This is how Charlie woke up this morning, happy as a clam.
That is, until we forced him into the requisite baby pumpkin costume.
I wonder what babies think of this strange holiday where
they are dressed in some crazy outfit and a parade of terrifying goblins and
ghouls come to their door. Can you guess what Leah’s costume is this year?
She’s “Where’s Waldo?” Halloween was always a huge deal in our house. My mother
would get so into the holiday I’d start to wonder whether the medieval belief
that redheads were witches was true. She would decorate every inch of our
house and organize the spookiest Halloween party in the neighborhood. I
especially remember her scaring the bejeesus out of me and my blindfolded
friends by passing around disgusting human entrails such as cantaloupe “eyeballs” and
cold spaghetti “veins.” Every year my mother delighted in becoming the ugliest
witch possible. She’d spend days dying sheets black in huge pots and fashioning her
putty nose, bushy eyebrows, and hairy moles.
Below is my mom before her transformation and then just
after. How many times have you seen a witch making a business call? Notice the
cigarette in her hand in both pictures—truly the spookiest thing of all
considering she would eventually die of lung cancer.
We are bracing ourselves for a huge onslaught of
trick-or-treaters tonight. Everyone knows by now that Kendall gives out
full-size candy bars (she just bought 300 of them—oy!) so at this point I
wouldn’t be surprised to see buses of costumed moppets unloading in front of
our house.
Here is seven-year-old Leah following in her grandmother's bewitched footsteps. When we were little, we didn’t stop trick-or-treating until we had several
grocery bags filled to the brim with candy. It's a wonder I have any teeth left. Luckily, Leah was always into the social aspects of Halloween more than the coma-inducing sugary
ones. She recently wrote a post on her blog decrying the holiday for giving
girls her age an excuse to dress inappropriately. Indeed, the Halloween party
held at her school a few nights ago looked like a dress rehearsal for a Cecil
B. DeMille production of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Leah looked so innocent in her
Waldo costume. Not that my actress daughter is incapable of looking far older
than her 14 years. Yesterday she received her final lice treatment (talk about
spooky ordeals!) which involved yet again forcing a tiny comb through her
voluminous red curls. As a result, her hair transformed into a gigantic cumulous cloud of auburn frizz. Instead of freaking out about it, Leah did what any seasoned thespian would do. She slapped on some make-up, grabbed one of her mother's dresses, and organized an impromptu photo shoot. Is this supermodel below really
the same little witch from a few years ago? Yikes!
Here is Charlie celebrating his half-birthday is an outfit
hand-knit for him by the talented Ellen Bloom of L.A. Is My Beat. My son is one
of the best-dressed babies in Los Angeles, certainly light years ahead of his
dad!
It is so hard to believe that six months have passed since
that day last April. We are so very grateful to have Charlie home with us now
and that he is thriving after six major surgeries and so many months in
intensive care, but I’m still feeling some of the after-effects of the PTSD
that resulted from that terrifying time. This morning I was doing some work on
my computer at a coffee shop on Larchmont when the clock struck the
times our sons were born: 9:46 for Oliver and 9:48 for Charlie. Oliver was
first and he was significantly bigger than Charlie. During Kendall’s short
pregnancy, Oliver always dominated the ultrasounds, healthy and active
and blocking (protecting?) his brother from view. For a while we knew that
Oliver was a boy but he kept moving so much he obscured a good look at his
Charlie’s parts.
But for whatever reasons, our rambunctious, full-of-life boy
was not strong enough to survive premature childbirth. We still don’t know what
caused Kendall to go into labor at 24 weeks, there were none of the usual
infections and Oliver’s extensive autopsy showed that his body and organs were
developing perfectly. But from the second he was born, the doctors struggled
mightily to keep him alive. None of the lines were going in as easily as they
were on Charlie. Nothing was working and with each passing hour more extreme
measures were considered and then rejected as being too invasive in his fragile
state. “Let’s wait until morning and see if he stabilizes” was the constant
refrain. He died less than 12 hours after he was born. We miss him every day.
If I had to remember one moment from that horrific day, it
would be when I had what I'd have to call an out-of-body experience in the operating room. Minutes
earlier Kendall and I were in another room discussing the fact that Kendall was
going to have to spend the rest of her pregnancy (weeks or even months, we naively thought) at Cedars.
What?! We couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t we just go home and take it easy? We
tried to bargain with the doctors. “Well, we’ll take another look tomorrow and
re-evaluate,” they said as they left the room. Suddenly the contractions
monitor that Kendall was strapped to went completely berserk. The needle I’d
been watching left the usual position and bounced literally off the
chart. And it stayed there. Kendall doubled over in pain and collapsed on the bed causing me to run into the hall and start screaming like Shirley MacLaine. The doctor who had just examined
Kendall came back in the room. She put her hands between Kendall’s legs and
shouted in panic: “I’M TOUCHING THE BABY’S HEAD! KENDALL, KEEP YOUR LEGS
TOGETHER AND DO NOT PUSH!” Kendall was wheeled out immediately and I was told
to stay put in the now empty room. The next thing I knew I was pushed into a
surgical gown and thrust into the operating room.
The first thing I saw was Kendall on the operating table,
her emergency C-section just completed and her internal organs in full view. I
spun around to the other side of the small room and saw Oliver and Charles,
each on his own surgical table with teams of doctors working around them. Both
babies were a frightening color but only Oliver had bruises over much of his
body. His sweet little mouth was black. Charlie was covered in bubble wrap and
despite the horror of his appearance, someone told me that he was doing okay.
This was when I traveled out of my body. I was desperately trying to understand
what was happening but it was just too much to take in. I felt woozy and like I
was in a dream and I started to bounce about the room like a pinball, coming
close to several of the busy doctors who shouted at me to move back. I felt my
body rising like a balloon to the ceiling of that cramped room and looking down
at myself and the teams of doctors working furiously on my wife and two sons. Our OB/GYN
had finally arrived and she was stitching Kendall up. I looked over to Oliver and
Charles and couldn’t believe what I was seeing or how such tiny, alien-looking
creatures could possibly survive. I felt like if I didn’t stop rising above them I would keep
drifting past the confines of Cedar-Sinai and into space. “STOP! Those are your
children,” I repeated to myself over and over again. “Your sons. There is your
wife. They all need you. Come back into your body. You have to come back.” As I
repeated this mantra, I began floating down into the room and back into my
body. I still couldn’t process what was happening but I knew I had to be there
for my family.
That’s about all of that day that I can handle right now.
There’s a lot more but I’ve learned during the past six months when I need to ground myself in the present. We lost so much that day but we also gained our
wonderful son who would face endless travails over the next 137 days. I wish I
could say that I was always filled with confidence and certainty that Charlie
would be coming home with us, but that would be a lie. In those early weeks, I
couldn’t allow myself to think such a thing and it made me painfully
uncomfortable when anyone said anything about it, even Kendall. But as we got
to know Charlie, his wonderful personality, and his incredible drive to
survive, the love I felt for him trumped any fears I had about his chances for
survival. I unabashedly threw myself into hopes and prayers for the time
when he’d be home in our arms. And now that time is here as we ecstatically
mark his half-birthday. Never getting to know Oliver’s unique personality other
than his playful in-utero antics is a sadness we’ll have to live with for the
rest of our lives. But Charlie brings us so much joy and happiness that his
brother’s sacrifice was definitely not in vain. Happy Half-Birthday, my
beautiful sons.
Soupy Sales died on Thursday. That name is such a part of my childhood I feel compelled to pay tribute. Truth be told, and I
guess this is awful to say so soon after his death, I never really “got” Soupy Sales when I was a kid.
Today I can see how his physical comedy and wink-to-the-audience hi-jinks paved
the way for all sorts of comedians and children’s entertainers that would
follow, but back in the 1960s I just didn’t think he was very funny. I was
unmoved by his pie-throwing antics and low budget puppets. I was a loyal fan of
“Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” and I didn’t think Sales could compete with the
Kuklapolitan benchmark, not that he was trying to. There’s no question that
Soupy Sales was a phenomenon in the 1960s. And
it wasn’t only among kids. College campuses would practically empty out when
his daily show was on. He held onto his goofy persona well into senior
citizenhood, and like many comedians, occasionally got a chance to show off his
acting chops in serious roles, often with a dark twist.
Looking back into the archives and knowing what a huge hit
hit he was in various TV incarnations, I was surprised to see how wary the
critics were of Soupy Sales from the very beginning. The first mention of
him in the New York Times is a sour review from July 1955:
The kiddies, subjected to one abominable television pitch
after another, have a new performer trying to woo their favor locally. He is
called “Soupy Sales” and he made his local debut on Channel 7 last night.
The show was loud, unimaginative, and annoying. It
introduced hand puppets that behaved like seedy relations of those appearing on
“Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” the program for which “Soupy Sales” is a summer
substitute. At times, “Soupy” himself suggested a combination of Pinky Lee and
Jerry Lewis at their most obstreperous.
For children, too, the prescription would seem to be long
hours in the fresh air away from video as long as the summer lasts.
But what could we expect from mid-1950s television, right?
All TV back then was sophomoric and unsophisticated compared to today, yes? NO!
I was flabbergasted to look at the TV listings from the day in July 1955 when
Soupy premiered in New York and realize how much better television was 54 years
ago. Take a look at this sampling and tell me if you think today’s idiot
programmers would put most of these shows on:
2:30—Youth Wants to Know. Rep. W. Sterling Cole, member of
the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the House Armed Services Committee
will talk to teens.
3:00—Frontiers of Faith. The relation of churches to urban
and rural life will be the theme discussed.
6:30—You Are There. “General Washington’s Farewell to His
Officers,” CBS correspondents covering.
7:00—Report from Geneva. Latest news from the peace
conference with Howard Smith, Edward R. Murrow, and Eric Sevareid reporting.
8:00—Variety Hour. Jack Webb, Janet Leigh, Peggy Lee, Ella
Fitzgerald, guests.
8:00—Producer’s Showcase. “The Four-poster,” Jan de Hartog’s
romantic comedy about married life. With Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.
8:30—Music ’55. Yehudi Menuhin and Duke Ellington will be
the guests.
8:30—Concert. Leontyne Price, soprano, and William Warfield,
baritone, guests.
9:00—Television Playhouse. Calder Willingham’s “Incident in
July,” with Maureen Stapleton. A young married woman acquires a destructive
affection for a seventeen year old boy. With Dick York.
9:00—“Man With Vengeance.” Story about a film director
intent on making a superb motion picture while seeking revenge on an actor.
With Barry Sullivan and Luther Adler.
10:00—Television Theatre. “Death of Billy the Kid,” with
Paul Newman, Frank Overton, Michael Conrad, and others.
10:00—Name’s the Same. Panel show with Clifton Fadiman,
moderator. Hildy Parks, Mike Wallace, panelists.
10:30—What’s My Line? Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf,
Arlene Francis, Fred Allen, panelists. John Daly is the moderator.
10:30—The Search. A new approach to the diagnosis and cure
of deafness in children. Dr. William Hardy will explain the procedure to
viewers.
There were so many great shows on that week. Every night featured several original dramatic productions for television
starring the biggest stars of the day along with endless variety shows, classic
sitcoms, concerts, serious news coverage, and cultural explorations. True, the
commercials were mostly ridiculous, and some of the sitcoms would seem
hideously dated today, but the overall quality of programming seemed shockingly
high.
But back to Soupy. Despite my aversion to some of his antics, he definitely pushed the envelope. A few years later, he
was given a night-time slot which featured classy folks like Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, and Shirley MacLaine getting pies in the face. Here’s an L.A. Times review of that 1962 show:
According to reports seeping back from the rest of the
country, viewers tuned to the ABC network last Friday evening are still in a
state of shock.
That was the night ABC unleashed a character named Soupy
Sales. Here in Southern California we are more or less used to Soupy,
especially those of us harboring teenagers in our homes.
This marked the first time, however, that a national
night-time audience had witnessed Soupy—or anything like him, since Halley’s
Comet last passed over.
Those who stayed the full 30 minutes got a bonus shock as
Frank Sinatra (in person) came on and broke into “Foggy Day in London Town,”
then stepped into Soupy’s alleyway and got pasted in the face with a meringue
pie.
To the saner element in TV-land, it just didn’t square that
the high-priced Sinatra would be found slumming on what probably is the lowest
budget show on TV outside of the nightly weather reports.
Soupy might best be described as the poor slob’s Kukla,
Fran, and Ollie. His nighttime network debut inspired many critics to dust off
expletives they haven’t used since Ed Sullivan started on TV. “A mishmash of
mediocrity,” said Variety. “For kids with low IQ’s,” snapped a wire service
critic.
ABC executives so far have maintained a fearful silence.
They won’t side in with these critics unless Soupy fails to get a mandate from
the viewers, which he is just likely to receive.
After watching Soupy’s show, one gets the feeling that he is
at least honest. He is not trying to tell us that TV isn’t a wasteland. He is
simply saying, “Try me and see the best waste in town.”
Okay, now I feel guilty. With tributes like this, dearly
departed comedians don’t need any enemies. Sorry, Soupy, I really do respect
your drive and innovation. Especially after being consistently trashed by the
snooty critics. Does anyone even remember that before Johnny Carson began his long stint on “The Tonight Show,” it was Soupy Sales who first took over for Jack Paar?
“Why should I be afraid to follow Jack Paar? I once followed
Sharkey the Seal!” This display of reckless bravado comes from pie-in-your-eye
Soupy Sales as he departs for New York to tilt at those sacred windmills left
on NBC’s Tonight Show by the omniscient Paar.
“I was supposed to hit Paar with a pie when he bowed out on
his last show,” Soupy reports. “He thought it would be better than a lot of
tears, but he changed his mind. Instead of me, he had Bobby Kennedy and it was
all tears. There was even a sign at the end of the show which read, ‘No more to
come.’ I guess he figured his leaving would close up the network.”
Soupy may not be what the FCC’s Newton Minow needs to
irrigate TV’s wasteland, but with a pie for a lance, he is ready to assault the
problem singlehandedly.
When Soupy takes over the help of Tonight he intends to play
it “cool, but enthusiastic,” just the way he did on that day he had to follow
Sharkey the Seal.
“They’re always giving guys like this Carl Sandburg awards
for something he did on TV. Sure, he goes on TV and picks up the bread, then
turns around and makes a speech knocking TV. I don’t dig that,” says an
indignant Soupy. I wanted to know if he had decided what to do on the Tonight
Show.
“Not yet, but I’m not going to solve anything, you can be
sure.”
Soupy could turn out to be the hit of the show.
It's not every comedian who has the hubris to publicly insult people like Carl Sandburg! Soupy was born Milton Supman in 1926. His was the only
Jewish family in their small town in North Carolina. I can only imagine what
that was like for him growing up in the 1930s and I’d guess that this helped
lead him into a life of comedy. Soupy's life and career were not without controversy. He was famously fired from one national show
in 1965 when he told kids to go into their mothers’ purses and send him all the
“green paper” they could find containing pictures of the presidents. Hundreds
of children across the children did this causing their parents to go
apoplectic when they discovered why their kids had mailed the TV host their cash. Love him or hate him, Soupy Sales was an original.
Here is some classic Soupy…
I look at my son's face and see the history of my family in his smiling countenance. I never dreamed I'd have a baby a decade into the twenty-first century and I think of all my family members born during the nineteenth century that I knew so well. I wish Charlie could know them, and the ones who came before. On some level, I think he does.
The last veteran of the Civil War died just before I was
born. There were lots of people around during my childhood whose grandparents
and even parents had been born slaves. I remember endless lines of old World
War I veterans marching in parades down Chicago’s State Street when I was a
kid. And since I was born only 14 years after World War II ended, there were
obviously plenty of those youngish vets around, as well as survivors of the
Nazi Holocaust including a number of my close friends’ parents.
Sometimes when you hear people talking about different
generations you’d think that every person born during a previous era dropped
dead on the same day, making way for the next group. Of course it doesn’t work
that way. Many different generations overlap in one person’s lifetime and the
older generations depart so slowly that it sometimes comes as a total shock and
surprise when we realize they’re gone.
My great-grandparents, about whom I’ve written often,
died when I was 12 years old. As I mentioned in one post about my
great-grandfather’s recorded album of Yiddish songs, he was born less than a
decade after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. The year Itshe Meyer
Korolnek arrived on this planet, George Eastman invented the first flexible,
paper-based film. Republican Chester Arthur was President of the United States,
Queen Victoria was in the heyday of her long reign, and Czar Alexander III had
recently ascended to the throne to become the Emperor of All the Russias (his
virulent anti-Semitic policies would ultimately lead to my family’s departure
from eastern Europe). And yet I knew Itshe Meyer and my great-grandmother Alta
Toba during most of my childhood. Even though my grandfather was born in 1907
in my family’s Polish shtetl of Staszow, he was only three when they arrived in
Toronto and he never had a Yiddish accent or any of the other immigrant
trappings. My grandfather died several weeks after Leah was born and most of
his seven brothers and sisters died during the 1990s. Of that generation, only
my Auntie Anne survives. She lives in Israel and has four
great-great-grandchildren. How many people can ever say that?
When Kendall and I were kids, our obsession with old movies
was enhanced by the still living stars of yesteryear. Kendall went to an event
honoring Claudette Colbert and got to meet the screen legend. Her dad once
interviewed (and inadvertently insulted) movie goddess Marlene Dietrich. I ran
into Gloria Swanson walking her dog in New York and trailed her several city
blocks. On my second date with Kendall in 1989, we went to a charity event
attended by a host of MGM stars including Janet Leigh, June Allyson, and
Margaret O’Brien. We also went to a Friars Club roast of Ann Miller where we
mingled with other stars from our favorite films. One by one, these people
started to die off, especially the stars of the 1920s and 30s. Who is left now?
Perhaps only the child stars of the 30s—Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney,
and a few elderly holdouts such as Luise Rainier and sisters Olivia de
Havilland and Joan Fontaine. I remember saying (in perhaps one of my gayest
moments ever) that I couldn’t imagine living in a world without people like
Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. And now both are gone. Now the stars of the 1940s and 50s have become the Old Guard. Of that group I am grateful that we
still have people like our friends Betty Garrett, Barbara Rush, and Eva Marie
Saint along with other movie luminaries such as Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth
Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Jane Russell, Jennifer Jones, Esther Williams, Doris Day,
Leslie Caron, and Tony Curtis. By the time Charlie is an adult, who will be the
screen elders? Winona Ryder? Claire Danes? Matt Damon and Ben Affleck? Oy.
I don’t know what made me start this stream-of-consciousness rant. I guess it was
the recent visit from my dad and the shocking realization that my parents’
generation is now firmly entrenched as our elders. That sort of snuck up on me. I
still view my parents as eternally youthful even though my dad is 77 and my mom
has been dead for 10 years. Still, comparing them to my great-grandparents' generation, I'd have to say that 80 is the new 50, they DO seem more youthful than their elderly predecessors. I guess some of these issues were bound to come up being
the 50-year-old father of a small baby. I see the Facebook pages of many of my
old high school friends talking about their adorable grandchildren and I think
“Huh? How is that possible?” I start to hyperventilate when I
realize that I’ll be 63 at Charlie’s Bar Mitzvah or how unlikely it is that I’ll
be around when he turns 50. Then, before I ramp up into a full-blown anxiety attack, I
work at bringing myself back to my major lesson of the past six months:
LIVING IN THE MOMENT. Today I am perfectly healthy and joyfully able to raise
my teenaged daughter and my infant son. Today I have the benefit of my father’s
wisdom, love, and neuroses, and I’m able to hear the wonderful stories from
people in his generation and a few people from my grandparents’ peer group.
And somewhere in the hills of Carmel, California, Doris Day is still singing “Que Sera Sera,” if not to the public at large, then at least to her dogs. Relax, Danny. All is
well in the world.
Update: I was reviewing this post last night and clicked on the above link to my great-grandfather's record. As soon as Charlie heard Itshe Meyer's voice, he went nuts—flailing his arms wildly and completely rocking out. You can take the boy out of the shtetl but you can't take the Yiddishkeit out of the boy...
I just put my father on a plane back to Chicago. He was here
this weekend for a wedding and to meet his new grandson for the first time. As
you can see from the above photo, it was a real love affair between the two of
them. Although my father has been blind for the past ten years, he was able to
interact with Charlie at length and sing to him in Spanish, Hebrew, and
Yiddish. He also told many of his off-color jokes while holding Charlie, and I
look forward to the day when Charlie will be able to fully appreciate my
father’s unique talents for accents and storytelling. I definitely see a
resemblance between Charlie and my 77-year-old dad and yet marvel at their very
different lives. I love hearing stories of my dad’s childhood even though they
are usually pretty sad. He had no father, his mother was mentally ill, and they
were often homeless on the streets of Chicago. When my dad was 14, his mother
was permanently institutionalized. And yet he overcame all that misery, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and became one of the most loving dads since Robert Young.
This weekend we attended the wedding of a
daughter of my father’s oldest friend, the brilliant writer Sam Bobrick. Their
friendship has lasted over 70 years and, as far as I’m concerned, is the model
for all friendships, past, present, or future. You’ve never seen two people
love each other more or be more supportive of each other through two lifetimes
of tragedies, crises, and good times. Sam and his wife Julie are two of the
nicest people on the planet. Sam was friends with Kendall’s late father and
Kendall and I met at Sam’s first daughter’s wedding just over twenty years ago.
Watching my dad with Charlie was fantastic and heartwarming,
but it also made me ache for my mother who would be absolutely gaga for him. My
mom was such a great Bubbie and it makes me sad that only Leah and my nephew Spencer
can remember her and even they were very young when she was died in 1999. But I
have to believe that my nephew Sammy and Charlie have a connection to her that
defies the physical plane. I also like to imagine our other son Oliver firmly
entrenched in my mother’s loving arms wherever they are. I know she is taking
care of him on some level.
We’ve been home from the hospital for two weeks now. Dare
I risk the wrath of my old friend, the Evil Eye, by saying that we are loving
every second of Life with Charlie? Maybe all babies should start their lives
with five months in the hospital and six major surgeries, it seems to have done
wonders to make Charlie one of the most good-natured babies I’ve ever known.
After being poked and prodded and intubated and IVed and cut open over and over
again, little seems to faze him now. He is so fun to be around and he spreads his joy to everyone in his presence.
I am so behind in thanking the legions of people who have
sent Charlie their good wishes as well as some amazing gifts including a
wardrobe of handmade clothes that would make Valentino jealous (fashion show to
come in future posts). What would we have done without the support of so many
people during this crazy year—people we already knew and loved as well as total
strangers who became interested in Charlie and followed his story over the
months. These people don’t feel like strangers anymore and all are
welcome chez Charles whenever they are in Los Angeles.
Here’s a small sampling of the people our son the social
butterfly has taken a shine to in his early life:
Charlie is wearing his first yarmulke in this photo but I
admit it looks more like a French beret on his small head.His recent hospitalization coincided
with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur but we’re home for Sukkot which lasts all of
this week as well as Simchat Torah next week—the “fun” holidays.
Yesterday I was in a Citibank parking lot when a young
Lubavitcher approached me with an etrog and lulav, two of the ritual items used
by observant Jews during Sukkot. He was part of the Chabad movement, a branch
of Chasidic Jews whose mission is to help non-observant Jews return to more
orthodox practices. The photo above shows a Lubavitcher approaching
a secular Jew in New York. My Chasid was even younger than the guy in the photo. He asked me
if I was Jewish and when I said I was, he asked if I’d shaken a lulav yet this
year. A lulav is a frond from a date palm tree and you're supposed to shake
the lulav each day during Sukkot. I said I hadn’t and he asked
if I wanted to. Sure, I said. I always stop whenever I’m
approached by the Chabadniks. I’ve written about my fascination with Chasidic
culture a few times. I know I could never be part of such a group but I look forward to
spontaneous interactions with them (my last encounter was learning how to “lay
teffilin” in a “mitzvah mobile” in the theatre district of New York). The
Lubavitcher guy in the parking lot gave me his hat and put his hand on his head. “Do I need to do
that?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “it’s only because I have to cover my head
and I just gave you my hat!” I held the etrog, the yellow lemon-like citron in
my left hand, the tall lulav in my right, and recited two prayers. Then I shook
my lulav for all it was worth. “You look good in a hat,” he said cheerfully as
I was walking away. “A yarmulke would suit you even more!” Here’s a video
currently making the rounds of people getting their Sukkot Shake on:
Hey, I didn’t say we weren’t a strange people. Normally, I can’t stand being accosted by people on the street but I’ll always stop and
talk to the Chabad folks. It isn’t only because they’re my people, I’m equally
fascinated by other religious emissaries who take the time to talk to those
with different beliefs. Mormon missionaries are constantly
roaming the streets of my neighborhood. You can spot the clean-cut white boys
in suits a mile away and for some reason they seem to target African-American
homes. They haven’t come to our house yet but I’d definitely invite them in.
Except I’d be the one asking most of the questions. What are you trying to do,
exactly, get people to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or
simply to goose up their Christianity? What is the Mormon Church’s position on
Judaism? What do you think about gay marriage? Do you really believe that
Joseph Smith found golden plates containing the Book of Mormon buried near his home
in New York State? Have you ever seen “Big Love?” An Osmond concert?
This morning we took Charlie, aka Chaim Yehuda Shmuel, to
see his neurosurgeon for a post-op exam and to have his stitches removed. All
is going well with his new shunt, thank God, and we were out of there in about
20 minutes. (The last time we went to see Dr. Danielpour we were admitted to
the hospital for 10 more days!) Charlie remains a constant delight, we love
every second of having him at home. I think of all the people who warned us to get all the
sleep we could and to do everything we wanted because basically,they said, life as we know it would come to an end as soon as we had a baby. Having already raised a child I knew that wasn’t true. And
it’s really not. Which is not to say it isn’t one of the most challenging
things any person on the planet could do but I grew tired of all the naysayers
during Kendall’s pregnancy. Yes, we’re tired and can’t go out as much as we did
before. Big deal!
I can’t wait until Charlie can participate in the activities
of our cool synagogue and enjoy the Jewish holidays. I have many wonderful memories
of those days from my childhood, even if it takes roving Chabadniks to remind
me how to perform most of the religious rituals.
Start peeling potatoes—only 67 days until Chanukah!
Charlie has been waking up in such a happy mood this week.
It’s so fantastic having him at home, I can’t bring myself to stop posting
these photos. Please let me know when I turn into that obnoxious parent who
can’t shut up about his kid (like I’m not already there?). At least I haven’t
put any bumper stickers on my car proclaiming that my child was the
Cedars-Sinai Baby of the Month. But oy, look at that punim, how can I not
record these delicious stages of development?
We took Charlie to the pediatrician on Tuesday and as we
were leaving a woman in the waiting room said, “Wow, he looks like he just came
out yesterday!” Really? I was stunned by that comment because to me Charlie
looks HUGE and feels like the sturdy five-month-old that he is even though I
realize at eight and a half pounds he is the size of a full-term newborn. And
of course this woman never saw our son when he weighed just over a pound. Every
time someone asks us how old he is we trip all over ourselves. “Well, he was
born over five months ago, but he’s really only seven weeks because he was born
at 24 weeks, blah, blah, blah.” Too much information for total strangers who
are just making conversation?
As I alluded to in my last post, now that we’re not facing
imminent crisis (God-willing, pu, pu, pu), I’m experiencing some identify
shifts. I’m trying to figure out my next steps in my work life and I’m also
wondering what I’m going to write about on here. Scrolling back, I’m stunned at
how many posts I’ve written about Charlie. Over the past five months only one
post (when Ted Kennedy died) did not mention him at all. But I’ve been writing
in this blog for almost five years. What the heck was I writing about before
this?
Oh yeah, all sorts of crazy stuff. Old, obscure movies like
the weird Ann Blyth film we watched this weekend called “Our Very Own.”
Released in 1950, the film treated adoption as a dark, dirty little secret.
When 16-year-old Blyth (who was actually 22 when she made the movie—and looked
it) finds out she was adopted, her idyllic life falls apart, especially after
an uncomfortable meeting with her sweet but wrong-side-of-the-tracks birth
mother, poignantly played by Ann Dvorak. These days it’s inconceivable (I hope)
to imagine parents not telling their children that they were adopted. Why
lovely Jane Wyatt (pre-Father Knows Best) neglected to tell Blyth about her
roots is perplexing—apparently she was worried that her daughter would feel
“less than” her younger siblings who Wyatt gave birth to.
The term “birth
mother” didn’t exist in 1950 so every time they refer to Dvorak’s character
they call her Ann’s “real mother.” Blyth’s spunky youngest sister is played to
perfection by 12-year-old Natalie Wood who was such a delight to watch as a
kid. 25-year-old Farley Granger appears as Ann’s hunky boyfriend. We met
Granger a few years ago when he was here touting his autobiography about his
closeted life in Hollywood. Blyth and Granger were huge stars back in the day
but I’m not sure either has withstood the test of time. My favorite Farley
Granger movie was Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” where he becomes the
hapless victim to a sociopath played by Robert Walker. Ann Blyth is best known
for her portrayal of Joan Crawford’s horrific brat Veda in “Mildred Pierce.”
(Did you know that Kate Winslet is now remaking “Mildred Pierce” for HBO? I
can’t wait!) I thought it would have been so cool if the producers of “On Our Own”
had hired Joan Crawford to play Blyth’s birth mother. Talk about a satisfying
Big Reveal! Joan would have had a field day with her one big scene.
Thank God being adopted is no longer such a big deal. We had
a fair number of adopted kids in my family and we always knew who they were, I
don’t remember any stigma being attached to it or feeling that they were in any
way less than “real” family members. On the other hand, it wasn’t something we
ever brought up in casual conversation, it was fairly hush-hush. In Kendall’s
family, back in the day, the adopted kids were left off the official family
tree because they weren’t “blood.” Yikes.
So much for my writers’ block, it’s scary how quickly this
kind of incessant rambling comes back to me. (Are my stats plummeting yet?)
Before our hospital ordeal I also wrote a lot about all my “only in L.A.”
events such as the “Sing-along Sound of Music” that Leah and I attended this
past weekend at the Hollywood Bowl. We’ve gone to this annual event many times
and it never disappoints. Watching a film in the sold-out Bowl with 18,000
other enthusiastic fans is something everyone should experience at least once.
As always, the original Liesl, Charmian Carr, was there to sing a little “16
Going on 17” for us even though she is now 66 going on 67. Carr was clearly
being groomed by 20th-Century Fox to be their next big young star,
and she was quite good, having beat out established actresses such as Mia
Farrow and Patty Duke for the role, so it always surprised me that she never
made another film. She did a few TV things and then retired to raise her
children. Can you think of anyone who’s made such a public career for herself
after appearing in only one film?
Carr joined host Melissa Peterman to judge
the annual costume contest. This year it was surprisingly light on the drag
queens and heavy on adorable young children portraying everything from “tea
with jam and bread” (from the song “Do Re Mi”) to the marionettes in “The
Lonely Goatherd.” My favorite costume was a family who recreated the entire
gazebo scene between Liesl and Rolf complete with a shower-curtain gazebo and
the kids who were dressed as trees with dolls hanging from them while another kid
zoomed by in a cardboard car with real working lights. This represented the
scene where the Von Trapp kids were climbing in the trees as Captain Von Trapp
returned home in his car with the Baroness. As usual, I think Baroness Schrader
got a bum rap from the hissing audience and I remained the only one out of
18,000 who cheered poor Eleanor Parker every time she appeared on screen. Lucky
I wasn’t beaten to death by the crowd.
Oh, and I’m sure I’ll continue to have posts about my more
public family members. I was so preoccupied last month that I missed the
following cool profile of Wilco on “CBS Sunday Morning.” Much of it was shot at
my sister’s house in Chicago (in the heart of the city, not “suburban Chicago”
as the host inexplicably states at the beginning of the segment—I’m sure that
drove my sister nuts). Check out the jamming in my nephew Spencer’s bedroom:
And yes, I will continue writing about the Magical Adventures of Charlie Miller.
Every day brings new miracles such as his voice
suddenly returning earlier this week. I shouldn’t even say returning, he’s been
silent since the day he was born. We thought it was just a result of his many
intubations and his decreased lung capacity and were starting to really worry
about it when all of a sudden he started letting out with major wails. Go,
Charlie! His voice is so cute it sounds like an adult voice-over artist playing
a baby. We go back to the neurosurgeon next week to make sure everything is
kosher with his shunt and we have a range of other appointments coming up from pulmonary
specialists to physical and occupational therapists. But we are so, so grateful
to have him home with us and he seems to be enjoying every moment.
