Jew Eat Yet?

Inadequacy at 35,000 Feet

My first post from the air, courtesy of Southwest Airlines Flight 82 en route to Chicago…

I guess you could say I’m fairly impressionable. Not in a way that makes me easy prey to cult leaders...I hope. You won’t find me selling pamphlets in airports for the Hare Krishnas or accosting people on Hollywood Blvd. in front of the Scientology Center. But when I’m exposed to something that I find particularly interesting, no matter how far outside my personal experience, I can go from complete obliviousness to full-out obsession in a manner of seconds.

I’ve noticed this in my job. Most of the books I work on these days focus on social studies, literacy, early childhood, or ESL issues. Occasionally we have staff meetings in which we are introduced to other disciplines and get to hear the editors who work in different fields discuss their upcoming seasons. I used to love math when I was in school until some truly bad high school teachers sucked that love right out of me. I don’t think I ever took a math class after sophomore year geometry (where our teacher called unplanned tests “parties”) and I went through adult life with the common phobia of “I hate math, I’m horrible at math, etc.” But last year when the Heinemann math editor introduced us to some of her interesting new titles, I had a sudden about face. “Math is the answer!” I cried. “Math is the only thing that will get these kids motivated about school! Everything should be about math.” Similarly, a poorly designed and completely over-my-head astronomy class in college turned me off to science in a big way. “Science is not for me,” I’d sadly intone. So much for my dream of becoming an Apollo astronaut (or was my space career already in trouble because of the fact that even going up in a Ferris wheel filled me with utter terror?). But when I learned about Heinemann’s latest science titles, my dormant attraction to the Periodic Table of the Elements was reignited. “Science is the key,” I insisted. “Every subject in school should be designed around thematic science concepts.”

Last Friday night we had Shabbat dinner with my orthodox cousins Nurit and Ephraim who were visiting from Israel with four of their seven children. They lived in L.A. when the kids were small but I haven’t seen them since they left 10 years ago. What a shock it is to see children after so long when you have such a strong memory of them as young kids—it was like looking at those computer-generated renderings they do of missing children to give people an idea of what they will look like as they age. All through the Shabbat meal, the family would burst into song, spontaneously breaking into perfect six-part harmony as they sang the Sabbath prayers. The kids, all close in age, were so sweet with each other, and I was immediately struck with two things I absolutely needed to do with my life: 1) become an orthodox Jew, and 2) have seven children. Why oh why didn’t my family indoctrinate us into the fold as seriously as most of my relatives did? It was obvious to watch my cousins that their faith was the centerpiece of their life, around which all other concerns revolved. And where are Leah’s six brothers and sisters? I want my own set of Jewish von Trapps, raising their voices in song in between the gefilte fish and chicken soup. This fantasy lasted until the next morning. Then I remembered my grandfather's constant attempts to entrench us in orthodox rituals throughout my childhood. In truth, I love Judaism today but only because I have worked hard to forge a version of it that resonates with me, and I don’t think my practices would cut it in the world of orthodoxy. Oh well. And as for my missing children, the fact is that Kendall and I are actively trying to get pregnant right now (oy, sorry for that visual, and of course I don’t mean RIGHT NOW—we’re on a plane and my membership in the mile-high club has long since lapsed) and I’m in enough of a panic about the possibility of bringing ONE more Miller onto the planet at my age, much less an entire Brady Bunch worth of future musical comedy stars. We visited a fertility doctor last week for the first time, just to check out our aging parts (again, sorry for the visual), so who knows? Maybe Kendall will have sextuplets and my dreams of being Georg von Trapp will be realized. Until then, I have enough anxiety about raising my existing child, thank you very much. And to be honest, while I think large families can be the coolest, I’m pretty sure that I’m way too selfish to adapt to that lifestyle. Nor would I want my newfound orthodoxy to cramp my style—what if there were a screening of a nitrate print of 1944’s film noir “Laura” at the Academy on a Friday night and I couldn’t go because it was Shabbat? I’m not saying that my love of Gene Tierney exceeds my love of God, but…well…

In the SuperShuttle on the way to LAX this morning we stopped in Inglewood to pick up a wonderful man in his 60s who was on his way to Atlanta to attend his 47th high school reunion. We watched him kiss his loving wife good-bye. She recently retired after 35 years teaching third grade in the Los Angeles Unified School District and now runs bible classes at their church. This man had gone to a very small school in Georgia that was shut down as segregation came to an end and the African-American students were allowed into the larger high schools. Although he walked with some difficulty and recently had an operation on his back, he seemed far more active than I could ever hope to be. He told us about his passion—traveling the country in his motor home and camping at remote lakes, deserts, and state and national parks. His enthralled description of the natural beauties of this country made me wonder why I spend the vast majority of my life on a concrete slab. Now that his children are grown and his wife is no longer interested, he travels mostly alone, but next week he is taking his five-year-old grandson on his first camping trip with Grandpa. As we got out of the van at the Southwest Airlines terminal, I was convinced. “Kendall, I want to start camping! Let’s buy a motor home and tour the country. I want to see the stars every night! I need more natural beauty in my life.” I thought about moving to Inglewood and befriending this man. Maybe he’d take ME on my first camping trip with Grandpa! Everything about this man, I thought as we snaked through the Southwest Airlines security maze, from his adoring wife to his long-term friendships with his high school classmates to his extended family, camping experiences, and love of church, seemed like the perfect ingredients for a truly fulfilling life.

Is my own existence so empty that I feel the urge to radically change my life whenever I meet somebody interesting? Why does it cross my mind to switch professions whenever I hear somebody talking passionately about theirs? Why can’t I walk out of the Cirque du Soleil without thinking that I must devote my life to becoming a gymnast (hey, stop laughing, it is not too late!). Why when I’ve visited the First A.M.E. Church in L.A. do I practically have to be held down to keep myself from being "saved" then and there and joining their fabulous gospel choir? Why can't I pass large Chasidic familes on La Brea Boulevard without thinking that I should grow payess and start talking Yiddish to Leah? I’m hoping that instead of indicating my own discontentment, this tendency only means that I am a naturally curious person who gets excited about life and enjoys being around other people who are excited about theirs. At the moment, I’m ready to drop everything and devote my life to Southwest Airlines, this flight is the greatest. Comfortable leather seats, free snacks galore (a rarity these days), and only one class so we don’t have to gaze at the hoi polloi eating their damn shrimp cocktails in first class. Not that I’d be eating anything other than the kosher plate. Remember, I’m turning ultra-orthodox.

Fade to White

How fragile is my emotional state if a TV show can plunge me into a clinical depression? I’ve had such a challenging week and I can trace this latest visit to the Dark Side to my viewing of the “Six Feet Under” finale last Sunday. I’ve already written about that show twice in the past month and I don’t want you to think I’m the Fisher family equivalent of a Trekkie or one of those Star Wars nuts who wants to argue the physics of hyperspeed (oh, wait, maybe I am!). My first two “Six Feet Under” posts had more to do with my recent interview with Jill Soloway, writer and co-executive producer of the show. Her insanely funny book of essays, “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants,” has just hit the stores, and if you’re in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, or Chicago, you should try to catch one of her upcoming book signings which are going to be part reading and part musical variety show. In New York and L. A. she’s going to have some of the great “Six Feet Under” actresses (Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose, Justina Machado, Maggie Holmes, Lili Taylor, and Ileana Douglas) on stage with her reading chapters from the book. Take a look at Jill’s cool website for more info.

As you know if you watched the finale (and if you didn’t see it yet, excuse the spoiler), the last 10 minutes of the show consisted of flash forwards to the future death scenes of every member of the Fisher clan (Nate Fisher had already died three episodes earlier) plus Nate’s wife Brenda Chenowith, David Fisher’s husband Keith, and the Fishers’ business partner Federico Diaz. It wasn’t the death of these fictional characters that freaked me out so much. Well, that’s not entirely true, it actually was quite jarring to watch these people kick the bucket, one after the other, even though most of them lived to a ripe old age. Ruth was the first to go, in 2025, in a Glendale hospital room surrounded by a much older David, Claire, and, George Sibley, who, what a surprise, had stuck around after all. Keith Charles was next, a few years after his wedding to David (gay marriages must have become legal some time in the late 2020s). Now the owner of his own security company, he is gunned down on one of his armored trucks. David drops dead in 2044 at a large family outing in Echo Park at the age of 75, and Rico is right behind him, keeling over while on a cruise in Puerto Rico with Vanessa, his wife of 54 years. 82-year-old Brenda’s last moments in 2052 were spent listening to her brother Billy (wearing by far the best aging makeup of the bunch) still talking about Claire after all those years and blathering on about emotional closure. Did Brenda die of boredom? Finally, we move to 2085 where we find 102-year-old Claire lying in her bed surrounded by the photographs she’s taken over the preceding decades. We see a close-up of her ancient eyes, covered by cataracts, as the old woman takes her final breath. These eyes then dissolve back into those of the young Claire, driving off to her new life, laden with hope and possibility. Oy.

The multiple death scenes, extending 80 years into the future, were a fitting end to a series that never shied away from looking at death head on. It purposely and brazenly denied us those comforting frozen-in-time images that we store in our memory banks when we visit our favorite characters for the last time. Can you imagine if the last episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore” had concluded not with Mary turning out the lights at WJM-TV Studios and walking out into an exciting future, but instead with an image of an elderly woman in a nursing home suddenly dropping her container of chocolate pudding as the fade to white revealed the words “Mary Richards, 1938 – 2023”? That much closure I do not need. Sometimes TV shows kill off characters quite unexpectedly such as when McLean Stevenson’s Lt. Colonel Henry Blake left “M*A*S*H” in 1975. We were all convinced that Blake would soon be having a raucously fun life stateside (that we’d possibly see in a spinoff) and we were horrified to hear that his departing plane got shot down before it even left Korean airspace. A harsh blow but an effective one considering the long-running series was about war and had never suffered a casualty among its cast. Sometimes TV deaths had more to do with actors’ contract negotiations than plot development. Remember the infamous Moldavian Massacre on the 1985 season finale of “Dynasty” when virtually the entire cast of the show was gunned down at Catherine Oxenberg’s wedding to a European prince? Come September, the folks whose agents had not alienated the producers had miraculously survived the hailstorm of bullets.

So, yes, it was a shock to see the Fishers bite the dust, one after the other, but what really knocked me for a loop was how this episode shoved my own mortality in my face. You’d think by the age of 45 (okay, I turn 46 a week from Sunday), I’d have long ago accepted the idea that we’re all going to die, every single one of us, every person living on my block, everyone who reads my blog, every kid in Leah’s class, and every newborn baby. I do understand that, of course, but it all seems so intangible, so vague, so much a part of an “I’ll think about that tomorrow” future, despite the fact that we could all get hit by a bus in the next hour.

When I went into Leah’s room on Monday morning, all I could imagine was her at 97, an old woman whose parents had died decades earlier. Who would be in her life? Would she be all alone? How would she die? Kendall woke up and I practically saw her fade to white in front of my eyes with the slow dissolve to those awful birth and death years appearing under her name and daring me to look. Wherever I went that day, the message was loud and clear: we’re all going to die so WHAT’S THE FREAKING POINT? Obviously this notion of looking into the future and seeing when we’re going to die was hitting some huge pre-existing stuff for me, I’m not really blaming “Six Feet Under” for my mental illness! It ties in with a general fear of the future that I’ve been grappling with for several months now. Where I used to daydream about the years ahead in such an excited way, convinced that so many fantastic things were in store for me and my loved ones, lately when my mind wanders to the future I experience more terror than anything else. Which loved one is next to die? What will my career be like in 10, 20, 30 years? What college will Leah go to? How will I ever afford it? What physical challenges will I and the people I know be facing in the coming years? What world conflicts will we be going through?

STOP! I know that a big part of the answer is to live IN THE MOMENT and I’m often able to do that and experience all the tiny joys of daily life, but this week it was difficult. Throwing myself into work was helpful, despite the tiny voice in the back of my head saying “What are we doing anything for? What does anything mean?” I do know that I am supremely grateful that it is NOT possible to fast forward to our deaths like they did on “Six Feet Under” and know how it’s all going to turn out. My biggest realization of the week is that I DON’T WANT TO KNOW, I want to get there slowly but surely and have it all be a surprise. When I was about 12 my sister and I were playing with a Ouija board and I asked the “spirits” when I was going to die. With our fingers lightly touching each end of the pointer, it slowly moved on its own across the board. First to 2… then 0… then 3… and finally to 1. 2031? Yikes, do I really have to die at the age of 72? I thought I had dismissed that episode as total nonsense but you can see I never forgot the date. (I didn’t want to scare my family so I added 10 years to my life in the above obituary!) Oh hell, I thought writing about these difficult feelings was supposed to make me feel better but now I feel even more anxious than when I started. Do I need medication? A drink? Just a little more time, I guess.

It’s the Pictures That Got Small

What a thrill it was last night to see a pristine print of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” at the Cinematheque with an enthusiastic sold-out crowd. There’s no comparison between viewing these classic films on the silver screen and watching them on a TV set. Has there ever been a more dead-on incisive movie about the underbelly of Hollywood than this 1950 film? “The Bad and the Beautiful” comes close, as do “A Star Is Born” and “The Day of the Locust,” but for me nothing surpasses Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s impeccable script and the brilliant casting of Gloria Swanson as deluded silent screen star Norma Desmond.

In retrospect it’s hard to fathom that Swanson was not the first choice for the role. The producers first approached Mae West and Pola Negri who turned it down flat and then Mary Pickford who considered it but wanted too much control over the final film. I have a feeling that Pickford was probably a bit too Desmondesque in real life to have the sense of humor and perspective to satirize her own career. Swanson did this perfectly, drifting aimlessly through the deserted 1920s mansion, surrounded by endless portraits from her own past when she was one of the most successful actresses of the day.

When I was little and watched this film I thought Norma Desmond was as old as Methuselah, an ancient, crone-like relic from a distant world who was barely clinging on to life. Watching it last night, I realized with a start that when she made this movie Gloria Swanson was only six years older than I am now. Six years! How did that happen? At what point did I make my exit from the youthful world of Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer and join the ranks of has-been Norma Desmond? People always say that the obsession with youth that runs Hollywood today did not exist during the Golden Age of Movies. Is that really true? “Sunset Boulevard” seems like sure proof that a woman who had barely passed 50 was already seen as a kind of demented Miss Haversham, sitting alone in a decaying, cobwebbed room waiting for past glories to return. At the time “Sunset Boulevard” was made, Great Garbo was only 45 years old yet she hadn’t made a film in nine years and was considered finished. Joan Crawford was also in her mid-40s but her days as a bankable leading lady were well behind her. The only decent film she’d make after 1950 would be the freak show, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” where she teamed with Bette Davis as two over-the-hill actresses forgotten by the world. Bette Davis turned 42 in 1950 and gave what most would say is her best performance. Like Norma Desmond, “All About Eve’s” Margo Channing was constantly confronted by the specter of her advancing years. Could Margo continue to be successful as an actress when even the playwright she had made famous was longing for someone young and fresh (like conniving Eve Harrington) to take over as his leading lady? Channing also had to deal with the whispers and stares caused by her love affair with Bill Sampson, played by 34-year-old Gary Merrill because of the differences in their ages. Life imitated art when Davis and Merrill fell in love during the making of the film and married each other later that year. Margo Channing’s worst fears came true as Bette Davis had to endure the same tongue-wagging about the “huge” difference in their ages.

If anyone ever deserved an Oscar for Best Actress, it was Gloria Swanson for her over-the-top but pitch-perfect performance as Norma Desmond. But then again, it’s also insane that Bette Davis didn’t get one for her brilliant turn as Margo Channing. In the end, it was Judy Holliday who took the statue home for “Born Yesterday.” I would never begrudge wonderful Judy Holliday any accolade, but oy, what an embarrassment of riches that year! “Sunset Boulevard” was up for a record 11 Oscars and won three. It was one of the few films in history to get nominations in all four acting categories. While he later dismissed his role in the film, Erich von Stroheim was obviously the perfect choice to play Max von Mayerling, Norma Desmond’s fiercely loyal but slightly batty butler, whom we later learn was the first of Desmond’s five husbands. Gloria Swanson also had five husbands and, as in the story, had been by directed by von Stroheim years earlier when both of their careers were red-hot. It is that very film, “Queen Kelly,” that Norma Desmond screens for Joe Gillis in a creepy scene in the movie. Swanson was one of the first mega-superstars in the film industry, and one of highest paid people in the country in the 1920s. Erich von Stroheim might well have said about her what Max von Mayerling says about Norma Desmond in the film:

She was the greatest of them all. In one week she received 17,000 fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser to get a lock of her hair. There was a maharajah who came all the way from India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later he strangled himself with it!

Of course it wasn’t just her age that made Hollywood turn on Norma Desmond. She also had the misfortune of reaching the height of her fame just as talkies were radically changing the whole industry. Desmond committed the fatal error of believing her own publicity and her massive salary and over-the-top coddling left her  ill prepared to make the transition to the New Hollywood. The so-called superstars of our own generation would do well to screen “Sunset Boulevard” as a cautionary tale before their egos careen out of control and they find a corpse floating in their swimming pool.

The cameos in “Sunset Boulevard” are a hoot. We see Norma visiting Cecil B. DeMille on the actual set of the film he was shooting at the time, 1949’s “Samson and Delilah” starring Hedy LaMarr and Victor Mature. DeMille had directed Swanson in many of her biggest hits and in his scenes he comes off far more sympathetically than I’m sure he would in real life. He calls Norma “Young Fella,” his actual nickname for Gloria Swanson back in the day. Swanson also got her old pals, silent movie greats Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner to play themselves in the wonderful bridge game scene where William Holden refers to them as “the waxworks.” To us silent movies practically seem as old as daguerrotypes. How strange to think that when “Sunset Boulevard” was made it had only been a little more than 20 years since the end of that era. That would be like us looking back at films made in 1980 as relics from a lost world. Well, maybe they are. Remember how big the “Brat Pack” was back then? Where are they today? Is Molly Ringwald our generation's Norma Desmond?

Are there any screenwriters alive today who can touch Wilder and Brackett? Many of the lines from this film have become so iconic that the audience last night continually broke out in applause. I drive by Paramount on an almost daily basis but to this day I am unable to pass the main gate without screaming out in my best Norma Desmond voice (as Kendall and Leah put their hands over their ears):

Teach your friend some manners. Tell him that without me he wouldn’t have a job. WITHOUT ME THERE WOULDN’T BE ANY PARAMOUNT STUDIOS!

Here’s another tiny sampling of dialogue that gets me every time:

Norma Desmond: We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

Norma Desmond: What's the matter with you?
Joe Gillis: What right do you have to take me for granted?
Norma Desmond: What right? Do you want me to tell you?

Joe Gillis: Oh, wake up, Norma, you'd be killing yourself to an empty house. The audience left twenty years ago.

Norma Desmond: My astrologist has read my horoscope, he's read DeMille's horoscope.
Joe Gillis: Has he read the script?

Tailor [whispering in Joe's ear]: As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the Vicuna?

Norma Desmond: This woman is doing wonders with the line in my neck!

Hedda Hopper: Times City Desk? Hedda Hopper speaking. I'm talking from the bedroom of Norma Desmond. Don't bother with a rewrite man. Take it direct. Ready? As day breaks over the murder house, Norma Desmond, famous star of yesteryear, is in a state of complete mental shock. A curtain of silence seems to have fallen around her...

Norma Desmond [to newsreel camera]: And I promise you 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.

Unlike Norma Desmond, I didn’t feel particularly ready for my close-up yesterday when the HGTV crew appeared at our door to shoot more of our house for an upcoming episode of “If Walls Could Talk.” Kendall and I had to put on the same clothes we were wearing at the original shoot we did months ago so that we could interact with the new host of the show. These segments will then be intercut with the old footage. The only problem is that I think I’ve gained around 15 lbs. since then and I’m worried that HGTV viewers will be frantically running to adjust their sets as they see my wildly fluctuating weight from scene to scene. It’s like that old Judy Garland movie “Summer Stock” in reverse. Most of that film was shot when Garland was quite overweight. After a few slimming months off, the producers decided they needed one more big number so they shot Garland’s “Get Happy” routine and inserted it in the middle of the picture. So as plump Judy walks out to do the number she suddenly morphs into bone-thin Judy, then back to plump Judy for the rest of the film.

I just realized that the list of the actresses I've mentioned on this post reads like the program for a West Hollywood drag show. Maybe I should start hiring female impersonators to act out my blog for people who don't want to read it for themselves. I think I’ve come up with yet another new title possibility for this site: Straight Man/Gay Blog.

A Pause for Some Unbridled Narcissism

I’m always interested in what people have to say about their blogs, but whenever I blog about my own blog it seems like the ultimate in narcissism. Does that mean that writing about the title of my blog, not once but twice, begs for a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder? The first time I mentioned my dissatisfaction with the title of my blog was last February, on my blog’s two-month anniversary. I said then that when I created my blog as a spur-of-the-moment lark I only mentioned Andy Hardy because I was sitting under three of the movie posters from my collection of Andy Hardy memorabilia—beautifully restored items from the 1930s and 40s. True, I was always a fan of the series and I have occasionally identified with Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy and the homespun town of Carvel that could only exist on the MGM backlot. Watching those Andy Hardy films when I was young, I never stopped wishing that my life could be that simple, that my family life could be that happy, and that the worst thing that could ever happen to me would be to discover that I had accidentally made a date with Ann Rutherford, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner for the same night.

As the years passed and my therapy bills increased, I no longer saw Andy Hardy’s world as some kind of black-and-white paradise that I wanted to be part of. Having met the increasingly cantankerous Mickey Rooney a few times, he has long ceased to be any kind of role model. I’d still look twice at mint-condition three-sheet poster from “Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever” but I don’t even comb through the screening schedules on Turner Classic Movies anymore looking for my next fix.

When I came up with the title of my blog last December, I was just experimenting with TypePad’s set-up program, never dreaming that my blog would become a creative outlet in my life or that it would ever be read by people other than my closest family and friends. Hell, I had only read my first blog a few days earlier, I didn’t even fully understand what a blog was.

I'm sure very few people who read my blog have ever heard of Andy Hardy, and the ones who have probably can’t see the slightest connection between my public kvetching and Mickey Rooney's mischievous high school student. The title of my blog has become something of an embarrassment to me and I’ve wanted to change it from the time I wrote my second post last Christmas Eve. I was immediately envious of the extremely clever, thought-provoking titles of the blogs that I began to read regularly: In and Out of Confidence, AmbivaBlog, Nappy Forty, True Ancestor (I never actually understood what that one meant but it still sounded cool), Wandering Jew, Stepping Stone, Tales to Astonish, Time Goes By, Citizen of the Month, even my own daughter’s Perfect Red Head—all great titles. I also liked the straightforward but classy ones such as The QC Report, Richard Lawrence Cohen, and Will Wheaton.Net. Every time I add a new listing to my blogroll I marvel at the clever, appropriate title.

I realize that no one on God’s green earth gives a damn about the title of my blog but me. Well, almost no one. My father is constantly hocking me to change it. Yesterday he called me all excited because he had the perfect title. Are you ready? "The Blogger’s Blog!" I know I should be grateful to have such a supportive dad, but I still had to scream at him that this was the most offensive title I’ve ever heard. Why don’t I just call it I-Think-I’m-Hot-Shit.Com while I’m at it? My father kept repeating that my blog was the best one he’s ever read. Um…dad? It’s the only blog you’ve ever read!

So what should I do? Is it too late to change the title of this freaking thing? I am so ready. The only idea I came up with last February was calling it “Jew Eat Yet?” after my favorite line in “Annie Hall.” But then I worried that people would think that my blog is only about Jews (like it isn’t?) or that I’m obsessed with food (like I’m not?).

I’m always desperate for comments, so maybe I should just try to pander to my largest base. Every time I mention Wilco on here, my number of hits goes through the roof. I could just call my blog “Jeff Tweedy Is My Brother-in-Law.” I also get endless hits from people who read my wife’s book years ago and want to know what happened to her. How does “I Married Kendall Hailey, You Didn’t” grab you? Or I could construct my new title from the weird Google searches that most frequently lead people to my site. These possibilities would include “Nude Walton Girls,” “Is Amy Carter Gay?” and “Tricia Nixon’s Tits.” (Oy, please don’t make me explain that last one again—just rest assured that I have never discussed any of Tricia’s body parts, it’s not my fault there are so many creepy people using Google!)

I beg anyone who has made it this far in the post to offer up suggestions they may have for a title to replace “Andy Hardy Writes a Blog.” First prize will be two tickets to a Wilco show, a copy of Kendall’s book, and a sincere promise that I’ll never bring up this subject again!

The Other Yom Kippur

Today is Tisha B’Av, the most solemn day of mourning on the Jewish calendar. For some reason, Tisha B’Av doesn’t get the same press as that other holy day, Yom Kippur. In fact I was only reminded of the holiday by True Ancestor’s post on the subject. Obviously religious Jews the world over are observing the sacred day but it never quite made it to the Top Ten List for the rest of us. Fasting holidays are always a challenge since eating is such a central part of the Jewish experience. Say the name of any Jewish holiday and the first thing that pops into the heads of most people is the food associated with the event. Passover: matzah and gefilte fish, Hanukkah: latkes and chocolate coins, Rosh Hashanah: apples and honey, Shabbat: chicken soup and brisket, Yom Kippur: “Heeelp! We’re starving!”

Remember when Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” came out in 1985? This impressive 9-1/2 hour film did not use a single frame of archival footage typical of most documentaries about the Holocaust. Instead Lanzmann interviewed survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis about the minute logistics of the campaign against the Jews. It is a powerful portrait of the Nazi genocide and many of Lanzmann’s subjects showed that anti-Semitism is still alive and well in Germany and Poland. At the time of the film’s release in Chicago, people had the option to see it on two successive nights or in one marathon sitting. My family chose the latter. Knowing that they’d be sitting for such a long stretch, I was shocked to see that most of the sold-out crowd brought huge coolers of food into the theatre—enough for several complete meals. I guess they were panicked that they might starve to death during the film’s extended running time. As a result, we had to listen to the constant munching of lox and bagels, chopped liver sandwiches, and smoked fish platters during the interviews. If I had my way, “Shoah” would be screened every year on Tisha B’Av. The content of Lanzmann’s work is a perfect match to the day’s commemoration of the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, and the fasting edict would help people focus on the messages of the film instead of their deli plates.

Many disasters took place on this day in history: the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (the first by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., the second by the Romans in 70 A.D.); the last fortress to hold out against the Romans fell in the year 135, sealing the fate of the Jewish people; King Ferdinand of Spain issued the expulsion decree in 1492, setting Tisha B'Av as the  final date by which not a single Jew would be allowed to walk on Spanish soil; and World War I began in 1914, starting the downward slide that ultimately led to the Holocaust.

Do other religions have special days to remember their tragedies? Oh yeah...let's not forget the crucifixion! I'll bet that among Christian groups the Catholics have a special cache of somber holidays—nobody gets into suffering as much as that flock. Look at how the nuns used to wear “hair shirts” that ripped their skin to shreds to show how holy they were. I guess the Jewish equivalent of that kind of misery is forcing us to miss a few meals.

I’ve mentioned that much of my extended family is orthodox, and yet I had never heard of Tisha B’Av until ten years ago. The prohibitions on Tisha B’Av are many. No eating or drinking, of course (not even water), nor are you allowed to wash, sit in a chair (you can sit on the floor), wear leather shoes, or read certain parts of the Torah. And Tisha B’Av is one of the few days of the year when Jews are expressly forbidden to get married. So, in 1995, guess what day my sister inadvertently chose for her nuptials? You guessed it. What amazes me to this day is that some of the religious members of my family actually attended. Let me set the scene: the wedding was on Tisha B’Av, she was marrying a goy, the wedding took place at Lounge Ax, my sister’s beloved  (and now defunct) rock club, the ceremony was performed by a hip rocker girl who had just received her minister's license via the Internet, and my sister was very pregnant. Oy! Not exactly the profile of a Lubavitcher wedding but it was a blast. Sue and Jeff were preceded down the aisle by a band that was specially created for the day, conducted by her good friend Dave from Poi Dog Pondering and featuring musicians from many of the great bands that had played at Lounge Ax over the years. Tisha B’Av or no, I found Sue and Jeff’s wedding to be a very Jewish occasion. And they did smash a glass at the end, yet another reminder of the Temple’s destruction. I read an interesting article about Tisha B’Av by Sara Yoheved Rigler that said that we often misrepresent the tragedy of the day by describing it as the destruction of the Holy Temple, as if the catastrophe is simply the loss of a building:

“The American people do not mourn on 9/11 because of the destruction of the Twin Towers; they mourn the thousands of lives lost in the conflagration. Contrast a person who mourns the absence of the majestic towers to the New York skyline with a person who mourns the loss of his/her parents caught on the 98th floor. Tisha B'Av is more like a death than a destruction, because on that day the world changed irrevocably…The Holy Temple was the mystical vortex between the higher, spiritual worlds and this gross, physical world. The Temple service was an elaborate mystical procedure that kept the aperture between the worlds open and functioning. The Divine Presence manifested itself in the Temple and through the Temple. When the Temple was destroyed, that palpable Divine Presence removed itself from our world. It was a loss as real and as searing as death.”

I am very drawn to this explanation of Tisha B’Av and I would like to honor the sanctity of the day. However I can’t say that the orthodox rabbis would approve of my activities. For one thing, I just came from Leah’s debut performance in one of the two plays she’s doing this month, “The Secret Garden.” The play, based on the classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, certainly fits the spirit of the day. It is a dark play which begins when Mary Lennox, the 10-year-old principal character, loses both of her parents to a cholera epidemic in India. She is sent to imposing Mistlethwaite Manor in England where she encounters the mean-spirited housekeeper Mrs. Medlock, a sickly cousin named Colin, a surly groundskeeper named Ben, and her emotionally distant uncle who has no time for the lonely girl. Of course all this changes when Mary meets a magical boy named Dickon who can talk to animals and she finds the key to the mysterious Secret Garden which reawakens the hopes and dreams of all the sad characters. As I watched two performances of this play this afternoon and thought about what my own key might be out of misery, depression, and fear, I don’t think I could have had a more appropriate Tisha B’Av experience if I had been sitting in an orthodox synagogue.

Tomorrow night Leah opens in “Aladdin” in which she plays Iago, the mischievous sidekick of Jafar, the sultan’s evil Grand Vizier. The Disney lyrics are not exactly a study in political correctness:

Oh I come from a land
From a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where it's flat and immense, and the heat is intense
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home!

Actually, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) did succeed in getting Disney to change the original lyrics to the end of that song (“Where they cut off your ear, If they don’t like your face, It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!”). But the musical does offer up a hopeful resolution to the adversity of its central characters and I’m sure it will provide a good follow-up to today’s focus on tragedy:

A whole new world
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we're only dreaming.

A whole new world
A dazzling place I never knew
But when I'm way up here
It's crystal clear
That now I'm in a whole new world with you.

Santa Monica Über Alles

The other day I had what is probably the closest I’ve ever come to a true anti-Semitic incident. It happened at a Starbucks on Montana and 7th which is one of the toniest parts of Santa Monica. This is an area choking in upscale restaurants, multimillion dollar homes, and designer boutiques that are so exclusive their entire display area might consist of a single pair of insanely expensive shoes sitting on a pristine block of maple wood. It is also a neighborhood that has an extremely high Jewish population.

I was meeting with a woman who runs a Jewish Elementary School in Orange County. I actually met her through my blog. Eve was a colleague of my old high school friend Julie Rotter Shumski who died last March. Julie was the former president of Eve’s school and they were close friends. After I wrote that post about Julie's untimely death we started talking about Julie and the ways my company might be able to work with the teachers at her progressive school. Eve was coming up to L.A. for the day so we decided to meet. We were sitting outside with our lattes when a young, blond, clean-cut guy sat down at the table next to us. After a few minutes the man mumbled something and Eve and I both looked up. Was he talking to us? He looked over but didn’t say anything so we continued our conversation. This happened a few more times until finally the man moved closer to our table and blurted out in a loud voice, “So, are you two from Palestine?” What? Why was he asking us that? Anyone who was eavesdropping could hear that we were native-born Americans, me with my strong Chicago accent and Eve with traces of an east coast cadence. Palestine? Did he think we were Arabs living in the Palestinian territories? Israeli soldiers stationed in Gaza? “No, we’re from here,” we said haltingly, and then shifted our bodies away from this guy so we could continue our discussion of the innovative programs at Eve’s school. “So, I guess since you guys are from Palestine,” the man called over, now almost shouting, “you support the terrorism that’s happening there? Your fascist government going in and destroying whole Arab neighborhoods?” That’s a slight paraphrase, I think there were some obscenities laced in but I can’t recall the exact words. “Look,” Eve said, adopting the authoritative tone she must need as head of a school, “we’re really not interested in talking about that right now, we’re in the middle of a meeting here.” The man waved his newspaper at us and inched still closer. He clearly wanted to engage us in his diatribe and continued to list the atrocities that “our people” were committing over there. Eve and I tried to ignore him but it wasn’t possible so we grabbed our coffee and moved to a table inside the store.

As I talked to Eve with one eye trained on the door to see if this unstable man was going to burst in with a gun, I realized that my first thought when this happened had been “How did he know we were Jewish?” Nappy40 had a fascinating post today about African Americans who try to “pass” for white. She links to a great article by Vershawn Ashanti Young that talks about the “burden of racial performance,” the demands that many blacks feel to prove what kind of black person they are. Nappy40's post reminded me of the times in my youth when I’d try to suppress my natural “oys” for fear that someone would “spot” me as a Jew. (Is that why I’m a never-ending “oy” machine today? Has that become the rallying cry at my internal Jew Pride parade: “I Say Oy, I’m Not a Goy, Get Over It!”) Even in the predominantly Jewish world of my childhood I had a strong sense that I was still part of “the other” and I longed to be accepted into the mainstream. It makes me cringe when I remember discussions from years ago about who looked Jewish and who didn't, the “didn't” being the coveted, sought-after spot. Not all that different from the plight of light-skinned blacks who attempted to pass as white or the classification in our culture of beautiful black women as those who have physical features that are more traditionally Caucasian (e.g., the lightest skin, straightest hair, thinnest nose, even in some cases the bluest eyes)—if you don’t believe me, take a look at the African American women who have won national beauty contests. I remember hearing Lena Horne rail about the indignities she suffered in the MGM make-up room as they constantly tried to lighten her up for certain roles. Max Factor developed a special foundation for her called "Light Egyptian" which made her scream, “I’m not Egyptian!” (I guess Egypt was exotic enough to 1940s makeup artists to make them forget that it was still part of Africa!)

Just like the variations of skin tone and features that exist in the African-American community, Jews in the Diaspora obviously have an endless range of physical characteristics, from people who look very Middle Eastern to those who could pass for Swedish immigrants. Even though I am personally attracted to what is often seen as the typical “look” of the American Jew (i.e., those whose descendents came from eastern Europe and whose appearance was caricaturized by the Nazis), I have to be honest and admit that the question “Does he/she look Jewish?” still carries with it some of that baggage from childhood. When my daughter was born, was I a little too happy when I saw her light blue eyes? It works both ways—some of Leah’s French relatives, who are Sephardic Jews from North Africa did, in fact, openly rejoice about Leah’s eyes, relieved that the recessive gene residing in her brown-eyed mom somehow pulled through and produced this blue-eyed light-complexioned baby as if that somehow gave Leah a leg up in this world. Even as recently as last week when I heard someone make a silly comment about all Jews being dark, I burst in a bit too defensively with a litany of my blond, blue-eyed family members who were 100% Jewish. God, this stuff is hard to shake!

I also read an interesting post today called “Jewish People Are So Smart” by Citizen of the Month. He describes the experience of his friend, an African American teacher in a mostly white liberal private school. "My friend always has amusing stories about how even the most liberal of liberal parents sometimes can’t get over the color of his skin. If anything, he is treated nicer because of his color, just so parents can tell themselves that they have no problem with him being black…When the school decided to do a special assembly program on Martin Luther King, all eyes turned to my friend, waiting for his approval and opinion, as if he had some purer psychic connection to Dr. King than the several older white teachers who had actually marched during the 60’s. My friend tried to remind them that during the 60’s, he was mostly a kid watching 'The Brady Bunch' on TV.” Neil goes on to say that while this kid-gloves approach is certainly better than old-time discrimination, the “over-politeness” can still be very awkward and that most members of minority groups do not want to be considered as spokespersons for “their people!” Every time I veered from my Jewish ghetto growing up, such as the year I went to college in France, I frequently heard odd comments when people found out I was Jewish. These ranged from non sequitirs about loving “Fiddler on the Roof” to more insidious comments about how their Jewish accountant/lawyer/doctor/tax man was so nice and VERY good with money. (I wish I were, I’d think to myself. Why the hell didn’t I get the Jew "good with money" gene?)

It would be easy to dismiss this putz at Starbucks as a crazy person but I think it goes deeper than that. He looked like a college student to me. Is it true that on many college campuses these days it has become politically incorrect to support the state of Israel in any way? In other situations I am only too happy to discuss my feelings about Israel. How I am able to deeply love the country and its ideals while vehemently opposing some of the policies of its government (exactly the same way I feel about my love of the United States and my disgust at many of the actions of the current administration). But this man was not interested in political discourse. And what’s with the designation of all of greater Israel as Palestine? Whatever their feelings are about the occupied territories, are young people today starting to dismiss even the original 1948 boundaries and reject Israel’s right to exist at all? Even Yassir Arafat got beyond that! Part of me wanted to train this guy in how to be a better anti-Semite. First, I’d tell him to choose his audience more carefully. “Look around, buddy,” I’d say. “One more outburst about Palestine and this entire crowd may start speed dialing the Anti-Defamation League on their Blackberries as they pummel you with their venti half-caf nonfat no-whip mocha valencias!”

I know my short-lived Starbucks episode is not even a blip compared to the real oppression and threat that Jews, blacks, gay people, and countless other groups still experience all over the world. But even that microscopic whiff of being targeted in some way and possibly in peril because of who I am made me think long and hard about the discrimination, subtle and otherwise, that so many people have to live through on a daily basis. I never expected to get such a lesson on one of the most chichi streets of Santa Monica, but it is one that was well worth the inflated price of my vanilla latte.

Marilyn Monroe's Blog

Leah and I were in Hollywood yesterday and came across a newsstand that had about 15 magazines with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. The headlines blared:

Jennifer Breaks Her Silence
Jen Reveals Secret Heartache
Jennifer’s Revenge
Jen Tells All

These stories stem from a recent interview Aniston did with Vanity Fair in which she spoke publicly about her divorce from Brad Pitt for the first time. A feeding frenzy then erupted with every celebrity rag trying to spin a story from her few comments. I haven’t read the original article but I’m sure that Jen did NOT “tell all” to the Vanity Fair reporter or anyone else. Just another example of our lust for details of the personal lives of the celebrities we inexplicably place on pedestals. Or am I being naïve? Was every cover piece vetted by Aniston’s publicist despite the actress’s pleas for privacy?

Even though I’m not particularly interested in Jennifer Aniston’s personal life, I don’t dare try to adopt a superior tone. You only have to read a few of the entries on this blog to see how captivated I am by the cult of celebrity. And while I’ve yet to run out to purchase the new Vanity Fair, I was riveted to the page one article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times about another actress who is still the Ground Zero of celebrity obsession.

Marilyn Monroe died 43 years ago this weekend. The anniversary of her death rarely passes without all sorts of kooks coming out of the woodwork. First there’s the woman, now almost 60, who claims to be the daughter Marilyn gave birth to in 1947. Story has it that she was placed by the mob into an Italian family in Queens but the “pretty lady” used to visit the little girl regularly throughout the 1950s. I remember years ago when this woman was interviewed by Tom Snyder on the old NBC “Tomorrow” show and I was amazed she had climbed that high on the network food chain. She was in her 30s then and made the mistake of trying to look like Marilyn which only made her look a bit like a drag queen. You’d think that if it were true this poor woman would have found a distant relative of Marilyn's and had a DNA test done. But who knows? Loretta Young was able to keep the love child she had with Clark Gable a secret until her death.

Then there are the Marilyn impersonators who are swarming Hollywood Boulevard this weekend like peroxide locusts, posing with tourists for a small fee, their heavy makeup puddling on their faces in the intense heat. Most wear facsimiles of the famous “Seven Year Itch” dress, the one that blew upwards when Marilyn stood over the subway grate (a scene that so infuriated Joe DiMaggio that he stormed off the set and begged Marilyn to leave the film). Leah and I have our favorite Marilyn—she hangs out next to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and looks so much like the actress that we’ve been known to follow her for a full city block. I always try to talk to her just so I can hear her “Thank you ever so” in perfect Marilyn pitch (even though that voice itself was a fake that Marilyn put on as part of her image control). Kendall and I were at a screening of one of Monroe’s films recently and met Marilyn’s actual stand-in from the 50s. She looked very much like Marilyn back in the day so it was fascinating to get a glimpse of how Marilyn might look if she were still alive today (she’d be 79 years old if you can believe it).

Despite all the hoopla surrounding these anniversaries, I’ve rarely seen such a provocative front page article about Marilyn in a publication like the Los Angeles Times. Apparently a former Los Angeles County prosecutor named John Miner, now 86, believes that Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide but was a victim of foul play. Miner was one of the principal investigators of Monroe’s death in 1962. He interviewed Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had in his possession a series of stream-of-consciousness audiotapes Marilyn had recorded shortly before her death as part of her therapy. Greenson played the tapes for Miner only on the condition that he would never reveal their contents. The tapes were allegedly destroyed and no transcripts were thought to exist…until now.

Miner kept his promise to Greenson until the psychiatrist’s death. But when recent books about Monroe tried to implicate Greenson himself in the movie star’s demise, Miner got permission from Greenson’s widow to reveal his secret transcript of the tapes. These are the transcripts just published by the L.A. Times. Pretty amazing, but I haven’t seen such an abuse of privileged information since excerpts of Jackie Kennedy’s letters to her clergyman were released. In the wake of her husband’s assassination, Jackie said she was in so much pain that she contemplated ending her life. Marilyn, on the other hand, seemed anything but despondent on the tapes, and she was making lots of plans for her future including a commitment to study Shakespeare with Lee Strasberg:

I'll pay him to work only with me. He said I could do Shakespeare, I'll make him prove it…Then I'll produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival which will put his major plays on film...I've read all of Shakespeare and practiced a lot of lines. I won't have to worry about the scripts. I'll have the greatest script writer who ever lived working for me and I don't have to pay him…I've some wonderful ideas for Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude. I feel certain I'll win an Oscar for one or more of my Shakespearean women.

I do feel a little sleazy reading Marilyn’s private comments to her shrink, not to mention reprinting them here. But they are mostly flattering to the film star, and do a lot to broaden our idea of what made her tick. Marilyn is obviously an intelligent, introspective person. In addition to Shakespeare, she talks about other authors she is reading including Joyce and Dolstoevsky. She is clearly someone who wants to be taken seriously despite her movie star image that she had a big hand in creating. At 36 years old, Marilyn surveyed the parts of her that the public seemed to be most interested in:

I stood naked in front of my full length mirrors for a long time yesterday. I was all made up with my hair done. What did I see? My breasts are beginning to sag a bit. My waist isn't bad. My ass is what it should be, the best there is. Legs, knees and ankles still shapely. And my feet are not too big. OK, Marilyn, you have it all there.

She mentions Clark Gable, with whom she had recently completed “The Misfits” with great fondness.

He was so nice to me and I didn't deserve it. I was having problems with Arthur and being sick and I held up the shooting a lot. Clark protected me from Huston who kept giving me a bad time… In the kissing scenes, I kissed him with real affection. I didn't want to go to bed with him, but I wanted him to know how much I liked and appreciated him. When I came back from a day off the set, he patted my ass and told me if I didn't behave myself, he would give me a good spanking. I looked him in the eye and said, “Don't tempt me!” He burst out laughing so hard he was tearing.

Because of his performance I've seen “Gone With the Wind” over and over again. He was perfect. It makes me so mad I could scream—those Academy fuckers didn't award him the Oscar. He should have won hands down.

Marilyn talked about her famous husbands in the tapes and confirmed that she and Joe DiMaggio still had feelings for each other:

Joe D. loves Marilyn Monroe and always will. I love him and always will. But Joe couldn't stay married to Marilyn Monroe, the famous movie star. Joe has an image in his stubborn Italian head of a traditional Italian wife. She would have to be faithful, do what he tells her, devote all of herself to him. Doctor, you know that's not me.

It's different with Arthur. Marrying him was my mistake, not his. He couldn't give me the attention, warmth and affection I need. It's not in his nature. Arthur never credited me with much intelligence. He couldn't share his intellectual life with me. As bed partners we were so-so. He was not that much interested. You know I think his little Jewish father had more genuine affection for me than Arthur did.

Am I getting too salacious here? But wait—you ain't heard nothin' yet! How have I lived on this planet for almost 46 years without ever hearing a word about the brief affair between Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe? Yikes!

We went to Joan's bedroom…Crawford had a gigantic orgasm and shrieked like a maniac…Next time I saw Crawford she wanted another round. I told her straight out I didn't much enjoy doing it with a woman. After I turned her down, she became spiteful. An English poet best describes it: hath no rage like love to hatred turned; and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – most people wrongly credit that to Shakespeare. William Congreve is the author. That's me, Marilyn Monroe, the classical scholar.

Joan Crawford’s orgasm? Remember, folks, I’m getting this stuff from the L.A. Times, not the National Enquirer!

Of course, the main thing people will be interested in is what Marilyn said about the Kennedy brothers. She waxed on about JFK’s promise as President:

This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry. No person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can't afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I'm not talking Utopia — that's an illusion, but he will transform America today like FDR did in the 30's…I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR as one of our greatest Presidents.

But Marilyn was confused about how to deal with her personal relationship with Bobby Kennedy.

I guess I don't have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him its over. I tried to get the President to do it, but I couldn't reach him. Now I'm glad I couldn't. He is too important to ask…Maybe I should stop being a coward and tell him myself. But because I know how much he'll be hurt I don't have the strength.

Pretty incendiary stuff if it’s true. Marilyn’s other comments about Bobby are so frank that I can’t bring myself to reprint them here. Several people place Bobby at Marilyn’s house on the day that she died. They apparently had an argument and Kennedy stormed out, not that I think he had any direct connection to her death. John Miner is the only person alive who heard Marilyn’s tapes and only he knows if these are accurate transcripts. In releasing them, Miner is hoping to get public support for exhuming poor Marilyn’s corpse to run further tests that may prove her death was not a suicide after all. Yikes, it seems rather grisly to even contemplate exhuming a body 43 years after death. Shouldn’t we just leave the woman alone?

Looking at the lengthy article about Marilyn in the Los Angeles Times, I notice on the opposite page a piece on the famine and genocide taking place in Darfur. Oh hell, that is the story I should be reading and commenting on. I feel sickened as I think of how many people devoured the Monroe article and bypassed the other story completely. What is the percentage of people in this country who even know where Darfur is? Oh wait, isn’t that where Angelina Jolie just got her new baby?

The Jewish Ricardos

The above photo from my parents’ wedding has always reminded me of “I Love Lucy.” My parents are Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and in the back my grandparents are dead ringers for Fred and Ethel Mertz. The photo was taken 52 years ago today, on August 2, 1953. My parents had met only that April when my mother was on spring break from her freshman year at the University of Colorado. She never went back to school and in June announced to her flabbergasted family that she was getting married. She had just turned 19 and my father was 20. As a kid I always thought this story was very romantic. Now I just think that they were INSANE!! Besides being too young to get married, who the hell gets engaged after knowing someone for six weeks? (Er…in the interest of total disclosure I guess I have to admit that I met my first wife in April, got engaged in August, and was married in December—but at least I was 34 at the time!) I always heard the stories about how my horrified grandparents tried to buy my father off, conducted background checks, and tried to scare my mom with stories of my father’s institutionalized mother (as if there weren’t also plenty of mental illness genes coursing through my mother’s side of the family!). To my grandparents’ credit, once they realized that my mother was going to marry my dad no matter what, they accepted it completely and somehow organized a wedding in two months time that made Grace Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier look like a Tupperware party.

With her blazing red hair my mom looked very much like Lucille Ball in the early 1950s (even though Lucy owed her famous orange locks to a steady regime of henna rinses) and she had the same kind of zany personality. My father’s swarthy complexion put him in the Desi Arnaz camp even though his Jewish Russian heritage was as far from Cuban as you could get. On the other hand, my father had always had a fascination for the Spanish language. This turned into an obsession in later years when my dad became completely fluent in Spanish and would only leave Spanish messages on our answering machines—something he still does to this day. When I used to work in an office with cubicles and co-workers would hear me talking to my dad on the phone (“Si….si….mas o menos…okay, papa, hasta mas tarde…”) they’d say with surprise, “I didn’t know your father was Hispanic!” “He’s not, “ I’d sigh. The weird thing is, none of my father's children speak Spanish, but we all learned to understand him. The immersion method, I guess—you have to learn Spanish when you're living with Ricky Ricardo! My dad even sang “Babalu” and his voice was every bit as good as Desi’s.

As my parents gorged on their wedding cake, “I Love Lucy” was at its peak, about to begin its third season on CBS. Earlier that year, on January 19, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” became the most watched television program in history. More people tuned in to see Lucy give birth to Little Ricky than watched Queen Elizabeth’s coronation or President Eisenhower’s inauguration. A few weeks after my parents’ wedding, Lucille Ball would find herself in the middle of her own Red Scare when Walter Winchell branded her a communist. It wasn’t true but that hadn't stopped Hollywood from stomping all over the careers of other well known actors during this crazy time. But Lucy was so incredibly popular that she was able to prove that the charges were false within a matter of days.

My brother Bruce was born the April following my parents’ nuptials. (Hey, stop with the math calculations—it was almost nine months and if my mom was knocked up at her wedding, it had only been for a week or two!) My mother was still 19 when my brother was born, my father was 21. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? (Okay, remember that total disclosure thing? Leah was born within a year of my first wedding but again, at least I wasn’t a teenager! At 21 I was barely ready to go the bathroom by myself, much less have a child.) Two more children would come within the next five years and my parents' model Eisenhower-era family was complete!

Lucy and Desi’s hold on the American public would last until I was six months old. On the day after they filmed the last episode of their TV show, Lucille Ball filed for divorce. Their marriage had lasted 19 years but it ended bitterly. My parents’ marriage would last 18 years and also end in a firestorm of ugliness and recriminations. But even in divorce the two couples lived parallel lives. On a television special a few years ago, Lucie Arnaz showed home movies of her parents swimming in the pool with their grandchildren. It was odd to see them together again when they were so much older but the chemistry was still there. They were very sweet with each other and you’d never know that so much acrimony had passed between them. My parents survived their own private hell to emerge as great friends towards the end of my mother’s life. Maybe in both cases it’s just impossible to hate each other that much unless you really love each other. And if you give yourselves enough time, some of that love is bound to seep through the cracks and heal those painful episodes from the past.

I talked to my dad this afternoon about his wedding. It was held at the classy Morrison Hotel at the southeast corner of Madison and Clark  in downtown Chicago. The building was razed in 1965 but my father remembers it all like it was yesterday. The same man who can barely recall anything I say from one day to the next was giving me detailed descriptions of the 52-year-old guest list, the delicious dinner menu, and the lavish gifts he and my mother received including a silver egg cup from Marshall Field’s that they returned for $125 (a fortune in 1953!). Some of my dad’s memories were too vivid for comfort. “We left the party early that evening and didn’t come out of our room until 3:00 pm the next day.” I know I should be mature  enough at this point to handle the fact that my parents had a healthy sex life but…ewww, gross! I don’t want to think about what they were doing as the “I Love Lucy” theme blared from the wedding suite.

I Love Lucy and she loves me,
We're as happy as two can be,
Sometimes we quarrel but then
How we love making up again.

Lucy kisses like no one can,
She's my missus and I'm her man;
And life is heaven you see
Cause I Love Lucy
Yes I Love Lucy
And Lucy loves me!

Spoiler

Are you the type of person who peeks at the last page of a book when you’re still reading the first chapter? Do you start telling your friends the ending of a movie you've just seen despite their pleas to stop? If you’re watching the delayed west coast broadcast of an awards show, do you check the winners online before tuning in? When the new Harry Potter book came out last month there was mass hysteria when a few copies of the book were accidentally shipped before the pub date. A gag order was issued and the books were confiscated. The publisher worried that people would try to sell these advance copies for exorbitant sums, even though millions of copies of the book would be available just a few days later. I know that there are whole websites devoted to giving people advance knowledge of closely guarded secrets, but I never realized how intense the spoiler subculture can be until my previous post about “Six Feet Under” and co-executive producer Jill Soloway. I mentioned that no amount of begging or cajoling could persuade Jill to reveal the fate of Nate Fisher following his collapse at the end of last week’s episode. Truth be told, I was grateful for Jill’s ethics because as much as I was dying to know, I didn’t really want to know! Still, it was a challenge to be in a room with her and not try to force it out. Maybe I was a Gestapo agent in a past life—there’s a part of me that wanted to tie Jill to the chair, shine a high-intensity light in her eyes, and scream, “You Vill Talk, Fraulein!” But there's another part of me that loves the anticipatory tension—when not knowing is way more fun than knowing. After my post last week, a few people linked to my blog on the official HBO “Six Feet Under” Bulletin Board. I had never visited this world of “Six Feet Undies” (as some of these überfans call themselves) who write long and detailed analyses of the show from psychological profiles of the characters to continuity mistakes made by the writers to various ways the show has had an impact on their lives. Interesting reading, but one thread also included a spoiler for the next episode. Someone who claimed to be a former HBO employee put up a detailed outline that described what happened to Nate Fisher as well as the rest of the cast. I truly didn’t want to read it but I was powerless to stop myself. I never want to slow down and look at an accident on the freeway either, but of course I always do. And I’d never be able to say to a doctor examining an ultrasound of my unborn child, “No thanks, we don’t care to know the sex of our baby.” Just couldn’t do it. It was there, I had to read it! The description seemed too detailed to be fake, but why would HBO allow this to leak on their own site when they didn’t even show previews of the episode for fear of giving anything away? Was it a plant? Were they purposely trying to lead us astray? Or, as one fan noted, because the series has wrapped have the formerly strict web supervisors already moved on to other jobs? Maybe they’re busy manning the “Over There” Bulletin Board for Stephen Bochco.

I wonder if anyone reading my blog ever thinks of it as a spoiler site. I just spoke to a friend who’s still immersed Season 1 in her Netflix viewing of “Six Feet Under” and she told me she is boycotting my blog until I stop talking about the show (don’t worry, Shari, this is the last time). She just told me how much she loves Nate and Brenda’s relationship, how it seems like “the perfect love.” Hmmm, my lips are sealed but...oh dear. As for other spoilers, I try not to give too much away when I talk about new movies, except for ones that are so bad (“War of the Worlds” and “Bewitched”) that I want to ruin them for other people and spare them the torture.

It won’t be a spoiler to say how much Leah and I enjoyed seeing Disney’s “Sky High” this weekend, and not just because our friend Shelly Johnson is the Director of Photography on the film. I’m surprised Disney hasn’t done more of an ad campaign since, unlike most mainstream films this year, this one is surprisingly original, funny, well acted, and beautifully shot. The teens in the film were great as were the parents/superheroes played by Kelly Preston and Kurt Russell. It even had a moving, non-smarmy moral that allowed for lots of interesting discussions after the film (conversations that I'm grateful for as Leah moves closer to the terrifying teen years). The film is about a high school for the children of superheroes. Upon enrollment, the kids are placed into two groups based on their powers: hero or sidekick. What an effective and fun way to look at the social minefield of high school, the damage that cliques can do, and issues of parental expectations and acceptance. We LOVED it! It didn’t hurt that we saw it at the spectacularly restored El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard where even the opening of the curtain is an elaborate show. Before the movie they had two Sky High “coaches” come out and ask for volunteers for a special movie-themed competition. I wanted to run from the theatre at that point but of course Leah was the first person up on that stage (which at the theatre's opening in 1926 featured Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie). And guess what? Leah WON the game! Better go swab the inside of her mouth for a DNA test—I never would've had the guts to do that when I was her age!

I was practically pacing the floors last night in anticipation of the new episode of "Six Feet Under." I was still hoping that the spoiler I read was a fake, but alas, every freaking word of that online description was true. Many of the fans on the bulletin board rant and rave against the spoiler posters, but I can't blame them for my own inability to resist the scoops. So what did I think of the episode? I hated it—which means that I loved it! I love that the writers refuse to give us what we want, a blissfully happy ending for these troubled characters. They faked us out at the beginning of the season and now we’re paying the price for our secret wish that “Six Feet Under” would end on the same warm and fuzzy note as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Oh, and this just in from the boards (Warning—Spoiler Ahead!): Nate won’t be the only family member joining Papa Fisher. The body count will increase as the series winds down. Help!