Jew Eat Yet?

God, I Hate the Oscars (But Dammit, I'm Hooked)

I admit that I'm a total hypocrite when it comes to awards shows. There's a big part of me that bemoans the insanity of pitting people against each other in the most arbitrary of ways and then pretending that the nominations and awards actually mean something. My wife always wants to watch every awards show on TV, but my running commentary is usually so annoying that we rarely make it past the first commercial break. Of course, the minute someone we know is nominated for an award I undergo an immediate conversion and start rooting for them with more enthusiasm than a Laker Girl. My brother-in-law Jeff was nominated for two Grammys last year and when his band Wilco won both of them I was so excited you'd have thought I'd just been given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Suddenly I loved the Grammys even though I had barely heard of most of the nominees. Wasn't Norah Jones the actress from that last James Bond film? Weren't Alicia Keys and Kanye West the name of those Florida counties that had their butterfly ballots impounded?

Some awards shows beg for ridicule. Does anyone really take the Golden Globes seriously? Who are these members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association who vote on the awards? Do I really care what some film reviewer from Kirkutsk thinks of Brokeback Mountain? Hey, I'm still recovering from the Pia Zadora scandal. Some of the newer awards shows take themselves so seriously I can barely make it through the first few minutes. Could you believe the pomposity of the opening of the SAG Awards the other night? Were those poor actors forced to say those lines by overeager publicists? "My name is James Denton...and I'M AN ACTOR." And whose idea was it to name the actual SAG Award an "Actor?" Gag me. When they said "...and the Actor goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman" I thought they were sending him home with Heath Ledger. By the way, have you ever seen a more hideous award statue? It looks like something that might have burst out of Sigourney Weaver's chest in one of the Alien movies.

But the Oscars...ah, the Oscars! So rich in history, so full of intrigue. I try to remain blasé about this granddaddy of awards shows but I get swept away every year. I try to remember that these awards are no different than any of the others. They are not handed down by Divine Decree but are chosen by a bunch of folks who sometimes see less of the films in question than the Icelandic critics voting for the Golden Globes. We know several Academy voters and while some of them take their responsibilities very seriously, others make snap emotional decisions twenty seconds before they have to mail in their ballots.

Yesterday I was visiting a family friend whose husband won an Oscar for Best Art Direction 40 years ago for the cult classic "Fantastic Voyage" (remember Raquel Welch being miniaturized and implanted in a human body?). I couldn't put the Oscar down, cradling and caressing it like it was one of those Romanian orphans with that syndrome you get when you're not held enough as an infant. Another friend of ours in New York has an Oscar and my obsession with it during a visit last year was so embarrassing he practically had to file a restraining order. Fine, I admit it--I'm smitten with the Oscars. Touching one of those beautifully designed statues makes me feel a connection to my favorite stars from Spencer Tracy to Bette Davis to Clark Gable to Katharine Hepburn. I can relive memorable moments from the awards shows such as Greer Garson droning on and on in her acceptance speech (it was less than six minutes long, not the 20 minutes many people claim), Hattie McDaniels, the first black Oscar winner, reading the studio-written speech in which she expresses her desire to "be a credit to my race," George C. Scott's refusal of the award, Marlon Brando's Native American emissary Sacheen Littlefeather refusing his, Marlee Matlin and Louise Fletcher giving their speeches in sign language, Ingrid Bergman handing over her award to another actress in her category she felt was more worthy, and so many other moments.

The nominees for this year's Oscars were announced at 5:30 this morning. In the spirit of armchair Oscar enthusiasts everywhere, here are my early predictions:

Best Supporting Actor: One of my favorite hobbies is to form opinions about performances I haven't seen and this category gives me a lot of practice since I have yet to witness William Hurt in A History of Violence,, George Clooney in Syriana, or Paul Giamatti in Cinderella Man. I think all three of those actors are excellent and Hurt and Clooney are probably the sentimental favorites. Matt Dillon was superb in Crash, a film whose impact on me has deepened with the passing of time. I thought he should have been nominated for Drugstore Cowboy and To Die For and I'd be very happy to see him take home the prize. (Isn't that what the Oscars are all about--making up for past slights such as giving one to Elizabeth Taylor for the trashy Butterfield 8 because she had nearly died that year and hadn't won for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?) If I didn't know better, I'd blame the Academy for putting Jake Gyllenhaal in this category for Brokeback Mountain instead of in the Best Actor category where he belongs. But I know it's not the Academy but the studios who decide which category they will submit their actors for and this was obviously a calculated move to get Gyllenhaal nominated for his fine performance and not overlooked in favor of Heath Ledger. Given the buzz surrounding Brokeback, I predict this ploy will work and that young Jake will go home with the statue.

Best Supporting Actress: In this category I'm guilty of not yet seeing the always superb Frances McDormand in North Country, or the talented Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener but I don't think it's their year. I was delighted to see Amy Adams nominated for her heartwarming performance in Junebug but I doubt enough Academy voters even saw this low-budget film. I was riveted by Catherine Keener's portrayal of author Harper Lee in Capote and it's always a Oscar attention-getter for beautiful women to don unattractive prosthetics, but my gut says that Michelle Williams' sad portrayal as Heath Ledger's wife in Brokeback Mountain will bring her the coveted statue and immediately hurl her into A-list territory. Middle America will breathe a little easier when they see that she and Heath Ledger are really together after all (they just had a baby girl) and he's not actually running around with any of the Best Supporting Actor nominees.

Best Actor: What a tough category this year. The only performance I haven't seen was Terence Howard in Hustle & Flow. David Strathairn was a pitch-perfect Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck and I'm thrilled he was nominated but I don't think the film is a favorite among the voters. My hands-down choice would be for Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, I thought his portrayal of Johnny Cash was extraordinary especially since he didn't even know how to sing before he began filming. I think it's a possibility that Phoenix could pull off a much deserved win, but I'm not holding my breath. I think it comes down to a race between people who want to honor Heath Ledger's work in Brokeback Mountain and Philip Seymour Hoffman's incredible channeling of Capote. In what could be the closest race since the 2000 presidential election (okay, people, it wasn't that close, we all know Al Gore won), I believe Hoffman will win it by a nose.

Best Actress: Very tough to call. Sorry, Charlize, I didn't see North Country. I'm sure you were good, if not as physically transformed as you were in the riveting Monster. But you already have your Oscar, give someone else a chance. I'd give Judi Dench an Oscar for selling popcorn at the concession stand, she is always such a thrill to watch. I loved her in Mrs. Henderson Presents even though I thought the movie could be better. But the Dame ain't gonna win. I've been a fan of 21-year-old Keira Knightley's for a while now and I enjoyed her fresh interpretation of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice but I admit I was a bit surprised that the Academy gave her the nomination. I was bowled over by Reese Witherspoon's performance as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line and I would jump for joy if she got the Oscar. I'm thrilled to see her finally given a role as juicy as the one she had in Election (she should have won an Oscar for that). But despite my cheers for Reese, am I crazy to think that Felicity Huffman might pull a major upset and win for her risky and poignant performance as a transsexual in Transamerica, a much smaller film that I'm sure most of America has not yet seen? Well, she just won the Golden Globe and a slew of other awards, maybe it's not such a long shot!

Best Director: George Clooney is nominated for three Oscars this year for two different films and he may just get it for Good Night and Good Luck to make up for the Academy's blowing off that film the rest of the evening. I think Paul Haggis winning for Crash would be well deserved but I don't see Bennett Miller getting it for the critically acclaimed Capote. He's not even 40 yet and this was his first feature film. Gotta pay your dues, man. Steven Spielberg has certainly paid his dues, God knows, but he's already won two Best Director Oscars and I have a feeling most Academy voters didn't even like Munich that much but only voted for it because they felt that had to. I really think it's Ang Lee's year and that he'll win for Brokeback Mountain. For a man who's only made a handful of English-language films, he has a very high profile and I believe that many folks in the Academy want to see a mini-Brokeback sweep, if for no other reason than to make the right-wing fundamentalists collapse in apoplexy.

Best Picture: No matter how wrapped up I get in the Oscars, I really do hate the concept of these awards, especially when I look at the list of the five films nominated for Best Picture and start thinking of the dozens of exquisite films that were left out in the cold. It's not that I don't think all the nominated films are worthy. I've seen and enjoyed all of them: Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Capote, and Crash. My personal choice would be Crash but my gut says that Brokeback Mountain will emerge the winner on March 5th and that on March 6th that lunatic Larry Miller will rescind his order to ban the film in his Utah theatres.

Sorry to ignore the writing and other awards but I think that's enough from me for now. I'll be watching every minute of the awards, God help me. Is it too much to ask for a little humor that is not focused on the knockers of beautiful actresses (remember Chris Rock's tasteless introduction of Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek last year and Adam Sandler's awful jokes about Catherine Zeta-Jones)? My 11-year-old daughter is a budding actress. I'm sure that if she's ever nominated for an Oscar, I'll cast whatever cynicism I have about the awards aside and follow the ceremony with the same reverence as the Bishops responding to the Second Vatican. If Leah were to win the Oscar, I'd make Paul Sorvino, the weeping papa of 1996 winner Mira Sorvino, seem like a poker-faced automaton. Of course if Leah were to lose it would just prove that the Oscars are a total sham.

Touching the Face of God

Twenty years ago this week I was working as a writer/producer at the Society for Visual Education (SVE) in Chicago. It’s easy for me to pinpoint the day five years earlier when I interviewed for this job because it was the day that John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan: March 29, 1981. I was only 21 and had been working as a copy clerk/slave boy at the Chicago Tribune. This was my first real job interview after graduating from college and I was terrified. I think it was the first time I had a suit on since my Bar Mitzvah and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same suit. I arrived at SVE shaking in my earth shoes but the hubbub caused by the assassination attempt was a real ice breaker. The entire editorial staff at SVE was gathered around a TV set in the office watching the coverage and I joined in the discussions about the dramatic events in Washington. I shared with my future colleagues that John Kennedy’s funeral was my very first memory (when I was four), I speculated on how Hinckley’s obsession with Jodie Foster had led him to shoot the new president, and I groaned when Secretary of State Alexander Hague prematurely started telling anyone who would listen that he was in charge. Despite my complete lack of experience in education or publishing, I got the job.

SVE was a wonderful training ground. I still talk to some of the other writer/producers I worked with during those years who are now spread across the country working for such organizations as National Geographic, Deloitte & Touche, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and “America’s Most Wanted” TV show. We all agree now that our jobs at SVE provided us with an amazing amount of creative freedom even though we were working in the soon-to-be-obsolete medium of educational filmstrips. SVE had several licensed characters that we all wrote for. The star of this group was the Lollipop Dragon, a kindly green dragon who lived in the Kingdom of Tumtum with his orange girlfriend Apple Blossom and his friends Prince Hubert and Princess Gwendolyn. I wrote many adventures for the dragon, addressing a range of curriculum areas from geography to science to math. The nadir of my SVE career, however, was undoubtedly my 1984 homage to multicultural education: “Lollipop Dragon’s Adventures in Ethnic Pride.” I believe I still have those scripts in a box somewhere and I really need to find them to relive the horror. I shudder to think of the dialogue I had coming out of Tumtum’s African-American residents and I have a vague memory of Lollipop Dragon wearing a yarmulke and talking about Yom Kippur. Oy.

I also wrote for Slim Goodbody, a New York actor who wore a body suit that showed all of his internal organs, What-a-Mess, my favorite character who was a mangy Afghan puppy created by English author Frank Muir, and Ted E. Bear, an animated creature who was responsible for me eventually leaving SVE and moving to California to work on a TV series featuring Ted and the other residents of Bearbank (the show never made it to the air).

My favorite projects to work on were ones that involved social studies. I loved history in school and I’d never forgotten some of my more interesting assignments such as when our African-American high school teacher made us write persuasive papers defending slavery or when we simulated the Mideast Peace Talks in college and, as Jimmy Carter, I had to grapple with the conflicting demands of the Israelis and Palestinians. In 1985 I received the plum assignment of working with the Anne Frank Center in Amsterdam on an educational video. I got to travel to Amsterdam and wander around the attic by myself after-hours. SVE no longer exists but I recently found my Anne Frank video on sale in the bookstore in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, a building in Battery Park that used to stand in the shadow of the World Trade Center.

In the mid-1980s I used to organize focus groups with social studies teachers in Chicago to help us plan our upcoming product lines at SVE. I had such a respect for these teachers—what could be more important than helping students understand the world in which they lived through the lens of past and current events? When I heard that a high school social studies teacher by the name of Christa McAuliffe had been chosen from over 11,000 applicants to be the first civilian to go up in the space shuttle, I followed the story every step of the way. I read everything I could find about Christa’s training, listened to every interview she gave, studied the lesson plans she would bring with her on the historic trip, and got to know her family members and her students in Concord, New Hampshire.

In January 1986, as the launch approached, I couldn’t get enough of the Challenger coverage. I was disappointed each time the cold Florida temperatures delayed the mission. On January 27, I watched McAuliffe’s husband Steven being interviewed on the Today Show, talking about how excited they all were for Christa. Their kids, nine-year-old Scott and six-year-old Caroline, seemed thrilled that their mom was making such an important trip and Scott was excited that his entire third-grade grade class had traveled to Florida to watch the launch the following morning.

On January 28th we all stood around the TV set in the SVE conference room to watch the liftoff. It was still unusually cold in Florida but we were relieved that mission control did not stop the launch. I suppose if it hadn’t been for Christa McAuliffe I might have been following the story of Judith Resnik, the Challenger astronaut who was the second American woman to travel in space and the first Jewish astronaut. The Challenger crew also included commander Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and Gregory Jarvis. When they showed the seven astronauts about to enter the shuttle, my eyes were focused on the high school teacher from New Hampshire. She seemed so happy.

My heart was racing as the Challenger majestically rose from its perch at 9:38 Chicago time. The cameras kept cutting away to McAuliffe’s mother and sister who were there watching the liftoff and live shots from Christa’s former classroom in Concord. It seemed like a perfect launch, the Challenger rising in a beautiful straight line at Cape Canaveral and beginning to arch over the Florida sky. At first I didn’t think anything of the strange double formations that formed around the shuttle’s trail which was being closely followed by the cameras. It took me and the millions of people watching the Challenger several minutes to realize that some kind of major catastrophe had just occurred. It never even crossed my mind that anything could happen to the crew of the Space Shuttle. Hadn’t NASA proven itself over and over again, even when potentially catastrophic situations emerged during some of its earlier missions? The only casualties of the space program to date had been the three Apollo 1 astronauts who were killed by a fire on a launchpad in 1967.

When it became clear that the Challenger had exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, I couldn’t speak. My adrenaline racing, it took my brain a while to catch up with what my eyes were seeing and my ears were hearing. At first in the confusion I remember some close-ups of the stunned and then grief-stricken faces of McAuliffe’s mother and sister. Thank God that there was still a level of human decency among news producers back then because when it became clear what was going on, there were no more images of the astronauts’ families or the horrified students at McAuliffe’s school. I remained frozen in my chair for hours, unable to turn away from the TV coverage. I kept hoping against hope that the cabin containing the astronauts had somehow survived the explosion and that they would be found shaken but alive off the Florida coast. As it turned out, the crew cabin did survive the initial breakup of the shuttle, but of course the astronauts were all killed, probably in the first few seconds after the disaster which we later learned was caused by a faulty O-ring in the rocket booster that had contracted in the still frigid temperatures of that January morning.

I can’t remember a news event that affected me so viscerally before or since. I couldn’t even imagine the grief that the families and friends of the astronauts experienced as they watched the live broadcast of their loved ones’ completely unexpected and terribly violent deaths. Christa McAuliffe felt like a friend, a colleague, and I still had the image of her trusting, excited husband and young children in my head. That night, in a national address, Ronald Reagan expertly delivered the famous words that speechwriter Peggy Noonan had borrowed from a World War II-era sonnet. Despite all my cynicism about Reagan’s policies and political views, I believed his sincerity and emotion when he said:

“We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

I am ashamed to say that when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003, killing all seven of the astronauts on board, it didn’t have anywhere near the impact on me as the Challenger disaster. I can barely remember the names of the astronauts who died, despite the fact that their deaths were obviously no less a tragedy than the loss of the Challenger crew. What had happened to me in the intervening years? Was I just world-weary and less interested in the space program? Was it a reflection of what was going on in my life at the time? The Columbia astronauts who died that day were commander Rick D. Husband; pilot William C. McCool; payload commander Michael P. Anderson; mission specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark; and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.

I was unable to drop any of my cynicism of President Bush as he unsuccessfully tried to follow in Reagan’s footsteps and comfort the nation that evening. I’m sure he was deeply saddened by the tragedy but his comments seemed hollow and he certainly lacked the oratory skills that Ronald Reagan possessed. “These astronauts knew the dangers and they faced them willingly,” Bush said in his emotion-free speech, “knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life."

In July 1969, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, I ran out into the Chicago night to study the bright orb in the sky. Could I actually see traces of the lunar module or the astronauts’ footprints with my naked eye? It was a thrilling night and a rare moment in which the entire planet seemed united. Everyone on Earth was focused on the amazing achievement of the Apollo astronauts and praying for their safe return. If someone would have asked me back then what the space program would look like in 2006, I would have said that by now there would be regular civilian flights to the bustling colonies on the moon and possibly tourist jaunts to other planets. Space travel would be no big deal by 2006 and maybe we would be interacting with life from other solar systems from whom we could learn so much. It seemed like a future of endless possibilities.

Band of Brothers

When I was in elementary school my brother, who is five years older, was already a legend. President of the Student Council, editor of the school paper, voted Most Likely to Succeed, he was a hard act to follow. I did well in school but lacked his outgoing personality and I was subjected to the dysfunctional “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” query from several disappointed teachers. My brother was the star trumpet player in the school band and by the time I was in eighth grade I inherited both the trumpet and his first chair position. The only thing I didn’t inherit was his talent and I eventually quit the orchestra, unable to cope with the constant comparisons. My brother attended a different high school so his reputation no longer preceded me, but I’ve always been interested in that difficult dynamic of living up to your brother’s accomplishments.

I was sad to hear that actor Chris Penn was found dead yesterday at the age of 40. They’re still not sure how he died, or they’re not saying. Of course every article about him began by mentioning that he was Sean Penn’s younger brother. Not that he wasn’t well known in his own right. Chris Penn was a great actor. I first remember seeing him as Kevin Bacon’s awkward friend Willard in “Footloose.” The part was written with him in mind and it fit him like a glove. He really showed his stuff in films like “At Close Range” and “Reservoir Dogs” but my all-time favorite Chris Penn performance was as Jerry Kaiser in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts.” Penn plays the shlubby husband of Jennifer Jason Leigh, a young mother who earns money from home by talking like a porn star to strangers as a phone sex operator while she cares for their young children. With a stellar cast that includes Jack Lemmon, Lily Tomlin, Tim Robbins, Lili Taylor, Robert Downey, Jr., and Frances McDormand, Penn delivers one of the strongest performances in the film, expertly showing how his good-natured persona is just a thin veneer over the rage that eventually causes him to explode.

I wonder what it's like to be known your whole life as someone else’s brother. I haven’t watched the show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” in several seasons but yesterday I happened to see the show in which Chris Penn’s “Footloose” co-star, Kevin Bacon, asks the Fab Five to help bring some style to his brother Michael, a talented musician and composer. While Kevin Bacon is stylish enough to be considered a confirmed metrosexual, the somewhat disheveled Michael needed all the help that the gay makeover artists could give him. He did look better at the end of the show but I was glad the boys didn’t go too far in their transformation. We do see Michael gamely applying two different types of moisturizer to his face during the course of the episode, but I’d stake my life on the fact that he’ll never touch any of these products again. (Are there really enough men who use moisturizers to keep these companies in business? The only moisturizer that has ever touched my face is the vegetable oil I end up covered with each Hanukkah while making potato latkes.) The Fab Five kept discussing the fact that Michael has spent his whole life being called “Kevin Bacon’s brother” and they were going to make sure that he was the star of this show. Michael and Kevin seemed very close (they perform together in their band The Bacon Brothers) and Michael didn’t seem fazed about being in the shadow of his more famous brother, but he did mention that his favorite times with his family are when they’re all hanging out and not talking about what they’ve just “done.” The Big Reveal happens at a Bacon Brothers charity concert at the end of the episode where Kevin is introduced, for once, as “Michael Bacon’s brother.”

There is an endless list of famous brother relationships in which one brother eclipses the other one in fame or attention. Some times the negative comparisons are just in the public’s minds and the brothers remain unscathed. Other times it seems as if the less famous brother suffers from the inability to “catch up” to his sibling. I remember last year when Michael Douglas’s younger brother Eric was found dead in his New York apartment. Eric used to frequently say how difficult it was to be the youngest member of such a high-profile family. I have no idea how big a factor this was during his troubled life, but I think you need a very strong ego if you want to be in the same profession as your very successful brother. Remember all the jokes about Frank Stallone? What must it be like to be one of the lesser known Baldwins? Changing your name might help—there are rarely comparisons made between Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, both seem to be judged on their own merits. Maybe it’s just a question of talent and temperament—the careers of people like Jeff and Beau Bridges never suffered for any brotherly comparisons. Of course each of them achieved their own fame separately, not one on the back of the other. And both Sheen/Estevez and the Bridges boys grew up with famous fathers, maybe that took the potential onus off of any brotherly competition.

When I still lived in Chicago in the mid-1980s, I came to Los Angeles on a business trip. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet (okay, I was 25 but that’s a whole other story) so I remember taking a bus from the airport to the San Fernando Valley where I was staying. It must have been an off-hour because the only other passenger on the large city bus was Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s younger brother. We quickly discovered that we were born a few months apart and had many of the same cultural references. In fact, he was in many of my cultural references. Howard starred in the 1967 series “Gentle Ben” in which the 8-year-old boy befriends a grizzly bear in the Florida Everglades. His father, Dennis Weaver, was always having to rescue Clint and his bear pal as they got into one dangerous scrape after another. I loved that show. I also remembered Clint from his supporting appearances on other TV sitcoms—from his recurring role as Ronnie Howard’s friend Leon on “The Andy Griffith Show” to bit parts on “Please Don’t East the Daisies” and “Bonanza.” Howard gave a haunting performance in the third episode of the original “Star Trek” (at the age of 7!) as Balok, the commander of an alien spaceship who plans to destroy the enterprise and its inhabitants. He gives Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the crew ten minutes to pray to “consult whatever deity they believe in” before they are killed. Clint Howard has had a long and successful career, appearing in over 100 movies (including small roles in almost all of his brother’s films) but I’m sure by this point he knows that no matter what he does he will always be known first and foremost as Ron Howard’s little brother. You need to check out one of his latest ventures, the Internet-only “Clint Howard Variety Show,” billed as “the shortest, cheapest variety show in the history of entertainment.” Truly bizarre and I was so riveted I had to watch all six episodes in one sitting.

There are countless other examples of this dynamic among siblings. Many books have been written about the expectations placed on Kennedy boys. When oldest son Joseph was shot down during World War II, next-in-line John moved right into his slot whether he liked it or not. When John was assassinated, brother Bobby took up the mantle. Some presidential brothers, such as Billy Carter, were the subject of derision when they were negatively compared to their more accomplished brothers. Let us pray that Jeb or Neil Bush don’t feel obligated to emulate their brother’s White House ambitions.

History is filled with intrigue and scandal when it comes to royal brothers. It can’t be an easy role especially for ambitious princes who know their only chance to sit on the throne is if their brother drops dead or marries an American divorcee and becomes a Nazi sympathizer. How do you think 21-year-old Prince Harry feels whenever he hears the old “an heir and a spare” joke, knowing that he is the “spare?” There can be a positive side to being in the number two position: many brothers of the first-in-line have been able to engage in behavior that would never be tolerated in their more prominent brother. I don’t know if Harry has any desire to be king, but he should take heart and remember that several of his ancestors who were second-born sons got to fulfill that destiny, including his great-grandfather King George VI. I read yesterday that Prince Harry may be sent to Iraq later this year. I can assure you that his heir-to-the-throne brother will never be allowed near the place.

“You Are the Un-Americans”

Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Paul Robeson, political activist, singer, actor, and author. I remember this date because of my recent involvement on a five-volume series called “Making Freedom: African Americans in U.S. History.” This is a fantastic resource for teachers that recounts the African-American experience through hundreds of documents, diaries, photographs, paintings, and texts. I wish my memories were more personal but I’m afraid on the actual day that Paul Robeson died, January 23, 1976, I was trudging through my senior year of high school and my main reference point for the whole of African-American history was Cicely Tyson’s performance in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” (“Roots” was still a year away).

It was a thrill working with the hundreds of fascinating primary source documents that the “Making Freedom” writers and scholars gathered for this series, but out of all of them one item was so extraordinary that I think it should be required reading for every person in this country: the transcript of Paul Robeson’s 1956 hearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Robeson’s accomplishments were so plentiful that it can be daunting to read his bio. The child of a former slave, Robeson excelled in high school and was awarded an academic scholarship to Rutgers University where he became a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, excelled in baseball, basketball, and football, and was the valedictorian of his 1919 class. He received a law degree from Columbia University in 1923 but later left a law practice when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He then returned to his childhood love of acting and singing and in 1924 starred in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings.” In one controversial scene, a white actress had to kiss Robeson’s hand. This so infuriated the Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan that he wrote O’Neill a letter threatening the life of the playwright’s son if the play went on. To O’Neill’s great credit, he sent the Klan leader a one-sentence reply: “Go fuck yourself.”

Robeson also starred in O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” created a sensation in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” and sang the haunting “Ol’ Man River” in the play and first movie version of  “Showboat.” We have a desk in our house that once belonged to Jerome Kern and I like to think of it as our direct connection to Robeson. Kern wrote “Ol’ Man River” specifically for Paul Robeson (Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics) and it became his theme song. Every time I sit at our Jerome Kern desk I can’t keep myself from lowering my voice three octaves and attempting to sing the lyrics Robeson made so famous (which usually sends my daughter running out of the room with her hands over her ears).

Ol' man river,
Dat ol' man river
He mus' know sumpin'
But don't say nuthin',
He jes' keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along.

Later on Robeson adapted Hammerstein’s lyrics, turning it into an ode to civil rights rather than a slave lament. Instead of “I gits weary and sick of tryin’, I’m tired of livin’ and skeered of dyin’” Robeson sang “I keeps laughin’ instead of cryin’, I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”

Paul Robeson always had a strong relationship with the Jewish community. In the early 30s he fought to help Jews who were trying to flee Nazi Germany. He did many concerts for Jewish organizations and even performed a Chasidic chant in his famous appearance at Carnegie Hall.

But back to Robeson’s best performance—his unapologetic and hard-hitting exchange with the bigoted members of HUAC. Robeson’s passport had been revoked because of his refusal to sign an affidavit swearing he was not a Communist. He also infuriated the committee by stating that black people in this country would not fight in any kind of “imperialist war." HUAC Chairman Francis Walter, Congressman Gordon Scherer, and HUAC’s counsel Richard Arens tried their best to intimidate him as they had so many others, but Paul Robeson stood his ground and never wavered in his resolve. Here is just a small taste from the June 12, 1956 proceedings:

THE CHAIRMAN: The Committee will be in order. This morning the Committee resumes its series of hearings on the vital issue of the use of American passports as travel documents in furtherance of the objectives of the Communist conspiracy. . . .
Mr. ARENS: Now, during the course of the process in which you were applying for this passport, in July of 1954, were you requested to submit a non-Communist affidavit?
Mr. ROBESON: We had a long discussion—with my counsel, who is in the room, Mr. [Leonard B.] Boudin—with the State Department, about just such an affidavit and I was very precise not only in the application but with the State Department, headed by Mr. Henderson and Mr. McLeod, that under no conditions would I think of signing any such affidavit, that it is a complete contradiction of the rights of American citizens.
Mr. ARENS: Did you comply with the requests?
Mr. ROBESON: I certainly did not and I will not.
Mr. ARENS: Are you now a member of the Communist Party?
Mr. ROBESON: Oh please, please, please.
Mr. SCHERER: Please answer, will you, Mr. Robeson?
Mr. ROBESON: What is the Communist Party? What do you mean by that?
Mr. SCHERER: I ask that you direct the witness to answer the question.
Mr. ROBESON: What do you mean by the Communist Party? As far as I know it is a legal party like the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Do you mean a party of people who have sacrificed for my people, and for all Americans and workers, that they can live in dignity? Do you mean that party?
Mr. ARENS: Are you now a member of the Communist Party?
Mr. ROBESON: Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?
Mr. ARENS: Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest that the witness be ordered and directed to answer that question.
THE CHAIRMAN: You are directed to answer the question.
(The witness consulted with his counsel.)
Mr. ROBESON: I stand upon the Fifth Amendment of the American Constitution.
Mr. ARENS: Do you mean you invoke the Fifth Amendment?
Mr. ROBESON: I invoke the Fifth Amendment.
Mr. ARENS: Do you honestly apprehend that if you told this Committee truthfully—
Mr. ROBESON: I have no desire to consider anything. I invoke the Fifth Amendment, and it is none of your business what I would like to do, and I invoke the Fifth Amendment. And forget it.
THE CHAIRMAN: You are directed to answer that question.
MR, ROBESON: I invoke the Fifth Amendment, and so I am answering it, am I not?
•   •   •   •   •
Mr. ROBESON: In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. Where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel [it] in this Committee today.
Mr. SCHERER: Why do you not stay in Russia?
Mr. ROBESON: Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the Fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with Fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people.
Mr. SCHERER: You are here because you are promoting the Communist cause.
Mr. ROBESON: I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause which I see arising in these committees. You are like the Alien [and] Sedition Act, and Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.
•   •   •   •   •
Mr. ARENS: Now I would invite your attention, if you please, to the Daily Worker of June 29, 1949, with reference to a get-together with you and Ben Davis. Do you know Ben Davis (New York Councilman and former secretary of the Harlem Division of the Communist Party)?
Mr. ROBESON: One of my dearest friends, one of the finest Americans you can imagine, born of a fine family, who went to Amherst and was a great man.
THE CHAIRMAN: The answer is yes?
Mr. ROBESON: Nothing could make me prouder than to know him.
THE CHAIRMAN: That answers the question.
Mr. ARENS: Did I understand you to laud his patriotism?
Mr. ROBESON: I say that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the nonpatriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
THE CHAIRMAN: Just a minute, the hearing is now adjourned.
Mr. ROBESON: I should think it would be.
THE CHAIRMAN: I have endured all of this that I can.
Mr. ROBESON: Can I read my statement?
THE CHAIRMAN: No, you cannot read it. The meeting is adjourned.
Mr. ROBESON: I think it should be, and you should adjourn this forever, that is what I would say.

At a time when public lynchings were a common occurrence and racism was deeply entrenched in this country, Robeson’s defiance and refusal to buckle before the committee is nothing short of miraculous. Can you imagine today if all public officials and citizens expressed and stood by their beliefs so forcefully? As far as I’m concerned, the entirety of Robeson’s testimony should be as familiar to every American as the words of the Gettysburg Address.

Paul Robeson, who spoke 15 languages and was loved around the world, could not travel outside of the country for eight long years. Finally, in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that a citizen’s right to travel could not be taken away without due process and his passport was returned.

Although today there are schools, theatres, and organizations named in his honor, it’s shocking that the average student does not know who Paul Robeson was. This is partly due to our government’s efforts to discredit him. Writer Lloyd Brown, a colleague of Robeson’s, has stated that “Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever.” With the passing of time, a lot of the animosity towards him has faded. The U.S. postal service finally honored Robeson with his image on a stamp in 2004.

Robeson was a complex man and he did have some blind spots. Despite  all the revelations about the tyranny of Joseph Stalin, including his murderous anti-Semitic campaigns of the early 1950s, Robeson refused to speak out against the Soviet leader, even penning a tribute to Stalin after his death called “To You Beloved Comrade.” It was only after Robeson’s death that his son, Paul Robeson, Jr., revealed that his father told him about troubling things he had seen in Russia but that he had vowed never to openly criticize the Soviet Union. The younger Robeson, now an expert in Russian studies, gave a speech at Dartmouth in 2003 in which he condemned the Bush administration. Robeson said that the Homeland Security Act was modeled after a collection of documents authored by Joseph Stalin and that President Bush “is part of a neo-Confederate government geared at destroying the Union.” I’m sure his father is proud.

Tonight I saw a moving documentary called “The Sons of Baraka” about a group of inner-city African-American boys in Baltimore who are chosen to attend 7th and 8th grade at the Baraka School in Kenya. Even 30 years after Paul Robeson’s death, the same message is clear—that for some disenfranchised people in this country, the only way for them to break free from the attitudes and harsh realities that are keeping them down is to leave the country and get a new perspective on what might be possible for them in their future. When the Chairman of HUAC tried to tell Robeson that with all he had achieved he must not have been a victim of prejudice, Robeson became agitated:

Mr. ROBESON: Just a moment. This is something that I challenge very deeply, and very sincerely: that the success of a few Negroes, including myself or Jackie Robinson can make up for seven hundred dollars a year for thousands of Negro families in the South. My father was a slave, and I have cousins who are sharecroppers, and I do not see my success in terms of myself.

I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America. My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington’s troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave. I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. And they are not. They are not in Mississippi. And they are not in Montgomery, Alabama. And they are not in Washington. They are nowhere, and that is why I am here today. You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too. And that is why I am here today.

Hello from Down Under

No, I’m not in Australia. But I’ve been hosting one of my Australian authors all week which is why I’ve been absent from this blog. Pauline’s book is being used by teachers working with English Language Learners in the behemoth Los Angeles Unified School District and she is so revered that when the superintendent was introducing her to a crowd of administrators and teachers the other day he compared meeting her to his recent experience meeting Paul McCartney. Hordes of teachers lined up to have her sign their dog-eared copies of the book, it was a gratifying sight. If only more progressive educators could be seen as the rock stars that they are maybe our education system wouldn’t be in such sorry shape.

It’s always fascinating for me to spend time with people from other countries because it helps me realize how cloistered I am in my life here. Did you know that Australia is in the midst of its worst drought in over 20 years? It’s really bad and there is severe rationing. Pauline was shocked at the abandon with which I let the water run as I was doing the dishes. I’m sure there must have been some mention of the drought on page 35 of our newspaper but hearing stuff like that just makes me remember how little the average American knows about what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Have you heard about Schapelle Corby? Pauline mentioned her as if I’d certainly know her story but I’m afraid it was news to me. She’s the 28-year-old Australian woman who went to Bali in October 2004 and was arrested at the airport for smuggling marijuana in her boogie board bag. She maintains that she was an unwitting drug courier for what was supposed to have been a transfer of drugs from Brisbane to Sydney. Apparently there’s a lot of such trafficking involving corrupt baggage employees who tag certain luggage but someone neglected to take out the stash in Corby’s bag before it was transferred to a flight to Bali. Her story is very believable to me (who would take drugs INTO Bali?) but even if she were guilty, 20 years is an insane sentence. The Australian government is trying to fight it or get her extradited but the Indonesian government is digging in its heels and recently overturned a reduction of her sentence. It’s a horrible story but I wonder if it would have attracted as much attention if Corby wasn’t a dead ringer for Charlize Theron. I'll bet Hollywood screenwriters are already at work crafting the story into another Academy Award-winning vehicle for the actress. Australian actor Russell Crowe has commented on the affair: “The photographs of Schapelle Corby broke my heart,” he said. “The first thing I thought this morning was, like, how can I get Johnny Howard (the Prime Minister) on the phone and say, ‘Look, what are you gonna do, mate, what are you gonna do? — that's ridiculous, what if it was your daughter?’” I wonder if Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson, or Heath Ledger have weighed in.

Another Australian was executed in Singapore last December for trying to transport a shipment of heroin between Cambodia and Australia. Apparently Indonesia and Singapore are the last places on Earth you want to be caught with drugs in your possession. If you’re heading that way, I suggest you follow the current trend among Australians and buy some locks for your suitcases so no crafty baggage handlers will land you in the clink.

Did you know that Australia is nearly the size of the United States and yet there are only 20 million people living there—15 million less than we have in California alone? Talk about your wide empty spaces. Considering the small population, it’s amazing that a 10-year-old boy found a message in a bottle on Australia’s eastern seaboard a few days ago that a four-year-old girl threw into England's Morecombe Bay last July.

Our houseguest admits to having eaten kangaroo but finds it a bit gamey. She taught us a great new word that comes from the dirty lump of wool at the back end of a sheep and is used to describe a socially inept person.

“Don’t be such a dag, mate!”

See you all next week.

Queen of the World

What is it about Queen Latifah? It doesn’t matter what she appears in, whether it’s a prestigious big budget musical or small-scale film with a mediocre script, she seems incapable of giving a bad performance. Leah and I saw her new film “The Last Holiday” this weekend, an old-fashioned star vehicle based on the 1950 Alec Guinness movie by the same name. At first glance, Latifah seems like an odd choice to replace Guinness as the hapless, shy salesman who learns he doesn’t have long to live and so takes a final holiday during which he rediscovers himself. This updated version is not going to win any Oscars but I think Queen Latifah’s performance as Georgia Byrd is every bit as revelatory as Alec Guinness’ turn as George Bird. I was particularly impressed by the way she played Georgia in the first part of the film when the character is very quiet and unassuming, not attributes one usually associates with the former rap star. She was completely believable during this part of the film and hit it just right every step of the way during her transformation. There was none of that phony wink, wink, you know I’m going to dramatically change my personality later in the film but bear with me now and see how well I can play against type. Nope, it was clear to me that in addition to having the most natural acting style I’ve seen in decades, Queen Latifah is consistently able to call up just the right emotions from her reservoir of life experience.

Though the script is largely implausible, Latifah’s character rings true from the first frame to the last (and there’s barely a moment of the film in which she doesn’t appear). Her love interest in the film is played by LL Cool J and when I saw his name in the opening credits I groaned, thinking they were shoving one more rap artist into a movie purely for reasons of demographics. I should have dropped this bias after seeing Queen Latifah in action because LL Cool J (what’s his last name—J?) was excellent, playing Latifah’s nerdy department store colleague. The funny thing about this movie is that while the basic storyline is preposterous and almost comic book-like, each of the supporting characters achieves a subtlety that is completely unexpected. The cast includes Timothy Hutton as a greedy multimillionaire (it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy who was young Conrad Jarrett in “Ordinary People”), Alicia Witt as his corporate squeeze who treats service people like crap until she learns an all-important lesson from Latifah, and Susan Kellerman who plays a Nazi-like concierge at a luxury hotel who hates everyone until she experiences the power of Latifah’s love. Even French star Gerard Depardieu (I thought he retired from films) shines in a small but moving role as a world-class chef who is going batty from the crazy Americans who want him to make health-conscious substitutions to his gourmet cuisine. The movie is very sweet but even if it sucked it would be worth seeing for the gorgeous shots of mouth-watering meals—don’t you love movies that know how to film a good cooking scene? It’s like watching a glitzy, big budget version of the Food Network.

One thing that is so remarkable about Queen Latifah is that she goes so completely against the grain of the straitjacket Hollywood usually reserves for its female leads. She is living proof that you don’t have to be skinny to be a glamorous movie star. Leah and I never talk during movies, being the film lovers that we are, but every time Latifah came out in a new get-up, Leah would exclaim, “Oh my God, she’s so beautiful!” Latifah has also managed to avoid the pitfalls that many African-American actors have had to endure in being offered only certain kinds of roles. Indeed, in a rare bit of Hollywood executives knowing a good thing when they see it, the studios seem to be bending over backwards to rewrite characters to fit Latifah, even if it means turning white males into black women.

On the day “The Last Holiday” opened, Warner Home Video issued new DVD versions of three classic all-black films which were called “race films” back in the day: “Hallelujah” (1929), “Green Pastures” (1936), and “Cabin in the Sky”(1943). These are all remarkable films and I urge you to buy or rent them immediately. Directed by white men, of course, and containing groan-inducing “Negro dialect” and many stereotypical characters, they were still way ahead of their time in the sense that they showed black people as three-dimensional characters having full lives, not just as slaves or servants for whites. The new editions come complete with a warning message about some of the dated and very politically incorrect references in the films, but at least the actors were presented as people who had rich lives of their own as opposed to the countless bumbling, inept characters these same actors (such as Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Oscar Polk) played in so many other films. Ethel Waters and Lena Horne fared better in mainstream Hollywood movies, but even they rarely had the chance to play fully rounded human beings who have relationships and sexual desires as they do here. And Lena Horne’s segments in many MGM films were often isolated so that they could be easily lopped off when the films were screened in the Deep South. As we think about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday today, I can’t think of a better beginning to a film festival than these amazing films.

You might want to continue your holiday film festival with “A Patch of Blue,” a biting 1965 look at racism starring Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Hartman, and in one of the bravest roles of her career, the great Shelley Winters who died this weekend at the age of 85. Winters won her second Oscar for her portrayal of Rose-Ann D’Arcy, the violently racist mother of a blind girl who falls in love with Poitier’s character. “A Patch of Blue” opened to critical acclaim just a few months after King’s first march from Selma to Montgomery in which 600 civil rights workers were attacked by local police with billy clubs and tear gas. Winters was a lifelong advocate of human rights and in 1960 was one of the sponsors of a controversial ad in the New York Times for “The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.” She was a brilliant actress, a kooky talk show guest, and a great American citizen and will be missed.

I was trying to figure out what elusive qualities Queen Latifah brings to her performances that make her so likable and appealing no matter what film she is in. I tried to think of other actors who gave me that same feeling and the first one that came to mind was the wonderful Judy Holliday. Although this blond Jewish actress was obviously a very different physical type than Queen Latifah, I got very excited thinking about Latifah taking on some of Holliday’s plum roles. What a fantastic Gladys Glover Latifah would be in a remake of George Cukor’s dazzling “It Should Happen to You.” I can hear her repeating one of Judy Holliday’s lines from the film—a line that also applies to Latifah’s character in her current movie and to her life in general: “I haven’t changed. I’m the same as I was before—only in a different way." How fun would it be to see Latifah as Billie Dawn in “Born Yesterday?” At first it’s hard to imagine her playing a character that is famous for being a dumb blonde but we know that Billie Dawn wasn’t really dumb at all. What I’d give to hear Latifah’s version of this exchange: “Would you do me a favor, Harry? What? DROP DEAD!” I’d also LOVE to see Queen Latifah as Ella Peterson in a remake of Vincente Minnelli’s “Bells Are Ringing.” Think of what she could do with Comden and Green’s “The Party’s Over” or “Just in Time.” Holliday and Latifah share the same kind of sincerity, openness, and world-wise smarts that comes from maneuvering through tough times. I don’t know that much about either of their personal lives and I don’t really want to—I just know that the minute they appear on screen they radiate a luminosity that extends to everyone in the scene and spills out into the audience.

Sadly, “Bells Are Ringing” was Judy Holliday’s last film. She died of cancer a few weeks before her 44th birthday. Queen Latifah has already made twice the number of films that Judy Holliday made. I have no doubt that if they were contemporaries the former Judith Tuvim would have been great buds with the former Dana Owens. Both are walking visions of goodness without smarminess. I’m usually dead against remaking classic films but I’ll change my tune if Latifah decides to tackle the Judy Holliday oeuvre. Mark my words—if she does, she’ll soon be following Holliday down that aisle to collect her Best Actress Oscar.

Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out

I would have made the world’s worst drug addict. Every time I tried smoking pot I’d lapse into a severe (and very uncool) coughing jag. If I did get high, I’d become paranoid and hyper-sensitive and withdraw into a corner of the room, examining the palm of my hand like some clichéd scene out of “Go Ask Alice.” The one time I tried “magic mushrooms” (psylocibin) with my girlfriend Julie I saw colors emanating from the top of her head and freaked out, thinking she was about to spontaneously combust. I never tried cocaine but I’m sure if I had I would have recreated the scene from “Annie Hall” in which Woody Allen sneezes on his friend’s stash, blowing the expensive powder all over the room.

Part of me longed to join the long-haired druggie clique at my high school. They were cool and hip and didn’t seem to get upset about anything. There was only one problem—to be a druggie you actually had to do drugs. I fantasized about taking that drug-induced portal into the world of psychedelia and expanded consciousness but it was not to be. On top of everything else, I was too much of a goody-goody to actually risk getting in trouble. The real druggies at our school didn’t care if they were caught getting high in the school bathroom or congregating in glassy-eyed stupor on the playground. They were frequently sent to the principal’s office or the school counselor. They barely got by in their classes and were often suspended or expelled. The only time I had ever been in the principal’s office was when I fell face down on the cement in elementary school and Dr. Stanek stuck her hand in my mouth to check for loose teeth.

Truth be told, there was also a fair amount of addiction in my family and I became convinced that I was genetically predisposed to the dark side of drug use. I worried that the slightest dabbling would automatically lead to a sordid life in a flophouse with a dirty hypodermic needle sticking out of my arm. But I secretly envied the kids who were tripping out daily, thus escaping the tedium of life in the Chicago public schools.

Yesterday was the 100th birthday of Dr. Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss scientist who is best known as the man who invented LSD. The fact that Dr. Hoffmann is still alive to celebrate his 100th birthday (and looks damn good) seems to prove the early adherents’ claim that LSD is a breakthrough drug that can help users achieve profound insights and spiritual renewal. Hoffmann described his invention as “medicine for the soul” and became very frustrated when the drug was demonized after being used quite successfully in psychoanalysis.

When I first read about Hoffmann’s 100th birthday, I thought surely he must be related to Abbie Hoffmann, political activist and founder of the Yippies, who when he was in court during the Chicago Seven trial famously suggested that the judge try LSD and offered to set him up with a dealer he knew in Florida. But there is no familial connection between the late Abbie Hoffmann and the still-ticking Father of LSD. In truth, the elder Hoffmann had little patience for the likes of Abbie or his pal Timothy Leary, despite Leary’s attempts to educate people about the psychological benefits of LSD. It was Leary who coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Another famous advocate of LSD was movie star Cary Grant who dropped acid more than 100 times under the supervision of his shrink. Grant had this to say about his experience with the drug:

“All my life, I've been searching for peace of mind. I'd explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment…I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn't know were there.”

Cary Grant was one of many celebrities who promoted the use of LSD in the 1950s and 60s. The range of famous people who enjoyed the benefits of d-lysergic acid diethylamide back then included Anais Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and, of course, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Albert Hoffmann is celebrating this landmark birthday by attending a three-day symposium on LSD that begins today in Basel, Switzerland. I can only hope to be that vibrant and “with it” if I ever reach that age. Hoffmann still takes daily walks in the countryside and says that we are all too reliant on technology and not observant enough of nature’s own beauty. Right on, Al!

I no longer secretly wish to be a druggie but I do think it would be great to have a way to be less uptight, remove my inhibitions, express myself more creatively, and experience enlightened insights into human consciousness.

Oh wait—isn’t that what blogging is supposed to do?

The Heart Wants What It Wants

I pride myself on being a very non-judgmental person. It’s a total lie, but I pride myself on it anyway. In my fantasy version of myself, I have a very open live-and-let-live way of looking at the world. I may have a well developed values system for my own behavior, but I don’t expect others to conform to my beliefs and I would never pass moral judgment on a friend, family member, or stranger. I don’t know where I picked up this New Age twaddle but it’s a good thing it only exists in my head since such an outlook isn't always the best approach (should I not judge Hitler for his actions?). The sad truth is that I’m one of the most opinionated people I know. I just can’t help it—present me with a situation, any situation, and I can usually muster up a fairly strong opinion about it. I will say, however, that as I mature, at least I’m more willing to change that opinion once I get more information or once my knee-jerk judgments start to fade.

In Kendall’s family, loyalty was a key factor in determining how the entire clan felt about certain people. If someone dissed one of her father’s plays or treated a member of the family badly, that person could go from trusted confidant to lifelong opponent overnight. Once someone made it to her father’s Enemy List, no matter how large or small the infraction, all of the Haileys were expected to follow suit and write that person out of their lives. It worked in reverse, too. If someone was a close friend, they could do no wrong, and their work was revered. Their play was pure brilliance, their book outstanding, their performance stellar. I’m not saying that the Haileys were insincere in their praise—it was just that their love for people colored the way they perceived the actions, behavior, or creative output of these individuals. Even though I used to mock this dynamic, there was always something I admired and envied about it. The Hailey Way has softened quite a bit since Kendall’s father died in 1993, but to this day you couldn’t wish for a more devoted friend, a more focused listener, or a more appreciative audience than anyone in Kendall’s family. They are a unique breed and rightfully beloved by their large circle of friends. But watch out if you happen to get on their bad side—they can disappear you faster than the Argentine Junta. I felt that undertow myself many years ago at the end of one of Kendall and my early attempts at a relationship. She later admitted that it was only her late grandmother, Hallie May Hailey, who committed the treasonous act of questioning Kendall’s decision to dump me, daring to ask in her heavy Texas accent, “Why is Kendall bein' so mean to Danny?”

I grew up very differently from the Haileys. The more someone was condemned at the hands of my loved ones, the more I felt I had to defend that person or urge my family members to try to understand the offender’s point of view. Equilibrium had to be maintained at all costs. I am still guilty of this reflex and it has infuriated Kendall on many occasions. If she’s having an issue with a family member, friend, or even a nasty sales clerk, my instinct is to jump to that person’s defense and try to make Kendall see the situation differently. It is only when Kendall is singing someone’s praises that I suddenly find myself offering up critical comments, as if I have to constantly balance out any reaction on her part with an opposite reaction. Why do I do that? Am I playing Devil’s Advocate…or just Devil?

I started thinking about the nature of my judgment last night as Kendall and I were watching Woody Allen's latest film. “Match Point” is Allen’s first film shot entirely in England, and, except for “Interiors,” his 1978 attempt at “serious drama,” it is his most goyishe film to date. While some of the themes in the film are very familiar (sexual obsession, infidelity, the lengths outsiders will go to fit in with the established upper class), the film lacks the usual stand-in for Woody’s Jewish angst-ridden psyche (even in “Interiors” we had Maureen Stapleton’s colorful Pearl, who, while not Jewish, represented that kind of vibrant persona that’s an oil-and-water mix with the elitist Gentile families Allen loves to write about—“She’s a vulgarian!” shouted Mary Beth Hurt about Stapleton’s character). There is also a noticeable lack of humor in “Match Point.” Although some laughs can be had from Penelope Wilton’s biting portrayal of the Hewett family’s upper crust Mama Bear, and from Matthew Goode as Wilton’s affable son who in the end wants to please his mommy, the film’s main stars, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Scarlett Johansson, are about as comical as broken glass. Not that they’re supposed to be funny. I hope I don’t sound like one of those nudniks Allen skewers in the wonderful “Stardust Memories” who keep telling the director how much they prefer his earlier funny films. Still, after two hours of tortured Gentile machinations I wanted to stand up in the theatre and shout, “Dear God, somebody get me a Jew!”

It’s impossible to follow the plot of “Match Point” without remembering Allen’s own troubles. Who can forget when Mia Farrow unleashed her wrath at her longtime companion after finding out he was having an affair with her daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Allen then held a press conference where he uttered his famous line, “The heart wants what it wants” to explain his behavior. I was disgusted by the media bandwagon that had turned against Allen during this time but hearing him utter that line made me join their ranks, at least temporarily. I remember getting into arguments about Allen’s situation with my ex-wife and other defenders. The heart may want what it wants, I posited, but that doesn’t mean you have to act on it when doing so will lay waste to the lives of the people you care about. My feelings about Allen never extended to a boycott of his films—I eagerly saw them all, but it took a viewing of the documentary “Wild Man Blues” for me to release my judgment of his personal life. The film provided a telling glimpse into Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi, and I had to admit that they seemed perfect for each other. Who the hell was I to judge them anyway?

Watching “Match Point” last night made me wonder whether I really did let go of that judgment. Rhys-Meyers, though light years away from the classic Allen character in looks and ethnic background, is definitely a student of the “heart wants what it wants” school of moral decision-making. I enjoy movies that explore characters with questionable motives who do all sorts of things in their quest to get what they want. I never watch these films and think about the personal ethics or beliefs of the screenwriter or director. But last night as the film played out (and incidentally, I do agree that it’s Allen’s best film in years), I couldn’t get Woody the Man out of my head, or more accurately my past judgments of Woody the Man. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the writer/director was somehow condoning Rhys-Meyers’ reprehensible actions by the way he was presenting them and that the film somehow revealed Allen’s own twisted view of women and relationships.

Kendall thought the film seemed like a thematic retread of Allen’s own “Crimes and Misdemeanors” but it reminded me more of the 1951 film “A Place in the Sun.” In both films we empathize with the protagonist’s desire for a better life and thus are initially torn when he engages in activities that are terribly out of character for a leading man. The difference in “Match Point” is that Scarlett Johansson is no boorish Shelley Winters. Rhys-Meyers goes after her with a vengeance until his obsession turns her into something else entirely, something that no longer has any appeal. The heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t want it anymore.

I’m trying hard not to give any of the major plot points away. Let’s just say the ending of the film is a shocker and never would have passed muster with the 1951 censors who made sure Montgomery Clift paid for his sins in “A Place in the Sun.” I also couldn’t help noticing how my perceptions of certain character types keep changing as I get older. I know there was a time when I would have been rooting for Rhys-Meyers’ obsessive interest in mystery girl Johansson and I would have thought his wife Chloe (played by the excellent Emily Mortimer) was a boring character. Today, Johansson’s Nola Rice sent up red flags from the minute she appeared on screen. Trouble with a capital T, I thought. Emily Mortimer seemed a much more appealing match, why would Rhys-Meyers possibly want to stray? Oh yeah, the heart wants what it wants, I keep forgetting.

I enjoyed seeing this film but by the time it was over I felt an uneasy creepiness that made me want to go home and take a shower or watch a few MGM musicals to get the sour taste out of my mouth. “What kind of mind would write a story like this?” I asked Kendall, my old judgments of Woody Allen’s personal life filling my consciousness. I then went into my usual self-reproach: What the hell do I know about what makes Woody Allen tick? I’ve never met the man and even if I had, why do I assume that the plotlines of his films are direct windows into his subconscious thoughts?

Suddenly I was overtaken by the screaming cacophony of judgment that lives in my head all the time—harsh opinions about the real-life celebrities I was watching, the other patrons in the movie theatre, the people selling refreshments, anyone within eye- or earshot. In the end, I reserved my harshest judgment for myself: Who died and made you king of the universe? Where do you get off with your holier-than-thou attitude? Why don’t you just focus on your own dysfunction before setting your sights on the foibles of the rest of the planet? By the time we got home I vowed I would not write about “Match Point” on my blog. I didn’t want to risk unleashing this tirade and exposing myself for the judgmental lunatic that I am. So what am I doing? Damn. With these thoughts still swirling in my head, I just couldn’t make myself write about anything else.

The blog wants what it wants.

High School in Black and White

I went to high school in an urban neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. It was during the early part of the 1970s, after the first wave of desegregation policies had changed the landscape of the Chicago public school system. We couldn’t believe the stories we heard from a few years earlier of white parents keeping their kids home or participating in protests in front of the school just because of the black children enrolling at Von Steuben High School. In elementary school we only had two African-American classmates who were bussed in, Mark and Patricia. They were the first black people most of the Jewish, Swedish, and Greek children in my neighborhood had ever met. But at Von there was a sizable black population. With no protests, no one picketing in front of the school, and no nasty letters to the school board, we were the model of integration, no? Not hardly.

Von Steuben was not a very large high school. Although we started out with quite a few more, there were less than 200 kids in my graduating class. Looking at my high school yearbook tonight, I was shocked to discover that I don’t remember almost half of the student body. It’s not just a question of a hazy memory after so many years, it’s as if I had never seen them before or heard their names. Zero recognition. What kind of private world was I living in back then? We thought we were integrated but it was like there were two separate schools co-existing with very little contact. The blacks ate lunch with the blacks, the whites with the whites. I can’t remember a single African-American kid at any of the parties I attended over the years. I do remember what the black kids sang at our talent shows because they were the only ones with any talent (I wish I could think of the couple who sang the Roberta Flack/Donny Hathaway song “Where Is the Love” one year and brought the house down). The jocks and the star basketball players were the other students who seemed to straddle both groups, as they were idolized by the entire school. My conversations with the African-American girls in my classes were so few and far between that I immediately developed a crush on every black girl who deigned to speak to me.

This yearbook picture is of my homeroom, or as we called them in Chicago, my “division.” We were grouped with these same kids for 20 minutes every day during all four years of high school. Whenever we posed for our yearbook picture, I made it a point to stand as close as I possibly could to LaJuan Amos. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Her sophistication made LaJuan seem more like the keynote speaker at Supermodel Day than a fellow classmate. I looked up her profile in the yearbook and in addition to her membership in the Afro Club and being captain of the Pom-Pom Squad, LaJuan’s ten-year career objective was to be a model. I wonder if she made it. This was my favorite photo because it looks like the two of us are holding hands. Check out my smokin’ velour shirt with the zipper (oy!) and my shoulder-length hair. How could LaJuan not go for that? But the two black students standing behind me? I haven’t the slightest idea who they are. And what in God’s name is that girl on the right holding? I hate to say it, but it looks like a watermelon—was that her political statement on the inherently racist subcultures at the school? Not only that, but look at her middle finger. She is clearly flipping the bird, something that the photographer and Jewish yearbook editors were too oblivious to notice. Go, Afro Club!

2006 marks the 30th anniversary of my high school graduation. 30 years?! I remember when my father went to his 25th Von Steuben reunion in 1975 and I couldn’t believe that any human being could have lived long enough to be out of high school for a quarter of a century. Have you ever attended a reunion? I’ve gone to both of mine—my 10th in 1986 which was sort of interesting and my 20th in 1996 which was so God-awful I vowed never to go near one again. How odd, then, that because of my blog I suddenly find myself on the planning committee for our 30th reunion.

I heard from a lot of former classmates after I wrote a post about our friend Julie Rotter who died last March. It was great to touch base with people who knew Julie back then. Our offline discussion eventually turned to our dreaded 20th reunion which was held in a boring, charmless hotel in the Chicago suburbs. The food was horrible, the conversations strained, and the only unifying event was a slide show mostly filled with photos of people from another school. I’d never been to an event that was so poorly planned and I swore I wouldn’t go to another reunion unless it took place in the school itself, not at some stupid hotel. So here I am, working with two classmates I haven’t seen in over a decade, one in Cornwall, England, and the other in Chicago. We secured the school building for October 28th and are in the process of contacting our former classmates, many of whom I have no memory of. I haven’t stepped foot in that imposing structure since my last day as a senior in June of 1976. Gerald Ford was the President and the price of gas had just skyrocketed to the unheard of price of 67 cents a gallon.

Sometimes when I think of my distaste for high school I wonder if I’m making it all up, if at the time I really enjoyed it. But tonight among my archives I found a letter I wrote to a friend in 1976 but never mailed. Almost every page is filled with invective slamming the school. If someone would have told me back then that I’d be helping to plan our 30th reunion, I would have thought they were using the hallucinogenics I would soon experiment with (ever so briefly) after graduation. As I’ve discussed in other entries, I was not a big fan of my Chicago public school education. Even then I could sense that many of our teachers were overworked, underpaid, and burned out to the point where they just couldn’t be bothered doing anything innovative or challenging. There were some notable exceptions—I loved filmmaking and most of my English and history classes. Oh, hell, maybe it wasn’t the teachers at all, it was probably just my own apathy that made high school life such a drag.

What was I so cynical about? Was that just a strategy to survive the usual horrors of adolescence? While I wasn’t exactly part of the “popular” clique, I did have my circle of friends and I was always a straight-A student. I was very outgoing in certain safe environments such as French class with Mrs. Snobel or filmmaking class with Mr. Daniels. Gym class was never a picnic, however, because I sucked at team sports. I remember the humiliating ritual of choosing up teams. As the teams formed in the front of the gym, I was always left sitting on the floor until the bitter end and I could see the dread in the team captains’ eyes when they realized they had to take me. It wasn’t that I was particularly uncoordinated, it’s just that I’d had absolutely no childhood experience playing sports and I didn't have a clue. My father grew up without a dad and he had to work from the time he could walk so I’m not sure he ever threw a ball in his life or even touched one. (Oy, I hope he’s not reading this—he’s already so guilt-ridden about some of the choices he made as a young parent that he’s taken to singing Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” every time we talk about the past.) My friends and I were fairly active in our own geeky ways, going on long bike rides to the Museum of Science & Industry or staging plays in my basement, but not so much with the team sports. In retrospect, I wish I had tried to improve my abilities in gym class instead of suppressing my normally outgoing self and developing a self-mocking persona that makes me cringe when I think about it. I’m sure I still carry some of the trauma felt by that boy sitting on the gym floor waiting to be chosen and knowing he was going to be last.

My co-chairs on the reunion committee, Donna and Susan, were among the most active, athletic, and energetic students in the entire school. They were involved in nearly every available extracurricular activity. I was involved in nothing. Why didn’t I join the writing club at least, or work on the yearbook? I guess I was too busy kvetching about my oh-so-miserable life. And yet, here I am, Mr. Apathy, Mr. Cynic, thrilled about reconnecting with these two women and excited about seeing these people I mostly don’t remember. What makes me so eager to explore these largely forgotten parts of my past? Am I trying to recapture something that I never really had? Is it my attempt to heal some long-dormant wounds? Do I want to touch base with people who knew me during a simpler time? Or am I just looking for new blog material?

I’m curious to see if the unintentional segregation will continue. All of the 1976 Von Steuben graduates were invited to both of our reunions but I can’t remember a single black student showing up. Maybe the former Afro Club members have their own gatherings.