a TV studio and we were constantly ingesting the helium so we could talk like Munchkins. It must have eventually gone to my head because at one point I just fell to the ground, narrowly missing the huge helium tank on my way down. The second time was in the early 1990s when I was working as editor-in-chief at a nonprofit in L.A. We were in the middle of creating a social studies-based arts-infused curriculum called “Different Ways of Knowing” which we had to finish in time for the upcoming teacher workshops. We worked until midnight many nights and all through the weekends and I was exhausted. On the way to work one morning, I stopped for a bowl of oatmeal at DuPar’s in Farmer’s Market. As soon my oatmeal came I felt sick and couldn’t even look at it. I threw a few bucks on the counter and ran out of the restaurant. As I walked past the large DuPar’s windows in front of patrons gorging on French Toast and hotcakes, I went down like a lead balloon, my papers flying in the wind and my head hitting the concrete. Some of the stunned customers ran to my aid and escorted me back into the restaurant. I was so embarrassed by the spectacle I had made (and I was sure that most of them thought I was on drugs) that I refused further offers of help and insisted I was fine. I waited a few minutes and then drove myself to work as planned. Was I nuts?

6. I believe in reincarnation. It’s not something I think about on a daily basis but I have had many experiences that make me believe that I’ve lived before. No, I don’t think I was anyone famous but a renowned trance channeller in the early 1980s told me I was once a son of the famous Lakota Indian leader Crazy Horse, that I had been guillotined during the French Revolution, and that I spent one lifetime as a Scottish writer named Lewis Spence. I do believe I have a past-life connection to the man who built our 1909 house, Henry C. Jensen. Will this admission come back to haunt me when I’m running for public office?

7. I was once part of an international Palestinian truck-smuggling ring based in Germany. Did I already tell this story? It’s an odd one, and of course I wasn’t really working with an illegal middle eastern group that was funding the PLO, but for a brief moment in Munich, Germany, people thought I was. I was living in Paris in 1979 doing my Junior Year Abroad and loving every second of it. In the spring, during one of the French college students’ numerous strikes that year (yes, the students went on strike!), my friend Kathy and I decided to hop on a train to go to Bavaria. I was fascinated by Munich ever since the horrific events of the 1972 Olympics there and Kathy spoke the language, albeit with a heavy New Jersey accent. On the train we were approached by a much older gentleman who seemed very interested in us and offered to help get us a cheap place to say in the German city. He claimed his brother-in-law owned a fantastic hotel in a neighborhood that was a little off the beaten track and he could get us a great rate if we’d accompany him there. INSANELY, we agreed, although we immediately had second thoughts when we reached the very run-down, ominous-looking area. We wanted to shake our new friend, who was becoming a big annoyance because he never left our side, but we didn’t have a lot of money and we were way too timid for our own good, afraid of hurting his feelings, believe it or not, so we got a room next to his at the flea-bag hotel. During the middle of the night we heard a furious knocking on our door that scared the bejeesus out of us. Some shady characters informed us, in broken German and English, that our truck would be waiting for us in the morning and explained how we’d just need to drive it across the border. They asked us if we had all the right papers and we just stood there dumbfounded. We found our “friend” the next morning who said it was just a misunderstanding, not to worry about it. We then realized that we were staying in Munich’s Palestinian ghetto and that everyone in this hotel was involved in some kind of smuggling activities. Still, we were too wussy to get rid of this guy who insisted quite forcefully that he go with us on our planned trip that day to the Dachau concentration camp. We finally ditched him that night. It’s a wonder I made it through Europe alive. Kathy and I also went to Moscow that year with a bunch of French students and there we did break a few international laws. But I’ll save that for another meme…

I’m now supposed to tag seven people which I’m reluctant to do but I’ll see if any of the following bite: Mining Nuggets, Here in the Hills, siblings Telecommuter Talk and Ian’s Blog, Division Street Princess, and the dormant-too-long Mother Courage and Tequila Mockingbird.

Update: Kids, you're in luck. Here's the clip from "Kiddie-a-Go-Go" and it looks so familiar I'm not sure you won't spot me somewhere in that crowd of gyrating pre-teens. I remember the sponsor, Mickelberry Meats, and while I remember the opening when the host jumped out of the box, I just now got the joke: Pandora's box. Oy, what drugs were these people on? Enjoy...

Up in Smoke

Just before the California Primary, after a lot of soul searching, I changed my vote from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. There were lots of reasons for my switch but I don’t need to go into those and I feel no urge to persuade others to follow suit. There was one fact about Obama that had nothing to do with my defection from Camp Hillary, but was such a breath of fresh air that I wonder if it might have pushed me over the edge in support of the candidate if I hadn’t already gotten there on my own. And that is Barack Obama’s matter-of-fact admission that yes….he inhaled.

I know Obama’s discussion of his past drug use is not a new revelation. In his 1996 memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” he wrote candidly about his struggles during adolescence. “Pot had helped,” he said of those years, “and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though.” What? When I recently reread those sentiments, I was flabbergasted. Could it be that we’re finally entering an era where political candidates can admit they’re human beings and still get elected? It is one of the many joyous changes that separates this upcoming election from all those that came before it.

As much as I admired many things about Bill Clinton’s Presidency (especially when compared to the insanity of the last eight years), his public stance about his own youthful marijuana use (“I didn’t inhale and I never tried it again”) was absurd and insulting, even though it was politically understandable. His wordplay evoked the dysfunctional dance that exists between our anointed leaders and those of us who place them on pedestals. We demand that these role models exhibit none of the human foibles that we all exhibit daily. If they have any warts (as they certainly all do), we insist that they hide them out of view, at least until after the election. It’s a tired game. When they say ridiculous things like they tried pot but didn’t inhale, we play along. They know they’re lying, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, we know they know we know they’re lying, but until recently we all felt duty-bound to play by these rules in every facet of public life. To admit to any past indiscretions with unabashed honesty and candor was seen as a death knell for a serious politician. Remember Thomas Eagleton?

Of course, this verbal shell game is not limited to public officials: we all do it to some extent. Every family has its own rules about which subjects are taboo or what pre-programmed responses we are supposed to use to answer questions about difficult topics. Mine sure does. If we choose to veer from these unspoken rules and speak the truth as we see it, all hell can break lose, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the willingness of the participants to deal with their feelings in a productive way. When I was 11 years old, my parents went through a very ugly divorce. My father has a lot of guilt about this traumatic period. He has probably asked me a hundred times whether I suffered any pain or lasting effects as a result of the fights, lies, and general acrimony of those years. “Absolutely not,” I always replied. “I understood that you and mom were doing the best you could under the circumstances and that you loved all of us and never wanted to cause us any pain.” While the second part of that answer is certainly true, I’ve recently started changing the first part of my programmed reply. Thanks to therapy and a growing awareness that acknowledging my actual feelings will not be fatal to myself or others, my current response to my father’s query (and I swear to you, he asks this question at least once every few weeks) sounds more like, “Hell, yeah, the divorce had a huge impact on me! I do understand that you were both very young and doing the best you could, and I know how much you loved us, but those years were very traumatic. I wanted to escape from all the pain so badly that I developed the ability to shut out my feelings and crank up my fantasy life, whether it was believing that I was one of “The Waltons” or one of the singing Von Trapps or hoping that my real parents, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, would soon arrive to carry me away from all this chaos.” Okay, my actual reply to my father may not be that long or include blog links, but I do answer a lot more honestly these days instead of saying what I think I’m supposed to stay. When I first started fiddling with the family covenant in this and other areas, I received some panicked responses, a few cries of treason, and some general discomfort on both sides, but I have to say that going off-script and actually stating what was real for me felt very liberating and ultimately led to much closer relationships with my family members.

Could the same be true for people in the public eye? Is it possible that we have matured enough to be able to hear people say things that feel less palatable than the scripts we feed to our candidates and want fed back to us in return? The bullshit lines that are interrupted every ten seconds by rote applause? How thrilling it is to hear someone speak their unabashed TRUTH, whatever it is. When I heard Michelle Obama’s line about being proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, I immediately understood the context and appreciated the thought, yet I also cringed at her spontaneity, knowing that the Fox News crowd would soon be condemning Michelle as unpatriotic and other such nonsense. And they certainly did. For the next several days, Cindy McCain introduced her husband on the campaign trail with the comforting words, “I always have been and will always be extremely proud of my country.” Really, Cindy? ALWAYS? There are so many reasons to be grateful for this country, but we certainly have countless examples of shameful moments to ponder as well. Cindy, were you proud of this country’s long history of slavery or of government-sponsored violence and racism? Were you proud of Joseph McCarthy and his minions who destroyed the lives of many innocent people? Oh wait, let’s stop, I don't want to go off on a crazy tangent and you don’t need to hear me reiterate the very true but clichéd maxim about how what we should really be proud of in this country is our ability to recognize our faults and freely talk about the things we’re not proud of. In any event, I say “Right on, Michelle Obama!” even though I’m sure her husband’s people told her to zip it after hearing that unpopular comment.

I don’t think Barack Obama is some kind of Divine Deliverer sent from on high. I know that despite his refreshing honesty and candor that he’s still a politician, still wants to get elected, and still worries about what he says and how it’s received, but I greatly admire his courage in veering from the expected script, such as his recent spectacular speech in response to the controversy about his former pastor. There will be heaps of dirt dug up on Obama before November and I wish him luck in not insulting our intelligence by hiding behind the same old creaking comments that we expect from politicians. Aren’t we all eager at this point to hear the candidates express real opinions, even if we take issue with some of them, rather than just a steady diet of platitudes and God Bless America pablum?

To be clear, while I am exhilarated by Barack’s admission of youthful drug use, I’m obviously relieved that such behavior is long behind him and that he recognizes how destructive it was. By being honest about it, he can help others who suffer from similar travails SO much more than he could with silly comments about whether he inhaled or not. I desperately want all of the candidates to trust us enough to be that honest with us, but I also understand why some of them won't take that risk. With our salacious desire to condemn people for making real statements from their heart instead of delivering the test-marketed party line, we have shown over and over again that we haven’t earned such trust. But I think that is starting to change.

It’s a constant struggle, though. I know that Obama has been a long-time cigarette smoker. Even though such a fact has nothing to do with his ability to be President (in years past it would have seemed freakishly odd if people in high positions didn’t smoke!), I have such an emotional thing about smoking (after watching my mother and grandmother die way too young from smoking-related illnesses) that I would not be comfortable seeing the President of the United States smoking in public. I’d worry that it might have some kind of influence on young people in this country. Obama has said that he’s finally kicked his habit and I have no reason to doubt him, but in this case, if he IS still smoking, I think I’d rather he do it in private and not admit to this weakness. Yikes, I guess that’s pretty hypocritical on my part, huh?

Maybe I’d change my tune if he discussed his struggles with nicotine and how hard it was for him to lick this addiction. In any event, I think his own people would go ballistic if he was ever photographed lighting up a cigarette on the campaign trail (unless access to the photo could be restricted to members of the tobacco lobby). On the other hand, contemplating a smoking Obama in the White House compared to our current cigarette-free Commander-in-Chief, I think I’d happily FedEx a few cartons of Marlboros to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Skyping Anne Boleyn

Hello, Anne? Yes, Your Majesty, I got your message, I’m sorry it took me so long to call you back. I’ve been super busy with this huge project for work and I—excuse me? Yes, of course I remember that I wrote you last year on your 474th wedding anniversary but I’ve been working so hard lately I feel like I haven’t written in my blog since the English Reformation. Ha-ha, the Refor—sorry? Blog? Oh, it’s short for “weblog,” it’s a kind of online repository of a person’s thoughts and—whoa, calm down, Your Highness, I can’t understand a word you’re saying!

Oh, I know, right? What did I tell you—it’s “All Anne Boleyn, All the Time” down here these days! Yes, my wife and I finally saw “The Other Boleyn Girl” last week—you saw it, too? Huh? Mary, Queen of Scots, showed it to you on Blu-Ray? Wow, I’m surprised to hear you two hang out considering your own daughter had her—what’s that? Yes, I enjoyed the film. Hey, what do you think of the B