Jew Eat Yet?

Patti Smith Does Debby Boone

Can you believe that Patti Smith is 62 years old? I can’t. Especially since she still looks like the androgynous punk waif she was when her first album came out in 1975. My brother-in-law played on a bill with her a few years ago and my then very young nephew Spencer, being the true hipster that he already was, knew her music and was thrilled to meet her. There was a great photo taken of Spencer with Patti Smith which unfortunately got lost in a computer crash.

There are few artists I respect more than Patti Smith. I’m no fanatic who follows her every move, knows all her lyrics, or agrees with everything she says (some of her politics make me squirm), but this woman once dubbed the “female Mick Jagger” is definitely the real deal. In my opinion there’s not an inauthentic bone in her body, she is what I’d call a true artist who could have sold her soul to the devil a million times over for endless riches but never did.

Which is why the video clip I want to share with you that I just saw on a friend’s Facebook page made my eyes bug out of my head. It’s from the 1979 network TV show “Kids Are People, Too!” which featured guests such as Brooke Shields, Scott Baio, and the cast of “Eight Is Enough.” Somehow the producers got Patti Smith to appear on the show and take questions from the all-kid audience. Then, inexplicably, instead of singing one of her own tunes or performing one of the covers she frequently did of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, or Neil Young songs, Patti chose to sing a completely straight version of Debby Boone’s treacly hit, “You Light Up My Life.” Huh?! Take a look at this bizarre but wonderful clip:

As you can see, there’s not a trace of condescension in the way Patti Smith talks to children. In that respect, “Kids Are People, Too!” was the perfect show for her to appear on, despite the inanity of the series. I’m sure that respect for children is what Spencer picked up during his encounter with Smith. I’m sure it also made her a great mother to her now grown children she had with her husband, the late Fred “Sonic” Smith from MC5. The couple lived quietly in Detroit when their children were young. “Our kids had no idea that we did anything, except be mom and dad and read a lot. I was always reading, studying and writing. So my children had an image of me always with my nose in a book. They had no sense that I did this. I had to talk to them about it when I went back. Still, they don’t identify with me as a rock'n'roll star. I’m their mom.”

And because I just can’t leave it at Debby Boone, here’s a recent video of the much older Patti Smith singing “Because the Night.” She hasn’t lost a thing. In my book, that’s what comes from leading such an honest life.

High School Weekend

My daughter Leah appeared in a local production of “High School Musical 2” last night. She played Peaches, one of Sharpay’s devoted minions. Sharpay Evans is the rich popular girl in the story, hell bent on stealing school jock Troy Bolton (the character that made Zac Efron famous) away from his true love, smart girl Gabriella Montez. It was a spirited, fun production and Leah was great, as always, but I’ve been pretty snobby about the whole thing. For weeks I loudly bemoaned the fact that the theatre company Leah is involved with bypassed the canon of classic musical theatre this time for a “fake musical” based on a made-for-TV Disney movie and its subsequent franchise juggernaut. Again, Leah and her fellow actors did a wonderful job with the material—I enjoyed the two shows I saw but… “My Fair Lady” it ain’t!

Like many Disney movies, everything is a bit exaggerated in the “High School Musical” world, with all conflicts speedily resolved by the closing curtain. This resolution is accomplished by having the antagonists undergo miraculous personality changes towards the end of the play. Suddenly, and seemingly out of the blue, Sharpay is sorry for all of her sly machinations and decides that Troy and Gabriella really do belong together after all. Okay. Still, the hierarchy of the various high school cliques in this story rang true for me, especially following the weekend I just had with some long-lost high school friends.

On the left in the above photo is an image from the 1976 Von Steuben High School yearbook. In the center you can see my old classmates Jo, Donna, and Helena. On the right is a photo of the three of them at my house this weekend. It was the first time we were all together since Graduation Day, June 2, 1976—nearly 33 years ago (gulp!). We all went our separate ways after high school. Helena lives in Los Angeles so we remained in touch. Jo and I went to college together but I was a film major and she was in the sciences and we rarely saw each other except for a skiing class we took together senior year (we went to school in flat Evanston, Illinois, so we rode a bus to Wisconsin every week and learned how to ski on hills that would make real skiers scream with laughter). I only recently learned that Jo has lived in northern California for years. I saw Donna at our first two high school reunions but that’s it. She went to school in Boston, stayed there many years, and now lives in Cornwall, England with her second husband. Donna found me several years ago through this blog and, after discussing how much we loathed our high school reunions, we helped to plan the 30th reunion a few years ago which was a resounding success.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about old school friends coming out of the woodwork via Facebook and I’ve certainly participated in that nostalgic dip. Some of my friends think I’m insane to resume contact with people from my distant past. “Why would you be interested in these people now,” they ask, “when you spent so much time avoiding them back when we were in school together?” Maybe that’s why? As I explained in a post a few weeks ago, I was so out of it during school that communicating with these folks helps to fill in the gaps a little bit and allows for some healing of my scabbed-over adolescent numbness. 

Such communication occasionally also allows for relationships that were stifled then by my own insecurities to emerge in adulthood. I can see my encounters with a few of my new Facebook “friends” developing into real friendships. I was surprised at what a great time I had with my in-person guests this weekend. We had marathon catching-up sessions on both Saturday and Sunday that went on so long they involved multiple meals. We had our common past as a foundation but the real joy was finding that now, freed from the shackles and restraints of adolescent angst and misery, we all had a much greater ability to communicate honestly with each other and really understand who we are as people. Who knew that we all had such challenges in our childhoods? I guess our teenaged narcissism didn’t allow for such empathy or compassion back in the day. I learned a lot more about how I came across back then and what protective devices I used (and still use) to shield myself from vulnerability or exposure. So interesting.

Jo and Donna were the editors of our senior class yearbook back in 1976 and they reminisced about the many fun meetings they had with the rest of the yearbook committee at various students’ homes that year. At the time it never even crossed my mind to consider working on the yearbook even though I know it’s the kind of thing I would have enjoyed. Again, I found myself regretting how I closed myself off from all social interactions even the ones for which I was especially well suited. For the rest of the weekend the yearbook committee became the metaphor for all of my lost opportunities in high school as well as for my frequently misinterpreted standoffishness and cynicism. At one point in the afternoon Jo and Donna were upstairs in our guest room chatting. I knocked on the door and stuck my head in. “I know I’m not very active at school,” I stammered, “but I would really enjoy working on the yearbook. Would it be possible for me to join your committee? I think I could help out in a lot of ways.” “Absolutely!” they replied, “we’d love to have you!” I was kidding, of course, I haven’t suffered an actual psychotic break that has taken me back to the year of our nation’s bicentennial! But I also felt that forgotten high school boy inside of me experiencing the pleasure of finally belonging to one of the groups he longed to be part of but was too afraid to join. Does that sound pathetic?

I’m thinking of adding a color section to the yearbook. I'll have Jo and Donna research the rates. I’d like to talk about the recent energy crisis and do a short feature on the upcoming presidential election—I hear this Jimmy Carter guy is someone to watch.

Natasha Richardson

I can’t stop thinking about Natasha Richardson. She died today at the age of 45 following a tragic skiing accident that apparently didn’t seem like much when it first happened on Monday. I was repulsed by the ghoulish death watch of the past two days but I kept hoping against hope that there would be an announcement that they somehow stopped the bleeding in her brain and that she was going to be fine after all. That’s how it would have happened on “ER” or “Grey’s Anatomy,” damn it. I feel ghoulish talking about her myself but it’s one of those events involving a public figure that really socked me in the gut, for some reason, like the deaths of Princess Diana and John Kennedy, Jr. You just can’t believe something so random and avoidable and so…well, human could happen to these folks and take them away in an instant. The circumstances of Richardson’s death seem even more incomprehensible when you read the reports of what the accident looked like and how she was talking and laughing afterwards and walked back to her hotel room only to come down with a crushing headache a few hours later. Horrible.

At times like this we feel bad for the real people involved, of course, and then we rattle ourselves by projecting our loved ones into the picture. My family members go skiing, my loved ones have had very bad falls. It brings up all my issues of “mother loss,” too, I almost can’t bear thinking of Richardson’s teenaged sons who I’ve seen photographed with her many times. I can still cry thinking of the image of that envelope addressed to “Mummy” that sat atop Diana’s coffin during her funeral. I can only imagine the searing pain Richardson’s sons are going through and how numbingly awful it must be to lose your mother at that age. The reports of her husband Liam Neeson holding her hand and stroking her face the whole way back from Canada and of a grief-stricken Vanessa Redgrave entering the hospital are poignant and painful. I didn’t see any of the TV coverage but I read reports of paparazzi accosting Natasha’s sister Joely Richardson as she entered the New York hospital. Is there a special place in hell reserved for people who torment the grieving?

I’ve always been an enormous fan of the Redgraves. I am fascinated by families whose members share the same career and passions (so different from my experience) and I’m especially interested in acting families. By all measures the Redgraves were the supreme royalty of that group. Only the Barrymores were in their league. One of my favorite films of all time is the 1952 version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” starring Natasha’s grandfather Michael Redgrave. Richardson’s grandmother was the luminous Rachel Kempson, a gifted actress who worked well into her 80s. Her father was the Oscar-winning director Tony Richardson and, of course, her mother is one of the most brilliant actresses ever to take a breath, no matter what her politics are. I’ve seen Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway and on the West End and I’d go to nearly any film she’s in merely because of her presence. My favorite parts of the 2007 film “Evening,” in fact the only parts I can remember at this point are the poignant scenes between Redgrave and Natasha Richardson. They appeared together only last month in a benefit performance of “A Little Night Music.” I’m sure Redgrave never dreamed in a million years that any of her children would go before her. It is obviously every parent’s worst nightmare.

I had few personal encounters with the Redgraves, apart from seeing them on the stage. I met Richardson’s immensely talented aunt Lynn Redgrave, whom Kendall knew, during one of our first dates. In 2002, my brother-in-law scored a film that Richardson appeared in called “Chelsea Walls” but I doubt that he met her. Kendall and I were lucky enough to see Natasha Richardson in her Tony-winning performance as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” in 1998. She was extraordinary in the role—totally different from the Sally Bowles we saw in the film and much closer to the spirit of Christopher Isherwood’s muse. Leah recently appeared in “Cabaret” so we listened to the cast recording for months on end. I appreciated the subtleties of Richardson's performance even more than I did when I saw it live.

I enjoyed so many of Natasha Richardson’s film performances as well as those of her husband, her sister, and several other Redgraves I haven’t even mentioned. I know next to nothing about her personal life but it seemed like she had a very close, loving family. How can we not feel their pain knowing this could happen to any of us at any time? This morning when I was driving Leah to school, before Richardson had died, we were talking about the tragedy. Her favorite Natasha Richardson movie, and one of mine, too, was the remake of “The Parent Trap,” a film that deals head-on with mother loss and then solves it in a preposterous but soul-satisfying way, especially for children of divorce which I am and which Leah already was at the time. I found myself talking to Leah about her frequent skiing escapades in the French Alps where her grandparents have a home. But as I nervously urged her to BE CAREFUL, I stopped myself in mid-neurosis and realized that Natasha Richardson’s death most likely had absolutely nothing to do with carelessness. Knowing that any one of us could meet with some unthinkable fate tomorrow or the next day, what else can we do but savor the present and appreciate every precious second we have with our loved ones?

Listen to the following clip that so beautifully evokes Natasha Richardson’s talent, playfulness, and spirit:

Where the Boys Are

Some couples prefer to keep this kind of news a secret so please don’t breathe a word of what I’m about to tell you: we found out last week that WE’RE HAVING TWO BOYS! Woo-hoo! I’m very excited! At my age I honestly never thought I’d have the experience of having sons. Having a daughter is the greatest thing in the world but I’m looking forward to the brand new experience of raising boys. A lot of parents I’ve talked to who have both say boys are easier—especially once they hit puberty.

It’s funny how talking about gender at this stage very quickly moves into the realm of gross generalization and stereotypes. When they determined a few weeks ago that Baby A was a boy he was so active during the ultrasound that he prevented the technician from getting a good look at the gender of Baby B. “I think it might be another boy,” she said, “but don’t start filling the nursery with blue clothes just yet!” Hold it—nursery? We have to have a bedroom for these kids? We haven’t lifted a finger in that regard and we probably won’t until long after they’re born. All of our house projects were frozen in mid-construction last year when the economy tanked and I don’t see any hand-painted alphabet murals going up any time soon. We can’t deal with any of that right now—didn’t that technician ever hear of a dresser drawer? At the moment we don’t even have working electricity in our extra room. What? You’re saying candles and babies don’t mix?

As for clothes, the only drag about having two boys is that so many people have offered us their girl clothes they no longer need. My brother- and sister-in-law have two daughters who are the best-dressed kids in the San Fernando Valley and they were poised to give us an entire wardrobe of fantastic duds. Damn. In these hard times, is it worth making at least one of our sons a cross dresser? At least having boys makes me feel less guilty for getting rid of Leah’s fabulous designer French baby clothes from her classy relatives in Paris. (Note to relatives: baby clothes that are so classy that they have to be dry cleaned are not very…um…practical?) Now that I think of it, don’t boys spend their entire childhoods in the same t-shirt and jeans? I know I did—and still do!

Within minutes of finding out we were having at least one boy, I managed to offend several of our lesbian friends by asking them if they would teach the boys how to throw a ball since I never could. They responded that yes, they would, but they would also teach the other baby if it were a girl because some girls also like to play ball and they don’t have to be lesbians! Oops. Think of all of the stereotypes I packed into that one little request—impressive, no? Of course I was only kidding. True, I sucked at most sports when I was a kid and can’t remember a single time when my non-sports-minded father hurled a ball in my direction (don’t feel guilty if you’re reading this, Dad!) but I look forward to encouraging whatever athletic prowess my sons may have.

We’ve got some strong name possibilities but I (uncharacteristically) feel like keeping those a little close to the vest at the moment. (I’m already tempting that damned Evil Eye with all this baby talk!) But just to give you a hint: one of my requirements of a first name is that there is a major Broadway showtune associated with it. Can you guess which names are on our short list?

In our most recent ultrasound, the twins’ heads were right next to other and they seemed to be communicating. According to the doctors, they are now fully aware of each other’s presence. That is amazing to me. I used to always fantasize about having a twin brother when I was a kid. Imagine being born with a built-in friend (slash competitor and enemy slash confidante and defender). We can’t wait to meet them. But hope they stay put for quite some time. Pre-term labor is the biggest concern in twin pregnancies.

We had a scare last week that I want to mention just as a warning to other prospective parents. We saw a doctor who was not our main obstetrician a few weeks ago and, after taking Kendall’s blood, she asked us if we wanted them to run something called a Triple Marker screening. I later learned the more clinical name is something like Maternal Alpha Fetal Protein. I also learned later that it measures different substances in the mother’s blood and combines those readings with various other factors (maternal age, due date, etc.) to come up with probabilities for chromosomal abnormalities in the babies such as Spina Bifida or Downs Syndrome. Sure, we said, why not? And that’s all we heard about the test—no explanation of what it was or what the potential results mean. 

A week later, we got a very grave-sounding message from this doctor that Kendall had tested positive for Downs Syndrome. What? When I finally got the doctor on the phone, I felt like I was pulling teeth to get more info. No, it didn’t mean that the babies had Downs, she said gravely, it was just about probabilities. She told us we needed to set up an appointment with the genetic counselors at Cedars-Sinai and get an amnio. We went through five days of major anxiety despite a lot of research we did about the appalling number of false positives this test produces. (I feel awkward writing about this knowing that parents of kids with Downs Syndrome might be reading—this is in no way intended as a slight of your wonderful children!) 

We weren’t planning to terminate whatever the results were, but we couldn’t go through the rest of the pregnancy not knowing. When we finally arrived in the specialist’s office, the doctor took one look at the results we were given and pronounced them “garbage.” Our doctor had read them incorrectly. Kendall was completely negative for Downs or any other abnormalities. An extensive ultrasound confirmed those results (and revealed the second boy!). Again, I’m telling this story because I want to urge anyone getting the AFP test to talk with your doctor about what that test is before you decide to do it. Even if our person hadn’t misread the results, the false positive rate is over 90 percent! You need to remember it’s a screening test, not a diagnostic test, and out of 500 women who test “positive” for Downs Syndrome, only a few babies are affected. The genetic specialists told us that they are always lobbying the medical community to change the language and the criteria for “positives” because they are constantly meeting with couples who are terrified for no reason. Oy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go throw a few softballs…and work on my showtunes repertoire!

Stretched Out

I’ve been on a total news blackout since January. I’m not proud of that fact, I’m actually quite embarrassed by it, but with everything that’s going on in my life and in the world, I found I just couldn’t take the constant drumbeat of doomsday reporting without falling into dangerously high levels of anxiety. I’ve always been a news junkie and prided myself on being fairly well informed but I consider it a temporary survival mechanism to focus on a much smaller swath of the world for the moment. I have barely seen or heard Barack Obama since the Inauguration in January and I’ve followed very few news stories since then. I especially avoid news reports about the economic crisis. Is that putting my head in the sand? Yes, but I’m not sure I’d be better off playing into the hands of the Chicken Littles who would have us believe that everything is worse now than it’s ever been (not true) and that there is little hope for improvement.

The news media is having a field day with its dour forecasts, but I fully recognize that my news blackout is a reaction to MY issues, not the media's fault. I’ve always been a bit too susceptible to the moods and actions of others. I remember the days when a change in someone’s tone of voice in a two-minute conversation could send me on a downward spiral for the rest of the day. And conversely, the perceived approval of someone could make me feel on top of the world. Giving away my power like that is a very destructive habit and does not lead to any kind of sustained peace of mind or mental health! So I’ve been working on it for years. I’m much better now but not completely there. I started realizing a few months ago that I was allowing news reports that I heard in the morning affect my mood for the entire day one way or the other. So I’m taking a break and getting a grip.

When Leah was a little girl she would overhear me talking about how stressed out I was from time to time but she thought I was saying something else. Later on, if I seemed upset she would ask me, “Are you stretched out today, Dad?” I loved that, it seemed like such an appropriate term. I’m very stretched out these days, along with most of the planet. But even though there are many serious real-life issues we have to deal with, I think the most important task at hand is to NOT succumb to panic and despair. Yes, we must address the specific content of any difficult life experiences we are facing, but I truly believe that the best way to do that is to develop the coping mechanisms we need to deal with what life throws our way. That is the difference between happiness and misery, that is where we get our true power and joy.

I’m not sure if I’m expressing any of that correctly and I hope you’re not stifling your gag reflex at my airy-fairy words. Let me make it clear that I don’t have any answers, this is not some inspirational post in which I lay out my wisdom for living stress-free lives in stressful times. I don’t have a clue, I’m just trying to get a handle on how I personally make it worse for myself. We are all familiar with various stress-reduction strategies such as meditating, working out, simplifying our lives, focusing on the positive, accepting what we cannot change, reaching out to others, and so on. I’m good at some of those and need to work on others. Part of the illusion during these current times is that this stress is a new phenomenon. It’s always been there, even if some of our personal situations seem more challenging at the moment. I was talking to my sister a few days ago, someone who is no stranger to stress, and I was obsessing about something as if it was a brand new challenge in my life. If only that would be solved, everything would be fine, I implied. Her response has stuck with me. “Most of the stuff that is stressing you out today was there a year ago and will be there five years from now, it’s about how you cope with it.” That is very true. An old friend I recently touched base with after many years offered me this advice when I start to feel anxious: breathe in and say to yourself “everything is,” then  breathe out say “just as it is.” There was a time when I would have scoffed at such a mantra but now I really appreciated it and have found myself reciting it often along with my own version that “everything is okay right now.”

Maybe I’ll start following the news again soon but it’s been very helpful to control what’s been going into my head during the past few months. As my father constantly reminds me, “Stress is a killer!” I know that’s true, even though I usually find his panicked worries about my stress levels more stressful than any stress I'm experiencing at the time! But I don’t want to spend my life “stretched out.” Living in the moment has always been a challenge for me. My biggest fear is squandering joyful moments in the present with my loved ones because I’m too focused on my worries about the future. For me it takes a lot of discipline to stay focused on the now. I also enjoy ruminating about the past, as is obvious from this blog. I don’t see that as a bad thing unless it takes me away from appreciating the now. I still feel, as I said in my previous post, that many of my ruminations about the past are somewhat cathartic and helping me better understand my present.

Many life experiences are simultaneously joyful and stressful. Having two babies on the way is certainly an example of that. I could spend every waking moment focusing on the fears I have about having more kids right now, or I could stay in the moment, recognize the excitement I feel about this impending huge change in our lives, and trust that I will be able to handle all of the challenges that accompany the joy.