Jew Eat Yet?

Women with Regrets

I was talking to my writing group friends Karen and Deborah the other day about what I was reading. I told them I’ve been on a memoir jag. I just finished Patti Davis’s book “The Long Goodbye” and now I’m reading Jane Fonda’s new autobiography, “My Life So Far.” In describing the books, I explained that while I am no fan of the Reagan presidency, I admire Patti Davis’s writing and was impressed by how honest she was about her own youthful actions. Even though she remains diametrically opposed to the politics of her father’s administration, she wrote about all the things she did during her dad’s White House years that make her cringe today. I then told Karen and Deborah how much I’m enjoying Jane Fonda’s searingly honest writing. She describes her ill-fated 1972 trip to Hanoi in detail and how she unwittingly found herself smiling on top of that North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that had probably shot down American planes. The photos became lightning rods in the battle between people who were against the war and people who thought the anti-war protesters were traitors. Fonda doesn’t pass the buck in her book, she takes full responsibility for her own stupidity that led to this unfortunate photo op. She understands why people continue to be so upset by these images and she apologizes for her actions again and again.

“Oh,” Karen and Deborah commented, “you seem to be into women with lots of regrets.” I hadn’t made any connection between Patti Davis and Jane Fonda, but they were right. I had always admired Patti Davis as First Children go, even when she was appearing in bad made-for-TV movies and doing misguided Playboy layouts. And I actively followed Jane Fonda through all three of her wildly different marriages and diverse film roles that included sex kitten “Barbarella,” tragic Depression-era Gloria in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They,” hardened hooker Bree Daniel in “Klute,” naïve military wife Sally Hyde in “Coming Home,” and repentant daughter Chelsea in “On Golden Pond.” What attracted me to both of these women’s books was their willingness to revisit past actions with the benefits of age and maturity and provide an unflinching analysis of where they erred even if their motives seemed beyond reproach at the time.

I also liked that Patti Davis and Jane Fonda are both confirmed lefties who stand by their politics but eventually came to realize that some of their extreme tactics were less than effective. I remember seeing Jane Fonda speak once at a rally in Daley Plaza in Chicago. This was during the Tom Hayden years and I can’t even remember what the cause was—I think it had something to do with migrant workers. What I do remember is that Jane took the podium and for a good ten minutes screamed nonstop into the microphone, fists in the air, her words completely unintelligible even to people standing a few feet away from her as I was. It was perplexing to say the least. I wasn’t looking for sexy Barbarella to sugarcoat the speech with breathy pauses but I did think it a colossal waste that Fonda delivered her message in such an angry, shrill way as to render it meaningless. Maybe she was upset by the crowds standing under the Picasso sculpture carrying signs that said things like “Go Back to Hanoi” and “Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales!” Similarly, during the Reagan Era, some of Patti Davis’s angry public rhetoric about her parents began to seem one-dimensional and rote. How much more interesting it would have been, Patti now speculates, if she had not rebuffed all of her father’s attempts to talk with her about the issues they disagreed on. It’s unlikely such discussions would have changed either of their points of view, but they could have provided some common ground on which future understandings could be built. Being a card-carrying liberal myself, I often secretly long for more level heads among the left. I cringe at the shrill, hysterical geshreis of many activists and the over-demonization of the right even though I know I do it myself. There’s something liberating about reading Patti’s book and realizing that while I will never agree with Ronald Reagan’s policies or actions, he was just a human being with many good traits and many flaws and not the anti-Christ we once feared. But please, please, please don’t ask me to have this more evolved perspective about our current Führer just yet. Get back to me in about 25 years and we’ll talk.

Jane and Patti both had troubled relationships with their powerful, famous fathers who disapproved of their social activism. And both had emotionally distant mothers. Jane Fonda’s socialite mother suffered from depression and committed suicide in a mental institution when Jane was still in grade school (she learned about the real cause of her mother’s death from a fan magazine!). Patti was estranged from Nancy Reagan for many years and it was only during the former president’s long struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease when the two women became close. Is that all part of my fantasy? Resolving seemingly impossible family conflicts just when everyone thought it was too late? Jane never fully came to terms with Henry Fonda’s icy aloofness, but she dedicated her book to her mother and expressed her lifelong regret that she didn’t say a final good-bye to her when she had the chance.

Reading these books, I’m fascinated that both of these authors are able to express huge amounts of regret without falling into the quicksand of guilt. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to separate the two emotions. I could almost say that it was this regret-guilt cocktail that killed my mother every bit as much as her lung cancer did. In the early 70s my parents’ teetering marriage came to an ugly end following the revelation that my mother was having an affair. This led to her losing custody of her three children, a rare turn of events in the 1970s and one that my mother never fully recovered from. While we constantly told her what a fantastic, loving mother she was, she could never shake the image she had of herself as the Whore of Babylon who had abandoned her offspring. She was apologizing for her long-ago actions until the final morphine drip released her from consciousness in 1999. And it is only sitting here writing this that I suddenly realize with deep sadness that we might have helped her a lot more during her life if we had just accepted her apology instead of insisting that she had nothing to apologize for.

Is this the real reason I am such a devotee of the “women with regrets” genre? I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge my mother’s mistakes while she was alive so I’m now transferring my personal family drama to women like Jane Fonda and Patti Davis and feeding off their painfully honest expressions of remorse?

Good Anxiety?

I woke up this morning with a familiar feeling of dread. I felt overwhelmed and completely inadequate in just about every area of my life. I was obviously an incompetent, lazy idiot, and as soon as the truth was discovered about me everyone would see how I was failing miserably in my job, marriage, parenting, finances, health, family, and blog. Kendall and Leah were still sleeping so I’m sure no one heard me audibly moaning or saw me rocking back and forth with my eyes clamped shut, imagining my future as the homeless man at the Western Avenue entrance of the Santa Monica Freeway, begging people to let me wash their windshields with my filthy rags for a small donation before the click of the green arrow sends them speeding by. Old friends on their way to work would recognize me through my scraggly beard and avert their eyes as they rolled down their windows two inches and passed some crumpled up dollar bills to me in exchange for not talking to them. In the midst of these painful fantasies, I opened one eye, saw that it was time to wake Leah up for school, and bounded into her room, Mr. Cheerful Happy Dad. The funny thing is, I wasn’t faking it, and I’ve had an extremely productive, pleasant day ever since. Do I have undiagnosed bipolar disorder? Or am I just wired in a way that requires that I sometimes go very low before I can bounce back up?

I’ve been looking at a lot of my negative patterns lately and realizing that my response to them is often more painful than the pattern itself. There were times when I could have easily spent the entire day hating myself for the ten minutes of agonizing self-deprecation I put myself through this morning. Which makes me wonder, which is more damaging—my neuroses or my endless judgment of my neuroses? So, as I discussed in one of my earliest posts about Sad Jessica Lange, I’m working hard to just accept my dysfunction as it is. Not indulge it, promote it, or like it, just accept it without always feeling like I need to be on the attack.

When I was in college I used to always despise myself for waiting until the last possible minute to write a paper or finish a project. The feeling of panic and anxiety as the deadline neared certainly wasn’t pleasant, and I was forced to pull many a miserable all-nighter as I reviled my procrastination tendencies and vowed never to let it happen again (until the following assignment, that is). But looking back there was something about that adrenaline rush that I guess I really did like or need, and those papers and projects almost always came out really well. There are plenty of things I do that I’d like to change but I don’t think despising myself for them is the strategy that will produce the best results. Accepting the fact that I needed to writhe in self-hatred for a few minutes this morning is ultimately far more healing than hating myself for hating myself!

I’ve been trying to listen to all the voices in my head lately and suspend judgment. What really works for me is to pretend that my screaming inner child is my daughter instead of me. This catapults me out of bitter recrimination and plops me smack into parental comforting mode. Many of my bitter attack thoughts start with “You have no right to feel ______.” (Fill in the blank with any so-called negative emotion—sad, depressed, lonely, scared, miserable, anxious, etc.) And then, in my newfound moments of awareness, my parental self pops in to say “Yes you do, go right ahead and feel that. Everything’s going to be okay.” Ah, what relief. What is with the Cult of Happiness in this country anyway? Sometimes when someone chirps “Have a nice day!” at me, I want to respond, “Why the hell should I? Maybe the best thing for me today would be to have a truly shitty day, maybe that would produce the growth that I need right now!” To borrow from the title of a deliciously awful movie from 1968 in which Mary Tyler Moore and George Peppard are hippies who get infected by a mood-altering virus, “What’s so bad about feeling bad?”

Pollyanna's Dad

No, that title is not a reference to me and God knows I don’t mean to imply that my daughter is a Pollyanna! I was surprised to hear that the father of the original Pollyanna, the great British actor Sir John Mills, died this weekend. Surprised not only because I didn’t realize the 97-year-old Oscar winner was still alive, but also because less than 48 hours earlier I was watching his daughter Hayley Mills on the stage of the Pittsburgh Public Theatre giving a magnificent performance in Frank McGuinness’ “The Bird Sanctuary.” While I always enjoyed Hayley Mills, who knew that Pollyanna, Susan and Sharon of “The Parent Trap,” and Mary Clancy of “The Trouble with Angels” grew up to be such a gifted, nuanced actress? She played this difficult, potentially unsympathetic role with surprising empathy and compassion. I was blown away by Hayley Mills’ acting skills and, without causing her any offence, I must add that her speaking voice is still so identical to her teen star persona that I half expected her to walk into a scene and shout to co-star Elizabeth Franz, “I’ve got a scathingly brilliant idea!”

I’ve always been fascinated by acting families like the Redgraves, Fondas, and Barrymores, and the Mills family is up there with the best of them. In addition to golden Hayley, I also grew up under the comforting watch of sister Juliet Mills’ Phoebe Figallily in “Nanny and the Professor”:
Phoebe Figalilly is a silly name
And so many silly things keep happening
Is there really magic in the things she does
Or is love the only magic thing that nanny brings…
Mills' co-star in this fluff was David Doremus, later known as Mary Ellen and then Erin Walton’s boyfriend G.W. Haines on “The Waltons” (dear God, will my 1970s TV blogpostings EVER end?). Juliet was also an accomplished stage actress but she will forever be known to the Baby Boomer generation as the Nanny every American boy dreamed of having.

My favorite John Mills performance was in one of his earlier films—as Pip in David Lean’s definitive version of Dickens’ “Great Expectations” but I also loved his work in the even earlier David Lean/Noel Coward collaborations “In Which We Serve” and “This Happy Breed,” both co-starring a special favorite of Kendall’s and mine (and the actress who is nearly responsible for getting us together), Celia Johnson. Also loved “Swiss Family Robinson,” co-starring Kendall’s fav Dorothy McGuire, as well as Mills’ brilliant turns in “Ryan’s Daughter” (which won him the Oscar) and “Gandhi” among many others (we’ll be kind and overlook his role in Madonna’s execrable “Who’s That Girl”).

As I continue to write about these celebrities who've had an impact on my life, I wonder if I’m using them to avoid talking about my real feelings or if I’m somehow expressing elements of my real feelings through them. There’s certainly an element of escapism at play when I find myself contemplating the careers of pop culture icons such as Hayley Mills (even though I’m convinced I’m losing blog readers with every keystroke), especially after an emotionally painful day like today.

Perhaps it’s all part of the Passover Purge that began on my knees Friday night over the porcelain bowl in the Pittsburgh Hilton. Only since I returned to L.A., I’m puking old destructive patterns and dysfunction. Kendall and I have spent a good part of the last two days at each other’s throats. Thank God that at this point we’ve both developed the maturity to accept that there are agonizing moments in any relationship and that calmer heads will prevail if we just give it a moment and try not to panic. Much of my stuff whirls around issues of fear and trust, and we had a great talk tonight about how to work through our current conflicts with consciousness and grace. I am so grateful that we can get to that place relatively fast these days. Unfortunately I often find myself at those moments trying to EXPLAIN MY PROCESS a bit too much, usually out of some underlying fear about meeting the challenges that lie ahead. So I keep yapping on, trying to get all my worries out on the table, until finally I’ve blathered on so long about the potential problems I end up creating fissures in our newfound serenity. What I really need is an Erich von Stroheim-like director standing in the corner of the room monitoring our discussion. Then, just at the right moment when we’ve achieved our goals and found common ground, but before I feel the need to process all my remaining feelings to death, von Stroheim would raise his megaphone and shout, “…AND SCENE!”

We did make it to the second seder last night. My friend Helena outdid herself with a smorgasbord of eastern European delicacies including homemade gefilte fish, matzah balls, brisket, and the best chopped liver this side of my grandmother and the Second Avenue Deli. She even dotted the chopped liver with the lethal but heavenly gribenes, or what our Christian friends would call “cracklings,” which she made out of bits of chicken skin and onions cooked in rendered chicken fat. Yum! When my grandmother made this we called it Jewish Popcorn and we ate it by the handfuls. Call the paramedics, please, but if they get here too late, tell them we died happy.

But let’s get back to Pollyanna for a second. I think this little girl gets a bad rap in our culture. Why has that word become such an insult? (“Stop being such a Pollyanna!”) As I remember from the film, Hayley Mills’ Pollyanna has lost both her parents and is forced to live with her miserable aunt, played by Jane Wyman. I don’t know about you, but living with Jane Wyman would turn me into the Bad Seed rather than someone who was able to see the good in everyone she meets and transform bitter, nasty people like Adolph Menjou and Agnes Moorehead into lovable old coots. Suppression of feelings is one thing, but having the guts to be truly optimistic about this terrifying, painful world we live in takes a courage and faith that I can’t even fathom. I only hope that one day someone accuses ME of being a Pollyanna!

Exodus

I’m back from Pittsburgh where I got a nasty case of the stomach flu on Friday night. I haven’t been able to eat anything for the past 48 hours which for me is as rare as the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I was so bummed to miss the seder we were invited to last night but I got off the plane and had to collapse for 12 hours. Is this my body’s way of getting rid of all of my emotional chumetz? I guess it is a sort of cleansing—on the day Jews were supposed to be ridding their homes of any leavened bread or foods that rise or swell I was puking my guts out in the bathrooms of the Hilton Pittsburgh. My own personal exodus. Maybe I can start a new trend, perfect for Los Angeles: Passover Bulimia.

We’re invited to a second seder tonight so I have one more chance to celebrate the Hebrew slaves’ release from bondage. Hmm, do you think gefilte fish, chopped liver, and horseradish will work well as my first food in several days? All washed down with four glasses of sweet Mogen David Concord Grape wine?

I have great memories of the seders of my youth, most of them taking place at my grandparents’ Lake Shore Drive apartment. These were the days when we read every word of the Passover story in our wine-stained Haggadahs in English AND in Hebrew so it was sometimes close to midnight when we finally got to the main meal. Because of the long evening, the small pre-dinner offerings, such as the boiled potato and hard-boiled egg in salt water were greeted as rare delicacies. We savored every morsel as if we were the starving Israelites making our way across the desert to the Promised Land. The egg is a standard seder item, representing the sacrifices at the First Temple in Jerusalem, but many families eat parsley instead of potatoes for that part of the seder. I’m guessing this was a regional difference—maybe it was hard to find parsley that time of year at our family’s ancestral village in Poland? I think there must have been grape juice on the table for the kids but my cousin Jerry and I used to secretly chug down full glasses of the real stuff, getting quite wasted in the process. I’ll never forget the seder where Jerry was so drunk he punched me in the nose, just in time to add some realism to the anecdote about the first plague that befell the Egyptians—Blood! Then there was the time my grandmother snuck out just before we opened the door to invite the prophet Elijah into our seder to drink from the special glass of wine set aside for him. As we rose to welcome Elijah, chanting the haunting “Eliahu HaNavi,” my grandmother appeared in the doorway, covered in a white sheet, as our very own prophet! We loved it but I don’t think my orthodox grandfather was terribly amused.

I miss those endless seders, even though as kids we kept counting ahead to see how many pages in the Haggadah were left until the meal was served. Maybe that was the idea—to give us a little taste of bondage, until, like Moses, we wanted to shout to our Pharaoh (my grandfather): “Let My People Go!”

History and Ketchup

Just a quick hello from the fun but grueling NCHE conference. I love being around history educators and so far I haven’t had to tackle anyone trying to steal Heinemann books from our booth! Above you can see my friend and history maven Christina Cocek Anderson standing with the Father of Our Country and on the right two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough in the Heinemann booth.

I have a great impression of Pittsburgh so far. Downtown seems to be in transition with many gorgeous old buildings being restored—but not so much that they start looking like a set at Disneyland. I love that they’ve left the 100-year-old fading painted signs on most of the buildings. The influence of the Heinz family on the restoration and the city in general is quite pronounced. Of course that made me think of our would-be First Lady, Teresa Heinz Kerry. (Trivia question: Is Teresa the only person who ever married two senators of different parties?)

Tomorrow morning the exhibit hall opens at 7:00 am (gulp!) but I will try to write more in the evening from this fascinating city, home not only to Heinz Ketchup but also the birthplace of Clark Bars, Eskimo Pies, Klondike Bars, Fried Ice Cream, Chipped Chopped Ham, and Fried Zucchini (why doesn’t everyone here weigh 400 lbs?).

Patriot’s Day Reclaimed

Raise your hand if you knew that today was Patriot’s Day. In fairness, this holiday commemorating the Battle of Lexington and Concord doesn’t get much play these days apart from some re-enactments in Massachusetts and a few other New England states. Today is the 230th anniversary of this battle which began the Revolutionary War. It was on April 19, 1775, that the “shot heard round the world” was fired.

There are so many great stories and characters in early American history that it’s criminal how badly the period is covered in many classrooms. I just read a really fun book called “George Washington, Spymaster: How the Americans Outspied the British and Won the Revolutionary War” by Thomas Allen that provides fascinating details about our country’s earliest covert operations and secret intelligence network. The book is written for middle schoolers but most adults I know could learn a lot from it. You’d think there’d at least be a bunch of riveting movies about the Revolutionary War but the ones that exist don’t do it justice. Sure, there was “The Patriot,” in which the entire war is seen as Mel Gibson’s revenge against the sadistic British for killing his son. Or “Revolution” which was so bad it almost sank Al Pacino’s career (he didn’t make another movie for four years).

It makes me crazy how certain right-wingers have tried to co-opt and twist the word “patriot” to suit their needs. To me true patriots are people who are willing to challenge authority and the status quo at every turn if it goes against their values and ideals (look at Washington and his co-horts!). They are also people who are willing to admit mistakes and fight for their less fortunate neighbor’s freedoms as vigorously as they fight for their own. In my book, that makes someone like Jane Fonda fifty times the patriot that George W. Bush will ever be, despite the incredibly dumb mistake she made (and bitterly regrets) climbing into that anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam.

My friend Christina Cocek Anderson, who lives and breathes American history, joined forces with the National Council for History Education (NCHE) this year to create the first annual “Make History Strong in Our Schools” Day. This event will be held on Patriot’s Day each year and is designed to raise awareness about the outrageous situation in our schools in which history is being crowded out of the curriculum—disappearing in some schools entirely thanks to the panic surrounding the high-stakes testing of the dreaded No Child Left Behind Act. This afternoon Christina spoke at the U.S. Capitol with Senators Robert Byrd, Lamar Alexander, and Ted Kennedy on the importance of teaching children about our history. As Christina said—“Our democracy depends on it!”

Tomorrow morning I fly out to Pittsburgh for the annual NCHE conference. The theme this year is “Conflict and Cooperation in History” and it’s in Pittsburgh to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Pulitzer-Prize winning author David McCullough is the keynote speaker. I usually just attend sessions and meet with potential and current authors at these fun history conferences but this year I’m manning the Heinemann booth by myself. Gulp—I’ve never done that before and I’m slightly terrified. Maybe it’s my unpleasant memories of fighting for customers at my grandfather’s clothing store. Okay, get a grip, Danny, social studies books are not polyester leisure suits! It’s always gratifying to see how well respected Heinemann is at these events. I just hope I don’t need to tackle any impoverished teachers in the corridors who want our books so desperately that they sneak them into their Paul Revere canvas bags or try to hold me up with one of the muskets from the Colonial Williamsburg booth!

History is all around us today as those happy-go-lucky cardinals chose their new Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Benedict XVI. Okay, let’s admit it, the first thing every Jew on  the planet wondered when they heard the news today was what the 78-year-old German was doing between the years 1933 and 1945. Turns out he was in the Hitler Youth movement but that it was compulsory so we can’t really blame him. And his father is said to have spoken out against the Nazis on numerous occasions. More worrisome than his connections to the Nazis are his arch conservative views including vehement stands against women in the clergy, homosexuality, birth control, and divorce. That can’t be good for the future of the church despite the international reverie going on in the wake of John Paul II. If only the cardinals had chosen a Latin American or African Pope as some speculated they would do, wouldn’t that have given the church the 21st century shot in the arm it so desperately needed? Oh well, it’s obviously not my decision to make—believe it or not, the 115 cardinals in Rome neglected to contact me for my opinion. But seeing all of those serious, red-cloaked men in the Sistine Chapel today and knowing the new Pope’s antiquated views about women, it’s hard to imagine the church winning back many of the disenchanted Catholics who have left the fold. And since I’m in an American history mode, the Pope would do well to read the words that Abigail Adams wrote in a letter to her husband on March 31, 1776:

“Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

You go, girl! Now there’s someone to admire!

Spit Three Times

No matter how sophisticated and modern Jews become, we will always have one foot in the shtetl. The evil eye was mentioned so often in my home growing up, I thought it was a family member. Did you know that there is an evil eye roaming the world searching for any signs of goodness and purity to destroy? That’s why certain things must never be said in a Jewish home for fear of attracting the attention and wrath of the evil eye. For example, here’s the cruelest thing you could possibly say to a young Jewish mother:

“Your baby is so healthy!”

That is, in essence, a death sentence. I’ve actually made this mistake a few times only to have the hands of the terrified mothers clamp down on my mouth as they shriek and shower me with spit.

What other religion prohibits people from saying good things for fear that uttering them out loud will cause an evil force to take them away? You can’t really say anything bad either since that, too, may tempt the finicky evil eye. There are also strict edits against “loshan hora” or speaking slander or gossip about someone. Isn’t it odd that the people with the biggest mouths on the planet (relax, I’m allowed to be anti-Semitic—I’m Jewish!) have the most restrictions on what they can talk about? Is that why we can’t shut the hell up? Maybe what we’re really doing is rebelling against our medieval fears and telling the evil eye to go fuck himself!

There are two antidotes to the evil eye. If someone calls attention to something positive, thus cursing you to a fate worse than death, you immediately say the magic reverse word, “kinnehora” (the Yiddish equivalent of “Be gone, evil eye!”) and you spit three times. Sometimes a well-placed “kinnehora” is sufficient to ward off doom. “How’s your daughter, Shlomo?” “She’s doing well, kinnehora.” But if someone says, “Shlomo, you’re the picture of health!” you should let out with a “kinnehora” AND a round of spitting. If you don’t feel like laying a hocker on your grandmother’s good rug, you can simply make the sound of spitting three times, something like “tui, tui, tui!” But it’s better if some actual saliva leaves your mouth.

I was thinking about Jewish superstitions today because we attended the second baby shower for my sister- and brother-in-law, Brooke and Scott. Brooke is due next month and the happy, excited couple is delightfully devoid of the special brand of neuroses that descend on Jewish expectant couples. In traditional Jewish circles, you wouldn’t see baby showers at all—that is like putting a target pattern on your uterus. You might think of a name for your unborn baby but you’d never utter the name out loud. You’re not even allowed to prepare for the baby’s arrival by bringing a crib, clothes, or other necessary items for the nursery into the house. Very impractical, I know, but you can’t be too careful—the evil eye seems to have a particular fascination with newborns.

Apparently baby showers as we know them today are a relatively recent phenomenon. In the late 1800s, Victorian women began having teas for new mothers but only after the baby was born since it was not acceptable for pregnant women to appear in public. In the early 1900s these teas turned into “showers” (based on the “showering” of the bride before marriage). The gifts were usually handmade except for the silver that was traditionally given to the baby by the grandmothers.

I don’t know when men started to be included, and I was a little scared at first, but I had a blast at both of the showers for Brooke and Scott. Last Sunday’s was held at the fabulous home of Barbara Rush. Her house is such a classic movie star residence that it screams for its own spread in Life magazine. Well, it actually had one a while back when it was Hedda Hopper’s house. There’s a great picture of Cary Grant helping Hedda Hopper move in. Oy, Hedda—talk about the Queen of Loshan Hora!

Today’s shower was at a yummy restaurant in Westwood. I heard about the girly-girl games played at baby showers and I expected the rooms to be swathed in so much pink that it looked like someone had puked Pepto Bismol all over the walls, but instead we had two very fun, classy parties at which Brooke and Scott received a boatload of fabulous loot. They got so many baby clothes for those first few weeks that they better hope their daughter is a Loretta Young Mini-Me who wants to change into a new outfit every 30 minutes!

Brooke and Scott seem amazingly calm and I can see what great parents they are going to be to little Hallie (named after Kendall and Brooke’s beloved grandmother Hallie Mae). Check out Scott’s beautifully written blog called “Hallieography” that provides a week-by-week account of the pregnancy from the papa’s perspective. I was glad to learn today that he has every intention of keeping that blog going after Hallie’s birth—let’s see how his writing is affected by massive sleep deprivation! I’m already feeling sorry for their second child, if they have one, because I bet that poor kid won’t have a blog dedicated to him or her. Okay, maybe I should wait until the first child is born before I start advocating for the rights of the second!

As I watched Brooke and Scott’s serene demeanors during the baby showers, I kept wondering what it would be like if Brooke’s dad Oliver were still alive. Though the Texas-born playwright probably never met a Jew until he was in his 20s, his neuroses and fears about the safety of his family made him more Jewish than the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I wish Oliver could’ve sat with me at the showers. The two of us would have been “kinnehoraing” left and right and we would have needed oversized spittoons to catch the results of our never-ending quest to keep the evil eye away from precious Hallie!

Tui, tui, tui.

April 15—Sic Semper Tyrannis!

I always found April 15th to be a day heavy with meaning—and not just because of all the anxiety people are experiencing as they race against the clock to file their taxes by midnight.

Abraham Lincoln died 140 years ago today from the bullet wound he received the night before. As we all know, Lincoln was attending a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford's Theater when actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth got into his private box and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of the head. Booth then jumped to the stage, breaking his left leg in the process, and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!” or “Thus always to tyrants!" Even with a broken leg Booth managed to get out of Washington but he was finally caught in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot. It was the first time a president had been assassinated and God knows how our history might have changed if Lincoln had lived.

The Titanic sank 93 years ago today. So much has been written about that luxury liner’s doomed maiden voyage. I often wonder what Henry and Emma Jensen, the original residents of our then 3-year-old home, were doing the night they heard about the sinking of the Titanic. One of the world’s foremost experts on the Titanic is our West Adams neighbor, Don Lynch. His beautiful house is the first home in the ‘hood that Kendall and I ever toured and is what inspired us to move here. Don wrote several superb books about the ship and was a historical consultant on James Cameron’s mega-hit movie. My main complaint with Cameron’s version is that the actual story was so fascinating and full of amazing characters—why leave so many of those out and invent new fictional ones? On the other hand, I thought it was brilliant when one of my all-time favorite shows, “Upstairs Downstairs,” got rid of the matriarch of the family, Lady Marjorie (actress Rachel Gurney wanted to leave the cast), by having her go off with great fanfare on the sinking ship. No mention was made of the ship’s name until the very last scene of the episode when her husband Richard Bellamy is dictating a loving telegram to his wife who is going to see their daughter in New York. At the end of his message, he gives the location ("HMS Titanic") to his secretary Hazel almost under his breath as a casual afterthought. Roll credits.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated 60 years ago today by British troops. The Nazis created Bergen-Belsen in 1943 as a transit center but Commandant Josef Kramer (“the Beast of Belsen”) turned it into a full-fledged concentration camp. By 1945 thousands of prisoners who had become too weak to work were shipped off to Bergen-Belsen and left to die from starvation or disease. There are many horrific first-person accounts of life in the camp. As the SS officers in Bergen-Belsen realized they were about to lose the war, they frantically tried to dispose of all the dead bodies but there were too many for them to deal with. When the British troops rolled in on the afternoon of April 15, they found 10,000 unburied corpses and 40,000 sick and dying prisoners. Of these, over 28,000 were too weak to survive and they died in the days following the liberation. Two of the most famous prisoners at Bergen-Belsen were Anne Frank and her sister Margot. The good fortune that had allowed the Franks and their cohorts to survive over two years in their attic hiding place had definitely run out. After being informed on and arrested, the residents of the secret annex were shipped out of Holland on the very last transport of Jews to Auschwitz. In 1945 Anne and Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen where a typhus epidemic was raging. Margot died first, in March, and Anne, believing everyone in her family to be dead, slipped away just two weeks before the liberation of the camp. If only she could have known that her father Otto had miraculously survived his time at the already liberated Auschwitz and was on his way back to Amsterdam to look for survivors, I’m sure Anne would have been able to hold on just a little bit longer. She was only 15 when she died.

Pol Pot, the man responsible for the killing fields of Cambodia, died 8 years ago today. After the Vietnamese communists were driven out of Cambodia in 1973 because of the secret U.S. bombings in the country, the resulting power vacuum was filled by Pol Pot’s infamous Khmer Rouge. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, overthrew the pro-U.S. regime, and established a new government with Pol Pot as its leader. Cities were evacuated, factories and schools closed, and anyone who was considered an intellectual or who spoke a foreign language were immediately killed. Between 1975 and 1978, over two million Cambodians died under Pol Pot’s rule as the world did little to help. So much for learning the lessons of World War II and Bergen-Belsen. Sic semper tyrannis indeed!

I really didn’t mean for this post to be so depressing—it’s just that there are so many important anniversaries on this day. Should I lighten the mood by mentioning that both Leonardo da Vinci and Elizabeth Montgomery were born on April 15th? Remember the great “Bewitched” episode when Aunt Clara accidentally transports da Vinci to Samantha and Darrin’s suburban home to help Samantha paint the house? While Aunt Clara tried to figure out how to reverse the spell, Elizabeth Montgomery manages to convince everyone that da Vinci was an actor for one of Darrin’s brilliant advertising campaigns in which the Mona Lisa’s smile will be used to sell Mint-Brite Toothpaste. Oy.

Another very personal April 15th memory I have occurred 11 years ago today when my then-wife woke up speaking gibberish and acting very bizarrely. Sophie’s condition worsened through the morning and terrified, I somehow got her into the car and raced to Cedars-Sinai. She wasn’t able to speak at all when we got there and tried to run from the attendants but after sedating her the doctors discovered that she had inexplicably come down with meningal encephalytus. It was so serious that I called Sophie’s parents in Paris who immediately got on a plane and were in her room the following morning. And then, just as quickly as it came on, her condition disappeared without a trace! After a week in the hospital, she was about to be released when a nurse reviewing her chart absent-mindedly said, “Congratulations on your pregnancy!” WHAT? Apparently she was so newly pregnant when she was admitted it didn’t even show up on the first tests they gave her. After a week of heavy medication for the encephalytus, her neurologist informed us that we couldn’t possibly keep the baby. A high-risk obstetrician we consulted disagreed and said everything was fine, any medication Sophie took was too early in the pregnancy to have any negative effect. The neurologist did not accept that and, to cover his own ass, tried to strongarm us into terminating the pregnancy. “If it were my wife, I’d force her to have an abortion,” he said, his back to the door as if he were trapping us in his office. “You’ll have other babies,” he said. “But not this baby!” we replied tearfully. Needless to say, we chose to consult other doctors and ignored the abusive tactics and malpractice of the neurologist, thank God. Leah was born completely healthy. Scary beginning, fantastic result!

April 15th. Phew! And you were just stressed about your taxes?

The Gifts of the Blog

We had two of the blogging Gottliebs over for dinner last night, True Ancestor’s David, visiting from Chicago to promote his book, and his niece, Raising Up Sunshine’s Sara along with her boyfriend Nate (memo to the family: he’s great!). What a fun evening! If someone would have told me a few months ago that I’d be having people I met through my blog over for dinner I would’ve said they were nuts. I’ve always been way too terrified of going near a chat room or any Internet-based meeting place, certain that if I ever communicated with strangers online it would only be a matter of time before they appeared at my door to murder my entire family. I guess meeting people through my blog is the closest I’ll ever come to online dating—some of the awkward guesswork of normal social interactions is taken care of ahead of time because I’ve already read their thoughts enough to know that we’re on a similar wavelength. It’s odd to talk to people I've just met and be able to refer back to things they’ve written about on their blogs. And for whatever reason, I feel so attuned to this family that I have to keep reminding myself that we are (probably) not related. There are so many weird “coincidences” that unite the Millers and the Gottliebs (including the fact that David and I were practically born in the same delivery room at the same moment) and it’s a real treat to read their diverse blogs (nine and counting), all of which I can relate to in different ways. (In the “Twilight Zone” version of this story, you'd see me sitting alone at our dinner table last night since the Gottliebs don’t really exist but are all different aspects of my own personality.)

Leah was so excited to meet her new “uncle” and “cousin” that she could barely contain herself. It always surprises me how much she enjoys meeting new people. I’m incredibly grateful for that, but it brings up a range of emotions. First, I remember how terrified I was of adults (or kids) I didn’t know when I was her age and how I’d hide away or respond to any questions in a nervous monotone, reluctant to engage with strangers for fear they couldn’t possibly be interested in me. When I see how hungry Leah seems for that kind of social interaction and how hyper she gets around new people I worry that I must not be providing her with enough stimulation and I wish that we were part of a larger community in our daily lives. I also worry about her NOT holding back with others, as much as I admire her abandon and trust of new people, and I fear that if she is that “out there” with people in her life she risks being hurt if they get scared by her exuberance and pull back. (Of course my therapist would say that all my fears about Leah in this situation are really fears about myself and she’d be absolutely right!)

I get confused on how to be the best parent in these situations because I don’t want to squelch Leah’s enthusiasm while at the same time I do sometimes want her to calm down a bit and I worry that people may be judging me for Leah’s outgoing behavior. This is old baggage for me. I’m grateful that Leah is so comfortable and giving with people instead of living in fear (as I did), I just need to keep working through my own stuff and help her develop appropriate boundaries while still feeling free to express her personality. It’s obvious that David is an excellent parent to his own kids, I really admired the way he talked to Leah and was able to skillfully diffuse situations where she was ramping up so fast because she wanted our guests to experience the entirety of our lives in a few short hours. I so appreciate when people talk to children as the human beings that they are. In L.A. I’ve seen a certain set of parents who talk to their children (and other people’s) as if they are some adorable, entertaining, alien species that must be coddled and made the center of the universe at all times. Yuck. By contrast, in my childhood (and perhaps in the decades when I was growing up), children in social situations were expected to be completely quiet and let the adults talk. There was never a lot of engagement with kids unless they were being put on display (“Play the piano for the people, honey, why else did I pay for all those freaking lessons?”). God I hope I’m never like that!

I’m feeling grateful for all the gifts of my blog today, including the fact that it’s helped me reconnect with some people I haven’t spoken to in 10, 20, and even 30 years! Through the miracle of search engines, several old friends and/or former classmates have contacted me and it’s been so great to hear from them. I’m especially grateful for the comments I keep getting on the post I wrote after my former classmate Julie Rotter Shumski died last month. It has been such a joy to connect with Julie’s husband, my former classmates, and several of Julie’s more recent friends and colleagues. I had no idea that Julie was deeply involved in a wonderful elementary school that believes as strongly in progressive education as the publisher I work for, and I have no doubt that I will work with this school on future projects. I just wish I could have done this with Julie but I’m not surprised that a person as amazing as she was is helping to forge new relationships even after her death. I am so glad that my site has inadvertently provided an online gathering place for thoughts and memories about this much loved and much missed woman.

Stargazer

I wonder how many of my blog entries mention celebrities in some form or another. All of them? 90 percent? Even deeply personal posts about my life manage to toss in a celebrity reference or two. It’s not like I’m some stalker chasing after celebrities in real life so what am I doing? I know I tend to use pop culture as a lens to reflect what was going on in my inner life. It’s my “thing,” my shtick. And my blog is a great place to ramble on about the odd group of celebrities that had some kind of meaning for me. Finding and posting copies of my correspondence with celebrities from the 1970s has reminded me what a lifeline these folks were during some pretty dark times. Hell, I named this blog after a fictional movie character from the 1930s and 40s, why am I surprised that I call on cinematic images to ground my personal experiences? I don't think I'm like Norma Desmond living in some fantasy past—at least not yet. Sometimes I hear lines from old films coming out of my mouth and I wonder if I’ll end up at the Shalom Retirement Home on Fairfax sitting in a corner and spouting off non sequitur lines from old movies.

“Don’t be scared, chickens. Your big sister was cleaning the gun and it went off. Nearly scared her half to death!”

“She won’t sing. She don’t sing unless she gets paid for it.”

“Buck never would have BEEN in the hospital!”

“H for Harriet. H for Hubbard. But it's not mine.”

“That’s funny. My family’s sitting right here and they don’t think anything of it!”

“Oh, rubbish! You have no power here! Be off before somebody drops a house on you!”

“But I hope to make it up to you by going beautifully through with it now as originally and most beautifully planned.”

I don’t expect anyone but Kendall and possibly my friend Helena to be able to name the six films that those lines came from, but if anyone wants to take a crack at it, I’m offering door prizes!

They shot another TV show at our neighbor’s house today, an episode of “CSI: New York.” Once again our entire block was transformed into a phalanx of equipment trucks, craft services vans, portable dressing rooms, and, in this case, NYPD squad cars. Sometimes it feels like we’re living on the old MGM backlot. Wouldn’t it be fun if Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy pulled up to shoot their scenes instead of Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes?

I’ve never watched any of the CSI series but from what I gather they are gory but very well done. I’m surprised I didn’t start watching the original show—I’ve been a huge fan of Marg Helgenberger since her “China Beach” days. A couple of years ago we were celebrating Kendall’s birthday at Trader Vic’s on the night that “CSI” was having its wrap party there. Was it wrong of me to position myself at the table so I could look past Kendall and stare at Marg Helgenberger? I thought “China Beach” (1988-1991) was such an excellent show, the first series to deal with the complexities and horrors of the experience of Americans, especially women, during the Vietnam War. Remember that last season where they broke the linear structure and moved wildly about in time from episode to episode to show the continued issues facing Vets upon their return to the States? They hopscotched between many dates in the time period between 1967 and 1985 and while it was often confusing, it was some of the best television I’ve ever seen. One of the episodes was directed by Gary Sinise, now the star of “CSI: New York.”

I always thought Sinise was a superb actor, if a dour one, but I mostly remember him from the early days of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. My all-time favorite Steppenwolf production was Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead.” I saw it three times: in 1980 and 1981 in Chicago, and then when the entire production moved to New York in 1984. Directed by John Malkovich, the play featured a good portion of the Steppenwolf company including fantastic actors like Sinise, Joan Allen, Terry Kinney, Laurie Metcalf, Jeff Perry, Glenne Headley, and John Mahoney. Laurie Metcalf gave the most breathtaking performance I’ve ever witnessed in the theatre. In one scene her poor, sad Darlene delivers a thirty-minute monologue sitting naked on the edge of a bed that is so heart-wrenching, so expertly acted, so pure and exquisite that I remember sitting there in my seat, tears flowing, unable to move for what seemed like hours. Not something that happens every day.

So there you have it. Another post in which my memories start offering up one celebrity after another—a neverending stream for the search engines. Maybe I am turning into Norma Desmond.

"I promise I'll never desert you again... You see, this is my life, it always will be! Nothing else—just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!... All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."