Jew Eat Yet?

Katharine Hepburn Wins 5th Oscar!

Talking about the Oscars the day after is little bit like seeing that damn tree the day after Christmas. I want to avert my eyes and move on. But despite all my “issues” with awards shows, I was jumping up and down when Cate Blanchett won the Oscar for her magnificent portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator." Now how about Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in a remake of “The Philadelphia Story?” (Never mind, I guess that would be sacrilege—I'm just angling for Hepburn's 6th Oscar!) I thought the wins overall were well deserved although I still think it’s crazy to pit these people against each other. I always squirm when the emotional winners say things like “I always heard that it’s an honor to be nominated, but let me tell you, it’s so much better to be standing up here as a winner!” Um, hello? There are four “losers” that you just passed on your way to the stage! And let’s not get too full of ourselves, it’s just the tally of a bunch of Academy schmoes filling out their paper ballots. I kept reminding Leah that it wasn’t really “true” that these were the best performances of the year!

I was right on all my predictions except for Best Director (Marty, Marty, maybe next time—and don’t worry, you’re about two years away from a Lifetime Achievement Award) and Best Picture (but I was happy for Tom, our "Million Dollar Baby" cast member guest!). I was thrilled that “Born into Brothels” won and hope it brings increased attention to Zana Briski’s work (but I wish she had talked more about the content of her film in her speech).

The telecast was one of those that seems fairly harmless at the time but rubs on the nerves the more you think about it later.

Top 5 Oscar Moments of Horror:

1. Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz Will Now Perform Lap Dances for the Academy Voters. I thought the low-point of the evening was when Chris Rock introduced these two talented presenters by saying “here come the four of them now” or something like that, referring to the women’s ample breasts. I am not a PC watchdog by any means, and can often laugh at jokes that broach the boundaries of good taste, but this one was so offensively retro and demeaning that I don’t even think it would be funny in a strip club these days. Can’t two beautiful women appear on a stage together without reducing them to a couple of nice racks? Can you imagine if Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly were introduced that way 50 years ago? (Oh wait, I know what you’re thinking, and you should be ashamed of yourself! Okay, how about Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner?) Truly a YUCK moment.

2. Here’s Your Oscar But Please Exit Through the Back Door. To be honest, this attempt to “shake things up” by presenting certain categories from the aisles of the theatre didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. But let’s face it, it clearly sent the message that these folks weren’t important enough to get their award on the actual stage. I liked Chris Rock’s joke that to save time next year they were going to set up a drive-through lane in the parking lot. I’d say it was an interesting experiment but that the Academy should go back to letting all the winners go up to the stage with the big kids. And how about the categories where the nominees were already gathered on the stage? Again, not as bad as I feared, but it did make for a few awkward moments. At least the cameras had the decency to avoid focusing on the losers as they tried to leave the stage with some dignity.

3. Adam Sandler Wants to Hump Catherine Zeta-Jones. Whoever wrote this awful bit should never be allowed near an Oscar telecast again. Catherine Zeta-Jones is announced as Adam Sandler’s co-presenter but does not show (already bad since it makes Zeta-Jones look like a flake before we understand that it’s a gag). Sandler doesn’t know what to do so Chris Rock steps in to read Catherine’s lines. All of Sandler’s comments focus on how hot and sexy Zeta-Jones is and how he’d love to get her in the sack and Rock is responding as if he’s her. Ha-ha-ha. Let’s see, we get to reduce yet another Academy Award-winning actress to a sexy pair of knockers AND we get to throw in some homophobia for good measure. The routine might have worked if Sandler was reading lines that he would have actually said to Catherine Zeta-Jones but they obviously didn’t have enough writing talent to pull this off. Bad move—and just when Adam Sandler was starting to get some credibility as a real actor.

4. Child Abuse Is OK If It Helps You Win an Oscar Some Day. I’m happy for Jamie Foxx and thrilled that his beloved grandmother was such an important influence on his life and worked so hard to keep him on the straight and narrow after his parents abandoned him as a baby. But did he ever stop to think how his comments about his grandmother’s beatings would read across the country? Can’t you just see abusive parents clucking to themselves, “See? I know he hates it and screams and cries, but my beatings are making my son into a stronger person and he’ll thank me for it one day.” I loved the rest of Foxx's speech, including how he cried when he talked about his grandma, but I just wish he’d stop saying how helpful it was for him to get repeatedly “whipped” when he was a boy.

5. Jude Law Is a No-Talent Bum/Jude Law Is a Prophet Among Men. Am I talking out of both sides of my mouth if I criticize both Chris Rock’s obnoxious comments about Jude Law AND Sean Penn’s humorless defense of the actor? I thought parts of Rock’s opening monologue were very funny including the bit about Jude Law appearing in every movie this year, but when he launched into how the studios should always wait for the big stars to be available and not hire the second-tier people like Jude Law and others, I cringed. I know he was joking but if anything I’d tell the studios to lose the big stars and focus on that talented second, third, and fourth tier of folks that need a break. I heard that Tom Cruise and some other huge stars wanted to be in “Sideways” and I give huge credit to the director for sticking with the much lesser known cast. But when Sean Penn defended his friend Jude Law, I couldn’t help feel bad for the other people dissed in Rock’s diatribe. I would have been much happier if Penn had come to the defense of Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, and Catherine Zeta-Jones!

As far as speeches go, I thought Morgan Freeman’s was perfection. I so wanted Annette Bening to win, but oh well, Hilary Swank was awfully good. Am I the only one who thought her “I’m just a girl from a trailer park with a dream” line seemed a bit over-rehearsed? Or was that a line that her character said in the film and I completely missed the joke? Did you notice several close-ups of Andy Hardy himself, Mickey Rooney? I’m glad he scored an invite, he was the number one box office star in this country for several years in a row, after all! Oh, and I have one last incredulous query that I can state in one word:

Beyoncé, Beyoncé, Beyoncé.

Why in God’s name would the producers have this woman sing THREE of the five Oscar-nominated songs? By her third costume change we were all screaming in sympathy for the singers that were overlooked in Hollywood just so the producers could pander to a younger viewing audience. I can’t blame Beyoncé herself, why would anyone turn down such a gig, but it was ridiculous. At that point, she should have just sung a medley of all five of the nominated songs. God knows none of those horrendous songs were worthy of an extended production number anyway, although I liked the boys choir for the first song and Leah pronounced Beyoncé’s French accent “okay.” After hearing that tuneless number written especially for the movie version of “Phantom of the Opera” just so it would be eligible for an Oscar, I think Andrew Lloyd Webber should return his “Evita” Tonys. Cool to have Carlos Santana there but was that really a great song? Frankly I think my brother-in-law was robbed. Jeff wrote and performed a song called “Just a Kid” for the “SpongeBob SquarePants” movie that featured both of my nephews. Did it get overlooked because of SpongeBob’s recent outing by the Christian Right?

And speaking of pandering, am I the only good American who rolled my eyes at the several solemn mentions of our troops in Iraq, including the dedication of the show to them? Of course we all hope they are okay and return home safely, etc., but what the hell does that have to do with the Academy Awards? Blatant pandering, pure and simple. On the political front, the show was pretty tame. Apart from a few wan Bush jokes at the beginning, there was nothing. No one even wears AIDS or other ribbons anymore, do they? But at least now we’re finally at the point where two African-Americans can win the top awards and it’s not such a BIG DEAL because they’re black. That’s some progress, anyway.

Best Chris Rock joke of the evening: “Cate Blanchett was so convincing as Katharine Hepburn that last night Sidney Poitier showed up at her house for dinner.” Now that’s funny!

Oscar Gridlock

Andy Hardy here reporting live from the corner of Sunset and Vine: I insanely ventured into the heart of Hollywood today, not to get a glimpse of early Oscar arrivals but just to load up on produce at the weekly Hollywood Farmers Market. I had to make about four detours because of the crazy Oscar security. If the Kennedy motorcade had half the security that I’m seeing today, we’d be living in a different world. I hate to say it, but you can feel the “buzz” in this town due to tonight’s impending rituals. Everyone is running around picking up last-minute items for their Oscar viewing parties, the yearly event at which normally mild-mannered people turn into Joan Rivers wannabes as they unleash an endless tirade about who's too fat, who's too thin, who looks like a heroin addict, who looks like their dress was designed by Charles Manson, who has had so much plastic surgery and botox she looks like Minnie Mouse, who is that 22-year-old with the breasts spilling out of her Vera Wang on the arm of that 74-year-old movie star with the bad rug, and who will be the first winner to forgot to mention his spouse in his acceptance speech (and have hell to pay to months to come)? We’ll be watching tonight with our friends Lisa and Tom, and I’m happy to brag that Tom has a featured part in potential Best Picture “Million Dollar Baby” as the sleazy lawyer for Hilary Swank’s family. In deference to our guests I will root for Swank (while secretly hoping for an Annette Bening victory).

Just wanted to quickly amend my Oscar predictions by saying that I saw “Hotel Rwanda” yesterday and was bowled over by Don Cheadle’s performance as Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu manager of a luxury hotel in Kigali, who saved the lives of more than 1,200 people during the slaughter of nearly 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. I am flushed with shame that I was not that familiar with the details of this genocide at the time and I’m grateful that films like this send far-reaching messages about what can happen when our patriarchal systems are allowed to run amuck. The mass murders were sparked by inflammatory radio broadcasts that urged to Hutus to run out and kill ever Tutsi they could find, including children, and the total lack of help from the U.S. and other countries during this 100-day siege is utterly appalling. I know it’s easy to criticize films like this as not providing the full historical context, and it’s easy to claim that they are made to give us Westerners a tsk-tsk way to feel better about ourselves as we gnash our teeth in outrage from our safe movie theatre seats, but I am in favor of any method that puts these countries on the mass radar screen, even if it’s only in the context of a semi-fictionalized film. I still follow what’s going on in Myanmar/Burma after being introduced to the military dictatorship there and the amazing work of Aung San Suu Kyi in the 1995 John Boorman film “Beyond Rangoon.” And frankly, seeing these films does make we want to learn more. I’ve been reading about other potential human rights catastrophes on the Amnesty International site including the dangerous situations in Sudan, Congo, and Nepal, and about some of the other awareness campaigns this organization is involved with including the proliferation of child soldiers throughout the world. Other sites worthy of frequent visits include the International Rescue Committee, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders.

But besides being such a noble education effort, Don Cheadle’s performance was superb on any level and I’d be thrilled if he went home with the prize (although I still think Jamie Foxx has a lock on the Oscar). Sophie Okonedo was great too as Rusesabagina’s Tutsi wife.

Now I must take Leah to an audition for “Gypsy” (what? you think it’s odd for 10-year-olds to perform in a play about strippers?) and then to the community service day at her school, followed by Oscarfest 2005. If I promise never to mention the damn Oscars again after tomorrow’s Oscar wrap-up, would you believe me?

My Family in Virginia

Writing in this blog is making me rethink a lot of the mythology I have about myself. As I look at what I’ve written here during the past few months I see post after post about the pop culture foundation of my childhood followed by an endless attempt to distance myself from it. I blather on about the movies, TV shows, musicals, plays, and celebrities that have had an impact on my development and then I scurry into embarrassed denial: “Oh, wait, these things are not really important to me, it was just a passing thought—silly, isn’t it?” Who am I kidding? Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that my identity was largely shaped by the steady stream of media flowing into my brain from the moment I was capable of sentient thought; time to begrudgingly acknowledge that my childhood mentors were not Marcel Proust and Henry David Thoreau but more likely Jed Clampett and Carol Burnett.

If anything, instead of denying my cultural ancestors, I should be grateful to them for helping me through the more difficult parts of growing up. When my family started breaking apart in the early 1970s, I honestly think that I owe my emotional survival to a certain family from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. “The Waltons” appeared on the scene just at the time my parents were slogging through a monumentally hideous divorce. No matter how ugly it got—screaming matches, doors being broken down, suicide attempts, being lied to about where my mother was for months at a time—I knew I could count on one thing on Thursday nights as I shut my door and upped the volume to real-life-blocking decibels. As soon as I heard that familiar theme music and saw the old jalopy pulling up with John-Boy, Grandpa, and little Elizabeth, I could relax—for at least an hour, anyway. I credit Richard Thomas’s John-Boy Walton for making me want to write. How many young people did he inspire sitting up in his room writing in his journal night after night? My first connection with an obsessive blogger!

My identification with the Waltons was so important to me that I started writing letters to the cast members. This morning I opened up a box that had been taped shut during my last two moves and, to my shock, found a manila envelope stuffed with letters from members of my surrogate family. As soon as I saw the faded envelopes I remembered how these missives gave me such strength as I read them again and again. I think I was most excited when I received the letter at left from Michael Learned. Or Miss Michael Learned, I should say, since that’s how her name appeared in the credits each week (as if we might worry that a cross-dresser was assuming the role of the Walton matriarch). I have no memory of what I wrote to her or how I happened to give her the “Danny Miller Award” which she so sweetly accepts in her reply. I guess I wasn’t completely lacking in self-esteem back then if I had the chutzpah to name an award after myself and bestow it with great fanfare the celebrities of the day. Seeing this letter now I am filled with admiration for this lovely actress. She could have so easily have ignored the hand-printed ravings of that little thirteen-year-old boy from Chicago. The letter became a kind of talisman for me, proof that somehow things would work out in my own family. “Hang on to your spark,” she urged. “I will, Olivia, I will!” I met Michael Learned a few years ago when she appeared in a play with a friend of ours, but I couldn’t bring myself to mention my childhood obsession or how much her letter meant to me.

I love the letters I found from some of the Walton children. Judy Norton, who played oldest daughter Mary Ellen Walton, sent me the above letter written on a ripped piece of her notebook paper. I remember the moment I opened that letter in 1973 and how it felt like I was reading a note from my sibling, complete with typical childlike mistakes (“Your right about the mags.”) I must have been trashing the fan magazines of the day, looking for some way to bond with my TV sister. As the first “women’s libber” in Depression era Virginia, Mary Ellen reminded me of my real-life sister. Mary Ellen was forever brushing up against the status quo and demanding that she be given equal opportunities. The same year Mary Ellen insisted that she be allowed to play sports with the boys, my sister Sue waged a single-handed campaign to allow girls to wear pants to our elementary school. Mary Ellen and Sue both won! Judy Norton tried to shed her Mary Ellen image by being the only Walton to appear nude in Playboy but I won't make any further comment since Olivia, John, and I have worked hard to put this unpleasant episode behind us.

I was especially excited when I received a letter from Eric Scott, who played third oldest son Ben Walton, because he wrote the letter on the back of a page of the script from that week’s show. I felt like I was part of the “in crowd” when the episode aired later that season and I could read along with MY copy of the script! The episode was another anachronistic “women’s lib” story, with Olivia Walton going on strike because she felt her family wasn’t helping around the house enough. Olivia Walton was the perfect 1930s icon for the early 70s—dripping with homespun values while also reflecting the quest for sexual equality. You go, girl! Reading Eric’s letter, I see that I was again looking to bond with my Walton kin, this time by dissing their saccharine TV competitors. “I personally don’t like the Brady Bunch,” he wrote in response. “It is very fake.”

While many kids my age were experimenting with drugs during the 1970s, my drug of choice was the Walton family of Virginia. I could deal with almost anything during the course of the week as long as I could make it to Thursday night. But by the time the series ended in 1982 I was out of college and ready to let it go. To be honest, the show had overstayed its welcome. Will Geer’s Grandpa died in 1978 and Ellen Corby’s Grandma had a severe stroke shortly thereafter that limited her ability to speak. The ultimate betrayal occurred in 1979 when Michael Learned’s Olivia left the show with some trumped-up storyline about moving to Arizona to recover from tuberculosis. As if the real Olivia Walton would have ever left her family. I felt abandoned yet again. Michael Learned popped up on another network as a modern-day nurse but I refused to watch. She did reappear, mysteriously cured, in the Waltons TV movies that were aired throughout the 1980s and 90s but these sequels infuriated me with their reckless handling of my beloved characters. In an effort to place the family against the backdrop of important events in American history such as the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing, they fast forwarded through the decades without aging the characters at all. To us fanatics who knew the exact ages of the seven Walton children when the show began in the year 1933, we were appalled to find Elizabeth still in college when she should have been in her late 40s, John-Boy a young newlywed when in the proper timeline he’d be 55, and John and Olivia Walton celebrating their 40th anniversary in 1969 when we all knew they celebrated their 25th anniversary on the show in the mid-1930s.

Once I moved to Los Angeles, I started collecting Walton encounters. I saw Mary McDonough, who played beautiful Erin Walton, one afternoon at the Bel Air Hotel where she was lunching with a friend. Grabbing my red-haired six-month-old daughter as bait (yes, it’s amazing how low I’ll sink for a Walton), I stood a few inches from Mary’s table until she was forced to say something. “Your daughter has beautiful hair,” she commented. “What?” I said as I reeled around in feigned surprise. “Oh yes, you know people always say she looks like a Walton!” Well, of course, no one had ever made this observation, but Leah did have the exact same shade of hair as Erin Walton so it was a good ice breaker! I later found out that Mary works for the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families and is a a tireless advocate against silicone breast implants because of her own horrible experience. I ran into Kami Cotler, youngest daughter Elizabeth Walton, at a film screening at the University of Southern California and recently in a local deli. She hasn’t changed much—even Leah recognized her from her TV Land viewings of “The Waltons.” I’ve also had several chats with Jon Walmsley, second oldest son Jason Walton, who married Lisa Harrison’s Toni (the only Jew ever seen on Walton’s Mountain) both on the show and in real-life. Did you know that Jon Walmsley was the voice of Christopher Robin in the original “Winnie-the-Pooh” movie and also used to play guitar for Richard Marx in the late 1980s? A few years ago Jon produced and wrote much of the music for an excellent CD called “Together Again” that reunited all of the living cast members from the show. Leah and I listen to it all the time and cry whenever we hear Michael Learned’s Olivia reciting a poem to Ralph Waite’s John Walton in which she tells him “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” After 70 years of marriage, they still have it!

Kendall’s mom is friends with Ronnie Claire Edwards, who played Corabeth Walton Godsey on the show, and she also knows Earl Hamner, Jr., the real-life John-Boy and the calming voice heard at the beginning and end of every episode. Out of sheer embarrassment I do my best to keep my Walton fawning to a minimum when I see them at Betsy's house. But here, on my blog, I will try once and for all to cast off my shame at my TV-saturated past and embrace the joys and challenges of that cathode ray tube that passes for my brain.

Trampled by Oscar

I went to an Oscar-related event in Hollywood tonight at the American Cinematheque which is right across the street from the Kodak Theatre where the Academy Awards will be given out on Sunday. They were in a frenzy of preparation, I’ve never seen anything like it. When I arrived the presenters and performers were just leaving after a full day of rehearsals. They also had people pretending to be movie stars walking down the grand staircase and red carpet so they could get the camera angles right. It’s a good thing I’m not a paparazzi, God forbid, or a photojournalist because I do NOT have what it takes—I am far too timid to “get the shot.” As it was, I couldn’t believe I whipped out my digital camera and started snapping pictures at all. A few months ago I wouldn’t be caught dead with a camera on Hollywood Boulevard and now, thanks to my blog, I carry it around “just in case I see something interesting.” SEE WHAT YOU’RE TURNING ME INTO? Tourists were at a minimum thanks to all the Oscar barricades but the ones that were there were swarming all over the exhausted jean-clad celebrities. The stars were all followed by “their people” holding overstuffed brown shopping bags, possibly the infamous Oscar goody bags. This year, all the privileged ones get upwards of $30,000 worth of free merchandise for participating in the show including a monogrammed cashmere blanket, engraved Baccarat crystal, and a three-night getaway package to the luxurious Four Seasons Resort in Whistler, Canada. Why do these fun prizes only go to the already loaded? Someone tried to start a campaign to get the celebrities to respectfully decline the goodies this year and have the companies donate that money to tsunami relief but I don’t know if anyone is taking them up on that. And I saw a special car lane set up for Prius and other “alternative fuel vehicles.” These folks, including Orlando Bloom, Salma Hayek, and Leonardo DiCaprio will get special “green” goody bags including a "conflict-free" cultured diamond pendant valued at $3,500 from Diamonds for Humanity, which promotes “luxury with conscience.” Oy.

The only "celebrity" I came face-to-face with as I was ducking my head in shame was Sharon Osbourne who I have to say looked fantastic and was posing for photos with everyone who asked her to. She sure seems like a good ol’ gal! I made the mistake of stopping in the Starbucks on Hollywood Boulevard to jump onto their Internet access and I sat down next to a guy with very bad teeth who was trying to impress an older woman who was visiting from the Midwest (his mother?) with his endless tales of celebrity encounters. “You’re gonna hate me for this,” he said, “But do you know that Madonna once CALLED MY HOUSE?” Why, I wondered to myself, to threaten police action if he didn’t stop stalking her? Or did he live in the back of a Domino’s and she was just ordering a pizza? The man explained in excruciating detail how a fence in his backyard was used on an old “I Love Lucy” show and seemed to get extremely agitated when the woman couldn’t remember the episode. He claimed to have “attended” (stood twenty yards behind the police line?) last year’s Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars, and to have spent part of last summer with Ben Affleck and Christian Slater. Every story began with “You are gonna really hate me for this…” Oh dear God, do I sound like these tragic people when I report on my L.A. experiences?

I then went into my event which was a special Oscar taping of a weekly film review program on KPCC, one of our NPR affiliates. The show is hosted by the excellent Larry Mantle and features eight of the most erudite film critics in the country including Henry Sheehan, Peter Rainer, F.X. Feeney, Ella Taylor, and Jean Oppenheimer. Leaving the Hollywood freak show on the curb, I was immediately confronted by an entirely different crowd. At the concession stand I heard this conversation: “You know, I don’t watch television.” “Oh God, neither do I.” “I haven’t owned a set in 30 years.” (Note to all listeners of National Public Radio: If you do not own a television, please keep that information to yourself unless specifically asked. And try not to be so smug. I’m sure you’re all listening to Howard Stern when no one else is in the car.) I had a nice conversation with a couple from Thousand Oaks who described their rare trip into Hollywood that night as if they had just traveled across Bhutan on mules. The critics' predictions more or less mirrored mine, and at the end of the evening we got to see one of the Oscar-nominated short films.

Leaving the theatre at 10:30 pm the Oscar workers were still in full force, lugging giant Oscar statues and setting up a phalanx of lights and cables. A Norwegian TV crew was shooting a spot near one of the statues and I heard one tourist tell her friend about the reporter, “Look! There's one of the women from Abba!” Several dozen members of the nearly 600-strong security detail that will be on hand Sunday were having a meeting in front of the red carpet and florists were setting up roses atop gold Oscar-shaped flower stands. Will someone please remind me to stay away from Hollywood the week before the Oscars next year? Besides my unpleasant over-identification with the celebrity sycophants, my ego is way too fragile to watch people planning a party that I’m not invited to.

One More Self-Conscious Blog

Today is the two-month anniversary of my blog and I’m celebrating by writing yet another blog about my blog. Yikes, what other medium has brought on such intense levels of reflection about itself? When Gutenberg came up with the idea for movable type in the 15th century were there a spate of books that began in the Renaissance-language equivalent of: “Wow, so this is a book! Gee, what will I write about in here? I don’t really get what books are but I’m going to write one anyway, so bear with me…”

Here are five realizations I have about my blog at the two-month mark:

1. I Hate the Title of My Blog. On December 23 when I was setting up my site and the TypePad screen asked for a title I was caught off guard. I was sitting under these three Andy Hardy posters in my office and thought, what the hell, I’ll call it Andy Hardy’s Blog. This might have made sense if I was trying to keep an anonymous profile but I blew that on Day 1. Nor do I really plan to ever write much about the MGM film series despite my extensive collection of Andy Hardy memorabilia. So now it just sounds like I’m some guy named Andy Hardy with a really boring and unimaginative blog title. At the time I was trying to play off the fact that all the Hardy movies are called "Andy Hardy’s this" or "Andy Hardy’s that" but I think that joke is lost on everyone but me, 84-year-old Ann Rutherford, and some gay movie fans on Fire Island. Oh, and of course Mickey Rooney who is still smarting over having his big Super Bowl commercial in which he moons the camera yanked at the last minute because his butt is obviously too titillating a sight for the current FCC censors. So now I’m stuck with Andy Hardy. I’ve noticed some of the sites that list my blog don’t even use that name but call it Danny Miller’s Blog. I laughed at one of the first comments I got on here—it was from Ellen in New York and she said she could really relate to what I was writing about in my blog “except all that Andy Hardy nonsense.” So should I change it? But to what? All the good names are taken! I considered “Jew Eat Yet?” but I worried that people would think it was a Food Blog. Do you think I think about my blog too much?

2. Blogs Cause Marital Discord. While Kendall could not be a more supportive blogwife, my blog has also led to some difficult moments. She doesn’t mind if I share intimate details of our lives or her psychological profile, but she asked me on two occasions to remove something from the blog. Kendall comes from a theatre family and grew up in the company of playwrights, actors, and a gaggle of theatre folk ranging from world renowned stars all the way down to borderline Norma Desmonds. She has seen firsthand what the sting of the critic’s arrow can do to people she cares about and was horrified to discover that I was quoting some of her critical comments about famous performers. Not people we know, or anyone who would ever happen upon this blog, but she still couldn’t bear the thought that something she said privately to me could cause these people any pain. The first time she asked me to delete something I flew into a self-righteous fit. “How dare you censor me! What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t freely write about my life without worrying that you’re going to be upset? You are stifling my creativity, why don’t I just delete the whole blog?” Then, when the smoke cleared off my ego I realized I was an idiot and had no right to post any private comments if it made her uncomfortable. I deleted those references and now I feel no need to share any of the obnoxious comments she makes about the rich and famous (but I wish you could hear them—they’re very funny and provide proof that Kendall isn’t as nice as she would like you to believe). Another problem we have is that Kendall is becoming a blog widow. So many nights now I start writing in my blog after Leah goes to bed and by the time I tiptoe back into our bedroom it is midnight or later and Kendall has long fallen asleep, TiVo remote still in hand. I need to go back to writing when I wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning. God knows that won’t disturb Kendall—she hasn’t seen dawn since a bad case of colic in 1967.

3. You Can Find the Family That Abandoned You at Birth. What I love most about the blogosphere is its far-reaching tentacles and how you can hook up with like-minded or at least similarly obsessed people. I have become addicted to a bunch of blogs (see list at right) that I simply must read every day and I have to keep reminding myself that I never met most of these people. Indeed, I’m surprised the Gottlieb family (whose number of blogs on my list is growing like kudzu) hasn’t banded together to file a restraining order. Even my own brother assumed these were people I must have known since childhood and was shocked to find out that I’ve never laid eyes on any of them. I first spotted David Gottlieb commenting on Tamar’s site and quickly discovered that we were born in the same hospital in Chicago at practically the same moment. Even more weird—a few hours before being introduced to my first Gottlieb blog I was in a used bookstore in Glendale perusing the American History section. What was the ONE book I thought looked interesting enough to pull out of the floor-to-ceiling stacks? Annie Gottlieb’s 1987 book “Do You Believe in Magic? Bringing the Sixties Back Home.” I began to think that I must be a lost Gottlieb myself, mistakenly given to the wrong bunch of Jews at Michael Reese Hospital. Then I found out they’re all too tall, in shape, and smart to share my DNA—I guess I’m stuck with the Millers.

4. Blogs Can Cause Your Therapy Bill to Rise. Am I the only one who has had whole therapy sessions about my blog? From dealing with the feelings that came up when certain friends had no interest in reading my blog, to bemoaning the lack of comments on my site and feeling jealous of people who received tons of them, to writing about childhood memories on my blog that I thought were long resolved and realizing I still had lots more work to do, to my general concerns about narcissism and disclosure, my blog has been a boon to my psychotherapy. Luckily, my therapist has excellent boundaries—I don’t think she’s ever read my blog!

5. I Never Knew I Had So Many Opinions. I can tell from my first tentative post last December that I had no idea what I was going to write in here and doubted that I had anything to say. Now I can’t seem to shut up. Am I becoming one of those boors you meet at parties who has always just read a magazine article about whatever is being discussed and paints himself as an expert on every subject? On the other hand, I’ve been trying for years to start writing again on a daily basis and nothing I tried worked until this blog. It’s really the perfect medium for me because I can write about whatever obscure topic I like and I don’t ever have to know how boring people think it is. Blogging fulfills my fantasy of being invisible and noticed at the same time. Who needs face-to-face human interaction anyway? I think lack of eye contact is underrated!

Memo from A. Lincoln to G.W. Bush

I’m a day late for a Presidents’ Day post, but I heard this author, Roland White Jr., interviewed on NPR last night about his new book “The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words” and was bemoaning the absence of a President who could speak so powerfully; a President who wrote most of his own speeches and could deliver them with such sincerity and passion. And he was even a Republican! How refreshing to hear about Lincoln’s distaste for either side in the Civil War using God to promote their own cause. What really struck me were some amazing words from an 1862 message to Congress that resonate so strongly today:

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Hear that, George?

I was listening to radio commentator Dennis Prager this morning. I used to enjoy listening to him but now his ultra-conservative views and smug attitudes so infuriate me that I can only take him for a few minutes at a time. During this morning’s snippet he was posing the question “Why do so many people become more conservative as they get older?” His answer was “because they get smarter as they age.” Arrrgh! There wasn’t an ounce of humor in that, he really meant it. And yet it certainly seems as if many people DO get more conservative as they get older—there's a whole journalistic subgenre of 1960s liberals who have moved to the far reaches of the right. I don’t buy that this is because of increased intelligence, obviously, but I do wonder what is causing it and how widespread the “trend” is. Prager’s related contention this morning was that all contemporary liberal positions rely on “feelings” rather than rational thought. He then offered this pearl:

Dennis Prager: Reliance on feelings in determining one's political and social positions is the major reason young people tend to have liberal/left positions—they feel passionately but do not have the maturity to question those passions. It is also one reason women, especially single women, are more liberal than men—it is women's nature to rely on emotions when making decisions.

Un peu condescending, n’est-ce pas? "Women’s nature?" At this point he always brings up the same examples of feelings-obsessed liberals: he rails endlessly about the so-called “animals-and-humans-are-equivalent” movement and always manages to find some lunatic to get on the phone and talk about how the chicken processing plants in this country are no different from Auschwitz, the "crimes" being committed there are EXACTLY the same. Or he’ll bring on the "liberals" who think that saying “Merry Christmas” is a violation of the recipient’s human rights. Where does he find these people? I have a wide circle of liberal friends and none of us share even a tiny portion of the views Prager uses to bolster his anti-liberal rants. I’m not saying that extremists and PC-obsessed idealogues don’t exist on the left, of course they do, but to constantly use these arguments to decry all liberal thought is just as disingenuous as saying all conservative Republicans are demonic beings who want to warehouse gays, Jews, and ethnic minorities in concentration camps.

I have to admit that I would never call Prager's radio show and engage him in conversation because I'm pretty sure he would wipe the floor with me. He’d be calmly articulating his views and pause just long enough for me to prove his point by hysterically frothing at the mouth. Okay, so maybe the question this liberal wants to ask, then, is why would we WANT to keep our feelings out of the decision-making process?

Oy, I swore I’d leave politics off my blog but I can’t seem to stop myself. I need to stick to Jews and movies. Nothing political about that, right?

Delhi Platter

Have you seen the new film “Bride and Prejudice” yet? I saw it this weekend: horrible title, mediocre script, some questionable acting, plot holes you could drive a herd of sacred cows through, and I LOVED every second of it! As the none-too-subtle title suggests, the film is a Bollywood version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Instead of the Bennet family in 18th century England, we have the Bakshis of 21st century India. The film could not be more removed from the documentary I saw recently that takes place in India, “Born into Brothels,” yet there were many parallels to the other film I blogged about that weekend, “Fiddler on the Roof.” Just like Tevye and Golde’s daughters, the four Bakshi sisters are all of marriageable age and their parents are desperately seeking suitable matches.

For Papa, make him a scholar
For Mama, make him rich as a king.
For me, well, I wouldn’t holler
If he were as handsome as anything…

The Elizabeth Bennet/Tzeitel character is named Lalita and she is played by Aishwarya Rai, the Queen of Bollywood and the highest paid actress in India. I bet this film will be the first exposure many Americans have to Indian culture. And that’s a little scary. First of all, are we to assume that every woman in India under the age of 35 is a freaking supermodel? Oh my God, not since Flo Ziegfeld died has such a bevy of beauties been gathered together in one location! With the frequent soft focus close-ups of these ethereal women in their dazzling colorful saris, the film borders on softcore porn, or at least the Miss India beauty pageant (and, in fact, Aishwarya Rai was Miss World 1994). The men are far less colorful. Austen's Charles Bingley becomes Indian Balraj Bingley, Mr. Darcy becomes the rich but boring American Will Darcy (with a nice cameo by Marsha Mason as his snobby mother who tells the Bakshis she doesn't need to visit filthy India since she can already do yoga and eat tandoori chicken in L.A.).

  We are clearly supposed to admire Lalita for her feminist ideals. She informs her parents that she will only marry for love and not for money or social advancement. That’s why she rejects the successful Indian man, Mr. Kholi (who has embraced Western culture and now lives in the San Fernando Valley but still wants a traditional Indian bride) that her meddling mother has found for her. Have you noticed that movie feminists these days have to be drop-dead gorgeous or else they’re not allowed to espouse such views? Lord, you haven’t seen such heavy makeup on a feminist since Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy bunny in 1963. And while Lalita supposedly spurns the comical Mr. Kholi because of her values, you could also say she dumped the Indian geek in favor of the American stud who, by the way, happens to be a billionaire. So, yes, true love always wins out—provided that your partner is outrageously attractive and loaded. Oy, at least Tzeitel risked everything for poor destitute Mottel the Tailor. Now there’s a real feminist!

The most thrilling part of “Bride and Prejudice” (and I defy you to pronounce that title correctly at the theatre box office) is the Bollywood-style singing and dance numbers. Where the few American musicals that still exist are so sophisticated they have to have damn good explanations for the characters singing, in this film people are endlessly bursting into song without the slightest provocation. Every number suddenly finds hundreds of extras singing along with the stars of the film and gyrating to the beat in an explosion of sound and color. The dance moves look more like a super-aerobics workout than anything in Jerome Robbins’ repertoire—you haven’t seen this much energy depicted on-screen since Busby Berkeley doped up Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland on amphetamines.

On another pop culture note, three icons left us today: John Raitt, Sandra Dee, and Hunter S. Thompson. Long before John Raitt was known as Bonnie Raitt’s dad, he starred as the original Billy Bigelow in the 1947 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel” and later in the Broadway and movie version (with Doris Day) of “The Pajama Game” where he introduced this timeless if depressing song:

Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes
Love never made a fool of you
You used to be too wise

Hey there, you on that high flying cloud
Though she won't throw a crumb to you
You think some day she'll come to you

Better forget her
Her with her nose in the air
She has you dancing on a string
Break it and she won't care

Sandra Dee was the first “Gidget” and also took over the “Tammy” franchise from Debbie Reynolds. That image made her the object of derision in the song from “Grease” that begins:

Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee
Lousy with virginity
Won't go to bed till I'm legally wed
I can't, I'm Sandra Dee!

Like Doris Day, I think Sandra Dee’s squeaky-clean image occasionally camouflaged her true talents. She showed what she was capable of in films like “Imitation of Life” and “A Summer Place” but never got many chances to shine after that and her career was mostly over by age 26. She is being portrayed on-screen right now by Kate Bosworth in the Kevin Spacey film “Beyond the Sea” about Dee's former husband Bobby Darrin. Rumor had it that Sandra Dee went to the Beverly Hills Library every day. I’ll miss looking for her in the stacks there!

I always meant to read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and now I will. I did see the film starring Johnny Depp who is in the midst of making another film adaptation of one of Thompson’s books, “The Rum Diary.” Thompson committed suicide today, ending what must have been a very difficult life.

Sandra Dee also suffered a lot—from anorexia, depression, cancer, and the kidney disease that killed her. I can imagine Sandra singing the following song written about John Raitt’s Billy Bigelow, but this time it could almost be a eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson:

What's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad,
Or if you like the way he wears his hat?
Oh, what's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad?
He's your feller and you love him,
That's all there is to that.

Common sense may tell you
That the ending will be sad,
And now's the time to break and run away.
But what's the use of wond'ring
If the ending will be sad?
He's your feller and you love him,
There's nothing more to say.

All Children Left in the Dust

“Public disgrace, punishment, humiliation, and torture are scientifically proven to improve motivation, reading skills, and test scores.”

I can see why I don’t have a political blog. Whenever I start to write about an “issue” such as my previous post on public schools, I can’t help but focus on my own childhood memories no matter how much I try not to! Of course, we know that the personal IS political so I’m not sure why I even try to keep my reminiscences to a minimum—this is my blog, after all, not the New York Times!

One reason why I could never write a traditional political blog is because whenever I try to discuss the current administration in a rationale manner, it only takes about two minutes until I am frothing at the mouth and experiencing a dangerous rise in my blood pressure. I realize that I may not be adding to the national dialogue on education policy when I refer to our elected officials using phrases like “the anti-Christ.”

But cooler heads do prevail, and the raison d’etre for my previous post was to mention one of them. There is SO much wrong with what’s happening in Washington right now, but do you ever wish you had the ability to talk about just one area of our government’s folly with intelligence and cold hard facts? To download the bullet points for your next cocktail party in a red state, you need go no further than Susan Ohanian.Org, an indispensable site put together by educator, author, and muckraker Susan Ohanian. The site includes the “Outrage of the Day” which shows, through real-life stories, how Bush’s misguided education policies are causing untold damage to schools, teachers, and kids. Today’s outrage comes from a high school English teacher who was forced by her Florida school district to abandon Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, poetry, and creative writing in favor of a curriculum exclusively geared to preparing kids for the FCAT (Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test). She was told she was no longer allowed to teach novels but had to use soul-killing test-length nonfiction passages and provide direct instruction “from bell to bell.” She was reprimanded for allowing her students to read silently in class and for not saying the word FCAT enough during instructional time. This gifted educator is quitting the teaching profession at the end of this school year. Sadly, her case is all too typical. Go to Susan’s website to learn about the intricacies of the No Child Left Behind Act (don’t be fooled by the clever title). You can read great stories about how brave people are resisting the insanity, and order a fun CD full of protest songs called "No Child Left Behind? Bring Back the Joy." All the proceeds from the CD go to a wonderful organization in Birmingham, Alabama, called the World of Opportunity (WOO), created when over 500 students were pushed out of Birmingham public schools just before a big high-stakes test.

Needless to say, I recommend Heinemann books as one antidote to the wrong-headed policies that are sweeping our nation. Two of Susan Ohanian’s books that I love are “One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards” and “Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum.” Or check out Crystal England's new "Divided We Fail: Issues of Equity in American Schools."

I keep writing and deleting paragraphs about Bush and his minions. I better stop because I’m starting to froth at the mouth so badly that I might scare Leah and force Kendall to give me a rabies shot. To counteract that bile, I’ll mention another of my educational heroes—my colleague Lois Bridges. Lois is one of those rare people who is able to articulate her beliefs quietly and firmly, without the slightest trace of white foam forming at the edges of her mouth. She has a profound understanding of how kids learn best and can speak at the drop of a hat about why the policies of the current administration are proving life-threatening to our nation’s schools. You only have to look at Lois’s three kids to see the extent to which she walks her talk. They are so politically aware, so socially conscious that whenever I hear about their latest activities I end up feeling like a fat cat industrialist putting my cigar out on the face of one of my oppressed workers. Lois has a son still in high school, a daughter in college, and one that’s a recent graduate, but between the three of them they’ve already volunteered in more Third World countries than Mother Teresa. Knowing that amazing young people like these three exist helps me breathe a little easier, especially after a Sunday wandering around Los Angeles seeing so many kids in their teens and 20s with plastic surgery scars and permanent cell phone indentations on their cheeks. I can’t help but think of some of the folks I encountered at that insane birthday party Leah went to last weekend at the Beverly Hills Hotel. If Lois’s kids lived here they probably would have formed a picket line.

I Survived Public School

Seeing the projects that Leah is working on, such as her model of an 18th century California mission, the 3-D pyramid she made depicting different themes in the Madeleine L’Engle book “A Wrinkle in Time,” and the Gold Rush musical her class is in the midst of rehearsing, I am filled with gratitude for the quality of her education and her love of learning. I had lunch today with one of my favorite local authors to talk about a new book she is developing for Heinemann. When this woman used to teach Kindergarten, she had the kids studying Picasso and creating art in his style; her third grade class lobbied the Santa Monica City Council to save a historic building from demolition; and her fifth grade class did a simulation of a trial involving fugitive slaves and the people who helped them. Thank God for great teachers. Unfortunately such folks are moving increasingly against the tide.

I was reading about Margaret Spellings, our brand new Secretary of Education (and personal favorite of Karl Rove), and wondering why there wasn’t rioting in the streets when her nomination was announced. It’s no accident that her very FIRST act as Education Secretary was threatening to pull funding from PBS because of a cartoon called “Postcards from Buster” about a bunny who learns about maple sugaring in Vermont and in the process meets two women who are…brace yourself for the shock…LIVING TOGETHER! From all the ruckus you’d think the animated couple were ringleaders of a hardcore gay sex network and were forcing Buster to perform lewd acts on SpongeBob SquarePants. Oy. there is trouble ahead, folks, and frankly, my fears are less about the Department of Education’s new Puritans and more about how the vile No Child Left Behind Act (which Spellings had a big part in crafting) is setting education back about 40 years in this country.

I am a product of the Chicago Public School system. I think it was a pretty lousy education overall but we didn’t really know it at the time. Forty years ago this month I was halfway through my first year at Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School. Our school building was an imposing structure, built on land once owned by Pehr S. Peterson, a Swedish immigrant who made a fortune from his tree nursery. He supplied all the trees for the 1893 World’s Fair and was responsible for most of the trees and shrubs in Chicago’s beautiful public parks. His wife, Mary Gage Peterson, was an expert in forestry herself and one of the earliest advocates for protecting forests from lumbering, mining, and other commercial interests. Mrs. Peterson met with Theodore Roosevelt several times and encouraged him to take an active role in conservation issues. After her death in 1922 it was decided that the school being built on the site of her former estate should be named after her.

The images I remember of Peterson School seem to belong to a different world. For most of my time there we sat in the original bolted-in wooden desks from 1925 with holes for inkwells and graffiti from Herbert Hoover’s presidency. If you ran your hand across the bottom of these desks you’d find stalagmites of ossified gum, most chewed long before World War II. We still had the original schoolhouse pendant light fixtures (the kind that yuppies like me are now searching for on eBay) and the enormous wood-framed windows that opened from the top. We used those incredibly long wooden poles from the 1920s with the brass hooks on the end to open the windows and it was always a special honor to be chosen to wield those poles. I can still remember the sensual feel of the smooth, varnished wood beneath my fingers as I tried to fit the hook in the wooden frame without breaking the ancient glass.

Rumor had it that my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Reid, was there when the school opened in 1925. We didn’t have nursery school back then so the first day of Kindergarten was a huge and often traumatic milestone. I remember the growing panic I felt when I realized my mother was actually leaving me with these total strangers. Even the full-sized slide and miniature log cabin playhouse inside our Kindergarten classroom did little to assuage my anxiety that first day. Helen Kotsoulous cried so much that her mother was called in to take her home but, try as I might, I could not muster up the tears, my natural emotions already deeply suppressed at the age of five.

Miss Stark was my first grade teacher and in my mind she was the clone of Helen Crump, Opie Taylor’s teacher (and eventual stepmother) on the old “Andy Griffith Show.” I remember first grade as the dawn of our literacy caste system that would follow and stigmatize us throughout our long school careers. Early in the year our class was divided up into two distinct reading groups. I believe they had some easy-to-decode labels such as the Tadpoles and the Frogs, but we cut right to the chase and renamed the groups the “Smart Kids” and the “Dummies.” We used those terms openly and I don’t remember Miss Stark trying to stop us. But being a Smart Kid didn’t protect me from social ridicule. Sitting up in front of the class one day in the half-circle of tiny chairs reserved for the Smart Kids (while the Dummies watched us wistfully from their nailed-down desks), I had “an accident” in my pants (number 1, as we referred to it back then). The sensory images of this experience are still white hot in my mind: the pungent odor, the feeling of wetness on my legs, the stain on my pants, the red-faced shame spreading like a rash. I can’t remember who was called or how the situation was remedied so in my mind I’m permanently stuck in that half-circle, exposed as if the Dummies are punishing me for daring to sit with the Smart Kids.

When I think of my old teachers I always imagine them towering over me even though I’m sure most were of normal height or below. But even as a short second grader, I remember my teacher Mrs. Kipnis at my own level. Is that possible? Was she a three-foot dwarf? At some point in second grade, a bunch of outsiders “from the city” came to our class and started giving special tests. I never knew if it was because of baby boomer overcrowding in my grade or what, but after the results of these tests came in, Steven Newman, Hilary Kaye, Scott Whitcup, and I were told that we would be skipping third grade entirely and jumping right to fourth.

Here’s my advice if your child is being encouraged to skip a grade in school: Don’t do it! It worked out fine for the four of us academically, but socially, my geekiness was even more set in stone. I would have been branded a complete outcast if not for the coattails of my older brother Bruce who was always a star student, and my popular sister Sue who had one steady boyfriend after another, starting in first grade. Physically, I had already been one of the shortest and youngest kids in my grade, so now I seemed to be from another species than the rest of the fourth graders. Nobody had bothered to tell me what students normally learn during third grade so I arrived in Mrs. Shapiro’s class completely unprepared. After our morning pledge I opened my mouth to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as the rest of the class started warbling “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I was still neatly printing my letters while the rest of the class had moved on to cursive. My main memory of Mrs. Shapiro is that she was obsessed with the multiplication tables and had a permanent twitch in her eye from the time her young son stuck a fork in it.

My fifth grade class was a split with sixth grade, making my tiny size even more obvious, and I was an easy target for the sixth grade boys. One day two of them cornered me in the boys’ bathroom and, in between hurling wads of wet paper towels upwards so they’d stick on the tiled ceiling, asked me if I knew what the word “fuck” meant. “Of course I do,” I replied, and ran out of the bathroom as fast as I could. But in truth I had no idea. Our teacher, Miss Geib, was a borderline sociopath. I remember her frequently smashing unruly sixth grade boys against the lockers even though most of them already towered over her. Oh well, at least I had escaped our sadistic third grade teacher, Mrs. Luby, who kept her room as hot as a furnace all year long, refused to open the windows, and used to punish children by making them sit under the piano while she played it vigorously.

My sixth grade teacher, sweet Mrs. Rosenstein, was a welcome relief from Miss Geib’s venom, and I instantly developed a big crush on her. By seventh grade, I was beginning to catch up socially and attended my first kissing parties. This was the year I had the hots for Judy Stigler, Debbie Shub, and Rhonda Hellstrom. Our teacher, Mrs. Stone, was the first to depart from the dry-as-dust textbooks and engage us with real literature and current events. It was 1970 and the forces of change were finally starting to have an impact on the Chicago Public Schools—a system which had been in a kind of Eisenhower-era time warp for most of the previous decade. Although the Apollo astronauts had landed on the moon in the summer after sixth grade, our science books still treated manned space missions as something we could only dream about. Mrs. Stone left the school for the second part of the year and was replaced by young, hip Mrs. Pink, who bore a strong resemblance to Stella Stevens. I mentioned her in my sex education post and told how we would try to foil her plans to be the grooviest teacher at Peterson School by making her life a living hell!

When I started eighth grade, the design horror of the early 1970s reared its ugly head and we watched as the cool antique fixtures were taken down and replaced by garish fluorescent lights in a lowered ceiling of white acoustic panels. The low ceilings blocked the top of the windows so the antique wooden poles were thrown away along with the original wooden desks which were pried up from their moorings and replaced with hollow metal desks that echoed throughout the building if you even brushed against them lightly. I’ll never forget our slightly batty French teacher, Miss Genitis, lecturing about how she would like to find out who manufactured these desks so she could line them up along the brick wall outside and be a one-woman firing squad, killing them all with her steady stream of machine gun fire to pay for the constant metal clattering that was wearing on her last nerve!

Our eighth grade teacher, Mrs. O’Connor, was a throwback to the old style of teaching but her real passion was music. No matter what we were studying, she’d always end up at the big upright piano in the corner of the room teaching us medleys of patriotic war songs or obscure novelty numbers from long-forgotten musicals. You can see I never made it out of the first row in the class photo.

Our little school did have one famous graduate. NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg went to Peterson in the mid-1940s and a few years ago did a report on "Weekend Edition" about the school's 75th anniversary and her fondness for the place where she began her lifelong love of the written word.

Well, in typical blog style, I haven't really addressed my intended topic of the current state of public school education in this country. But at least this survey of my elementary school teachers has reminded me how far the teaching profession has come in the past 40 years, despite all attempts by our government to turn the clock back.

Hair-Brained

I was fascinated by Tamar’s and Nappy40’s discussion yesterday about the politics of hair. They talked about the torture they felt they had to put themselves through for so many years to cajole their curly, frizzy, fuzzy, nappy hair into something that more closely resembled our culture’s idea of “good hair.” I often worried about the messages my curly-haired, glasses-wearing daughter got from some of her favorite films such as “The Princess Diaries” where invariably the makeover given to the main character midway through the film sent the message that for a girl curly hair and glasses = unattractive and subject to ridicule, while straight hair and contacts = endless opportunities and the cutest guys. Yuck. My daughter has since straightened her hair (that Japanese process that lasts six months at a time) but she and her curly-haired mom swear that the straightening does not come from a belief that their natural hair is inferior or unappealing. Leah recently insisted on keeping braids in her hair for two days so that when she took them out it would be curly!

I hope Tamar and Nappy40 keep that conversation going. It did make me think—what about the politics of NO hair? I firmly believe that bald men are one of the last groups in this country that people are allowed to blatantly discriminate against and ridicule without the fear of appearing uncool or politically incorrect. I was watching one of those ghastly “reality” shows the other day (God forgive me) where a woman was being set up on a blind date. The host was giving her some clues about the guy she was going to meet and then, with panic flashing across her eyes, she asked, “He’s not bald, is he?!!” The host looked confused and then quickly said “Oh no, OF COURSE not!” thus assuring the woman that even in the manipulative world of reality television, it would never cross the producers’ minds to be so cruel as to fix her up with a BALD person. Hmm, what if she had said, “He’s not Jewish, is he?” with the same horror in her voice?

I think these messages about baldness are as prevalent in the media as the ones that are constantly telling girls and women that they are less than. The good guys and romantic leads in movies typically have thick manes of perfect hair, while the sadistic criminals and poor shlemiels are balding. It is so insidious I think most of us don’t even see it anymore: full head of hair = trustworthy, kind, desirable stud; receding hairline = sleazy, pathetic losers. Aren’t there even studies that show how a bald man could never be elected president in this country? I loved what Paul Giametti said when he was nominated for a Golden Globe this year for “Sideways”: “I hope I strike a blow for chubby bald men everywhere!” and yet to read some of the venomous reviews of “Sideways,” you’d think Giamatti had committed a crime by daring to be a romantic character while looking the way that he does.

I know, I know, you are now going to mention a bunch of famous bald men you think are very handsome and sexy. I’m familiar with the list—from Yul Brynner to Telly Salavas to Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard to a range of African-American athletes who shave their heads. Yawn. Whenever I hear women pulling out this list to prove they have no issues with bald people, I think of discussions by white folks about how beautiful black women are but then they only mention African-American women with very specific features including straight silky hair, slim noses, and small lips. Have you seen the African-American women who have won the Miss America pageant?

Yikes, I guess I’m sounding a little bitter. I certainly have no reason to complain in my personal life. I know that my baldness is not a turn-off for Kendall or my friends and family. I’m just saying we all need to be more aware of the messages we’re putting out there, and I’m talking to myself too. My hair started thinning when I was in my 20s and for years I treated it as a kind of illness. It didn’t matter that I knew intellectually that it was a genetic condition over which I had no control, to me it somehow represented my lack of health (perhaps because of all the media images of healthy/full head of hair; sickly/balding that I’d seen). I got very used to my straight-on reflection in the mirror, but for many years when I’d see a photo of myself from a different angle I’d audibly gasp. “Oh my God, who is that bald guy?!” To be honest, I'm still shocked when I see certain pictures!

I used to get my hair cut at the ritzy health club I belonged to, until one day, as I was sitting in that chair, I thought, “WHY are you paying $40 for a haircut? You’re BALD!” Now I happily fork over my $9.00 at the local Supercuts, forego the shampooing, and I’m out of there in less than 10 minutes. What a dream! But whether I’m sitting in the fanciest hair salon in Beverly Hills or the Pico Boulevard Supercuts, the person cutting my hair always approaches the fuzz growing on the top of my bald head as if she were a museum curator handling an ancient artifact that must be preserved. “Please cut it off,” I always say, and they seem surprised, as if keeping those few wispy strands would be fooling anyone into thinking I’m an Abercrombie & Fitch model.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I have no sense of humor about baldness. Nothing made me laugh harder than the exchanges between Murray Slaughter and Sue Ann Nivens on the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He’d make some crack about what a pathetic nymphomaniac she was and she’d stop and check her makeup in the reflection on the top of his head. On the other hand, can I tell you how much I am NOT into the “Bald Pride” movement? As much as I don’t want to be hiding in my basement cowering in shame, that still doesn’t mean I want to join a “Bald Is Beautiful” parade. I just don’t get it. There is a group called the Bald-Headed Men of America (BHMA) that publishes a newsletter called “Chrome Dome,” has an annual convention, promotes National Rub a Bald Head Week, and states on their website that they are “dedicated to the belief that bald-headed men have extra individual character.” Oy, do we? I don’t think so! And please do not rub my head unless expressly asked. There’s a documentary about this group called “All Together Bald” that I haven’t seen but I hope it’s in good fun. I got a little worried when I heard it compared to “Best in Show,” the hilarious Christopher Guest “mockumentary” about a national dog show. But what other film could have the tagline, “This film is a must-see whether you have a full head of hair or not!”

At least the Bald Pride people mean well, unlike the multi-billion dollar industry that tries (and fails) to “save” people from going bald. And to watch their TV commercials, you’d think they were saving balding men from certain death. The scripts for these commercials are truly appalling, implying that if you’re balding you are weak and less than a man and certainly will never be able to attract a mate. Thank God I have never felt any desire to to hide, stall, or reverse my baldness. I fully accept that I am bald and know that there is nothing I can do about it, it is just part of who I am, and a fairly meaningless part. But just when I want to laud myself for my healthy attitude and perspective, I give myself “the test,” and I’m afraid I fail it every time. If suddenly someone invented a pill that would restore my full head of hair exactly as it was in my early 20s, and I only had to take this free pill once and there were no side effects, would I take it? You bet I would! Damn.