Jew Eat Yet?

Charlie Update: 14 Months (Adjusted)

I usually bristle when people tell me what they think I should write about on here. Being a writer and editor for hire, I fiercely hold onto this space as the place where I can babble on about whatever I feel like, even if the topic sends my readership stats plunging faster than the Dow Jones Index. But lately several people have asked me to write more about Charlie and that is a request I can happily honor. Also, I know there are people reading this blog whose babies are still in the NICU and who are grappling with some of the major problems that Charlie faced during his first five months in the hospital (birth weight of 1 lb. 4 oz., Level IV brain bleed, six surgeries, VP shunt, etc.) and I want them to see how he is growing and thriving, I know how much that would’ve helped me when we were in that situation.

I wish I had a better camera because my photos from this week don’t do him justice. (The more artsy photos I'm including in this post were taken by our friend Campbell who is an excellent photographer.) Still, even in my photos you can see that he is an amazingly happy boy. And very social. We often go to Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax for our morning outing and Charlie loves it, mostly because he loves interacting with the people there. The other day there was a busload of German tourists swarming the market and we came upon an exhausted couple, probably in their 60s, arguing with each other about something and looking quite miserable. When we walked by, Charlie, strapped to me in his ErgoBaby carrier (no back pain at all—I highly recommend this carrier over all others!), looked straight at them and started smiling and waving. The couple stopped their fight in mid-sentence and broke into wide smiles, cooing at Charlie in German (!) and trailing us a half block through the market.

Charlie’s smiles are like crack to me. I’m addicted to them and they immediately send my sometimes languishing seratonin levels through the roof. His laugh is also intoxicating. He thinks his mother is a scream. She can cause hysterical gales of laughter in all sorts of ways, from the more traditional farm animal sounds to her dead-on impersonation of Katharine Hepburn singing Wilco songs (you really have to hear that to believe it). Oh, he’s a normal baby and can also cry up a storm, usually when he is tired, but since for a long time we worried whether his vocal chords would ever function (when he came home from the hospital after five months he still had never made a peep), there’s always part of me that sighs in gratitude at his screaming wails. Nothing is sadder than a baby’s silent sobs.

As of yesterday, Charlie is a year and a half old. But he is only 14 months “adjusted,” a term used with extremely premature babies to more accurately describe where they are in their development. Eventually we’ll switch to his actual age, but for now he acts much more like a 14-month old. Because of his prematurity, he still gets therapy three times a week at our house. Thank you, California. But because of the crumbling (crumbled?) California economy, I worry that the center that supplies this service (until the age of three) may fold at any moment. We’ll see. Because of Charlie’s severe brain hemorrhage at birth on the left side of his head (he had a slightly less severe hemorrhage on the right side), he has delays on his right side. He favors his left arm and leg but he certainly uses the right side—there is no paralysis. (He definitely seems to be left-handed at the moment but it’s hard to really tell at this point.)

While in the NICU, we were constantly given the range of disabilities that Charlie could face in the future because of the brain damage, including all the worst-case scenarios. While we still have to wait and see what cognitive issues he may or may not have in the future, it’s clear that he’s learning every day (he speaks several words and understands many more) and that he clearly has no problem at all attaching to people or making eye contact.

Charlie is not walking yet, but he can zoom all over our house in record speed, acting as a human Swiffer since he’s usually covered in dog hair at the end of one of his sprints! For some reason Charlie is obsessed with our pitbull Emma (the dog my nervous father would still like us to take out back and shoot) and calls out to her all the time, even in his sleep. He loves her and has been known to sneak her many a treat from his high chair. Charlie and our other dog Henry have more of a bemused tolerance for each other. Henry was barely over the addition of Emma to our household when Charlie came along and usurped most of the attention that Henry feels is rightfully his. But he’s also been known to benefit from Charlie’s furtive high chair treats.

Charlie sleeps in bed with us. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you will think that is a really bad idea and will have horror stories to share, but please don’t, I’ve heard them all. It’s what’s right for us at this stage. Don’t worry—Charlie won’t be sleeping with us when he’s 17. I have to say, though, that we’re not fanatics about the “attachment parenting” stuff. I heard actress Mayim Bialik (remember her from “Blossom”?) on a podcast recently talking about her approach to parenting that includes “elimination communication” which means her babies do NOT wear diapers at all, she learns to “know” when they have to pee or poop and keeps a bucket next to their family bed. Oy. I’m not dissing Mayim, I actually thought she was fantastic on the podcast, but we will be keeping those diapers on for a while, thank you very much.

I’m trying my best to live one day at a time and to appreciate everything we have right now. Sometimes we get very sad about Charlie’s twin brother Oliver who died after 12 hours, but that doesn’t take anything away from the constant joy we experience with Charlie, even when he is screaming in our face. Yesterday Kendall took Charlie to a senior citizens home near our house and he brought so much happiness to the old ladies there (except for the one elderly Miss Gulch-like woman who said to Kendall “you get of here and take that damn baby with you!”) that Kendall wants to keep going there on a regular basis. We have no idea what the future holds for Charlie, what issues he may face, or what other challenges we may have to deal with ourselves. But today is great. 

June Cleaver vs. Betty Draper

We lost Barbara Billingsley this weekend, the lovely actress who played June Cleaver, the ideal of the perfect mom for an entire generation of Baby Boomers. Growing up, we all wondered why our own mothers never vacuumed the house in a pretty dress, complete with high heels, pearls, and a flawless coiffure. Ever cheerful, ever respectful of her husband Ward’s final say in all matters of raising their two rambunctious boys, Billingsley’s June became an icon that was later made fun of as the epitome of an anti-feminist male fantasy. 

This weekend also saw the season finale of AMC’s superb “Mad Men,” the show that revisits the time of Cleavers with a savagely realistic lens. When “Mad Men” premiered in 2007, Betty Draper (played by January Jones) was often compared to June Cleaver. She certainly looked the part: beautiful, always made up and dressed to the nines, her gorgeous blonde locks perfectly in place. But through Betty we got to see the underside of that quest for outward perfection. Beneath the Pepsodent smile and the manicured nails, Betty was a mess. When the series began, Betty’s mother had recently died and Betty was having a hard time coping with the kind of grief that had no outlet in the severely repressed environment of the early 1960s. The cracks in Betty’s polished veneer became more visible with each season, compounded by the heavy philandering of her husband and the way nearly every character on the show dismissed her as nothing more than a pretty face.

It was only in the third season, when Don and Betty were on a business trip to Italy, that we got a glimpse into the life Betty might have had if she had not sleepwalked into the marriage and family that was expected of her. While Don, with his humble roots as the former Dick Whitman, initially floundered in his attempt to be cosmopolitan, Betty rose to the challenge. She was a vision in Italian haute couture and, surprise, surprise, held court in the fluent Italian she had learned at Bryn Mawr. But Don’s continued infidelities and secrets and Betty’s inability to deal with the harsh realities of life eventually decimated their marriage and the two divorced. 

I won’t say much about last night’s surprising finale for those of you who haven’t watched it yet, but I do remember that following last year’s finale I wrote a post defending Betty Draper from all the chatter about what a horrible person she was. I could relate to her character and see so much of my own mother in her. I felt that despite her constant annoyed barks to her children to get out of her hair and go watch TV, that she really loved them and was simply a victim of her time and her emotionally suffocated upbringing. And, lest we forget, for all his charm and appeal, Don Draper was an awful husband, making Betty feel like she was going nuts whenever she even tiptoed toward the truth of his affairs and lies. She cast herself in the role of the grounded parent, as she understood it, while Don was all dreams and fantasy. He was in advertising, after all! Not that Betty's default parenting skills would win any awards:

  

I found it much harder to sympathize with Betty this season. Ensconced in her new marriage to Henry Francis, she remained bitter about Don, impatient with her kids—especially daughter Sally who was having a hard time with her parents’ divorce—and generally unpleasant (she exhibits an unjustified viciousness in the season finale that seems designed to make the audience—and even her new husband—turn on her). I still empathize with the Betty underneath the brittleness (i.e., the Betty that I admittedly project onto the character from my own past), the woman who, like my mother, finds herself trapped in life circumstances from which she can’t seem to break free no matter who she’s with.  I find Betty Draper such a tragic figure. I hope that the writers give her more time next season and allow her to explore the new possibilities of the changing era. I’m not saying they need to transform her into a counterculture bra-burner, but how about giving her some new interests and maybe even a job so we can see how all of that repressed potential might begin to come to the surface? We’ve seen the tortured Betty-Sally dynamic, how about some telling scenes between Betty and her sons, Bobby and Gene? Despite her awful behavior this season, I still hold out hope for Betty Draper.

After being discredited for decades, I think June Cleaver gets a lot more respect these days—and it's well deserved. Have you seen any “Leave It to Beaver” episodes lately? Sure, all problems and dilemmas get neatly resolved (usually by Ward Cleaver) in the show's 26 minutes, but look again at the Cleaver dynamic. June is no pushover. Ward would never get away with talking to June the way Don often speaks to Betty, June simply wouldn’t allow it. She may spend most of her time in the kitchen but she is a woman who understands her strength and power. From all accounts, the late Barbara Billingsley seemed to be a lot more like June Cleaver than she ever was like Betty Draper. I was watching a 2007 “Good Morning America” segment that reunited all of the living cast members for “Leave It to Beaver’s” 50th anniversary. Jerry Mathers (the Beav!) was talking about how he knew the Cleavers were not real, that all families are dysfunctional, at which point Billingsley good-naturedly retorted, “Mine isn’t!” And I believed her. It was a testament to Barbara Billingsley’s real life maternal instincts that all of the boys who were on the show loved her until the day she died. Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow (Wally) considered her a second mom and Ken Osmond, who played the infamous Eddie Haskell, in responding to the crazy rumors that he and Barbara Billingsley got married, replied, “If she’d have me, I’d marry her in a heartbeat!”

I had a personal encounter with Barbara Billingsley in the late 1990s. I was having brunch with my family at the Beverly Hilton but for some reason I took the elevator up from the restaurant level to the lobby by myself. There was only one other person in the elevator—June Cleaver herself! She looked fantastic (she must have been in her eighties at the time) and we smiled at each other and said a few words. I restrained myself, which I now regret, from acknowledging that I knew who she was, but I was afraid I’d sound like an idiot (“OH MY GOD, JUNE CLEAVER, I LOVED YOU SO MUCH AS A KID, I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M IN AN ELEVATOR WITH YOU…”). Billingsley emanated a sweetness that seemed as authentic as anything Mrs. Cleaver was capable of. I think it’s time we let her off the hook for those high heels and pearls. She later claimed that she started the series in flats but they had to keep putting her in heels when the boys started growing and that she only wore pearls because of a hollow in her neck that was hard to light!

And how many sweet ladies do you know who can speak fluent jive?

 

They didn’t give Betty Draper many girlfriends this season and I think she suffered mightily for it. If only Betty could drive over to Mayfield and head to 485 Mapleton Drive, I just know that June Cleaver could be a wonderful support. 

Open Season

What is going on with all the gay bashing lately? From the horrific physical torture of three men in the Bronx last week because they were gay to the suicide of the college freshman whose roommate posted a secretly recorded video of his encounter with a guy to the two 13-year old boys who hanged themselves recently because they were the targets of school bullies to the vile homophobic comments spewing forth this political season from candidates trying to curry favor with their hate-filled right-wing constituents, it’s a pretty depressing scene out there. Is it really 2010?

Not that there aren’t victories, too, such as today’s ruling by a federal judge against the 17-year-old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Earlier today, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ordered the government to immediately discontinue all discharge proceedings and investigations currently underway. I believe that future generations will study this outrageous policy in disbelief, wondering how it possibly went on for so long.

I am repulsed by the homophobic remarks of candidates like Christine O’Donnell and New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino who this week said “I don’t want my children and your children brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.” Then, in an appearance on the “Today Show” to “explain” why his remarks weren’t offensive, he stuck his foot in deeper. “Young children shouldn’t be exposed to homosexuality at a young age…especially at a gay pride parade. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one,” Paladino asked Matt Lauer, “but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other. And it’s just a terrible thing.” Jesus, what an idiot. It depresses me that Paladino made the first comments in a Chasidic synagogue to an allegedly receptive audience. I know, who am I kidding—why would I be surprised that the ultra-orthodox Chasidic crowd would agree with Paladino’s remarks? It’s just that my experience with Judaism is, shall we say, a bit more progressive than that and I’d like to think that there are Chasidic folks who would not condemn gay people. Today Ann Coulter tried to defend Paladino’s remarks by saying that he was just in a “When in Rome” situation. “He’s speaking to Chasidim," she told Bill O'Reilly, "it’s like going to Chicago. You say ‘Go Cubs!’” Really, Ann?

Fred Phelps and his “God Hates Fags” goons are one thing—everyone with at least a handful of brain cells recognizes the soul-less, deeply damaged Phelps clan as lunatics far outside the mainstream. What really gets me these days are the supposedly deeply religious people who express their anti-gay discriminatory views and then try to hide behind the “it’s just my religious beliefs, it’s the way I was brought up” defense, as though we’re supposed to admire them for holding true to their deeply felt values and laud them for their “religious beliefs.” Bullshit. Millions of people were brought up believing that Jews and African-Americans were less than human, should we have respected those beliefs? Of course there’s one person often cited by the homophobes who would tell them all to go take a flying leap if he could. And that is Jesus Christ. Well, okay, maybe he’d be above the anger that I feel towards these louts but he sure wouldn’t approve of their actions, especially in his name.

Maybe it’s the ramblings of the Tea Party activists and the growing anti-Obama forces in addition to (and related to) the mounting cases of extreme homophobia, but it just feels like hatred in general is on the rise in America. I’m relieved that my daughter goes to a high school where gay bashing and bullying would never be tolerated by the faculty OR the students. Her best friend came out last year when he was a freshman and was greeted by support all around. There are a few openly gay teachers and a strong Gay/Straight Alliance on campus. I feel for all those kids going to school in much less welcoming environments.

Even though it’s received criticism in some quarters of the gay community, I couldn’t be more moved by the “It Gets Better” YouTube campaign started by sex columnist Dan Savage. In his column and podcast, Savage frequently hears from young gay people who describe how miserable they are in their intolerant "religious" communities. Savage always treats these calls very compassionately while still recognizing that there’s little most of these kids can do until they turn 18. He always tries to encourage them to find some kind of support system and just remember that their lives will get better once they come of age and are less dependent on their families. Following the recent rash of gay teen suicides, Savage posted a video and urged others to do the same to give these young people hope for a better future. I’m sure the campaign has saved more than one life. The YouTube channel has already had more than a million hits and currently contains hundreds of inspiring videos. Here are a few:

 

 

 

 

Tony Curtis and His Dames

Here is actor Tony Curtis, who died this week at 85, with his then-wife, Janet Leigh, and our friend Barbara Rush. The three starred together in a crazy 1954 guilty pleasure called “The Black Shield of Falworth” that takes place in the 1400s. Tony and Barbara play a brother and sister who are living as peasants but are secretly of royal blood. Both of them fall in love with unsuitable partners and high drama ensues. Today the film is mostly forgotten except for its three claims to fame: it was Universal’s first film in widescreen Cinemascope, it was the first of six films to feature the happy newlyweds, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and it supposedly provided the line that was used to make fun of Tony Curtis’s Bronx accent and acting ability for years to come: “Yonda lies da castle of my faddah!”

But there will be no making fun of Curtis’s acting chops here, and not just out of respect for his passing. I thought Tony Curtis was a brilliant actor (with the right material) and classed up every film he was in. I am especially grateful that I got to meet him last April at the Turner Classic Movie Festival that I was “covering” for General Motors. I actually walked the red carpet with Curtis on opening night. Here’s the photo I took of him. He was all over the festival, attending screenings and introducing two of his best films, “The Sweet Smell of Success” and “Some Like It Hot.” I must have seen the latter film several dozen times and yet I was still transfixed by Curtis’s brilliance in the triple role of Joe, Josephine, and the Shell Oil magnate. While the wonderful Jack Lemmon looked like a bad female impersonator as the lovable Daphne, Tony Curtis had such pretty movie star features back in the 50s that his Josephine was actually a knock-out!

Before the film last April, he told many funny stories about the making of “Some Like It Hot,” including his costume fittings with famed designer Orry-Kelly. The designer measured Curtis and Lemmon first and then Marilyn Monroe walked into the session, wearing only panties and a barely-buttoned white blouse. As Curtis remembered this image, he practically started hyperventilating. When Orry-Kelly was measuring Monroe and got to her bottom, he cracked, “Tony Curtis has a better ass than you, Marilyn.” Monroe then opened up her shirt and said, “Maybe, but he doesn’t have these.” 

Curtis was full of ribald stories that night, and, at 84, was still hitting on anything that moved, even though his sixth wife was at his side. He talked about shooting the kissing scene with Marilyn on the yacht. Things got so hot and heavy that Marilyn asked him if he had an erection. “No, honey,” he replied, “but I can get one for you if you like.” The two had an affair ten years earlier when both were just starting out and it wasn’t so hard to pick up where they left off. Like his contemporary Eddie Fisher, who died just a few weeks ago, Curtis was a major womanizer. Both married America's sweethearts (Janet Leigh and Debbie Reynolds) and both had talented, intelligent daughters (Jamie Lee Curtis and Carrie Fisher) from whom they were sometimes estranged (but not at the end, happily). 

Tony Curtis left an amazing body of work. I was talking to my brother earlier and we both admitted that as kids our favorite was his portrayal of the flamboyant “Houdini.” And, or course, the actor was immortalized as Stony Curtis on what is probably my favorite episode of “The Flintstones.” My friend Helena, who is a member of the Academy, had been trying to get that group to host a reunion screening of “The Vikings,” the film that cast two Jews as its Viking leads, Bernie Schwartz (Tony Curtis) and Issur Demsky (Kirk Douglas)! I also enjoyed Curtis in "The Defiant Ones" (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and fought to get Sydney Poitier proper screen credit), "Operation Petticoat," "Spartacus" (oy, that scene when Curtis is bathing his master Laurence Olivier!), "The Great Impostor," "Sex and the Single Girl," and many others.

Ironically, at the very moment Tony Curtis was leaving this mortal coil, we were with Barbara Rush who was being honored at the American Cinematheque in Santa Monica. They showed two of her films and she spoke in a delightful Q&A between the films. Barbara talked about her many co-stars, from Curtis to Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, James Mason, Frank Sinatra, and many others. She was good friends with Tony and Janet Leigh back in the day, and although she didn’t yet know about Curtis’s passing, remarked about how hard it is to lose so many friends at her age. (The audience gasped when Barbara said she was about to turn 84—she looks decades younger than that.)

Barbara introduced my mother-in-law Betsy in the audience. She starred in the successful play version of Betsy’s novel, “A Woman of Independent Means” and toured with it for years, and she also had a great run with Kendall’s dad’s play “Father’s Day.” If you promise not to call DCFS, I’ll tell you that Charlie enjoyed his first double feature (until midnight!), but why wouldn’t he—Barbara Rush is his favorite actress! Now I can’t wait to introduce him to the films of Tony Curtis!