Jew Eat Yet?

Ghosts of Thanksgiving

 

I was so busy cooking and schmoozing during our fun Thanksgiving fest that I forgot to take photos. Some family archivist I am! I did manage to take the above picture of Leah and Charlie (in matching holiday orange) at our Thanksgiving table. I wanted to take a group photo of our 12 guests but never got around to it. But given my propensity for living in the past, I guess I shouldn’t fault myself for enjoying the present so much that I neglected to document it for the future!

Other than the photo above, I have this photo my brother-in-law took of Charlie with our adorable nieces Franny and Hallie. As usual, I thought there wouldn’t be enough food for our crowd but we now have enough leftovers to feed the combined reunions of the Osmond and King families. Anyone for turkey pot pie? I just made turkey soup from the carcass and will be enjoying roasted brussel sprouts through the week. We had a wonderful time with family and friends, eating, talking, eating some more, celebrating Charlie’s first Thanksgiving, and remembering those who couldn’t be with us. We had a plumbing disaster in the middle of our dinner, leading to a cascading waterfall of raw sewage in our basement but, given all that we’ve dealt with this year, we didn’t let it affect our gathering in the least. (In truth, I refused to even look at the mess until the next day—denial can sometimes be a very useful survival tool!)

My Chicago family had Thanksgiving at my cousin Sarah’s this year where my sister got a hold of one of my Aunt Bobby’s old photo albums. It included snapshots we had never seen of some of our long-departed relatives. Sue managed to sneak some photos out in her underwear (just kidding, they were very kindly lent for digital scanning) and I was especially thrilled to see the following two pictures of my rarely photographed great-great-grandparents,  Moshe (Morris/Moses) and Rivka (Rebecca) Goldkind.

 

Moshe and Rivka were born in Staszow (Stashev), Poland in the late 1850s, a few years before Abraham Lincoln was elected President. They emigrated to Canada in 1910 with their married daughter, Alta Toba Korolnek (my great-grandmother) and their three other children, Pearl Blima, Gittel Chana, and Harry Goldkin (the final “d” in Goldkind regularly appeared and disappeared over the years). I could stare at these photos for hours, thinking about these Old World relatives and what their lives were like, wishing I could converse with them at length. What a thrill it is to find images I’ve never seen. Zayde Goldkin is sitting here with “Cappy” and “Goldie,” my cousin Goldie Handelsman and her husband Julius Kaplan. Parts of my family tree get very confusing since both my great-great aunts Pearl Blima and Gittel Chana married Handelsman brothers and then two of the Handelsman daughters also married brothers. Goldie married Julius on November 10, 1929. less than two weeks after the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression. How young and vibrant they look, I wonder if they lost a lot of money in the crash. 

As anyone familiar with this blog knows, I am obsessed with family history, my own, of course, but also other people’s including the Henry C. Jensen family who were the first inhabitants of our hundred-year-old house. Henry Jensen was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, the same year as my great-great-grandfather Moshe Goldkind, though the two men could not have had more different upbringings. Here is the only other photo I’ve ever seen of my great-great-grandfather. In this 1939 image, Zayde Goldkind is hanging out with three of his great-grandchildren, my cousins Diana Saunders, Rhoda (Rivka) Glickman, and my five-year-old mother on the far right. I look at the date on the photo and can only imagine what would have happened to these folks if they hadn't had the good sense to hightail it out of Poland when they did. None of my relatives who stayed in Staszow survived the war.

Here’s the only other shot of Rivka Goldkind that I’ve seen, this one taken in the late 1920s or early 1930s with her grandchildren: my Aunts Ruth and Anne and my Uncle Dave, three of my grandfather’s siblings. Auntie Anne is still with us, the only surviving child of Itshe Meyer and Alta Toba Korolnek. She is currently a great-great-grandmother of four.

Why am I so interested in my family now? And why was I so not interested in it when I was a boy and had the chance to interact with the generation that could still remember every nook and cranny of the old shtetl? I’ve been listening to Yiddish songs all weekend on my iPod and yet when I was surrounded by that language as a kid it seemed like nails on a blackboard to me. We always had Thanksgiving with my grandparents, and like all secular holidays we celebrated, our traditions were so blended with Jewish rituals that I half-believed Thanksgiving was a Jewish festival on par with Rosh Hashanah (didn't everyone baste their turkey with chicken fat?). I remember various Old World Thanksgiving visitors at our table, including my ancient Aunt Gittel Chana, my great-grandmother’s sister who lived in Chicago. She was born in Staszow on October 15, 1897 and died in 1973. I doubt I said two words to her in my lifetime. What I wouldn't give for that chance now.

The middle Goldkind girl, Pearl Blima, the one who married Gittel Chana’s husband’s brother, died in childbirth on June 27, 1927. She had a difficult time with her pregnancies, bleeding dangerously, and should not have gotten pregnant again. But her doctor thought that if she had another baby the problem would correct itself. Instead, both she and the baby died. She was 39 years old. Here is her obituary from the Chicago Tribune along with a photo I found from her passport application several years earlier.   My great-grandmother is called “Tobey Korolnek” in the obituary but I’ll eat my yarmulke if anyone ever called her that.

 If only I could raise this generation of relatives from the dead for a few lengthy interviews. What would they think of the lives of their many descendants? Maybe some of these ultra-orthodox Jews would rise from the grave on their own volition if they caught wind of my daughter's new play that opened last night for a four-week run. It’s a professional musical version of “A Christmas Carol.” Leah plays Martha Cratchitt and Miss Fezziwig and she is absolutely brilliant, if I may say so. (Here she is at yesterday's opening night party with the actor who played her papa, Mr. Fezziwig.) The cast, consisting of adults and children, is superb, and I urge you to check it out if you have a chance. It’s playing at the Lonny Chapman Theatre in North Hollywood through December 20. I’ll be seeing it several more times before Christmas, and despite the non-Jewish content I hope that if any of my Old World relatives were still around they would be kvelling over Leah and exclaiming the Yiddish version of Tiny Tim’s fervent prayer:

“God bless us, everyone!” 

What I Am Thankful For This Year

 

…and all the other family members and friends who helped us get through a terribly difficult but ultimately life-enriching time. As I sit here dry-rubbing my bird (oy, that sounds odd) in anticipation of tomorrow's festivities, I can't help but reflect, for once, on the true, non-cynical aspect of the holiday. Yeah, times are tough for everyone—I may need work, money, a new car, etc.; we may be inundated with hospital bills; and the world may be going to hell in countless ways—but I have never in my life had a Thanksgiving in which I was so filled to the brim with gratitude. Thank you to everyone who touched our lives this year. I will never forget the generosity and kindness of others. Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

 

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

 

Is it my fault that Charlie is exactly the same size and weight as the fresh turkey I haven’t picked up yet? How else was I to see if our roasting pan was large enough? Our 1940s oven is very small but at least I didn’t go so far as to slide our son into it for a real test! Besides, in a true experiment I would have trussed his legs. Charlie enjoyed hanging out in the roaster but he has mixed feelings about the holiday. “What exactly are you celebrating,” he asked me as I scattered shallots on his head, “some mythical love-fest between the Pilgrims and Native Americans?” He had a point. “Hell,” he said as I spooned melted butter into the pan, “it wasn’t even made a federal holiday until 1941! And then Roosevelt only moved the celebration up to get in another shopping week before Christmas.” True, Charlie. But it's always a good idea to stop and give thanks. And you know what I'm grateful for this year.

And now please excuse me while I pick the sage out of my son's hair.

Interview With a Diva

Being a total control freak and fiercely protective of the content on my blog, I rarely participate in online group blogging activities. But Neil Kramer of Citizen of the Month gets me every year. One of his virtual events during the holidays is called the Great Interview Experiment. You sign up for it on his blog and send ten interview questions to the person above you. You then receive ten questions from the person after you. I enjoy participating in this random exercise and talking to new people I probably never would have known about otherwise. This year I was interviewed by a woman named NeCole who has a newer blog called Eclectic Ecstasy (love that name!). You can see my answers to her interesting questions here.

I got a chance to interview longtime blogger Laura of I Am the Diva. Laura lives in Saskatchewan with her hipster husband B-rad and their cute baby she calls Chewie. I was excited to talk to someone from “the Skatch,” a first for me.

1. You’ve had your blog for seven years. That makes you a true pioneer since blogging didn’t really hit in a big way until several years after that. Has your blog been a consistent passion of yours or have you been tempted to quit from time to time? Have you ever had an experience with blogging that made you think, “That’s it, I’m done!”

Y’know, I never really thought of myself as a blogging pioneer, mostly because – while I was *blogging* seven years ago, I had very little in the way of regular readers. I really feel that I didn’t ‘come into my own’ until a few years ago – when my blog posts began being more than just the run down of my day; when I actually attempted to write. Blogging in itself has not always been a passion, but I’d say it was safe to say that writing was.  I have been an avid journal writer and really loved every moment of English classes – from elementary school all the way up to University, with creative writing being my strong suit. In fact, when I told my parents I was going to go to college and be a Music Major, my mother was shocked. She told me years later she always thought I’d end up a writer, and here we are… an almost finished music degree/college drop-out later… am I doing music currently? Nope. But writing all the time. Dang. I should have been an English major.

Have I ever been tempted to quit? There was a time when I stopped writing regularly, when I moved to Calgary  We had no computer and I worked at Staples, so the only computer access I had was at the local library, which was – like – a stupid amount of bus transfers away. But then I got an office job, with a desk, and eventually we got a computer… and now I feel this ache – for lack of a better word, if I don’t blog regularly.

I’ve never really had a moment where I thought of shutting down for good… too much good in my life has come from me blogging. I have met some amazing people online and in real life through the magic of this blogging world.  And the times when I’ve posted something personal, or painful, and wondered whether or not it was the wisest thing to do – I would get bombarded with comments and emails from people giving their encouragement or their support. So, in this increasingly isolated world, I’ve found a real home and community among the bloggers of the interweb. I couldn’t leave it behind. It’s in my blood now.  I do, sometimes, question where to draw the line between sharing and over sharing with regards to my child or my husband. With B-rad, most times if it’s something serious or sensitive, I will ask him if I can post it first, but generally he’s pretty laid back and sometimes thinks it’s funny when I post our conversations. As for Chewie, I try to limit posting about him to things that won’t come back to haunt him, or bite me in the a$$, y’know?

2. I was surprised to learn that your insanely adorable son was born prematurely last year and spent some time in the neonatal intensive care unit. Surprised because we just finished an almost five-month stint in the NICU with our baby Charlie who was born at 24 weeks. We had an amazing experience there filled with incredible highs and miserable lows. What’s the most important thing you learned in the NICU? Aren’t the nurses there amazing?

Oh my God. First of all, I can’t imagine what you and your family must have gone through. Five months! The eighteen days that Chewie spent in NICU were the longest, most exhausting and difficult days of my life. That being said, we had a mix of amazing nurses/staff and not so amazing nurses and staff. The day he was born, we had a nurse tell us we were not allowed to hold him, but we could look at him through the isolette. After just having an emergency labour and only seeing him for a few moments before they whisked him away, I was dying to hold him and being told I couldn’t was heartbreaking. When we went back down later that evening, a very kind older nurse told us in no uncertain terms that “you are the parents, and the nurses here like to think they have the control, but they don’t. If you want to hold him, you can.” That was the first time that I realized that, as his parents, WE are the ones that are responsible for looking out for his best interest. So that was a big thing, but probably the most important thing I learned was that babies, while fragile, are not made of glass. The first time I helped the nurse change his diaper, I was amazed at how they handled him. Strong hands, but not so gingerly, the way I was doing it. They flopped him around (safely J) and he took it. It really helped me not to be so afraid of holding him, or moving him around. It was a big shiny lesson for me and B-rad.

3. I love the cool pin-up graphics on your blog and I know as a child you fantasized about being a stripper. If you were a stripper in the 1940s and had to have a “gimmick” (I assume you’ve seen “Gypsy?”), what would it be? Describe your act as Queen of the Burlesque.

I should clarify that when I had that fantasy about being a stripper – I was, like, 6 and completely naive and it was very innocent, I just wanted to be able to dance around naked. That being said – I did just finish a burlesque class a few weeks ago. I’ve always had a love for the music of the 40s… and the pin-up thing is kinda new, but I’m totally lovin’ it. If I was a stripper in the 40s, I’d probably end up being one of those cutesy adorable type strippers, y’know, with the whole “OH my GOSH! My stockings come RIGHT OFF!!” kind of play… I really thought that I’d lean toward the smoldering seductress, but in my Burlesque classes this cutesy-playful tease just showed up outta nowhere. I’m thinking my gimmick would be something along the lines of a lollipop and pigtails? It still needs some ‘fleshing out’ (pun intended)…

4. Speaking of musicals, I love that you were checking them out at the library as a kid and that you loved “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Would it impress you to know that I received an email from actress Julie Newmar (the unfortunately named Dorcas from that film, one of the seven brides) yesterday? She thanked me for talking about her on my blog and for showing her favorite clip from her TV show “My Living Doll.” She also gave me the URL for her own blog (julienewmarwrites.com). Describe a celebrity encounter you’ve had. Have you ever been reluctant to talk about famous people on your blog for fear they might Google themselves and see what you wrote?

Actually, I AM impressed. That’s pretty sweet! (Who would name their child Dorcas on purpose? I can only assume it was a popular name at the time the film portrayed…but still…Dork-us? Puh-lease!) As far as celebrity encounters, there’s not really a whole lot of opportunity up here in the Skatch. I did hang out with the guitar player (Mark Tremonti) for the band CREED for an hour in the summer of 1998 after being kicked in the back of the head by a crowd surfer wearing steel-toed boots (SERIOUSLY!?) at a summer music festival. He was pretty cool – he signed my T-shirt and gave my friend and I a play-by-play of how Green Day would end their set: a dude in a Bee costume would play some trumpet, then Green Day would smash their guitars, and in the end the drummer would light his kit on fire. He was pretty cool guy. The only other ‘celebrity’ encounter was running into one of the kids from Home Improvement while waiting to get on a ride at Disneyland. See? Pretty boring.

As for fear of famous people googling themselves and finding my blog… I never had that fear…until now!! But maybe my boyfriend Maynard from TOOL will google himself and find out how much I love him and we’ll become pen-pals or something. The only person I’d ever be concerned about would me T-om Cruuze… cuz his people are scary. Not that I write about him or his ‘religion’ very often, but when I do… I try to make the name less googleable… like I just did. 

5. I’ve always admired Canadians and might have been one if my Toronto grandfather hadn’t moved to Chicago in the late 1920s. You were born in Alberta , lived in lots of places, and moved back to Saskatchewan 15 years ago. I’m afraid most ugly Americans wouldn’t be able to place that province on a map if there life depended on it. How did you end up in the Skatch? What one thing would you want us ignoramuses to know about the Land of Living Skies?

I ended up living in the Skatch because my dad decided to go to college when I was 14. We were living in B.C. at the time, and when he shopped around, the Skatch was the most affordable place in terms of cost of living, and housing, and tuition. So, off we went. I hated it at first, because I used to live nestled into this gorgeous valley filled with fruit trees and forests… but now I’m a die-hard prairie girl.  There are a few weird quirks that I’ve discovered about the people while living in the Skatch… here’s one that took me YEARS to adapt to, and I still struggle to this day:  In the Skatch, what the rest of the world calls LUNCH, they call DINNER. What the rest of the world calls DINNER they call SUPPER. You can imagine how confusing trying to make meal plans with a Saskatchewanian. “I’ll meet you at Taco Joe’s for dinner!” do you go at noon or at 7:00? Tricky. Also, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone wearing a ‘hoodie’ in the Skatch. Here those bad boys are known as Bunny Hugs, and they are DAMN protective of that term.  

People in the Skatch, generally, are bad drivers… and I never felt this way until I lived in an actual metropolis. In a city such as Calgary, the only way to survive is to drive by the Golden Rule and let people into your lane when they need in, or to signal when you’re turning, etc. etc. etc. If you don’t – you have crazy accidents and traffic jams and general mayhem. When we moved back to the Skatch I developed a bad case of road rage that I never had before. People speed up when you want to get into their lane, because you being in FRONT of them just CANNOT happen… and people don’t signal, they just turn whenever the hell they fell like it… they roll through stop signs, they lane change all willy nilly… my theory is that they’re small town/farm drivers that have moved into the city… news flash – the city is NOT Elbow, Saskatchewan (yes, a real place!). 

Having said all that, you will never in your life find a province filled with friendlier people… I have never seen a more beautiful sunset than the ones you get on the prairies…and the food, my GOD the food… living a province that was essentially filled with Mennonites, Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians, etc… a ‘home cooked’ meal by someone from a small town (like my mother-in -aw, or my husband’s grandmother) is absolutely to DIE for. Mmm… nothing makes something more delicious than cream gravy (which consists of meat drippings, fat, cream, more cream, more meaty drippings, salt and pepper and a bit of flour for thickening). 

Oh, and also? It’s bloody cold in the winter and scorching hot in the summer… we folks from the Skatch are tough.

6. I share your reaction to “Puff the Magic Dragon” and always sob when Jackie Paper comes no more. (I take it you don’t buy that the song was really a coded parable about drug use?) What’s another popular song that always makes you cry like a little girl?

I’m not sure how I feel about the drug use in that song, it certainly is possible… I think that may be why it affected me so much that day was because I stopped thinking about weed and started listening to the story, in the innocent way. 

Popular songs that make me cry? Listen, I’m a woman. Depending on the day, a television commercial will make me cry! But there are definitely some songs that move me each time I hear them… some examples being “The Great Gig in the Sky” “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd … “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera… “Fix You” by Coldplay… “Snuff” by Slipknot… “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon… if I can find the story in the lyrics and the emotion in the music, I’m a goner, really.

7. I was once living with a family in France and was served one of their pet rabbits for dinner—with the head still on it, teeth and all! Also tripe, the stomach lining of a cow, which made we want to hurl. What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?

Rabbit, probably, and really it was only disgusting cuz it used to be my pet. I don’t know, I’m pretty open about food – but I also have a few allergies which help me get out of having to try things that look gross… I don’t like fish, but I don’t mind sushi – it’s the taste of the seaweed that gets me every time… OOH wait! Actually, I remember something that’s gross! When I was in the 5th grade, my elementary school had an exchange program but for teachers… so we had a Japanese teacher for a couple of months, and when she went back home she gave us all “Delicious Japanese Candies” which were seaweed flavoured, and also teeny tiny dehydrated fish – which were salty like potato chips… but they were WHOLE fish, eyes, scales, bones, everything. THAT was probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten. Bleh.

8. Hey, your wedding anniversary (September 4^th) is my birthday! I like the tattoos you and B-rad got to mark the day. I know you have a fondness for tattoos and piercings. If you could design a full-color tatt for your son Chewie, what would it look like?

Actually, I have a design in the works with my tattoo artist – who I really should call for an appointment… the Tattoo I’ve ‘designed’ will work the Star on my arm into it. I have a strong fondness and fascination with astrology – not as far as basing my life on my horoscope, but more the personality traits that seem to come with each sign. I’m a Taurus, oh what an earthy sign, and you are too – you earthy Virgo, you! That’s what Chewie was supposed to be had he been full term, which would have made us all earth signs as B-rad’s a Capricorn… but I digress. In the end, Chewie was born in July, making him a cancer. I don’t know if I have a photo on my blog of my wrist tattoo, but I have the glyph for Taurus on the inside of my right wrist. I wanted to get the Glyph for “Cancer”, but that’s the sideways 69. And the animal associated with “Cancer” is the crab. So – not exactly wanting a 69 or a crab permanently etched on my body, I decided on the constellation of cancer. So, hopefully soon, I will have Chewie’s constellation on my left shoulder, with the spiral from my Star working into the shoulder piece… the stars of the constellation tatt will be smaller but the same as the large one on my arm.

9. Let’s say Samantha Stevens from “Bewitched” rides her broom to Saskatchewan and agrees to transport you to one historical time period for a year. When and where are you going? What will you do there?

This is a really good but difficult question! Part of me wants to pick times like provincial France in the 1500s, or Ancient Egypt, or even Chicago in the 20s… but being female, I think i’d really miss all the rights and equality that I enjoy today… so I guess, maybe I’d like to live in California in the late 60s or early 70s! Women’s Libbers, crazy drugs and love ins (with the sweet bliss of ignorance towards acid flashbacks or STDs)… and the Music… the music would be worth the historical trip… maybe I’d live in a hippy commune or start a rock band, or maybe I’d just ‘trip’ for an entire year? 

10. Diva is a great word that I feel has started to take on more of a negative connotation in recent years. List some of the positive aspects of diva-hood. Name a few people that you consider to be the world’s all-time greatest divas.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this very thing for ages. It really makes me crazy when the term “Diva” is lumped in with “Princess” or “Drama Queen” or whatever the Hot Pink bedazzled t-shirts are saying these days. It bothers me when Beyonce says things like: “A diva is the female version of a male hustler” WTF? 

Actually, Beyonce, a diva is: a celebrated female singer. The term is used to describe a woman of outstanding talent in the world of opera, and by extension in theatre, cinema and popular music. The meaning of diva is closely related to that of "prima donna”.

The word entered the English language in the late 19th century. It is derived from the Italian noun diva, a female deity. The basic sense of the term is "goddess”. (Thank you Wikipedia)

And wouldn’t the female version of a hustler just be a hustler who’s a girl? Why do you add “male” to the word hustler in the first place? Would you say A Pilot is the Female Version of a Male Doctor?? No, you wouldn’t. Because a) a pilot and a doctor are different things entirely. PLUS, you would never say a “Hello, I’m Male Doctor Jones, how are you feeling today?” it’s just plain dumb. Shame, Beyonce! Shame.

In my opinion, a diva is someone who has worked hard and practiced and through determination and the sheer joy and love of music has found success in her field (of course, by my own definition, I am NOT the diva… no success here, except for in my shower…for now….) When I was in University I practiced anywhere from 1 – 2 hours a day… for FOUR years…. To be a diva means you have enough love and passion for the music that you have made a commitment to yourself and the world to give the gift! To be a diva is SO MUCH more than being a self absorbed brat who wears too much makeup, dresses too trampy and is, essentially, a bitch.  Now, I know that sometimes a real honest to goodness diva can get a little on the full of-herself side, but so can a surgeon… but we don’t go around saying: “Look at that guy driving around in his Mercedes, what a surgeon!” 

I see it as the very unfortunate hijacking of a once empowering term for a successful female, and it’s been cheapened and dragged through the oversexed mud. Bleh. 

As for world class divas: I would say that any woman, or girl, who feels the music – who is moved by it, who is completely and utterly passionate about singing and the way singing makes them feel, who tries and fails and tries again… I think THEY are the world class divas. Live people, real life musicians, on the stage, in the clubs… without auto tuners, and over produced albums, and so much dancing that they can’t even perform without the aide of a backing track (I’m looking at YOU Britney Spears).  

 

Thanks so much, Laura! I will be checking back at your blog regularly. Stay warm this winter!

In Defense of Betty Draper

 

I’ve rarely seen a fictional character on a TV show engender such fierce debate and disagreement. Following the third season finale of “Mad Men” last week, Betty Draper (played by actress January Jones) has been vilified, condemned, and denounced by journalists, bloggers, and countless viewers. Others, including me, have defended her vigorously, asking the haters to remember the severe social constraints Betty faced in the early 1960s, the choices she had available to her back then, and, of course, her husband’s never-ending stream of infidelity and lies. My feelings about Betty were so strong during this season that I began to wonder if they were really about the TV character at all. The truth is that I wince when I hear people judging Betty Draper because I feel like they are talking about my mom.

One of the reasons I love “Mad Men” so much is that it feels like I’m watching home movies from my childhood. I’m the age of Bobby Draper and I’m astounded at the accuracy of every outfit, wallpaper pattern, kitchen clock, and ashtray that is seen on the show. There are some big differences between the Millers and the Drapers. For one, we were Jewish, they most decidedly were not. My father wasn’t having endless affairs and he didn’t work in advertising. But the parallels are also there. Like Don Draper, my father had a past that he wanted to forget. He came from abject poverty, had no idea who his father was, and had a mother who loved him but was mentally ill. She was institutionalized when my father was still a boy. Although he didn’t assume another man’s identity or keep his past life a secret from my mom (he couldn’t—my grandparents had him investigated when my mother announced their engagement), my father’s drive to re-invent himself mirrored Don Draper’s. Like Don, he married a privileged girl from the “right” side of the tracks.

It’s Betty Draper’s similarities to my mother that I find even more startling. My mother was born the same year as the fictional character and had a similar upbringing. In the first season of “Mad Men,” Betty states, “My mother wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man. There’s nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go ‘til you’re in a box?” Everyone was shocked in the episode this season when we saw Betty speaking fluent Italian while in Rome with Don. Like Betty, my mother was extremely intelligent during an era that didn’t exactly place a high value on women’s intelligence. It was considered far more important to be beautiful, as both Betty and my mom were. My mother never completed her education or thought she was very smart. She met my dad spring break during her freshman year in college and impulsively quit school to get married just a few months later. She was still 19 when she had my brother Bruce. My sister Sue followed three years later and I came two years after that. Three kids by the time she was 24.

Betty Draper has been most criticized this season for the way she treats her children. Indeed, her somber detachment and frequent commands to “go outside and play” or “go watch TV” are chilling to watch, especially with our modern sensibilities of what it means to be a good parent, but so accurate to the times and to this character. My mother was not anywhere near as dour as Betty, but there’s something quite familiar about the distinction Betty makes between children’s roles and adult roles and her desperate desire to maintain her adult life as separate from the needs of her offspring. While I’m sure there were very hands-on parents in the 1960s who would spend hours on the floor playing with their kids, I think that was far less the norm back then than it is today. I remember with great nostalgia how we used to go out after school and every weekend, find people to play with in the neighborhood, and only return home for dinner. Our parents usually had no idea where we were or who we were with and they had no way to reach us. That would be unheard of today.

Parents of young children in the 1960s tended to be younger than such parents today but they acted “older,” or let’s say they seemed more focused on their own adult lives. The constant drinking and smoking around children was one aspect of this that is perfectly depicted in every “Mad Men” episode. Sending kids out of the room when daddy came home is another. By the way, it’s hard to fault Betty for her heavy drinking and smoking throughout her pregnancy earlier this season since that was the case for most pregnant women during that time period, including my mother and Jackie Kennedy. And when her baby is born mid-season (the baby she at first wanted to abort before she was shamed by her horrified doctor), Betty takes care of it dutifully if unenthusiastically.

I guess the main premise of my “defense” of Betty Draper’s behavior toward her children is less a defense and more a sociological observation. I think many women of that generation, my mother included, did not view having children as something that required a lot of thought or decision-making as it does (and should) for most women today. It was something that was simply expected of them—they just did it. Combine that with their youth, the modeling they received from their own parents when they were young, and the growing dissatisfaction with a society that was highly sexist and unfair to women in so many ways, and you can see why many young mothers in the 1960s were increasingly unhappy even though they were supposedly living the American Dream. Where did it all go wrong? Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking “The Feminine Mystique” was published in 1963, the year this season’s “Mad Men” took place, and I only hope that Betty Draper finds this book at the five and dime the next time she goes out to buy some cigarettes. As Friedan hypothesized in her book, women at that time were victims of a false belief system that required them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children. Such a system inevitably caused women to completely lose their identity in that of their family.

At the end of this season (spoiler alert to those of you who haven’t watched the finale!), we see Betty flying off to Reno with the new man in her life, ostensibly to get a divorce from Don (we’ll see if that pans out) and marry this up-and-coming politician. She has her new baby with her but her older children, Sally and Bobby, are left to celebrate Christmas 1963 with their housekeeper. My mother also left with a new man. For Betty and my mother, only another man could provide the escape hatch from their expected roles as perfect wife and mother. But for my mother, and I’m guessing Betty, this other man will ultimately prove not to be what they needed to find themselves. Au contraire.

My own mother was a fantastic mom who loved her children more than anything despite having gone through some very difficult periods in her life. Unlike many viewers of “Mad Men,” I suspect Betty Draper also loves her children far more than is evident by her behavior towards them on the show. I think that when the smoke clears following the upheavals of the 1960s and Betty’s dependence on the men in her life, she will have a very close relationship with her children. And before you attack my theories, remember that I’m well aware of all that I’m projecting from my own life into my perceptions of Betty Draper. 

Now shut up and go watch TV!

Sick Day: My 1960s TV Sitcom Cure

 

Charlie is sick with a cold. Not a huge deal but with his history we took him to the doctor who prescribed two breathing treatments that we’re giving him every few hours via a panda-shaped nebulizer (we so did not ask for a creepy animal-shaped device!). He’s already had one regular flu shot and we’re waiting for the H1N1 shots to arrive as well as a special series of insanely expensive vaccines he needs to protect himself from the potentially serious RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus). Scary when preemies are released from the hospital in the throes of flu season. Especially this year, with the most flu fear-mongering on record since Europe was decimated by the Bubonic Plague. A bunch of people in my extended family (including young children) have already gotten and recovered from Swine Flu. Not to underestimate the seriousness of this illness, especially for people like Charlie, but to hear the news reports, you’d think we’d be tripping over piles of corpses on every corner. Oy.

I was just telling Kendall how much I liked being sick as a kid. Besides the fun of staying home from school, my mother always ordered a new set of Play-Doh from the pharmacy. They would hand deliver it to our house along with the two medicinal staples of my childhood: orange-flavored chewable aspirin and Vicks VapoRub. What a treat to open up the virgin cardboard cans of Play-Doh and behold the untouched blue, red, yellow, and green before my brother and sister could get their grubby little hands on them and mush up the colors into an ugly brown. But the main draw of sick days was getting to stretch out in my parents’ luxurious bed and watch copious amounts of TV.

It’s appalling how much television I watched as a kid. I’ve written often about my TV-saturated childhood. How The Waltons helped get me through my parents’ divorce, how Julie Newmar ignited my sexual fantasies, how Zoom gave me my first taste of fame, how Maude taught me all I needed to know about feminism, how Barney Fife made me feel less alone, how the Magic Door nurtured my Jewish roots, and so on. I’ve written endless posts about the highs and lows of television from the days when there were only three major networks.

Of course TV viewing practices are so different today. I have a few shows that I watch but in most cases I don’t even know what nights they air. Except for one—my favorite show, Mad Men, which concluded its fourth season Sunday night. Kendall and I are so obsessed with this series that we wait breathlessly in front of our TV set for each episode to begin, just like in the old days. I’m always stunned at how much Mad Men reflects my actual childhood whether through the constant references to 1960s pop culture or Betty Draper’s frequent bark to her children to “go watch TV” when she wants to get rid of them. I’ve heard that line has become part of a drinking game on some college campuses. Whenever Betty orders Sally and Bobby Draper out of the room to go watch TV, you have to down a shot.

I never had to be ordered to watch TV when I was the age of the Draper kids, I was already glued to the front of the screen. It horrifies me to remember that I would watch TV before school (Captain Kangaroo, Ray Rayner), while home for lunch (half an hour of Bozo’s Circus and half an hour of Let’s Make a Deal), the minute I got home from school (Garfield Goose, Mickey Mouse Club, etc.), during dinner (we had a small RCA television perched at the end of our kitchen table and would watch nightly reports of the Vietnam War as we ate sweet and sour meatballs), and of course, the full gamut of prime time fare. Yet I also remember spending countless hours outside playing with my friends. Were there more hours in the day back then?

As I think about my brain cell-killing habits today, I am most interested in my memories of the more obscure programs from the 1960s. Sure, I was addicted to top Nielsen family sitcoms such as Mr. Ed, Bewitched, Petticoat Junction, and the Beverly Hillbillies, but how about all the programs that did not withstand the test of time? Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I now present you my Top Ten Obscure TV Shows of the 1960s. There are so many more, but these are the first ten that popped into my head (that have clips on YouTube). They are presented in chronological order:

My Living Doll (1964)

I touched on this show in my old Julie Newmar post but it’s worth mentioning again. It only lasted one season and since I remember every episode (including the one in which Bob Cummings was teaching sexy android Julie how to get into a girdle) I can date the beginning of my sexual education to age five! The premise of the show was the height of Johnson-era male fantasies—developing a uber-sexy robot who will do anything you program it to. Of course much of the series would be considered appalling by today’s standards. In order to become the perfect woman, Rhoda (Julie’s character, also known as AF709) was trained in housekeeping, cooking, and total subservience to men but she often managed to have the last laugh. I remember being sad when the show was cancelled but all was forgiven a few years later when Newmar appeared in her skin-tight costume as Catwoman on episodes of Batman. 

My Mother the Car (1965)

Another show I watched religiously and one that is arguably considered to be the worst sitcom in the history of television. Pretty high concept though, I can just hear that elevator pitch: “a guy’s mom is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter automobile.” Hello? I actually watched a full episode of this series online recently and for such a preposterous premise it was surprisingly watchable (not that I needed to see any more episodes). The series was created by Allan Burns who went on to create true classics such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. I enjoyed Jerry Van Dyke in the lead (who "auditioned" for this show via a two-episode stint on The Dick Van Dyke Show, the best sitcom of the 1960s). The voice of the car was played by sexy screen star Ann Sothern. This might have been one of the first TV themes I committed to memory (and it’s still there in my brain, taking up valuable space!).

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965)

I loved this show, based on the Doris Day/David Niven movie from a few years earlier (and the book by Jean Kerr), about a family who buys a gigantic but somewhat decrepit Victorian mansion in the suburbs. The show starred lovely Pat Crowley as the overwhelmed mother of four boys and Mike Miller (dad to actress Penelope Ann Miller) as college professor Jim Nash. The kids were awfully cute as was the giant sheepdog named Ladadog that made me beg my parents to get us one. Kendall and I referred to this show often when we explained the purchase of our large West Adams home. Just like the Nashes, we couldn’t afford anything smaller!

Love on a Rooftop (1966)

Does anyone remember this one? It starred the late Peter Duel (who killed himself a few years later) as architect Dave Willis and Judy Carne (Burt Reynolds’ wife at the time) as his bubbly free-spirit wife Julie. I haven’t seen an episode of this show since the 60s but I remember the scripts as mini-Neil Simon plays. The Willis’s neighbor was played by Rich Little. The series was cancelled after a year and Duel went on to much bigger fame in Alias Smith and Jones before his untimely death. I think there are still séances here every year in which people try to contact him. Carne went on to become the “Sock It To Me” girl on Laugh-In before descending into heroin addiction. Yikes.

He and She (1967)

I loved, loved, loved this show because I loved, loved, loved the stars, real-life married couple Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Benjamin played successful cartoonist Dick Hollister and Prentiss his social worker wife. Dick’s main creation, “Jetman,” had become a TV series with the lead played by egomaniacal Jack Cassidy who was perfect in the role. (Cassidy’s character seemed a precursor to Ted Baxter and he ended up playing Baxter's older brother in a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) I was only eight when this show aired but I remember it as one of the most literate shows on TV. The writers (including Allan Burns) won an Emmy that year but the show was stupidly cancelled after only one season.

The Mothers-in-Law (1967)

I never missed this Sunday night sitcom. I have a vivid memory of eating ribs at our kitchen table from the Black Angus restaurant in Chicago while watching the crazy Lucy-like antics of stars Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden. The similarities to I Love Lucy were no accident–the show was produced by Desi Arnaz (now divorced from Lucy) and written by Madelyn Pugh Davis and Bob Carroll of I Love Lucy fame. The show also starred teen actress Deborah Walley (the one-time Gidget sadly died of cancer years ago) but it belonged to those two aging dames. Of course at the time the show aired I thought Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard were positively ancient. Turns out Arden was 59 when the show started and Ballard only 42. The two of them had great chemistry—almost as good as Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance!

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968)

This was my first exposure to our beloved Charles Nelson Reilly who starred in this sitcom with Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare (based on the 1947 movie) about a house that is haunted by the ghost of a 19th century sea captain. Charles played the bumbling Claymore Gregg, a descendent of the ghost, and Mrs. Muir’s landlord. I remember the great character actress Reta Shaw as the housekeeper (remember her in Mary Poppins?) but did not care for the two child actors who played Lange’s kids. Loved the family dog, though, a wire-haired terrier named Scruffy who had the uncanny ability to cock his head on cue. Not a great show, but Charles excelled. Watching him at the age of nine, I never could have dreamed that 41 years later I’d be naming my son after him.

Julia (1968)

TV was really starting to change in 1968. The Smothers Brothers were presenting controversial political humor, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was pushing every imaginable envelope, the very hip Mod Squad was taking over crime-solving from the older generation of TV sleuths, and Diahann Carroll broke ground as the first African-American woman to star in a TV series in which she wasn’t the maid. Carroll played Julia Baker, a single mom (her husband had been shot down in Vietnam, a country that had never even been mentioned on a sitcom before this) who was a nurse (okay, it was still 1968, there weren’t too many “lady doctors” on TV yet!) for a craggly old white guy played by Lloyd Nolan. Unlike most black women on television, Julia was actually allowed to have a sex life and got to date African-American hunks Paul Winfield and Fred Williamson. The show was hardly a hard-hitting depiction of life for African-Americans in the 1960s but that was sort of the point—to have Diahann Carroll play a regular non-stereotypical sitcom character. Still, the reluctance to delve into the racial issues that plagued the country at the time brought a lot of criticism by African-American groups. I had a bit of a crush on Julia’s neighbor Marie Waggedorn (played by Betty Beaird) who was the mother of redheaded Earl J. Waggedorn. Always great character actress Lurene Tuttle also starred in this show. Dig the psychedelic opening credits!

The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969)

“People let me tell you about my best friend, he’s a warm-hearted person who’ll love me till the end…” Anyone who watched TV in the late 60s knew this theme song and I never forgot a single word of it. This was a sweet sitcom trying to be counterculture hip (based on the movie starring Glenn Ford and Ronnie Howard) about a widower named Tom Corbett and his young son Eddie. The show starred a pre-Hulk Bill Bixby and little Brandon Cruz  who later started a hardcore punk band and also sang for the Dead Kennedys. It was one of the first sitcoms to inject some real dramatic moments into the half-hour plotlines and it actually dealt with some serious issues during its two-year run. Oscar-winning actress Miyoshi Umeki co-starred as the Corbett’s wise housekeeper, Mrs. Livingston. I still find myself imitating Umeki’s stilted English from time to time (“Hello, Mr. Eddie’s Father!”) causing Leah to go apoplectic with cries of racism.

My World and Welcome To It (1969)

I would love to see this show again. In my memory, it was way ahead of its time and absolutely brilliant. Based on the writings and cartoons of James Thurber, it starred William Windom as a Thurber-like cartoonist working for a sophisticated New Yorker-like magazine. Windom would frequently have his daydreams and fantasies acted out (using very cool Thurber-ish animation) on this intelligent show that again was inexplicably cancelled after one season. Joan Hotchkiss played Windom’s wife (she also played Oscar Madison’s girlfriend on The Odd Couple) and their daughter was played by Lisa Gerritsen who went on to play Phyllis Lindstrom’s daughter Bess on Mary Tyler Moore.

So there you have it, kids, your guide to what to watch during your next case of Swine Flu. With the lack of original programming on TV these days, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these old chestnuts remade for current audiences. Let's see...how about Mario Lopez starring in a sitcom in which his deceased mother comes back as an iPod Touch? 

Your Children Are Not Your Children

 

It’s strange having an infant and a teenager at the same time. As a baby, Charlie is completely dependent on us for survival. Though he is no longer hooked up to the ventilators, IV drips, and various machines that kept him alive during his first tumultuous months, it is still essential that we focus on his needs 24 hours a day, there’s no way he could fend for himself in this world. My daughter, Leah, on the other hand, is in the midst of the boundary-shaping stage of adolescence that will ultimately enable her to function as an independent adult. We are still responsible for her physical and emotional well-being, as we are with Charlie, but the goal with Leah is to begin to extricate ourselves as best we can and allow her to make decisions and figure out how to get along in the world—an exciting but frequently painful process to go through as a parent. While offering loving support, we have to let her work through more and more stuff on her own, including feelings of sadness, disappointment, and grief.

Because Charlie is so dependent on us, it’s tempting to think of him as a blank slate on which we can fashion the best person our collective wisdom is capable of. But is this really true? Are we Pygmalion to his Galatea? Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle? Not bloody likely. While I don’t underestimate the important role and influence Kendall and I have as Charlie’s parents, I can also see that there are already aspects of his personality that are all him, not us. As parents, we can work hard to create a loving foundation of support and trust that will benefit our children throughout their lives. We can also fuck up our kids royally and ensure their future presence in therapists’ offices. (I guess most of us do a little bit of both!) But if there’s one thing I’ve learned as an older parent it’s that we are not creating our children out of whole cloth. There is no blank slate on which we can showcase our handiwork.

On the one hand, that realization is a relief (what if that tapestry was fashioned entirely from our neuroses?). On the other hand, it’s an affront to our egos and our narcissistic desires to see our children as extensions of ourselves. I think I did that a lot with Leah which is why the early years of her adolescence were difficult for me. I had to learn not to take it personally as Leah began pulling away and wanting to spend a lot more time with her friends than with me or the other adults in her life. Which, God knows, is as it should be, but it was still a shock since I was so used to being involved in every part of her life and activities. I remember hiding in the bushes at her school when she was in Kindergarten and watching her interact with the other kids, agonizing over every slight. Let’s face it, having kids is a wonderful, joyful, and painful process. Loving anyone that much carries with it the potential for so many different kinds of loss. Even when our kids are happy and healthy, there’s an element of loss we experience every day. I grieve the little girl that Leah was just as I enjoy and celebrate the young woman she has become. After everything Charlie has been through, Kendall and I already feel a bit of a panic that he’s growing up so fast! It’s hard for me to talk about these feelings because I’m happy and excited about all the changes we see every day, but they still represent elements of loss. Do I sound crazy?

I was talking to my dad on the phone yesterday and he said to me, “As a parent, I’m only ever as happy as my least happy child.” What? Of course I understand this sentiment and recognize that it's based in his strong love for his three children, but it is so rife with dysfunction I begged him to write it down and hand deliver it to a therapist. God love him, but it’s the kind of philosophy that has led to us keeping some of our feelings from him for fear of causing too much pain. Who needs that kind of responsibility? Sometimes Leah will want to tell me something that’s going on in her life but she’ll preface it with “Now, Dad, please don’t freak out when I tell you this.” Freak out? Moi? (Hey, stop laughing all those who know me!) I don’t want to be that dad hiding in the bushes crying because some snot-nosed Kindergartener snubbed my child. And I hope I won’t be anymore. Going through the ordeal of losing a child this year and watching Charlie fight for his life made me realize more than ever how we are all on our own journeys and how going through all sorts of painful emotions can lead to many gifts. I've also seen how our own loving actions work in tandem with aspects of our children that have absolutely nothing to do with us.

When Leah was born in 1994, we sent out baby announcements that included the poem “On Children” by Khalil Gibran. I recognized the beauty and wisdom of the words back then but I didn’t come close to understanding the poem the way I do now.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
But seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.