Larry No

It's Oscar Time!

2010-02-25T12:05:00.001-08:00

It's Oscar time!

Ah, the Oscars. The Oscars! The gala! The excitement! The HISTORY!

And the winner is… Casablanca!

And the winner is… From Here to Eternity!

And the winner is… West Side Story!

And the winner is… Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle!

And the winner is… Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce!

And the winner is… Diane Keaton in Annie Hall!

And the winner is… Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts!

And the winner is… Robert DeNiro in The Godfather, Part II !

And the winner is… Frank Capra for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town!

And the winner is… John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre!

And the winner is… Mike Nichols for The Graduate!

And the winner is… Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind!

And the winner is… Jessica Lange in Tootsie!

And the winner is… Clark Gable in It Happened One Night!

And the winner is… James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy!

And the winner is… Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field!

Then, in 1989, they changed it. There are no winners or losers. That’s politically incorrect. Let’s make it more politically correct…

And the Oscar goes to… Rain Man!

And the Oscar goes to… Schindler’s List!

And the Oscar goes to… Chicago!

And the Oscar goes to… Kathy Bates in Misery!

And the Oscar goes to… Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking!

And the Oscar goes to… Charlize Theron in Monster!

And the Oscar goes to… Denzel Washington in Glory!

And the Oscar goes to… Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine!

And the Oscar goes to… Oliver Stone for Born on the Fourth of July!

And the Oscar goes to… Stephen Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan!

And the Oscar goes to… Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain!

And the Oscar goes to… Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist!

And the Oscar goes to… Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted!

Now, QUESTION: Do you remember who the Oscars “went to” last year?

STOP! DON’T READ THE NEXT FIVE LINES. Try to remember first.

And the Oscar last year went to… Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight!

And the Oscar last year went to… Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona!

And the Oscar last year went to… Sean Penn in Milk!

And the Oscar last year went to… Kate Winslet in The Reader!

And the Oscar last year went to… Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire!

I don’t have to remind you who won Best Picture last year, do I? Here’s a hint: It was one of the five films listed above, and the movie didn’t take place in Germany, the USA, Spain or Gotham.

Hmmm, I wonder if Penelope Cruz will win Best Supporting Actress again this year. She’s nominated for her performance in Nine. If she does win, she will be the first actress in Oscar history to win that award two years in a row. Two other actresses have won the Best Supporting Oscar twice, but they were not in consecutive years. Shelley Winters won for 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank and for 1965’s A Patch of Blue. Dianne Wiest won for 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters and 1994’s Bullets over Broadway. But those awards were separated by six and eight years, respectively. So will Penelope pull it off? Will she win two back-to-back Oscars? Will she win for 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona AND 2009’s Nine? It doesn’t seem likely.

Winning an Oscar two years in a row has only been done by five performers. Luise Rainer won Best Actress for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). Spencer Tracy won Best Actor for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). Katharine Hepburn won Best Actress for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968). Jason Robards won Best Supporting Actor for All the President’s Men (1976) and Julia (1977). And finally, Tom Hanks won for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). He was the last one to do it, and it’s been 15 years.

When you figure that in 83 years, only five people have pulled this back-to-back feat, the odds don’t look good that Penelope Cruz will join the ranks of the other five. Besides, it looks like Mo’Nique has the momentum for her bravura performance in Precious. And if she does win, she will be only the second performer with no last name to win an acting Oscar. Who is the other one-name Oscar winner? That’s easy. Cher, who won Best Actress for 1987’s Moonstruck. Duh!

You may have deduced by now that I am an Oscar NERD. Totally. And a GEEK. I am an Oscar nerd-geek.

I have watched every single Academy Awards since 1982. I’m sure I saw some Oscar shows before then, but my memory of the Oscars begins with 1982’s show, which presented the awards for films released in 1981. I was 13 years-old, and the only Best Picture nominees that I had seen were Raiders of the Lost Ark and On Golden Pond. I wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark to win. It was my favorite film of the year (again, I was 13). Well, that Oscar night was my first experience (of many) of being disappointed by who ended up winning. The top awards were won by Reds and Chariots of Fire, which won Best Picture. Neither of those films were teenager-friendly.

I remember being happy that the one Best Supporting Actor nominee whose performance I had seen, John Gielgud in Arthur, won the award. I wanted Best Actor nominee Dudley Moore to win for that same movie, Arthur, because he had made me laugh so hard in his drunk scenes. Well, he lost to Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. It was another Oscar lesson, two actually: Comedic performances rarely win in the lead categories, and older actors who have never won an Oscar throughout their long careers, will usually be voted the award for sentimental reasons.

Yes, Gielgud wasn't the only old-timer who was finally winning an Oscar that night in 1982; there was also, as I just mentioned, Henry Fonda.

In a celebrated film career spanning five decades, Henry Fonda had only been nominated once, in 1941, for The Grapes of Wrath. His own daughter, Jane, had won two Best Actress Oscars before he had even won his first, and been nominated six times. It was definitely Henry’s turn to win. Not only for the aforementioned reasons, but also because he was in such poor health, that he couldn’t even attend the ceremony. It was obvious that he did not have much longer to live. Despite my having favored Dudley Moore for having made me laugh in Arthur, I was very moved when the envelope was opened, and Henry Fonda’s name was called out.

At that age, I was still very ignorant about classic Hollywood, and knew nothing about Henry Fonda's career except that he was great in On Golden Pond, had appeared in that 1970s attack of the bees movie, The Swarm. The reason I was moved was not because of the body of his work, but by the father-daughter aspect of the award. Jane Fonda was at the ceremony, herself a nominee, and accepted the award for her ailing father, with tears in her eyes, and a trembling, joyful, emotional voice. Later, she brought the statuette home to her dad, who looked frail in a gray beard and a thick sweater. The pictures appeared everywhere the following day. It was all very dramatic and moving, and it got me hooked on Oscar.

In the following years, there was always an aspect of the competition that attracted my attention, and the Best Actress award became my favorite contest, as the 1980s ran their course…

Meryl Streep winning her second Oscar, for Sophie’s Choice, and being so pregnant that I thought her water might break as she gave her speech…

Shirley MacLaine finally winning after many nominations, for Terms of Endearment, beating out her younger co-star Debra Winger, and saying, “I’m going to cry because this show has been as long as my career!”…

Sally Field winning for the second time, for Places in the Heart, prompting her to say, “You LIKE me! You really LIKE ME!”…

Geraldine Page finally winning, for The Trip to Bountiful, and the presenter, F. Murray Abraham saying, after he opened the envelope, “I consider this woman the greatest actress in the English language,” and then genuflecting on his knees before her, in front of an audience that was on its feet…

Marlee Matlin winning for Children of a Lesser God, and being the first deaf person to win an acting Oscar (and the youngest Best Actress winner ever), signing her acceptance speech as her co-star and then-boyfriend William Hurt stood beside her, having just presented her the award due to his Best Actor win the year before …

Cher winning for Moonstruck... Cher! CHER winning an Oscar! CHER!...

Jodie Foster making the transition from child star (and obsession of Reagan shooter John Hinkley) to serious adult actress, by winning for her searing portrayl of a gang rape victim in The Accused...

Jessica Tandy, esteemed theatre legend, winning on her first nomination, for Driving Miss Daisy, and becoming the oldest Oscar winner ever; she was 80 going on 81...

But it wasn't just the Best Actress competition which drew my attention. I was drawn to all things Oscar. My teenage interest in the Oscars grew to such an extent, that one of my high school graduation gifts was an 800-page book called, Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards. I devoured that book, reading every page, fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stories, the politics, the publicity, the scheming, the slights, the paybacks, year after year after year, going from 1927 onwards. I became an expert in Oscar trivia, the firsts, the onlys, the irregularities... this new interest coincided with the birth of cable TV and old movies on videotape for rent at video stores. I began to rent Oscar-winning films, and set about watching every performance that won the award for Best Actor and Best Actress. Often I would be amazed that certain leading role actors and actresses won for THAT performance...

James Stewart winning for The Philadelphia Story, (most likely because he had lost for his superlative performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the year before)...

Humphrey Bogart winning for The African Queen, beating out Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (most likely because Bogart hadn't won for Casablanca, or ever before, for that matter)...

Bette Davis winning for Dangerous, beating out Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (most likely because Davis had, outrageously, not even been nominated for Of Human Bondage the year before, and Hepburn had already won the award 2 years prior)...

Katharine Hepburn not winning her second Oscar for her amazing performances in Alice Adams, The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year, The African Queen or Long Day's Journey into Night, but rather, winning her not-so-amazing performance in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (most likely because her her co-star and long-time lover Spencer Tracey had recently died)...

William Holden winning for his brief, remarkably average performance in Stalag 17 (most likely because he had lost for his lengthy, magnificent performance in Sunset Boulevard three years earlier)...

Elizabeth Taylor winning for the trashy Butterfield 8 (most likely because she had just had a tracheotomy, and because had just lost for two years in a row, for her two performances as Tennessee Williams heroines, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer)...

Julie Andrews winning for Mary Poppins (most likely because she had lost her Broadway role of Eliza in the film version of My Fair Lady, to the dubbed, weak-singer Audrey Hepburn, who as punishment, wasn't even nominated that same year for her performance in the film)...

John Wayne, in a year of ground-breaking performances by his younger, fellow nominees, winning for True Grit (most likely because he was an old John Wayne who had never won an Oscar)...

Art Carney, in a year of ground-breaking performances by his younger, fellow nominees, winning for Harry and Tonto (most likely winning because he was an old Art Carney who had never won an Oscar)...

Peter Finch winning the lead award for his supporting role in Network (most likely because he had died of a heart attack just before the ballots were cast)...

...and I haven't even gotten to the 1980s, '90s and '00s yet.

To avoid letting this piece become a longer reading experience than War and Peace, I will just focus on one more irregularity in the Oscars that has often caught my attention: leading role vs. supporting role.

It happened just last year with Kate Winslet in The Reader. During the entire awards season, she had been nominated in the supporting category for her brilliant performance as the illiterate, teen-loving ex-Nazi. I had seen the movie, and was insulted that she had been placed in the supporting category, just because her character wasn't the protagonist of the film. She was clearly the female with the leading role in the movie, and I found it unfair that actresses with legitimate supporting roles, and much less screen time, were made to compete with Winslet, whose role was much bigger, and who therefore was winning every award in sight.

The Academy actually fixed the problem, and nominated her in the leading category. Suddenly the Best Supporting Actress category became a wide-open field. With Winslet placed in the leading category, there was no clear victor in sight in the supporting. I had no clue who might win; none of the nominees had won any of the pre-Oscar awards. Penelope Cruz ended up winning, while Winslet took home the lead award. This was as it should have been. This, however, has not always been the case.

Jennifer Connelly in 2001's A Beautiful Mind, Marcia Gay Harden in 2000's Pollock, and Juliette Binoche in 1996's The English Patient, are only three recent examples of actresses in leading roles placed in the supporting category because the competition in the lead category was very tough, and the studios wanted to better their chances of winning an Oscar. There are many more, if you go further back. Tatum O'Neal was in virtually every minute of 1973's Paper Moon, but was placed, and won, in the supporting category because she was a child at the time, and children are almost never put in the leading category.

In other years with less-tough competition, the opposite has been done. Supporting actresses have been put in the leading category, often having less screen time than other actors in the same movie who were nominated in the supporting category. Three memorable examples of this this include 2002's Best Leading Actress winner Nicole Kidman in The Hours, who actually had less screen time than Best Supporting Actress loser Julianne Moore, in the same movie. Another is 1996's Best Leading Actress winner Frances McDormand in Fargo, who actually had less screen time than Best Supporting Actor loser William H. Macy, in the same movie. And yet another is 1975's Best Leading Actress winner Louise Fletcher in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, who actually had less screen time than Best Supporting Actor loser Brad Dourif, in the same movie.

There are many examples of leading Oscar winners who had the same, or less, screen time than those nominated in the supporting categories that same year. Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), William Holden in Stalag 17 (1953), David Niven in Separate Tables (1958), Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959), Patricia Neal in Hud (1963), Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972), Peter Finch in Network (1976), Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Geoffrey Rush in Shine (1996)... none of these winners for the leading Oscar had much more than 20 or 30 minutes of screen time in movies that were 2 to 3 hours long.

And since we're talking about screen time, which is the performance with the smallest amount of screen time to ever win an Oscar? Beatrice Straight, Best Supporting Actress of 1976 for Network, whose entire performance was barely 6 minutes long, and she had only 8 lines of dialogue. The next most brief Oscar winning performance was 1998's Best Supporting Actress Judi Dench, in Shakespeare in Love. Her performance had a couple of more minutes of screen time than Straight's, and a few more lines of dialogue. And the next most brief Oscar-winning performance....?

ENOUGH! Don't get me started. I need to start wrapping this up, or it'll be as long as an Academy Awards show that never seems to be close to wrapping up.

I'll wrap it up with this: who do YOU think will win Best Picture this year, and how many of the nominees have you seen?

This year, you have more movies to see, because this year they increased the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten.

For the last 66 years, there have been five nominees for Best Picture. The last time there were ten was in 1944, when the nominees for the Best Picture of 1943 were...

Casablanca

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Heaven Can Wait

The Human Comedy

In Which We Serve

Madame Curie

The More the Merrier

The Ox-Bow Incident

The Song of Bernadette

Watch on the Rhine

How many of those films have you heard of? Just Casablanca, right? You've SEEN Casablanca, too, most likely, haven't you? Well, Casablanca was the movie on that list that won. What about the others? Maybe you've heard of For Whom the Bell Tolls because it is a famous novel by Ernest Hemingway. But have you seen it, the movie, or any of the others? I'm a total classic film buff, and besides Casablanca, I've only seen The Song of Bernadette and Watch on the Rhine, and that was only because the former won the Best Actress award for Jennifer Jones, and the latter won the Best Actor award for Paul Lukas.

This should give you an idea of the importance of winning an Oscar as time goes by. In 65 years, the chances are higher that your film will still be known.

So here are the ten nominees for the best picture of 2009. Read the list, and ask yourself which of these films, 66 years from now, will be known by people who haven't even been born yet...

Avatar

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hurt Locker

Inglorious Basterds

Precious

A Serious Man

Up

Up in the Air

I am certain that I will never know which of these films will still be remembered 66 years from now, because I would have to live to be 107, and that ain't happening. But I will be able to have a fairly good clue on March 7, when the 83rd Academy Awards are handed out at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, California. I'll be watching. I've been watching for 28 years, so I'm sure I'll be watching for many more,

Oscar nerd-geek that I am.

"It just means bad. Gay is something that you don't want to be."

2010-02-07T23:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was tutoring a 4th grader, Luis. I tutor kids one-on-one. Right now I have six students, and I tutor them on different days.

Luis I tutor every Saturday afternoon for two hours at the public library. I teach him English language arts (I could never teach him math. He would need to tutor me in math).

In any case, the first hour of our sessions we focus on reading. I have him read Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi. He reads three chapters, and we discuss the story, etc.

Pinocchio was written in Italian, in the 1880s. The English translation we are reading is from the 1940s. As a result, there are some words that children today are not familiar with, and I take the opportunity to increase their vocabulary by defining these still-used yet seemingly-archaic words for them.

Well, yesterday, as he was reading, Luis started to giggle. I asked him what was so funny, and he pointed at a word in the text: "gay."

"Why do you think that word is so funny?" I asked him.

"It's a bad word!" he said.

"Read the sentence again," I told him, "and see if you can figure out what 'gay' means in the context of the sentence."

He read the sentence again, and said he didn't know. I told him that, as it it used in the sentence, "gay" means "cheerful." I gave him other synonyms: "joyful, gleeful, merry, jolly..."

" 'Gay' means all those things?" he asked.

"Yes. It can also mean 'lively' or 'exuberant.' Why? What do you think it means?"

"I don't know. It just means 'bad.' If you're gay, it's a bad thing. In school, any kid who does something dumb, or makes mistakes, or isn't liked, or is bad at sports, or dresses bad, is gay."

I decided not to correct him for saying, "dresses bad," rather than, "dresses badly," in favor of sticking to the topic at hand.

"I know what you mean," I said, "for example, if you think something is uncool, you say, 'That's so gay,' or if something looks weird, you say, 'That looks gay,' or if a TV show is bad, 'That show's so gay.' "

"Yeah. Right. It's gay. Did kids talk like that when you were in school?"

"Yes," I said, and then I paused. I didn't know if he knew that gay also refers to homosexuality. When I was nine, I had no idea what homosexuality was (or even what heterosexuality was) but with kids today, you never know...

After thinking it over, I said to him, "So we know that the proper definition of 'gay' means 'cheerful,' and that as slang, some people use 'gay' to mean 'bad.' Can you think of any other way that 'gay' can be used in slang?"

He thought it over for a long time, and said, "No. It just means bad. Gay is something that you don't want to be."

I wanted to tell him, "Well, you should not use that word to mean 'bad' or 'weird' or 'stupid' or 'something you don't want to be,' because 'gay' also means 'homosexual,' and there are lots of kids that, as they become teenagers, realize that they are gay, and it makes them feel less of themselves if they hear their classmates using the word that describes what they are as a pejorative."

I didn't tell him that. I decided to drop the subject. I decided to only teach him that "gay" is a synonym for "cheerful," and move on. Let his parents teach him that "gay" also means "homosexual." That's their job, not mine.

But it did get me to thinking. Anti-gay sentiment is instilled in kids at a very young age. Even before they know what "gay" means, they know it is bad, weird, negative and something that you don't want to be-- even though nobody wants to be gay (you just are or you aren't). But if you are, and you're young, it must be a blow to your self-esteem to hear people using the word for what you are to mean "bad."

Imagine this...

"I hate this class. It's so Asian."

"This movie sucks. It's so woman."

"I'm not doing that. That's so black."

"Look at that awful dress she's wearing! It's so Hispanic."

"Why do we have to do this? It's so white."

"I'm not hanging out with them. They're so man."

"I am so sorry to be retarded..."

2010-02-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

WARNING: THIS PIECE CONTAINS SOME OFFENSIVE WORDS.

There's been a lot of flap in the last few days about Rahm Emanuel's use of the word "retarded" to describe some left-wingers who planned to campaign against any conservative Democratic politician who opposed Obama's health care plan. Actually, I think what he called retarded was the plan, not the the planners themselves.

In any case, this gave Sarah Palin her customary cue to leap on a glib side issue, so that she can garner even more unjustified publicity. Seriously, that woman cannot generate public attention by coming up with creative new policy ideas, or offering any detailed rational solutions to our country's problems. What she CAN do though, is get into verbal tiffs with other celebrities and public figures over trite, easy-to-comprehend social issues to keep the culture war burning.

This time, it wasn't David Letterman who Palin was word-policing. It was Rahm Emanuel. She suggested that he be fired or resign, even though her sweethearts Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have used the R-word many a time.

Which brings me to the actual "R-word." Yes, it seems as though we have yet another word with a capital letter before it. First it was the F-word, then it was the N-word, then it was the B-word, and now it's the R-word.

Today on Facebook, a friend of mine referenced it, writing something like, "The R-word is mean and hurtful and should not be used." Accompanying her statement was a video that she was posting. It was a montage of people on TV saying the R-word.

Well, I had no idea what the R-word was. I sat there for a few seconds, scouring my brain, trying to figure our what the R in the R-word could possibly stand for.

The Rahm Emanuel flap was not in my mind at the time, so I was totally stumped. I knew that I could quickly find out by watching the video, but I resisted clicking "play" until I could guess what the R-word was.

Since it was a woman who found the R-word offensive, I started out thinking of crude words for the female private parts... "Cunt? No, that starts with a C.... Pussy? Naw, P.... Queef? No, that's a Q, and it's not even a part of the female anatomy..."

Then I switched to racial possibilities. The N-word was out, so I tried other racially insensitive terms. "Spic? No, S. Dago? No, D. Chink? No, C....."

Finally, I gave up and watched the video.

RETARDED!

THAT'S what the R-word was! Duh! How could I not have guessed that, due to the recent Rahm flap?

Now let me say, that I'm so tremendously fond of the woman who posted the video and used the R-word. She is one of my favorite Facebook friends. She is a rational, sensible, open-minded, smart-as-hell person with a sharp sense of humor. We agree on virtually everything, and I couldn't respect her more. But I must say that I resented her a bit, for having introduced yet another upper case letter-word into our vocabulary, or at least for having spread it around more.

I am so sick of these childish words. N-word, B-word, S-word, F-word, R-word....

Are we in 3rd grade?

"Awmm! You said the R-word! I'm gonna tell the teacher!"

I'm a Latino of mostly Spanish ancestry. I would rather hear a person refer to the word "spic" as "The word 'spic'," than as "The S-word." I think it's very silly to hear an adult say, "And then he used the S-word."

What does the S-word refer to? Shit? Slut? Stupid? Spic? What?!?

This is so much better: "And then he used the word 'spic'."

As a Hispanic, I much prefer this, mainly because I was last a student in elementary school in the '70s, so "S-word" sounds pretty puerile to me in the year 2010.

Believe it or not, not all liberals are politically correct cadets. I, a total, unabashed liberal, abhor political correctness. I can't stand how a person can lose his job over a verbal slip-up. Of course there are some verbal slip-ups that are more severe than others.

Any public official who refers to any black person as "a nigger," or a gay man as "a faggot," or a Mexican as "a wetback," should get booted out of office. However, if a public official calls any man "a prick" or any woman "a bitch," well, that to me is not a fireable offense. It is an offense that demands apology and a lot of eating crow, but it doesn't demand firing.

It's just different. It's a slip-up, but I really don't feel that "bitch" signifies misogyny, or that "prick" signifies misanthropy. After all, I'm a man, and I call other men pricks all the time (under my breath or in private, of course). It doesn't mean I hate men, or that I think men are inferior. It just means that that particular man really annoyed me, angered me or offended me. Is it a bit childish to call a man a prick? Sure, but it's not as childish as calling him a P-word. Bill O'Reilly is a prick, not a P-word (same thing for Glenn Beck).

Same thing with "bitch" and the even more offensive "cunt" (I LOVE that word. It's so strong!). I adore women. In my opinion, it is women who make this planet a livable place. If it weren't for women, this world would be a real cesspool. I actually think that if there IS a superior gender, women are it, no contest. I truly admire them. They are complicated and fabulous. But don't you dare tell me not to mutter the word "cunt" when I see Nancy Grace or Michelle Malkin on TV. Don't you dare. "Cunt," to me, is the perfect word to describe those two bitches, so please don't limit my vocabulary at all times. If it offends you, I won't say it around you. After all, I'm not a prick. But I refuse to erase "cunt" from my vocabulary.

Now let me wrap up this vile piece with a very funny story.

In 1999, I lived in Milan, Italy, where I worked as an English teacher. One of my favorite students was Francesca, a smart, funny, charming, beautiful blond a great sense of fashion, but not a great aptitude for learning English. I'm sure she was great at math, though...

Well, I moved back to New York City in 2000, and, to my delight, she soon moved to New York to do an internship with a fashion designer.

Whenever I'd call her at her boss's office in Manhattan, she would always answer the phone like this: "Hello, I am Francesca."

No matter how many times I'd tell her, in Italian, "Francesca, that's not how it's said in English when you answer the phone. You can say, 'Hello, this is Francesca,' or you can say, 'Hello, Francesca speaking,' but you can't say, 'Hello, I am Francesca.' It's just not said that way."

She'd tell me that she understood, but I'd call her a few days later, and she'd say, "Hello, I AM FRANCESCA."

The problem was that she was translating her thoughts from Italian to English, and in Italian you would say, "Buon giorno, sono Francesca" (Sono means "I am").

Which brings me to the night when Francesca used to R-word to some shocked Americans in a trendy, swanky lounge.

It was a trendy, swanky lounge. I wanted to introduce her to some of my friends. We were to meet at a certain hour, like 8 or 9 o'clock. Of course she was running late. Francesca was always running late. Even when I'd try to fool her into arriving on time by telling her the meeting time was a half-hour earlier, she'd still show up late.

Well, in Italian, the way you say "I'm running late," is Sono in ritardo. Both English and Italian get the word "retarded" from Latin, thus the similarity. However, in Italian, it has evolved to primarily mean "late" wheras in English it primarily means, well, we know what it means.

So Francesca arrives to the lounge, flustered and out of breath, and about an hour late. After I introduce her to my friends, she profusely apologizes for having been in ritardo, so she says to them, "Hello. Hello. Hello. I am SO retarded. I know I am. I am totally retarded. You must please forgive me, it is just the way I always am. I am retarded. I am so sorry to be retarded..."

My friends' jaws dropped and their eyes popped open. I had to explain to them the language mix-up, and when she realized what she said, she said, "Oh my God! I really AM retarded! I am retarded in the Italian sense and I am retarded in the English sense! I am so retarded!"

My friends laughed uneasily. Poor Francesca. In addition to not having mastered the English language, she also hadn't mastered American political correctness. She should have used the R-WORD once she knew the English meaning of retarded.

Didn't she know what a touchy, sensitive place the USA is...?

San Francisco, We Finally Meet

2009-12-29T12:51:00.001-08:00

I'm 41-years-old. It has taken me a long time to visit San Francisco. Well, I'm in San Francisco right now as I type. I'm here for the first time. San Francisco, we finally meet.

It had become a running joke with some of my friends, the fact that I had not yet been to San Francisco. After all, I am known for being a traveler. I've been to 20 foreign countries. True, it's not 100, but it's more than the average person has visited. And in these countries, I've usually visited multiple cities.

For example, in Holland, I didn't just go to Amsterdam, as most tourists do. I also went to Rotterdam, Delft, Utrecht, The Hague, Dordrecht, Haarlem, Gouda, Leiden and Kinderdijk. In Spain, I didn't just go to Madrid and Barcelona. I also went to Segovia, Toledo, Alicante, Malaga, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Caceres, Zaragoza, Avila, Salamanca, Burgos, Valladolid, Santander, Bilbao, San Sebastian, Girona, Sitges and Montserrat. And don't even get me started on Italy. In Italy, I even went to Fanna. FANNA. Have you ever heard of Fanna? Well, neither have most Italians-- not even those who live in the northeast, where Fanna is secretly located.

Si signori, I had been to Fanna, but not to San Francisco. I had been to Ljubljana, Slovenia, but not to San Francisco. I had been to Bucharest, Romania, but not to San Francisco. I had been to Haifa, Israel, but not to San Francisco. I had been to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, but not to San Francisco... My friends were really giving me a hard time about this, especially after I had gone four years living in Los Angeles, neglecting to visit San Francisco (in favor of San Diego and Las Vegas).

Last year on vacation, did I go from L.A. to San Francisco? Nope. I did, however, go from L.A. to Morelia, Mexico. And Patzcuaro. And Janitzio. And Tapalpa. Have you heard of those Mexican towns? Probably not. I hadn't before last year. But I had heard of San Francisco. Everyone has. People travel from all over the world to visit San Fran. Not I. Not until this week. Finally.

San Francisco, we finally meet.

AND YOU ARE KILLING ME.

What the fuck was I thinking, waiting until age 41 to see this city, which is basically a concrete-covered roller coaster of merciless, mountainous hills? The sidewalks here aren't sidewalks. They're walls. You turn a corner and see a wall. You have to crane your head up to see the top of the sidewalk. You don't walk the sidewalk. You scale it. They shouldn't be called sidewalks in this city. They should be called sideclimbs.

Let me explain. I get to know new cities by walking. I'm a major walker. Even if I have taxi fare, when I'm exploring a new city, I walk it. A bus is passing by? So what. I keep walking. It's the only way to really get to know and feel a city, in my opinion.

So: Visit here at age 41? Why didn't I visit here at age 21, when my younger bones put a real spring in my step?

Here's another question: Why am I sitting here writing in my blog, when I am only here for 10 days and should be out seeing the city? Here's the answer: Because my 41-year-old legs can't take it. My ankles and knees are kill-ing me. I'm taking a break.

San Francisco has given me a rude awakening: I am aging. This is my first vacation where I can't walk and walk and walk for hours and hours and hours, then go back to my lodgings, take a shower, change clothes, and experience the nightlife.

Nightlife? That requires more walking up or down hills--prohibitive hills. My body needs to recuperate. I'll just sit here and type...

My first encounter here with a steep, sidewalked hill was quite deceptive. It was on Christmas Eve, when I arrived in town. I'm staying in Nob Hill, and decided to go to Grace Cathedral for Christmas Eve mass. Wow. What a beautiful cathedral, and what a lovely mass. And it gave me a good intro to walking in this city...

You see, on my way to Grace, I was walking along Pine Street, following the map from my Fodor's guidebook. I could see that it was a short walk to the cathedral. Just turn on Taylor Street, walk a block, and you're there. Well, I turned on Taylor Street, and saw an uphill climb so steep, that the sidewalk actually had steps carved into it. As I huffed and puffed my way up the eternal steps, I thought, This isn't so bad. At least the sidewalk has been turned into steps. Steps are easier to climb. If all the steep sidewalks are like this, it won't be so bad...

They are not all like that. In fact, that stretch of Taylor Street is the only stepped sidewalk that I've seen.

Let me just say, so I don't sound like a whiner, that this city is really beautiful. The word that keeps coming to my mind is "wow." That's because, in these few days that I've been here, as I huff and puff my way up a hill, feeling like Shelly Winters in The Poseidon Adventure, I always get a reward once I reach the sidewalk's summit: The view. And the only word that seems to come out of my mouth when I behold the view is, "Wow."

Uphill I'll go... Walk. Up. Hill. Huff. Puff. Sigh. Breathe. Creak. Damn. Climb. Huff. Puff. Ow. Up. Up. Ouch. God. I think I can. I know I can. Pause. Breathe. Fuck. Sigh. Walk. Up. Hill. Up. Up. Step. Step. Huff. Puff... you're at the top. Turn the corner, take a look, and..... "WOW!"

The bay! What a beauuuuutiful view.

Does any city on earth have a more beautiful natural setting? Barcelona, Florence, Lisbon and Quebec City, among the cities I've seen, are runners up. But really, they don't hold a candle to the bay of San Francisco, and views of it, and the sea of roofs below, from the city's hilltop sidewalks. True, I've never been to Rio de Janeiro or Vancouver, but I can't imagine their cityscape blending so seamlessly with the geographical setting as San Francisco's does.

I guess I should just leave it at that. I'm tired, but I really do need to go out there and see more of this charming city. I should stop writing, gather my strength and tackle more of those hills. They're a bitch, but it's because of them that I can turn a corner and say, "Wow!"

All of this beauty comes at a price.

San Francisco, we finally meet... and you are kicking my ass.

Over and out. Out I go.... Huff. Puff. Huff. Puff....

Never Judge a Teen by His Cover

2009-11-17T00:29:00.000-08:00

This week, I started tutoring school-aged kids in English language arts as part of a federally-funded program. I'll be tutoring the kids in their homes or at public libraries.

Today, I had my first student, and I've already learned a lesson. Yes, it was the tutor who learned the lesson.

I arrived in the apartment to find my student's guardian, his aunt, alone. She informed me in Spanish that the boy, Antonio, would be arriving shortly.

The family is from Guatemala and they live, 6 people, in a tiny studio apartment-- the one room being about 12' x 12'. The apartment is not located in a "nice" part of town.

All I knew about Antonio was that he is a 17-year-old who is in the 9th grade. Knowing this, I assumed that he had failed a few grades, since most 9th graders are 14 years-old. As a result, I was worrying that perhaps he'd be a gang guy type.

Soon, two teenage boys entered the apartment. One looked quite clean-cut, neat haircut, wearing a sporty zip-up sweatshirt and nice jeans. He looked like a good kid. The other boy was wearing a big baseball cap tilted to the side, with the bill of the cap straight and uncurved. He wore a T-shirt that was several sizes too big. He wore extra-baggy jeans that were so over-sized that he had to "cinch" them with a belt, his boxer shorts being the only thing that were covering his ass. He had several gold chains around his neck, bracelets and rings, and had piercings. He looked like a Chicano gangsta to me.

Instantly I started hoping that first boy would be Antonio, my student. He was. Whew, I thought.

Well, the first lesson with all of my students is actually not a lesson at all. It's a test. They take the test, which takes them about an hour. Then I grade it, and figure out what are their strengths and weaknesses, and plan my lessons accordingly.

Antonio sat down and started taking the test. I sat and waited. As I did, the other boy (he of the baggy jeans, gold chains and piercings) started to engage me in conversation, in his thick barrio accent. He was very friendly and respectful, to my surprise. He showed me a copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth and asked me if I had ever read it. I told him I had. He then started discussing the play with an enthusiasm which quite frankly stunned me. I am paraphrasing a bit, but this was our conversation...

"We're studying it in English dramatic lit now. It's pretty short for a Shakespeare play, so it didn't take me very long to get through it. What do you think of Macduff?"

My mind drew a blank. I scoured my memory to remember who the hell Macduff was. I hadn't read Macbeth in ages. I said, "You mean the Scottish king that Macbeth kills?"

"No, that's Duncan," he said, "Macduff is the man who suspects Macbeth of killing Duncan, so he goes to Malcom and convinces him to join him in taking revenge on Macbeth."

"Oh," I said, feeling quite inadequate.

"Do you think that Macduff is the personification of morality in the play? 'cuz it's like Shakespeare is using him to represent what is moral, in a play full of immoral people."

At that point my head was spinning. I never thought, when I first laid eyes on that kid, that a word such as personification would come out of his mouth, much less a name like Shakespeare. I felt such shame for having prejudged him as I did, and I simultaneously was wondering how he ever got interested in Shakespeare.

You see, he wasn't some teenager moaning that he has to read Macbeth for English class. He was a teenager who was actively interested in the story, enough so that he wanted to converse about it on his free time with a 41-year-old man.

I said, "I'll be honest with you, I only read it once, in college, and that was back in 1991."

"Whoa," he said, "that was before I was born."

"Yes," I muttered, grimacing at that fact, for the boy was almost as tall as I.

"How come you've never re-read it since?" he asked.

"It's not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays," I said, "Julius Caesar I've read about 5 times, but Macbeth only once."

"It's not one of mine either. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both don't have a struggle of good and evil in them. They're just plain evil. I think it's more interesting when the evil wins over the good, then it's more tragic, you know?"

I marveled at him and asked, "You really like Shakespeare, huh?"

He said, "He's okay. I really-really like Goethe, though."

GOETHE?! This boy reads GOETHE?

He got out one of his school folders and pulled out a few verses of Goethe's Faust. It was covered with yellow highlights and pencil marks, in which he used modern synonyms to define the more obscure words.

"You don't find this too hard to read?" I asked.

"It's hard, but not too hard. I like that it's hard. It's like a puzzle or a code. When there's a word I don't know, I look it up, and when I get all the words together and it all makes sense, it's really cool."

I suddenly realized that I had forgotten all about Antonio, my student, even though he was seated at a table right in front of me taking the test. I asked him if everything was okay and if he had any questions. He shook his head and continued taking the test with great concentration.

From behind me I heard, "Do you like opera?"

This is too much, I thought, I have got to be on Candid Camera. He likes opera, too?

"Yeah," I said, "I like opera. I'm not an aficionado, but I like it. Why? You like it?"

"Well, I've only seen one, but that got me interested in it. Me and a bunch of kids from my school went downtown to the Disney Concert Hall to see La Boheme."

"That's one of the few operas that I know well. I love it. What did you think of it?"

He said, "At first I didn't think I'd get it, because it's in Italian, and I can only speak Spanish and English, but after a while I realized that if I just took in the visual things and opened myself up emotionally to the music, it would all sink in, and it did. I cried when Mimi died. Really."

He not only liked the opera, but he admits that it made him cry. Wow, I thought.

So finally Antonio finished the test, and I said bye to them and left. As I drove home, I couldn't stop thinking about what had just happened. I had caught myself being prejudiced. I am always disdaining prejudiced people, and there I was, being prejudiced.

Sure, he's Guatemalan, and lives in a bad neighborhood, and wears huge, baggy T-shirts and jeans and he piles on the gold chains, and shares a one-room apartment with 5 other people, but that doesn't mean that he can't read Macbeth and write about Faust and cry at La Boheme.

Conversely, there are many white kids living in big houses in the suburbs, who dress like preppies, and, if assigned to read Macbeth, would only read the Cliff Notes. They would hire a nerd to write a paper about Faust, and would have to be dragged to La Boheme, most likely falling asleep in the middle of an aria. Yet, would I have winced at the thought of tutoring them at first-sight? Of course I wouldn't have.

So today, the tutor learned a lesson.

Never judge a teen by his cover.

STOP THE WAR ON THANKSGIVING!!

2009-11-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

Today I went to the Pier 1 in my neighborhood to do a little shopping for my apartment, and before I could even enter the store, I saw on the windows the image of a Christmas tree, and the image of a Christmas stocking, and the words, "Make Christmas magic. Kick back & celebrate."

Today is November 2, 2009.

It is only two days after Halloween, and already the Christmas onslaught has begun.

I am so sick of this. Every year it gets worse and worse, earlier and earlier.

As I walked into the store, I could hear Christmas carols blasting over the sound system. The first one that I heard was the one that I hate the most: "It's the most wonderful time of the year... there'll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing when loved ones are near...!" Why is it that they never play the carols that I like, the lovely church carols, like O, Holy Night or Hark, the Herald Angels Sing? Could it be that those songs aren't conducive to buying?

I tried to tune it out, and looked for the things that I need for my apartment. The colors of my living room are earth tones, yet it seemed to me that the only colors that I could see today, at the usually earthy Pier 1, were red, green and gold. I got so annoyed by the premature yuletide assault on my senses, that I grabbed a couple of somewhat muted earth-toned cloth place mats, and went to the cashier to buy them and get the hell out of there.

As she was ringing me up, I said, "I know it's not your fault, but the Christmas decorations and music are really unbearable. It's not even close to being Thanksgiving yet, much less the day after it. It offends me so much that I don't want to spend more time browsing. I just want to leave after 10 minutes." She said something like, "Believe me, I know. I've been having to listen to these carols for over a week, and there's still two more months 'til the Christmas season is over." I looked at her with compassion and said, "You mean they were playing Christmas carols before Halloween?!?" "Oh ya," she said, rolling her eyes. I told her to hang in there and left with my place mats.

As I walked home, I thought about what she had told me. They were playing Christmas carols before Halloween. My heart sank. The situation has become more dire than I had imagined. Before, I had felt that Halloween had become the last firewall that shielded the rest of the year from Christmas consumerism.

When I was a child and a teen, the firewall was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a unique and separate holiday. It wasn't Christmas, Act 1. Thanksgiving had its own little season, which lasted from November 1st to Thanksgiving Day. I distinctly remember seeing autumn colors as the November color scheme. Cornucopias, turkeys, Pilgrims and Indians were what were seen in November, not elves, reindeer, stockings and boughs of holly. We used to make turkeys out of pine cones and decorate the dinner table with them during the month of November.

I have photos of Thanksgiving 1973. I was 5. I had made a Native American vest from a brown paper grocery bag, and painted tribal symbols on it with watercolors. I made a headband with paper feathers. I dressed as an Indian rather than a Pilgrim because, even in kindergarten, I was a bleeding-heart liberal, and I intrinsically sensed that the Indians had gotten a raw deal from Whitey. But I would have easily dressed as a Pilgrim before I ever imagined dressing as a North Pole elf. Why? Because it was the Thanksgiving season, naturally. Once Thanksgiving Day was over, then the Christmas season began.

I find it curious that Bill O'Reilly, and other right-wing nuts, rail against the "War on Christmas" when the real war has been against Thanksgiving, and Christmas has won.

Perhaps I'm being partial. I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. There's something very simple and beautiful about it. You partake in a feast with family, friends and often acquaintances and strangers, in thanks for the blessings of life. There are so many rotten aspects to life, but on Thanksgiving, you focus on the blessings, as you feed your body with hearty, delicious food. To me, there is no greater way to express the bounty of life than with a really big, satisfying meal.

In addition to recognition of thanks via eating, there's also the friendship of the opposites, of the unknown. The Pilgrims and Indians were like oil and water. They really didn't know, understand or trust each other, but they were able to gather together for one meal, in peace and brotherhood, because they shared a common thanks for a good harvest.

Unfortunately, that one meal did not symbolize the relations between the European settlers and the indigenous Americans in general, but hey: for one meal, things were as they should have been.

I can identify with that first Thanksgiving. For most of my life, my family has lived in Houston and Miami. During the years that I've lived in New York City and Los Angeles, I've often not been able to go home for Thanksgiving. But it hasn't really mattered, because there were always others who couldn't go home for Thanksgiving either, and we would band together and make a big feast. Usually at these expat gatherings, I'd be friends with a few of the people, and the rest would be strangers. I liked eating Thanksgiving with strangers. That sense of breaking bread with people whom you don't really know, it made it feel more like the Pilgrims and the Indians, back in 16-whenever-it-was.

Another thing that I like about Thanksgiving is that anyone can celebrate it. It doesn't matter which country or culture you come from, what your religion is, or if you even have a religion or a belief in God at all. The recognition of the good things in life knows no borders and has no specific faith.

But perhaps most importantly, what I like about Thanksgiving, is that it cannot be tainted by consumerism. Besides buying the turkey, or the yams, or the green bean casserole, or the pumpkin pie, there's really not much else that you can buy, besides a bottle of wine or some after-dinner cognac. Thanksgiving has not been contaminated by capitalism, like Christmas, nor does it seem like it ever will be.

Capitalism has forever changed Christmas. I don't mean to start sounding like Emma Goldman, but it's a holiday that has been marketed to the masses to the extent that the very seasonal parameters of the holiday have been pushed back two months. We start the season earlier because we start hearing the carols in restaurants and shops earlier, the malls are decked with decorations earlier, we start seeing commercials on TV earlier, and so we start trimming the tree earlier and earlier and earlier.

Let me give you an example of how out-of-touch modern society has become with what Christmas was traditionally in the Anglo world. You of course know the famous song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Well, do you know what those 12 days are? What days on the calendar are the 12 days of Christmas? Is your mind drawing a blank? Give up? Well, the first day of Christmas is December 25, Christmas Day, and the twelfth day is January 6, Epiphany. Do you even know what Epiphany is?

In the West, Epiphany celebrates the day when the Magi visited the baby Jesus. According to Christian legend, the Magi (or Three Wise Men) arrived 12 days after Jesus was born, although you'd never know it, because most modern Christmas paraphernalia shows them arriving on Christmas Eve. Anyway, for this reason, the trimming of the Christmas tree was done on Christmas Eve, because the Christmas season began the following day, and lasted 12 days, ending on Epiphany.

Today it is very rare to see a Christmas tree that is still standing by January 6th. In fact, last year on my block, I saw several discarded trees on the curb on December 26th. Not that I blame them. By the day after Christmas, they had had their trees up for almost two months. They were probably sick of the sight of them.

Please don't think of me as Ebeneezer Scrooge. If people want to have a Christmas season that lasts longer than 12 days, fine. In some non-Anglo countries, it lasts 40 days, but it begins on Christmas day, and ends on February 2nd, which is the Christian feast of Candlemas.

But not in America, baby! If we're gonna prolongate the holiday, we're gonna make it buyer-friendly! You need time to buy gifts before Christmas Day, not after it, so from now on the holidays will precede Christmas, by two months! Screw the holy aspects of it. Christmas day is the finale, not the opening act.

Halloween is the kick-off to BUY BUY BUY season, Thanksgiving is incorporated into the monster, and we are bombarded with images that have nothing to do with Christ, but have everything to do with Santa.

By New Year's Eve, most Americans have spent an pretty huge sum of money, and spend the month of January tightening their belts and trying to recuperate, completely unaware that January is, in fact, the traditional Christmas season according to the Christian calendar, and that Christmas is not the holiest Christian day (Easter is).

But who am I to complain? Although I was raised Catholic, I am no longer a believing Christian. I am a happy Agnostic. I'll let my Christian friends try to pry Christ out of Santa's arms, if they care to. He's their god, not mine.

I'm writing this manifesto in defense of Thanksgiving, which is everybody's holiday, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostic or what have you.

I want to save Thanksgiving from the Christmas of the Capitalists, not the Christmas of the Christians. The Christmas of the Christians begins a month after Thanksgiving. The Christmas of the Capitalists begins a month before it, the day after Halloween. The way things are going, within 20 years, it'll begin the day after the Fourth of July. To prevent that, though, we must first save Thanksgiving. Save Thanksgiving!

I've had it. This war.

STOP THE WAR ON THANKSGIVING!!

A Very Important Death

2009-10-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

Do you recognize the young lady in the portrait above? Of course you don't. Perhaps you'll recognize her name, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales. Does that help? Of course it doesn't. What American knows who Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales was? In fact, I'm wondering, what average Briton knows who she was?

It's not surprising that she's virtually unknown today. The poor girl died at the age of 21, back in 1817, before she was able to achieve anything. She could have achieved a lot, had she lived. After all, she was meant to be the queen regnant of England. Had she lived, she would have assumed the throne in 1830, when her father, King George IV died.

Had Princess Charlotte lived, Queen Victoria would never have been born, and therefore, Queen Elizabeth II would never have been born. For that matter, the English kings Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI would never have been born. Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry would also, never have been born.

A lot of the royalty of other European countries would never have been born had Princess Charlotte lived... Kaiser Wilhem II of Germany, the czarina Alexandra of Russia, King George II of Greece, King Alexander I of Greece, King Paul I of Greece, King Constantine II of Greece, King Olav V of Norway, King Carol II of Romania, King Michael of Romania, King Harald V of Norway,
King Peter II of Yugoslavia, King Carl XVI of Sweden, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and King Juan Carlos of Spain.

All of these crowned heads are descendents of Queen Victoria. I looked on a royal website and saw that Queen Victoria, at present, has 1,056 descendents. None of them would have been born had Princess Charlotte lived, because again, Queen Victoria would never have been born had Princess Charlotte lived. There never would have been a Victorian Age.

The story behind the birth of Victoria, the world's longest reigning female monarch, is very interesting to me. But to even approach her birth, we must start with the death of her cousin, Princess Charlotte, because although Charlotte was her first-cousin, she was old enough to have been her mother.

Here's the story. Princess Charlotte's grandfather was King George III. He was the English king who lost the American colonies, the king whom our founding fathers rebelled against. It's kind of great that he was such lousy king to the colonists, because had he not been, the USA may never had been born.

But I digress. Back to George III.

George III had 15 children.With 15 children, one would assume that the succession to the throne would be secure. Surely 15 children would eventually produce 30, 45, even 60 grandchildren. Well, 57 grandchildren were produced, but all of them were illegitimate, except one: Princess Charlotte Augusta. So for royal purposes, George III's 15 children only produced one grandchild.

Princess Charlotte was produced by George III's oldest son, the Prince of Wales, also named George. As the heir to the throne, he did his duty and produced an heir, or rather, an heiress. The Prince of Wales had a hideous marriage with his wife, Princess Caroline of Brunswick. No male children (who would knock Charlotte out of the line of succession) would be produced by the couple, because after Charlotte was born, they promptly stopped having sex with each other, due to an intense, mutual loathing which lasted decades.

So Charlotte was it. The only legitimate heir of her generation of the family, a princess with no brothers or sisters, but with 56 illegitimate first-cousins.

From girlhood, the common people knew that one day she would be their queen, and she was adored, the darling of the nation. The young, virtuous princess offered a sharp contrast to her royal uncles, who were known for their financial debts, public scandals, bastard offspring and disreputable private lives.

She married a dashing and handsome prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and the lovely couple were the pride of the kingdom. Then came the joyous news that the princess was pregnant; the next generation's monarch could be produced in a matter of months. True, she had suffered two previous miscarriages, but this time it should go smoothly. Her doctors closely monitored the new pregnancy, putting her on a severe diet, and performing on her the questionable practice of bloodletting.

Well, the due date came, and Princess Charlotte went into labor. She labored. And labored. And labored and labored and labored. She labored for 50 hours. Two full days of labor. Finally, her laborious labor produced a 9-pound baby boy. The boy would have been king one day, had he not been born dead. The plump, stillborn baby was taken away, and the exhausted Charlotte lived for another six hours, and died.

Princess Charlotte, dead!

The nation descended into a maelstrom of mourning. Do you think the Brits were overwrought by Princess Diana's death in 1997? You should have seen them when Princess Charlotte died in 1817. After all, Diana's death did not affect the succession to the throne. There was Prince William, Prince Harry, and the two daughters of Prince Andrew. But when Charlotte died, that was it. Her father and mother were still married, but estranged, and they were old. They would produce no more children. Charlotte's uncles were all that was left. The throne was destined to be inhereted by dissolute uncle after dissolute uncle.

UNLESS... one of those dissolute uncles could produce a legitimate heir!

There were six of them, and three of them were married. Of the three married uncles, two were married to women who were too old to have secure pregnancies, and the third was in a morganatic marriage, meaning their offspring could hold no royal title.

Of the three unmarried uncles, two were involved in long-term relationships with their mistress, and the third seemed to have little interest in women.

So it was up to the two uncles with mistresses to dump their mistress, marry a princess, and produce an heir that would save the crown from oblivion.

The elder of the two mistress-involved brothers was William, Duke of Clarence. The younger was Edward, Duke of Kent.

William had been in a 20-year relationship with a well-known actress of the day, and together, they had 10 bastard children and happy family. After Princess Charlotte's death, he left his happy bastard family and married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen.

Edward on the other hand, had been in a 27-year relationship with French Madame. After Charlotte's death, he bid her adieu and married the sister of his dead niece's widower, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.

Within two years of Charlotte's death, both brothers had pregnant wives. In March of 1819, William's wife gave birth to a baby girl, whom they called Charlotte, in honor of her dead cousin. In March of that same year, Edward's wife also gave birth to a baby girl, Alexandrina Victoria (or as she was simply called, Victoria).

William was the elder brother, so it was his daughter, Charlotte, who would one day become queen, except for one problem: Charlotte died on the day of her birth, so Victoria, the daughter of the younger brother, was heiress presumptive-- for the time being. William and his wife would not let one dead infant stop them from having others, and William's wife was soon pregnant again. In December of 1820, little Victoria was knocked out of the line of succession by the birth of her younger cousin, Princess Elizabeth.

Little Elizabeth would have grown up to become Queen Elizabeth II, had she not died three months after her birth. As a result, the world would have to wait another 132 years for a Queen Elizabeth II.

What the world got in her place was Queen Victoria.

I imagine that Edward would have been awed by the fact that he, the fourth-youngest son of George III, would one day become king, and that his daughter, Victoria, would succeed him. It would become inevitable, as time passed without his older brother producing any living children. But the inevitable didn't happen to him. Edward would not see time pass, because he died 8 months after Victoria was born. He would never become king.

Upon the death of George III, his eldest son, George the Prince of Wales, became King George IV. He reigned for ten years and died. The next in line for the throne would have been his daughter Charlotte, but she was dead. Next in line. His brother Frederick, but he was dead. Next in line. Frederick's children, but he had none. Next in line. His brother William. He was alive, and he became King William IV. He reigned for seven years and died. The next in line for the throne would have been his daughter Charlotte, but she was dead. Next in line. His daughter Elizabeth, but she was dead. Next in line. His brother Edward, but he was dead. Next in line. Edward's daughter Victoria, and she was alive.

Victoria, the 18-year-old girl at the end of the line, was alive and well, and she reigned as queen for 63 years. She resided over an empire that spread so far across the globe, that the sun never set on it. Her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren have become kings and queens that have greatly influenced modern history.

Yet none of these monarchs would have been born, had Victoria not been born. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V would never had led Germany and the UK through World War I, had Victoria not been born, and been their grandmother. There would never have been a Victorian era, had there been no Victoria. We wouldn't even have the tradition of Christmas trees outside of Germany, had Victoria and her German husband Prince Albert not introduced them to the Anglo world in the 19th century. These, and so many other historical and cultural effects would never have happened, IF....

...Victoria's older cousin Charlotte had not died in childbirth, changing world history irrevocably.

I believe that the death of the forgotten Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales is one of the most important deaths in world history.

Food for thought as you decorate your Christmas tree this holiday season.

Oh Boy, Balloon Boy!

2009-10-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

I'm hearing in my head, the first few notes of the song Love Story..... "Where do I begin, to tell the story of...."

BALLOON BOY.

Well, perhaps not tell the story, because pretty much everybody in the USA and a few other countries knows the story inside and out.

What I'll attempt to do is tell you how the Balloon Boy circus has affected me personally. Aren't you oh-so interested?

I'm hearing another song in my head... "Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon? Would you like to glide in my beautiful balloon? We could float among the stars together, you and I, for we can fly, we can flyyyyyyyy, UP, UP and awayyyy in my beautiful, my beautiful balloooooooooon......"

I've been humming that song intermittently for... how many days now...? Since last Thursday, when the Heene family of Colorado blew into my life on the autumn breeze.

I was at home, listening to The Randi Rhodes Show on the radio. She stopped talking about politics for a minute and said something to the effect of, "If you're near a TV set, turn it on, you've got to see this. There's a little boy alone in a balloon and it is soaring across the sky. This is horrible. I sure hope he gets down okay."

I rolled my eyes and thought, Oh God, the news will now be canceled for the rest of the day until they get this little boy down.

It's not that I didn't care about the boy. I of course hoped he'd be rescued. But I instinctively knew that CNN, MSNBC and FOX would be carrying it live, milking it for all it was worth, and that maybe even ABC, CBS and NBC will have interrupted their regular programming to carry the balloon chase.

None of those news channels give a rat's ass about the boy's life. I mean sure, the news anchors, the reporters, and other employees care, they're human after all, but the news channels themselves were covering the story live, because it was dramatic television viewing. A 6-year-old boy whose life is at risk in a more mundane way would not have attracted continuous live coverage on channel after channel.

Let's say that a normal child, not the son or daughter of a celebrity, just a normal suburban kid, a boy, named, say, Falcon Heene, had accidentally swallowed some poison and had been rushed to the hospital with doctors fastiduously trying to save his life...

Do you really think that all the news channels would be planted outside the hospital with their cameras pointed at the building, canceling all other news coverage for two hours straight? No. A normal boy's life in that case, is not worthy of the coverage, but a boy in a BALLOON, well, that's a different story!

It was on all the channels for the thrill of it.

After hearing Randi mention it a couple of times more, I gave in, and turned on the TV.

The very first thing I saw was what looked like a giant, inflated Jiffy-Pop popcorn pan, zooming across the sky. My jaw dropped. I had expected to see a typical, classic, hot air balloon with a basket underneath, like the one that the Wizard flew away in, at the end of The Wizard of Oz. I expected it to be loftily floating in the sky, quite placidly, with the boy in basket, clearly visible. Instead I saw this foreign-looking object soaring through the heavens at great speed. What IS that, I thought, and where's the boy? Inside it, like Jiffy-Pop popcorn?

I sat down and became immersed in the spectacle. The more I looked at it, the more it began to look like a silver chef's hat... then like a flying saucer... I started to wonder if there could really be a boy in there. The wind was blowing that balloon effortlessly, it was traveling like a bullet through the air. That boy must be as light as a feather, I thought.

I got on Facebook, wondering how many comments I'd see about it on the news feed of my homepage. I remembered how when Michael Jackson was dying, there were lots of comments on Facebook as the story unfolded.

There were a few about the balloon boy. Most of them saying things like, "Pray for that poor, air-borne child." I wrote something like, "How many of you are watching the boy trapped in a UFO-looking balloon which is flying across the country? It's dreadful!"

I hadn't been watching for long when the balloon began to make its inevitable descent. Within a couple of minutes of my writing that Facebook status, the balloon descended slowly, and not in a free fall. It was gliding softly down onto the ground. Whew, I thought, if there's a boy in there, he'll be okay. That was a gentle landing.

Well, the moment that balloon touched terra firma, there appeared a man, then a crew of men, on the ground running towards it. The last thing they seemed to have on their mind was saving a trapped child. They treated that balloon as though it were a wild animal that they were trying to rope into submission. They actually threw ropes over it, they wrestled it, they dragged it, it almost looked as though they were kicking it.

I said out loud to my TV screen, "Uh, are you guys gonna like, look for the boy? Isn't the point of this recovery mission to recover the boy, not the balloon?" I wondered if maybe someone should call one of those guy's cell phones and say, "Perhaps you haven't been watching TV, but there's supposed to be a little boy in there, that's why half the country is watching you, live. I suggest you gently but quickly open that balloon and look inside."

After a few minutes it dawned on me that there was no boy in that balloon.

I got on Facebook and wrote, "THE BALLOON BOY IS A BOGUS STORY!! FOOLED US!!

My two statuses garnered me about 20 comments in 20 minutes. Many people were transfixed by the story.

I looked at the TV again, knowing what would come next. THE SEARCH IS ON! WHERE'S THE BOY?

Ah shit, I thought, all my political talk shows on MSNBC are gonna be canceled today because they're gonna be looking for that missing boy. He's probably hiding somewhere in the house, because it's his fault that the balloon blew off, and he's afraid of getting a spanking. I turned off the TV in disgust.

A few hours later, I heard on the radio that the little boy had been found. He had been hiding in a cardboard box in the attic. I should join the Missing Persons Bureau, I thought. Then I heard that the boy's name was Falcon. Falcon? I thought, Who the hell names their kid FALCON?

That night, I was flipping though the TV channels, and saw that the boy and his family were being interviewed for the full hour on Larry King Live. The Heene family exclusive!

I was not going to watch it, but within a minute of having it on, I became drawn in. There was something "off" about that family. I have an ingrained bullshit detector, and it went *BEEP*BEEP*BEEP*

The father. It was the father. I honed in on him. His demeanor, his voice, his eyes, everything about him made me suspicious. He seemed like total bullshit artist who knew he was skating on thin ice. The wife raised my eyebrows, too. I couldn't put my finger on it, but she seemed compliant and complicitous. It was just a gut feeling that I got from watching her. In between the couple were their 3 sons. There was something bizarre about them, too. The boy in the middle kept coughing. The coughs seemed fake. "Are you okay?' the mother kept asking him. Yes, he'd nod, then he'd keep coughing, passively. It's an act, I thought, he wants to be the center of attention. In this family, it's all about attention.

I was beginning to think that maybe I was being too harsh on the Heenes, that my imagination was running away with me, UNTIL... little Falcon blew the lid off the story.

Wolf Blitzer, who was substituting for Larry King, asked if, when Falcon was hiding, if he heard anything, if he heard his parents screaming his name. The boy didn't have an audio feed, so his father asked him if he heard them calling for him. He said yes. He was then asked why he didn't come out then, and Falcon said,

"You guys said that, um, we did this for the show."

I leaned forward and thought, WHAT did he just say?

I could see the father's heart sinking. He looked suddenly full of dread. The mother said, "No," in a helpless, nervous voice. Neither of the parents asked him to elaborate. They tried to skirt his remark. Wolf Blitzer went on blithley asking them other questions. I said aloud to the TV, "Uh, Wolf, didn't you just hear what that kid said?!? 'We did this for the show,' so how about a follow-up question, like, 'Mr. Heene what did your son mean when he said you did it for the show? Will you please ask him that?'" But Wolf didn't! I was going crazy. The whole hoax could have been exposed right then and there by asking the boy that question at that moment. Wolf blew it.

As the interview continued, I kept focused on the father. It was so obvious to me that his mind was elsewhere. He was superficially answering the remaining questions, trying to keep it together, while in the back of his mind he was thinking things like, Shit, we are so busted. I can't believe Falcon said that. I told him what he was supposed to say. Now what? The whole nation has heard it. I wonder if what Falcon said was really audible or noticeable. Shit what am I gonna do? Thank God Wolf didn't notice it and ask me about it. We're exposed. What will we do to cover it up...?

The whole thing was so transparent to me, and as the show dragged on, I resigned myself to the fact that that idiot Wolf Blitzer was not going to confront the Heenes on what Falcon said. But I was wrong. E-mails had been coming in to CNN, and obviously many viewers were asking about Falcon's comment, because in the very last segment, due to being prodded, Wolf Einstein Blitzer finally asked what Falcon meant by saying, "We did this for the show." Mr. Heene gave some bullshit reply, and so Wolf asked him to ask Falcon directly why he said that.

The father paused, with a look of panic. You could feel his panic. It was palpable. He hemmed and hawed and finally said, "Falcon, they want to know why you were in the attic..." then it looked like he was about to ask him the question, but that he just couldn't bring himself to do so, because he feared the boy would tell the truth. He paused, and asked Wolf, "Say--say it again...?" and Wolf repeated the question that did not need repeating: what did Falcon mean by "We did this for the show"?

And then, the father refused to ask his son the question! He changed the topic, telling Wolf how appalled he was that their story was being questioned, that he didn't even want to do this interview, and look how he was being treated, with suspicion, of all the nerve! There was such tension in Richard Heene's voice. He sounded like he was unraveling. He looked like he was unraveling.

After expressing his indignation, Wolf apologized, basically told them how wonderful they were, and ended the show.

After that, I was so sure that the whole thing was a hoax. I had heard that he had been involved in reality TV. The man is obviously an attention-whore. The kids were his tools, his wife, his accomplice.

I thought about the boy, Falcon. He was so jittery, he couldn't sit still for more than a minute. I know he's only 6, but still, even for a 6-year-old, he seemed a bit wacky. I thought about what he said. "You guys said we did this for the show." I became convinced that, in addition to being an attention-whore, the father was an idiot. I mean really, if you're going to pull a hoax on national TV, you don't choose for your accomplice a goofy 6-year-old boy. Children have loose tongues.

When I watched a replay of Countdown with Keth Olbermann later that night, I shot a video of the Balloon Boy segment with the volume turned off. I played The 5th Dimension singing, "Up, Up and Away" in the background, as I was filming. I laughed. I thought the whole story so hilarious. Then I uploaded the video onto YouTube. I gave it the title, Up, Up and Away, Balloon Boy! It's the first time that I've ever uploaded a video onto YouTube.

That was Balloon Boy, Day One. The next day, was to be even more bizarre...

Once again, the noon hour had arrived without my having turned on the TV. Once again I was listening to my girl Randi Rhodes talk politics on the radio. Right away, she started talking about Balloon Boy. What she was talking about initially though, was not about the Wolf Blitzer snafu.

She spoke about the vomit. Yes, the vomit. The family had been on two morning shows, Good Morning America and Today. He had vomited on both shows. On camera. He had vomited. He had vomited on both shows, on camera. I couldn't resist. I turned on the TV to see if they'd be showing video clips of it. Then I looked on YouTube. Eureka!

I can't describe how hard I laughed when I saw Falcon vomit, while his father tried, in his yeoman manner, to trudge on in their charade. How can I express the way I laughed? Let me just put it this way: I scared my cat. That's how loudly I laughed.

But back to Richard and Mayumi Heene and their three sons.

I don't know which of the shows they did first. I think it was Good Morning America, because, if memory serves me correctly, on the Today show, they had a Tupperware container at the ready for him to puke in, whereas on Good Morning America, the boy was sent off to the bathroom to do his puking.

This strongly suggests that they were caught unawares on Good Morning America, and that on Today, they were prepared to deal with the vomit to come. My conclusion: Good Morning America first, Today, second.

The up-chuck drama truly fascinated me. First of all, didn't the father say that he didn't even want to do Larry King Live, and that he only did it because it could be the first and last show they'd do? So okay, he says that, and the next day, bright 'n early, he's doing Good Morning America AND Today? Isn't he proving himself to be full of shit then?

It was actually kind of sad to watch. As his son vomited, Richard Heene could see the narrative being stolen from him again, second day in a row. His 6-year-old accomplice was becoming his worst enemy. His face looked pained as his son's puke interrupted Daddy's talking, but the pain was not for Falcon, it was for himself. The whole gig was unraveling on live TV. Again.

The mother's behavior seemed to be lacking in all maternal instinct. They were on TV, that's all that mattered. Her boy could have been having an epileptic fit, and she would have ignored it, and soldiered on the with interview. Of course she would. Cameras are rolling.

This was Mayumi-as-mother on TV that day...

On Good Morning America, Falcon kept saying he wanted to vomit. It was Dianne Sawyer who finally suggested that the boy go to the bathroom. Off to the bathroom he marched, all alone, while his mother obliviously sat in her chair. Dianne Sawyer said something like, "Mayumi, perhaps you want to go with him," and Mayumi said, "It's okay...?"

WHAT DO YOU MEAN "IT'S OKAY...?" FUCK THE INTERVIEW! YOUR KID IS SICK! BE HIS MOTHER AND GO HELP HIM VOMIT! YOU DON'T NEED DIANE SAWYER'S PERMISSION! GOOD MORNING AMERICA WILL SURVIVE WITHOUT YOU!

Perhaps I'm being too hard on poor Mayumi. After all, by the time they sat down for Meredith Vieira on the Today show, Mayumi was prepared with that Tupperware container, plus a handful of toilet paper. She was equipped. That's motherly of her. It's not as motherly as saying, "My son has been vomiting, so he's going to sit out this interview. He'll be in bed, not on TV," but still, it's motherly in a way.

So they're doing the interview, and Falcon is sitting next to his father and starts writhing his body. He closes his eyes. He leans forward. Whatever words are coming out of the father's mouth are completely immaterial, because all I could focus on was that boy and if more vomit was going to exit from mouth.

The boy delivered. He said, "Mom, I'm gonna vomit." Mayumi immediately held out the Tupperware container, Falcon puked, his brothers said, "Ooooooh!" and Mayumi wiped the vomit off his mouth with a long trail of toilet paper. Meredith Vieira kept asking the questions oblivious to the puke fest, Falcon vomited again, and Richard kept answering them, saying again how offended he was at the idea that this was all a hoax. Meredith suggested that they take a break, seeing as how little Falcon was not feeling well, and cut to commercial.

That was day two. Do I even want to write about day three? I'm not sure.

(To be continued...?)

Friday, September 14, 2001

2009-09-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Three days ago was the 8th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. I lived in New York City then, about 2 miles from the Twin Towers. Sadly, it takes the anniversaries to get me to seriously think about that day and the months after, and to delve into my mind and relive it via my memories.

When I do think about it though, I have more than my memories to draw upon. I have my photos. I took so many photos of those days. I have my scrapbook, in which I keep mementos of my time volunteering for the Red Cross at the Pier 94 Family Assistance Center, from October 2001 to January of 2002. Above all, I have my journal. I started writing a journal in July of 2001, and man, did I ever continue writing once September 11 came along.

Each day since this past Friday, I've been reading a journal entry per day, the entry for that day, 8 years ago. Today I read my entry for September 14, 2001. Even though I wrote it on the 14th, I was describing the events of the previous day. My journal entries were so long, that I was always writing a day behind. What I wrote on the 14th was about the 13th.

Anyway, I've decide it to type it in below...

Friday, Sept. 14 2001--

Yesterday the wind changed directions, and rather than blowing Mary Poppins our way to magically solve all our problems with a metaphoric spoonful of sugar, it instead brought us noxious World Trade Center smoke. The air downtown had a brown haze, and everywhere, a stink was in the air.

I couldn't think of a more unwelcome and depressing addition to our trying times, but there WAS one-- the fliers that began to appear all over town that had on them photos of people who are missing-- people who went into the Twin Towers on Tuesday, and haven't been seen since. How I wished that there weren't so many. How I hoped to see on the news, Saint Vincent's Hospital, flooded with survivors who needed medical treatment. How I wished to see a convoy of ambulances rushing the multitude who had been pulled out of the rubble to treatment. This however was not the scene at the hospitals. Patients were only trickling in, and those who were, were rescue workers who had gotten injured. I began to realize that the vast majority of those missing, on those fliers, perhaps all, were not actually missing, but dead.

It was a morbid day... the smoke in the air, the silence in the streets, the fliers, the people walking around with masks made of cloth over their mouths and noses. I wondered if I should go back to the apartment and get that mask that they gave me Tuesday afternoon, and wear it as I walked around town. Almost everybody else had them on. Could there be asbestos in the air? And if so, could those simple cloth masks actually keep it out of our lungs?

I walked up to Beth Israel hospital on 17th Street to see if I could donate blood there. They said no. While there, I could see this big cardboard "wall" that they had erected, with a concentration of photos and personal information of those missing. So many faces, so many, so diverse, all ages, races and social levels.

This was one thing that struck me later in the day, when seeing all their faces and their short "bios"-- all the different jobs that they held in the Twin Towers... an executive, next to a trader, next to a line cook, next to a salesman, next to a security officer, next to a janitor, next to a secretary... and I was particularly struck by the number of young people, many of them younger than I, people, guys and girls born in '76, '77, '78... people who were younger than the Twin Towers themselves. For the first time, the emotions started to hit as my eyes scanned the plethora of diverse faces of the missing. Tears started to well up in my eyes.

I crossed the "border" back into the forbidden terrain that is Manhattan south of 14th Street, flashing my ID to prove I live on 1oth Street. But I didn't go home, and the further south I walked, the more I saw people wearing masks. The air really was bad, it smelled awful, like burnt plastic or burnt tires or something. I've never smelled anything like it in my life.

I overheard someone on the street saying that they were taking blood at at some place on Avenue B, so I headed east. When I got to 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, I saw a woman in a white van who had stopped, and was answering questions from pedestrians. She had information on blood donation. She said that there was no more blood donation in Alphabet City, but that at Webster Hall they were going to set up a volunteer center later in the afternoon.

I decided to walk over to the Hudson River to see if there was anything that I could do closer to the disaster site. Who knows, I thought, maybe they still have civilian volunteers for search & rescue still camping out in front of that skyscraper with the lawn, just like on Tuesday when I was one of them. I walked downtown along the West Side Highway until I wasn't allowed to go any further. So much for search & rescue...

Luckily enough, right there I saw a large group of people lined up in a sort of assembly line, making sandwiches for the rescue workers. Another option was simply standing alongside the highway, clapping and cheering for the rescue workers as they enter and leave the scene in their trucks. It made me so proud to be a New Yorker-- those people standing by the road, waiting in the sun for the opportunity to applaud emergency vehicles. However, I preferred to help-out by making sandwiches. Well, they didn't need me to make sandwiches, but they did put me to work by putting muffins into plastic baggies. There were like six large cardboard boxes filled with big, plump, gourmet muffins-- the expensive type that sell for $2 a piece or more.

Two women and I organized ourselves for the bagging of muffins. There were so many donated items-- bread, mustard, meats, cheese, jars of peanut butter, milk-- so many items, donated by restaurants, groceries, gourmet shops... also plastic wrap and plastic baggies.

As we wrapped and bagged items, we realized that the generic brands of plastic wrap and baggies were not as good as the name brands. Saran Wrap really DID cling much better and was easier to maneuver. Ziplock baggies really did seal more easily and better. We found ourselves discarding the donated boxes of generic wrappings in favor of the better name brands.

"Ziplock baggies really do seal better, and they'll keep the muffins fresh for many days", said one woman who was in front of me, to the woman who was next to her. I started to wearily laugh. Here these two women were, saying this, and behind their shoulders, close-by in the background, were the smouldering ruins of the World Trade Center... the persistent column of smoke drifting up into the sky, emergency vehicles on the highway behind them... my God, what a TV commercial that would make. They were basically saying a commercial script impromptu, endorsing Saran Wrap and Ziplock.

Smiling, I imitated them to them, using a velvetty commercial voice: "When YOUR city has been attacked by airliners hijacked by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, there is no better plastic wrap for your rescue workers' sandwiches than SARAN WRAP. And ZIPLOCK baggies seal better, and keep gourmet muffins fresh for many days." They laughed. We needed to laugh.

After having bagged the muffins, I helped with the ice. It had arrived, and it was my job to gather all the sandwich meats and put them on ice. Then I gathered up all the bread. The sun was moving westward, so we had to move the canopy-tent over so that the food would still have shade. After that, there didn't seem to be anything else to do. I had already taken pictures of the sandwich-making, so I took some pictures of the people cheering along the side of the road for the rescue workers.

After that, I walked north along the Husdon, all the way to the Chelsea Piers, to see if there was something that I could do there. I had heard that they were accepting donations there. Maybe I could help by sorting out the donations, or by moving boxes of donations, I thought. Well, I never even got to inquire. The police wouldn't even let me near the Chelsea Piers. When I arrived, they shouted, "Everybody head east! Out of this area! Go east!" Go east? There was nowhere else to go BUT east; we were at the Hudson River.

I did as I was told and walked into Chelsea. Since Chelsea was north of 14th Street, it had private vehicles on the street, like newspaper delivery trucks, so I checked to see if I could find any foreign newspapers like El Pais or La Repubblica on the newsstands. There were none. Suddenly it dawned on me: the airports are still closed. Delivery trucks are a moot point when delivery PLANES can't land.

I stopped at the Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue and bought some postcards of the Twin Towers, because soon THEY'LL no longer exist, either. Then I bought a T-shirt that had been printed before the disaster. It had an image of the Twin Towers on it. It's still hard to swallow, their absence. I really did love those buildings. I don't care that they had been criticized architecturally. I always thought they were stunning, beautiful-- the way they would change colors with the color of the light in the sky. I'll miss them.

I put on my Walkman and listened to the radio as I walked east. The Chelsea Piers didn't let me near, so maybe I could do something at the Armory on 26th and Lexington, I hoped. I listened to a lot of talk radio as I walked. It was very disturbing to hear so many budding jingos, calling in with comments. Xenophobia littered the airwaves. We're better than this, we Americans, I kept thinking. We're better than this. We are.

I've seen a lot of marvelous, lovely things from Americans these past few days, both on TV elsewhere in the country, and here in New York. But one fault that Americans have always had is this: the inability to see the difference between patriotism and jingoism. It seems to be a fine line that Americans always walk, often falling into the jingo side. Patriotism is fine. I'm moved by the patriotism that I've seen, and I've never felt so patriotic in my life.

New Yorkers I've never really considered to be especially patriotic, if at all. It seems to me that they are citizens of the nation of NYC, and then of the USA. Even on Tuesday, I didn't feel so much that the USA had been attacked. I felt that WE had been attacked-- we New Yorkers. It wasn't until the day dragged on, and I had time to think, that I thought of it as a national thing.

In these days though, I've seen New Yorkers wearing the flag-- people who at first glance, would never seem the "patriotic type". It feels good, but God, it's a fine line, and I fear that jingoism, as always in the USA, is showing its ugly face. I hope that this time, we can keep it under control and not let it consume us, as it did when German-Americans suffered in World War I, and when Japanese-Americans suffered in World War II.

When I got to the Armory, I was totally shocked. There, along the walls of 26th Street, from avenue to avenue, were photos of the missing. The number of photos assembled at Beth Israel Hospital was nothing compared to this. These were hundreds of photos--HUNDREDS--face after face after face after face after face after face after face... I read as many of them as I could (their date of birth, for which company they worked, in which tower, on which floor, and maybe a few sentences describing them personally), but after a while, it became too overwhelming, too numbing. After a few yards of reading each flier, the faces started to just pass in front of my eyes as if my eyes were a movie camera scanning the faces, or, as if I were a talent agent or casting director, flipping through an endless stack of head shots. Every once in a while, a "head shot" on a flier would catch my eye, and I'd pause to read the info, as if it were an actor's resume'. It was terrible, horrible.

I was finally able to grasp, to begin to comprehend, the magnitude of this tragedy, of this hideous crime. I got that burning sensation on the back of my neck, the same one as I used to have when I was a kid waiting for Dad to give me a belting. I hate that burning sensation in the back of my neck; I haven't felt it in ages.

I stopped looking at all those missing faces, and looked at a chain of people passing boxes along person by person, from a delivery truck to the interior of the Armory. I started to walk over to them to see if I could volunteer, but then I realized with a glance to my watch that it was nearing 5:00, and I had to be at work by 6:30. I walked quickly to my apartment, showered, changed, and walked to work.

I was very tired, especially my legs. I had walked a lot during the day. I passed Webster Hall, and assumed that the volunteer center never materialized. There was only a big flag hanging there, with "God Bless America" written on the marquee. On the way up Park Avenue South, I saw that a lot of businesses and restaurants had put up American flags. They seemed to be all over town. It was strange and heart-warming to see.

Not surprisingly, things were dead at work, and I left early. As I walked home, I passed by Union Square. It was around 10:30, and my God, what a metamorphosis... it was so unbelievably beautiful, so sad, so rich with creativity. Around the huge papier-mache' candle, there was now on the pavement a vast congregation of real candles, all lit, with flowers strewn among them. The glow, the colors... I can't express how lovely the scene is, how touching. I continued on home, changed into more comfortable clothes, grabbed my camera, and headed back to Union Square.

I can't explain how surreal it is to walk around my neighborhood with it being so "still". It's so quiet, so vacant, so dark, like an empty movie set. Walking from my apartment up to Union Square, I walked on 10th Street, passing 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue, up to 12th Street, passing 3rd Avenue, 4th Avenue, Broadway, and up Broadway to Union Square. During the entire walk, I didn't see a single automobile. I walked smack-dab in the middle of the street, not using the sidewalk, no cars in sight, barely a soul walking, even-- at 11:30pm on a Thursday night! Has New York EVER been like this? EVER?

On Broadway, I crossed the 14th Street "border" checkpoint, and suddenly: people. Movement. Sounds. Life. As I approached the square, I could see a group standing almost in a perfect circle, and in the center, a few guys were shouting at each other in a political debate, tossing blame back and forth... "the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Americans, the Saudis, the Taliban, imperialism, socialism, zionism, blah blah blah..." I saw the same thing happening at Union Square the day before, and it disgusts me. Do we need to be shouting at each other and fighting at a moment like this? The victims have not been dead for more than two days! Can't we just reflect on the tragedy and on those who died? And will shouting at some guy whom you don't even know in Union Square solve any of the problems that we're going to face in this new conflict, that we are facing now? SHUT THE FUCK UP.

"Shut the fuck up" was what I felt like saying to the musicians who were showing up at the square with guitars, drums, etc. and playing hippie songs from the '60s. I always liked those songs, but here they seemed banal. They represent another time, another polemic, another world. When they started singing Kum-bai-ya, I rolled my eyes. The '60s ended almost 32 years ago. Let go. Let go and find your own generational identity.

I went up to the main part of the memorial where the sea of candles and flowers were, and knelt down. I wish that they'd cut the music, because SILENCE is much more powerful and eloquent. I tried to mentally shut it out, all the music and reverie from the other said of the square. It was distracting. It felt like Haight-Ashbury circa 1968, not Union Square 2001. The glow of the candles calmed me and awed me. There were so many.

Bordering all the candles along the edges of the circle, were people sitting, kneeling, gazing at the glow, their faces softly illuminated by the flickering lights. Many looked very introspective, immersed in their own feelings. I was very curious to know what thoughts, reflections and emotions were going through their hearts and minds. They just sat there, for such a long time, staring out at the candles. Once I got settled in there, I did the same.

What I saw inspired me to remember all the times that I had visited the Twin Towers, and all the masses of people that I always saw within. I remembered how once, on my first visit there, in February of 1990, I asked myself how many telephones there must be inside the two towers, and how many swivel chairs, and light bulbs, and desks, and how many personal photos on those desks, and how many people sitting behind those desks. Now I thought that again, but with the knowledge that all of those things, and more, came crashing down in maelstrom of destruction on Tuesday. My heart ached as I reflected on this, and so many different things.

Time passed. I saw that some candles had blown out. I grabbed a discarded lighter and started to re-light as many candles that had blown out as possible. Fliers with photos of the missing were placed among the candles. Their faces seemed to look at me, as I did my re-lighting.

I came across a photo that had fallen underneath two candles, and was in danger of being covered by dripping hot wax and ruined. It was the photo of a young man with sandy brown hair, maybe 21 or 22-years-old, squatting down and holding three small children in his arms, posing for the camera with a big smile on his face. In the background are some middle-aged people (his parents and an uncle?) also smiling.

On the back, it said something to the effect of, "Quinner, I pray for the day when you annoy the shit out of me again... I love you and my heart goes out to your family..." Was the young man killed in the Twin Towers? The caption really moved me. "I pray for the day that you annoy the shit out of me again." When someone you care about is forever gone, we appreciate the minute details of their personality-- even the details that annoy the shit out of us. I placed the photo back among the candles, fastening it to the top hat of a wooden Uncle Sam doll, thinking that there, it would be safe from hot candle wax.

Next to me lay a blond girl, no older than 20, using her handbag as a pillow. She stared out at the candles, her eyes wet, her face red and puffy. She was totally engrossed in her thoughts, still and deflated, unaware of the marijuana music that was playing nearby and the debates that were raging on a few yards away. The image of her really sticks with me. She was the personification of mourning to me, that girl.

I walked over to the "Wall of Hope", as it was called, which had on it yet more photos of those who were missing. I started to choke up with tears again, and walked to the western side of the square. I saw on the square's sidewalk near the George Washington statue, comments written in chalk defending Arab-Americans from attacks in recent days across the country. One comment said, "ARABS AREN'T THE ENEMY. TERRORISTS ARE."

Well, a skinny brown-haired guy started to furiously rub it off the pavement with his shoe, and a blond girl with her hair in bun saw him doing it, grabbed his arm, and said, "STOP that! What the hell are you doing?!" He shouted at her, "They're fucking pigs! They're scum! They should be wiped out!" and she said, "You're disgusting! YOU'RE the pig. You're revolting, repulsive--" He blurted, "They're--" and she cut him off: "They're HUMAN BEINGS! Why do you think they come to this country? To escape those Islamic regimes! You are sick."

The night was progressing and Union Square was becoming a public forum of sorts, complete with a microphone and speakers. Crowds were gathering around, listening to people speaking like voters listening to a politician. Most were speakers railing against the idea of war. Some off-handedly blamed the USA for the attacks, saying that our foreign policy has bred these terrorists due to our missteps in the Middle East. It was so much hot air... "Peace!" "We want peace!" "Give peace a chance!" "Peace on Earth!"... well OF COURSE we want peace! Who the fuck doesn't want peace? Wouldn't virtually everybody on the goddamned planet except the irretrievably insane want peace on Earth, and think of it as an ideal to be wished for?

The question is, HOW do we attain that peace? By singing '60s songs and coming up with touching, moving artwork? By writing on posters and debating in some city square? I don't want war, but nobody here is giving any feasible alternative to stop terrorism, besides simply intoning the refrain "Peace peace peace."

Then a blond frat-boyish kind of guy stood up, grabbed the mic, and, with no evidence that PLO was behind the attacks, said that we should retaliate right away and "turn Palestine into a parking lot". People booed him. He said, "Hey, I have friends who are missing in those ruins!" Something inside of me snapped, and I shouted out to him, "So you're going to be as bad as the terrorists themselves? Kill ALL the Palestinians just because they're Palestinians, just like the terrorists killed Americans just because they're Americans? They're diverse, too, just like us! I was there, and I got warm treatment from them--"

I then shut my mouth, not being able to go on. I was way too altercated. I just wanted to get the hell out of there and cool off. Then a black man with the most beautiful complexion put his arm on my shoulder and soothingly said, "Go up there and speak. Finish what you were going to say. Go on. Speak." I refused, but he kept convincing me. He took my arm and led to the steps where people were speaking. "Go on," he said gently. He finally convinced me. I had to wait for like three people to finish speaking, which gave me time to gather my thoughts, and then I spoke.

I basically said, "Who is THEY? Who is THEM? I was in Israel, and I went to the West Bank, to Bethlehem, and I left the Manger Square area, and when I met Palestinians, the reception was always warm: 'You're from New York? I have cousin in Brooklyn', 'You're from America? I have a sister in Baltimore' 'in Chicago' 'in Philadelphia'... We got lost and were helped to find our way by a Palestinian woman who was raised in a convent and speaks Italian. THOSE Palestinians are not cheering right now, the way the sick-minded ones are... In these days, I've heard a guy say, 'Burn down the mosques', I've seen xenophobic graffiti pointed at a mosque in my neighborhood. During World War I, German-Americans and their businesses were attacked and looted. During World War II, Japanese-Americans were interred in prison camps. Let's not let the same mistakes happen in our country again."

I got a good round of applause for my comments, big deal. I had thought that all this speaking that is going on in Union Square is just a lot of mental masturbation, and probably really is, but I wanted to say what I said because there are a lot of things that are troubling me right now, and this nascent brand of xenophobia is genuinely frightening to me. If it's this bad in Manhattan, imagine being an Arab out in the heartland.

So anyhow, after I finished my lil' speech, it started to pour down rain, thunder, et al. I ran home in the rain-- it was easy, with no cars on the street at all. But the only thing that I had on my mind as I ran home drenched in water, was that the rain was going to make it extra-hard for the rescue workers down at Ground Zero to do their jobs.

My Dance with Miss Universe

2009-08-24T23:04:00.001-07:00

Last night I was writing about how I have gotten very forgetful about this blog, and I thought to myself, I must write something tonight... or tomorrow.

Then later, as I was watching TV, mindlessly flipping through the channels, I saw that the Miss Universe pageant was on. I watched it in its entirety. Miss Venezuela won, for the second year in a row, the first time a country won for two years straight.

I used to watch the Miss Universe pageant as a kid. And although the pageant has changed for the worse (last night's pageant was a horrible, vapid, rushed spectacle-- the whole format of the show sucks compared to the suspenseful, involved competition it was in the '70s and '80s) some things never change: the final 5 are always dominated by Latin American super-contestants (last night it was Miss Venezuela, Miss Dominican Republic and Miss Puerto Rico) just as they were when I was a kid. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, be damned.

Anyway, last night's Miss Universe pageant gave me an inspiration. Why write a new post? Why not just copy and paste?

You see, last February I met a former Miss Universe, and I wrote a long, loooong piece about it. It has been sitting in my Windows documents for 6 months now. I figured I'd dust it off and paste it below. So here it is....

Friday, February 13, 2009--

Before I write about my brush with Miss Universe yesterday, let me start out by saying that I am not a star-struck person. In addition to living in Los Angeles for over 3 years now, I lived in New York City for 15 years, and during all this time, I've seen, in person, a large number of celebrities, usually with me in a service capacity... presenting them with a tray of hors d'oeurves, waiting on their table, assigning them a table to sit at, checking their coat... but also on "equal-footing"... walking past them on the sidewalk, in line with them for coffee, eating at a table near theirs, waiting with them for the "walk" sign at a corner... even marching slightly behind them in a parade.

I've seen in person Woody Allen, Kathy Bates, Alec Baldwin, Uma Thurman, OJ Simpson, Anthony Hopkins, Tony Bennett, Donald Trump, James Franco, Drew Barrymore, Tobias Wolf, Claudette Colbert, Ethan Hawke, America Ferrara, Ice-T, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Brendan Frasier, Leonardo Di Caprio, Judge Judy, Jeff Goldblum, Robert Sean Leonard, Martha Stewart, Kyra Sedgwick, Gloria Steinham, Adam Sandler, Lee Grant, Julie Haggardy, Michael Douglas, Spike Lee, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Smits, Benjamin Netanyahu, Glenn Close, Maggie Smith, Ann B. Davis, Kathleen Turner, Richard Dreyfuss, Salman Rushdie, Marsha Mason, Al Franken, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, Jackie Chan, Patrick Swayze, Andy Garcia, Eric Dane, Bernadette Peters, Rick Moranis, Chris Farley, Mary J. Blige, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Rudolph Giuliani, George Pataki, Ed Rendell, Rick Perry, Chuck Schumer, Chelsea Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Laurence Fishburne, Roscoe Lee Brown, Christina Aguilera, Kristen Chenoweth, Barbara Walters, Marni Nixon, Astrud Gilberto, Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro, Bob Dole, Mariah Carey, Lauren Bacall.... and many, many more who have slipped my mind.

I never was that awestruck by seeing celebs, even at the beginning. Only thrice have I ever asked for an autograph. Only once did I tell one that I admired his work. And as time passed, I became so not-awestruck that I wouldn't even look thrice at them. Sure, when Lauren Bacall handed me her coat to check, I thought, Holy Christ, that woman has had sex with HUMPHREY BOGART, but it's not like I waited with baited breath for her to return later and claim her coat. Lauren Bacall? She's another person, that's all... a rather legendary one, but still, just a person.

I don't say this to brag. Rather, I say this so that you won't think, as you read what follows, that I am some star-eyed hick who freaks out at seeing a minor celebrity, if even a celebrity at all.

Well, I think that former Miss Universes fall under the category of "if even a celebrity at all". Yet to me, being Miss Universe, and Miss USA, is a very big deal. You see, I'm originally from Texas, and in Texas, beauty pageants are a very big deal. I don't mean to use that as an excuse. There are many Texans who don't give a shit about beauty pageants. It's not an excuse, it's a reason.

When I was a teenager in the '80s, five--count 'em--FIVE Miss Texases won the Miss USA title. Not only that, but they won the crown five years IN A ROW. Back then, I thought it a very big deal that my state was winning Miss USA every year, and during those five years, I was profoundly disappointed on an annual basis that none of them won the Miss Universe title. Miss Chile won it one year, Miss Thailand another year, Miss Holland another… but never the five annual Miss USAs from Texas--not once--five years in a row. Winning Miss Universe, I learned, was no easy feat.

As a kid, Miss Universe was always my favorite pageant. There were many pageants... Miss Texas, Miss USA, Miss America, Miss World... but Miss Universe was the one not to miss. My family used to gather in the living room every year and watch it as a big event... my mother, father, sister and I. There was always a finalist or two from a Spanish-speaking country, and as Cubans, I suspect my parents felt a sense of pride, because if Miss USA was not in the finals, we'd root for Miss Venezuela or Miss Colombia or Miss Puerto Rico or Miss Spain or Miss Quien Sea.

I remember once asking my mother why there was never a Miss Cuba in the competition, and she said, “Because Fidel Castro is a cruel dictator and will not let Cuban girls compete.” My heart sank just thinking of this injustice. “That’s Communism for you” added my father. You may think my parents’ reply silly, but you will notice that Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, a commie Fidelista if ever there was one, has not stopped Venezuela from competing in the Miss Universe pageant. There would be an armed uprising from the masses, and Hugo knows it. Stereotypically, Latin Americans take beauty pageants very seriously, and my family fit the stereotype.

The earliest Miss Universe pageant that I remember is from when I was like 6 years-old. The first runner up was Miss Haiti, and the winner was from one of the Scandinavian countries; I forget which. I just remember being shocked that Miss Haiti, a black woman, and very black at that, made it so far in the competition. When it got down to the final two contestants, I thought, Miss Haiti CAN'T win! She can't! Miss Blond HAS to win, she's BLOND! Not Miss Haiti… not Miss Haiti… not Miss Haiti.... Then the emcee said, “And the first runner-up is…. MISS HAITI!” and I felt relieved. Whew. Miss Haiti didn’t win. Then I felt guilty for feeling relieved. It was my first encounter with racism, and it was self-induced. Gimme a break: I was 6.

A couple of years later I redeemed myself, because a black contestant was in the finals, and I thought she was the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen. I guess I evolved from age 6 to 8, because I didn't care about her race. She was Miss Trinidad and Tobago. I remember this because I asked my mother how one woman could represent two countries. To me, a “Miss Trinidad and Tobago” was the same as a “Miss France and Germany”--nonsensical. My mother told me that Trinidad and Tobago was one country, not two--two united islands in the Caribbean. Well, whatever her national status, she was absolutely lovely, like an angel. I wanted so much for her to win, and was thrilled when she did. We have a black Miss Universe! Hooray! I was cured of my beauty queen racism.

The following year, Miss USA was in the finals, but it didn't matter. I thought Miss South Africa was more beautiful and I wanted her to win. She was white, though. I couldn't understand why a contestant from an African country would be white. So I asked my mother, "Mom, why is Miss South Africa WHITE?" and my mother said, "Because in that country there are a lot of whites, and the whites rule the government, and they don't let blacks have equal rights. The blacks have to drink in separate water fountains and go to separate bathrooms, just like here in this country before you were born. So the blacks probably aren't allowed to compete in beauty pageants South Africa".

When the coronation came, the previous year's Miss Universe, the black woman from Trinidad and Tobago, put the crown on the white woman from South Africa's head. I wondered if she knew how people of her race were treated in South Africa, and if so, how she felt about crowning a white representative of South Africa. I also wondered if the new Miss Universe would have wanted the old Miss Universe to sit in the back of the bus.

Yes, the Miss Universe pageant figured large in my youth. It was anticipated annual event, like the Oscars.

Which brings me to yesterday's audition...

I had an audition for a Target Commercial at Casparis Casting on Beverly Blvd. I had had one of these before some months back, where I walked down an imaginary runway to the beat of some hip music. Well, when I got there, I asked if there were any sides ("sides" are sheets of paper that have the dialogue that you will be saying in the audition). The guy told me that there were no sides, no dialogue, that I would just be walking down an imaginary runway to the beat of some hip music. Huh. Like the last time, I thought.

With no sides to review and attempt to commit to memory, I was free to sit in the waiting area and read my current book. However, I was unable to read more than a few pages, because soon my name was called.

I went over to the guy. He gestured me to sit on one of two stools, along with the girl I was to audition with. He also told me to do something that was unusual. He wanted me to hold one of my headshots AND one of the girl's headshots, and she was to do the same with one of hers and one of mine. Usually, you just hand your one headshot to the person running the audition, and never handle another actor's headshot.

"Hi" I said to the girl, and handed her one of my headshots as she handed me one of hers. "Hi" she said, and sat down. I sat down next to her. There we sat, side by side, alone in the hall, waiting to go in and audition.

Normally, it would be during this waiting time that the two actors assigned to audition together would go over the sides and rehearse. But since there was no dialogue, there was nothing left for us to do but kill time with small talk.

I've noticed over time that pretty female actors generally don't like talking to male actors at auditions. They usually seem rather reticent to engage. They're friendly and cheery, yet stand-offish. I think it's because after so many auditions with so many actors, they are probably used to having actor guys talking to them in an attempt to give or get a phone number, and really, what could possibly be more unappealing to a young woman than a struggling actor? So they keep their distance a bit and tend to keep extended personal conversation to a minimum. The prettier they are, the more stand-offish they seem to be, and understandably so.

Well, this girl was very pretty, so I didn't want to bother her by engaging her in conversation, for the aforementioned reason. She was pretty in an innocent, Emmy Rossum way... perfect complexion, high cheekbones, with very exotic yet wholesome, innocent good looks. There was nothing intimidating about her beauty. She also had a nebulous ethnic look to her. She looked like she could be Spanish mixed with Amerindian, or Polynesian mixed with Italian, or Filipino mixed with Korean, or Persian mixed with Arab... perhaps her ancestors are from India or Sri Lanka... or they could be Eskimos... the ethnic role casting possibilities for this girl were endless.

I had her headshot in my hands. Unlike most headshots, she didn’t have her name printed on the photo or under it. I wanted to turn the headshot over so that I could look at her resume', thinking that perhaps her surname might give me a clue to her ethnicity. But I didn't, for fear of looking nosey.

We sat there, silently staring off into space for a few seconds. The silence was awkward. I ventured to speak.

"I think I've auditioned for this casting director before," I said, "I remember an identical Target commercial at this very office a few months back."

"Yes, she does Target", she replied, "This is like my 5th audition for Target here. There's never any dialogue. Just walking down the runway, then dancing"

"Yeah, that's what I did the last time, too. As though I were a runway model"

"Target is trying to save money. Models are more expensive than actors, so they've been cutting costs by using people like us, who are not that beautiful"

I turned and looked at her. Not that beautiful? How could she say that about herself? She was really quite beautiful. Sure, she wasn’t sexy-beautiful, but she was My-mom-will-love-you beautiful, and how. I gave her a perplexed look, but I guess she misunderstood my expression, because she said,

"Oh, I didn't mean that you are not beautiful. It's just that you and I, we're just not as unrealistically and absurdly beautiful as fashion models are. We look like real, normal people, not perfect."

I shrugged and looked across the hall. There were three tall, thin blond girls waiting to audition for a Virgin Atlantic commercial. I said,

"Those girls over there are models, huh?"

"Gee, d'ya THINK?" she said, "Whatever gave you that idea? Could it be that they are 6 feet tall and weigh about 60 pounds each, or could it be that they are hardly dressed, despite the fact that it's only 60 degrees today?"

I chuckled. Then I sighed. Then I said,

"I hate commercial auditions"

"Really? Why?" she asked, with a tone of surprise.

"Because it seems so little to do with how I perform. It's so much more about how I look, and if someone else is more of what they're looking for physically, my performance becomes irrelevant"

"Oh, okay. I know what you mean"

"I've given great auditions and not gotten a callback, and then I've given lousy auditions and gotten callbacks, on-avails and even bookings"

"It's a lottery" she said, "It's totally like playing the lottery. If your number's up, it's up. It's an odds game--the lottery."

At that point I started to get the feeling that I had seen her somewhere before. This happens often at auditions, because the actors may have been in commercials that you have seen, or have had a one-day role on a TV series. That's how I was feeling with her after talking to her-- I knew her from somewhere, but where? I wanted to hear more of her voice because it seemed to be her voice that gave me the impression that I knew her from somewhere.

There was a woman down the hall holding a newborn baby in one of those cloth slings. I said,

"Aw, look at that baby. It looks so comfy in that sling"

"I could never carry my son in one of those" she said.

She has a son? She looks so young, I thought.

"You have son? You look so young" I said.

"Well, he's only a year old"

"And why can't you carry him in a sling?"

"Because I'm paranoid. I need something made by a manufacturer,” she said dryly, “so that if my baby falls, I'll have a company to sue."

I laughed. "So how do you carry him then?"

"Oh, I don't carry him anymore. The kid can walk, so no more carrying. That’s it. No mas. But when he was little, I would carry him in one of those backpacks that goes on your front instead."

I think she sensed that I was totally ignorant of the real names of baby-carrying devices. I said, "Well, you women have nature's baby carrier: your hips. You can perch a baby effortlessly on your hips."

"Yeah, that is true."

"I remember being at the zoo when my younger niece was a baby. I tried perching her on my hip like my sister did, but she kept sliding off. We men have non-existent hips. It's nature's way of saying that women should be the ones to carry babies"

"A lame excuse" she said.

And then the chit-chat abruptly ended, because we were called to go in and audition.

We handed the guy running the audition our headshots and stood on the line made of masking tape on the carpet, to the right of her.

He pointed the camera at me and said, "Slate your names".

I looked into the camera and said, "Larry Nodarse, and I’m willing to shave", referring to my goatee.

He said, "Left profile. Right profile” and I turned to my left and my right.

Then she slated her name: "Brooke Lee" she said, and then showed her profiles.

Suddenly, a bell went off in my head. Brooke Lee... Brooke Lee... Brooke Leeeeeee..... MISS UNIVERSE! She was Miss Universe! THAT'S where I've seen her before!

It kind of freaked me out that I knew her name, because while I used to watch the Miss Universe Pageant annually as a kid in Texas, I've rarely watched it again after leaving Texas in 1990. Maybe three times, tops, in the 18 years since then.

After we slated, the guy started telling us what to do in the audition, but I didn't hear a word he said. Instead, I looked at her, and saw a humongous crown on her head with 80 international beauty queens who lost, standing behind her, clapping with forced smiles. I saw her walking down the runway, with a bushel of flowers in her arm, waving at the crowds as the tuxedoed has-been emcee grandly announces her prizes and new responsibilities as the new female representative of the universe. She was the girl from Hawaii, wasn't she? The one who at Miss USA or Miss Universe made the radical feminist comment that beauty queens can gain a lot of weight and still be beautiful? Wasn’t that her?

"Larry..?" said the guy, "Did you get that?"

SHIT. What am I supposed to be doing when the camera rolls? I missed everything he told us because my mind was elsewhere. Stop thinking about Miss Universe... "Yeah, I got it, but could you repeat it though, just to be sure that I got it right?"

He sighed and said, "Okay. AGAIN: this is the 'runway', you are a runway model at a Target fashion show. She'll do it first, then you. The first time you do it sly and sexy. Stop at the first mark on the floor, look at the camera. Walk to the second mark on the floor. Stop. Look at the camera. Walk to the third mark on the floor. Stop. Look at the camera. Walk back to the second mark. Stop. Look at the camera, and then walk directly to it. Then walk back to the second mark, and then to the first mark without stopping. Then SHE will go a second time and do the same thing she did before. Then you go a second time and do the same thing you did before, but this time with a spring in your step and to the beat of the music, and with a big smile, just like her. But at the end, instead of walking out-of-camera, stop at the second mark. She’ll come out and join you, and you two will dance together for a minute, and that's it. Got it?"

"Can we walk through it first, rehearse it?"

"No."

"Okay, I got it. I can do it."

Miss Universe and I stood against the wall side-by-side as we waited for him to tell us to start. She’s not very tall… she’s barely taller than my shoulder… aren’t all Miss Universes supposed to be very tall...? She elbowed my arm and whispered, "Don't worry, it's easy. You’ll be okay. You'll see."

"Yeah, it's the same as the last one I did here. No sweat."

The music came on and she started her fake runway walk. How times change, I thought, looking at her. A few years ago, she was walking down a real runway in a glamorous evening gown, and a mountainous crown on her head, and a hedge of flowers in her arms, in an immense theater full of applause, with an international television audience watching her. Now she's here, in this harshly-lit little room, in a gray sweater with her hair in a ponytail, walking to masking tape marks on the dreary carpeting, with mere ME. How times change...

My turn. I went. I walked down the imaginary fashion runway. Sly and sexy, sly and sexy, sly and sexy, cool cool cool....

I finished and stood against the wall, and she did her runway walk a second time. I watched her and thought, How can she say that she's not that beautiful? Not so 'absurdly and unrealistically beautiful'? 'Real, normal' looks? She was Miss UNIVERSE. Doesn't that mean extra-ordinary beauty? Not even Miss World, but Miss UNIVERSE... meaning she’s even more beautiful than women on OTHER planets. Miss UNIVERSE of all people has low self esteem when it comes to her looks? And what year did she win, anyway? I've only seen like 3 or 4 Miss Universe pageants since 1990. So is she my age, then? She looks so young...

She returned and stood against the wall. My turn again. Out on the 'runway' I went. A spring in my step, beat of the music, big smile… spring in my step, beat of the music, big smile… spring in my step, beat of the music, big smile… playful 'n cool, playful 'n cool, playful 'n cool....

I stopped at the second mark, and she came out and joined me, and we danced together. I'm dancing with Miss UNIVERSE, I thought. Then out of nowhere, I heard a loud female voice, seemingly coming from Heaven:

"Can you have him do it over again? He's walking way too fast, and I'd actually like to SEE him. All I see is a blur. He needs to slow down."

I looked around, trying to find where the voice was coming from. Miss Universe said, "It's her" meaning the casting director, who was obviously watching from another room on a TV set, and speaking on an intercom, like Charlie in Charlie's Angels. Wasn't Farrah Fawcett a former Miss Universe? Or was it Jaclyn Smith…?

The guy said, "Let's do the whole thing over again. Man, you gotta slow down. And another thing, both times you didn't stop at the first mark, and walked right past the camera's focus to the second mark. Stop at the first mark, like I said."

"Okay, sorry" I said, but he kept talking...

"You know, I teach a commercial audition class, and the first thing I tell my students is to LISTEN. That's why mistakes are made, because actors DON'T LISTEN. The simple key to a successful audition is LISTENING. You weren't listening. Stop at the FIRST mark before stopping at the subsequent ones, okay?"

I felt like telling him that I normally DO listen, and I never flub the directions, but this time I did because was distracted by imagining Miss Universe here, in her towering crown. Did you know SHE was Miss Universe? I did not tell him that, however.

“Slate your names again” he told us. Miss Universe walked back to the camera to slate. I felt like an idiot being the cause of her having to do it again.

After re-slating, we started the whole routine again. She did her walk, and I did mine, this time without a hitch. I watched her as she did her “runway” walk and thought, She surely won the swimsuit and evening gown competitions, no? That’s runway modeling, and yet she may not even get a callback for this lousy commercial. Some girl who has never even competed in a local beauty pageant may book this gig over her. I am such a geek. I need to get a life. Why am I even thinking these things? It was my turn to do my second walk. When I finished, she joined me in front of the camera and we danced. I’m really dancing with Miss Universe. No big deal--not the waltz or the tango, we’re not even touching, but still, I’m dancing with Miss Universe. I never would have dreamed this as a child in Texas... Jesus Larry, big deal. Get a life.

“Thanks guys. That was fine. That’s all” he said.

“Okay, thanks, bye”, she and I both said.

She walked out of the room, and as I was about to walk out, he stopped me by saying, “Hey man, I’m sorry if I got a little harsh with you about listening. Nothing personal.”

“No, no problem” I said, “You must have to put up with that a lot. I understand.”

When I walked out into the hall, I was surprised to see that Miss Universe hadn’t gone off already. She was there waiting for me.

She said, “Don’t worry about her telling to repeat what you did. If she stopped the audition like that, it means that she liked you and wanted to make sure you came out well on tape. She’ll call you in for future auditions, you’ll see.”

I tried to act cool, like I couldn’t have cared less, and jokingly said, “Woo, I’m thrilled”

I think she took my sarcasm the wrong way, because said flatly, “Okay. Well. Bye”.

“Bye, Brooke” I said, “It was nice to meet you” and without looking back at me, she put on her winter coat, walked out the building very quickly, and was gone.

She MUST have originally been Miss Hawaii, I thought, looking out the front doors where she had exited. Why else would she be wearing a thick coat like that in 60-degree weather? Only a Hawaiian could think it’s cold today.

On the drive home, I listened as usual to liberal political talk radio on AM 1150, but I wasn’t really listening, because I was too busy thinking, lost in my thoughts… Michelle Pfieffer competed for the Miss California crown, and didn't even win. Halle Berry won Miss Ohio, but didn’t win Miss USA. She was first runner-up... She didn’t even get to compete for Miss Universe, and now she’s Halle Berry, an Academy Award winning actress, a top box office draw, starring in major motion pictures… Laura Harring did win Miss USA… yet she didn’t even get to the finals of Miss Universe, but she starred in Mulholland Drive, one of my favorite films ever… she was directed by David freakin’ LYNCH, for God’s sake… and Brooke Lee… well, she won Miss USA and Miss Universe… and now she’s auditioning for TARGET COMMERCIALS…? Not pre-cast, but auditioning for a sans-dialogue commercial…? It shows you just how little these pageants mean... Well, give her a break… maybe she’s not even pursuing acting. She could be pursuing commercials and the hosting and emecee-ing of television shows… she’s probably not an actor, so how can I compare her to Halle Berry? Why was I so impressed by meeting Brooke Lee, anyway? It’s absurd… I’m such a dork… I’ve seen so many real celebrities in person, so what’s the big deal about auditioning with Brooke Lee…? Hmm… it’s childhood. Childhood is a hard thing to shake off, isn’t it? If, as a child, something is a big deal to you, you can be 40-years-old and it still impresses you… after all, of all those big celebrities that I saw in NYC, I only asked three of them for an autograph, all three of them after I had seen them perform on Broadway. The first was Maggie Smith, the second was Glenn Close, and the third, and most important, was Ann B. Davis… of course she was the most important of them all… of course she was… she was ALICE in The Brady Bunch…. I adored her as a child… I didn’t know who the hell Maggie Smith and Glenn Close were when I was in 3^rd grade, but I sure knew who Alice and Miss Universe were… I’m surprised I didn’t get into a car accident on the drive home, so distracted was I by my thoughts.

Of course when I got home, the first thing I did was sit at my computer, get online, go to YouTube and type “Brooke Lee” in the search box. The first thing I noticed was that her name is spelled Brook not Brooke. That surprised me. I had just assumed that every female with that name would naturally spell their name like Brooke Shields. With an “e” on the end, the name brings the lovely Brooke Shields to mind… without an “e” it brings to mind a creek or marsh…

I watched clips of her winning the Miss USA crown and of her winning the Miss Universe crown. I watched clips of her in the interview competitions, and saw that funny, smart, somewhat sassy woman that I saw at the audition an hour before. I realized that what won her those crowns was her smarts more than her beauty; good for her.

I realized that for all the glamor and swirl of winning such a competition, it only represents a moment in time, and the one consolation for the probably 200 women that she defeated for the Miss Hawaii, Miss USA and Miss Universe titles, is that, like them, today she's a normal mom, living her life pretty much un-noticed, going out for interviews when a job possibility arises. I learned that winning one of those crowns, really, amounts to pretty much nothing (unless you are Venezuelan, where they make you a senator for life).

I guess I didn't realize that because I haven't given the topic any thought since my youth, so I was thinking as a youth... well, until I met the lovely Brook Lee yesterday.

That was loooooong, huh? Anyway, it's funny that I mentioned what happens to a Venezuelan Miss Universe winner, because last night, Venezuela got a new, pretty, senator for life.

I Have a Blog?

2009-08-23T20:35:00.001-07:00

Oh my. I forgot that I had a blog. It had totally slipped my mind. A friend of Facebook sent me a message telling me what a good writer she thinks I am, and asked if I had a blog, and I thought, Oh my God, I DO!

I don't know what happened. My mind got distracted in the last month or more.

Here are the current stats of my blog:
May: 22 posts, and that few only because I started the blog on the 13th day of the month.
June: 8 posts.
July: 0 posts.
August: 0 posts so far, and today is the 23rd day of the month.

This blog is representative of my personality. I started writing in it, and I just dived in. It was a blizzard of writing. Every single day I wrote something... then it tapered off to once in a while... and then to where finally I forgot it existed. That is SO me. Begin something with an exuberant passion, lose steam, get lazy, and let it go. It's actually my biggest fault. It's why I haven't got farther in life. Truly.

Okay... must keep writing, must keep blogging... I'll write something good tonight... or tomorrow.

A Sad Day for Us Children of the '70s

2009-06-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 25, 2009 has been a very sad day.

It was a sunny day here in L.A. Brilliantly sunny (what's new), warm but with zero humidity and a nice, cool breeze.

The day began for me as it usually does. I wake up, turn on the radio and continue to lie in bed for 20 minutes or so. Well, today, I woke up, turned on the radio, and heard the breaking news that Farrah Fawcett had just died.

"Aaaah, SHIT." I said aloud, and got out of bed and made coffee.

Farrah Fawcett was my first crush. I had that red swimsuit poster of hers, that famous-famous poster, on the wall of my room, when I was like 8-years-old. I also had the poster of her as Holly in Logan's Run.

I adored Farrah. I was too young to think of her in a sexual way. To me, she was just a beautiful angel. And I don't say "angel" because she was on Charlie's Angels. She quite literally looked like an angel to me. Perhaps it was her feathered hair. Angels' wings have feathers on them...

Anyway, Farrah soon had competition when I saw Jessica Lange in King Kong, and then a couple of years later, they were both wiped way by Olivia Newton-John in Grease. Still, Farrah was my first (along with Nadia Comaneci, who was more my age).

Farrah's was a death foretold. We all knew it was coming. She was fighting cancer, and the cancer was winning. I watched the documentary about her battle with the malignant killer, and was tremendously moved. It reminded me of my own father's heroic struggle with cancer.

Although I was not surprised by her death, I was very saddened. She was a huge figure in my childhood, and I continued to be a fan in my teen years, watching her in The Burning Bed and Extremities.

Later, I got on the computer and went to YouTube, looking at Farrah Fawcett video clips from the '70s... Farrah shampoo, Farrah dolls, Farrah hair dryers... then I got on Facebook, and started reading many of my friends' statuses honoring her passing.

Suddenly, as I was immersed in Farrah nostalgia, I heard from the TV that Michael Jackson was reported to be in the hospital, having suffered a heat attack.

The Facebook statuses began to change.

"Michael Jackson may be dead!"

"Oh no, not two on one day..."

"This is surreal. First Farrah, now Michael?"

My eyes glanced back and forth, from my computer monitor to the TV. And I'm not even on Twitter. I could imagine what I'd be reading there.

I honestly didn't think that he was going to die. I mean, it really was surreal, the idea that two icons from my youth could die on the same day. An icon from the '40s, the '50s, hell, even the '90s, wouldn't have been so surreal, but Michael Jackson, the pop icon of pop icons?

I was convinced that he would pull through, and was annoyed that this latest Michael Jackson drama was stealing all the attention from Farrah. I was uploading a tribute photo of Farrah to my Facebook profile, and statuses saying "RIP Michael" appeared above and below it to my homepage. It was so aggravating.

"HE'S NOT DEAD YET!", I said to my computer monitor.

CNN was on, and I was switching back and forth between it, and MSNBC. Neither channel was saying he was dead.

On Facebook, I was commenting under my friends' status reports... "I don't care what TMZ says, I have CNN on right now, and they are not saying he's dead. He just had a heart attack, that's all."

Then I saw on TV, that he had suffered cardiac arrest. Uh-oh. That's worse than a heart attack. That's like, a dead heart, which means a dead person.

But still, I wouldn't believe that he was dead. It's really crazy, but the true reason was... that I didn't want him to die on the same day as Farrah. I instinctively knew that Farrah's death would not be publicly memorialized to the extent that she deserved, as a cancer fighter and as a childhood icon of mine. Her death would be forgotten if Michael Jackson died on the same day.

My friend Shannon, who was at work, sent me a text message. "I can't believe this. Is he dead? What does it say on TV?" I looked at the TV. The new graphic said, MICHAEL JACKSON IN A COMA. Oh shit. I texted Shannon back, "No he's not dead. He's just in a coma. Not good, though."

Not GOOD though?!? JUST in a coma?!? A stupid thing to text, but hey, people DO come out of comas.... sometimes.

As the minutes dragged on, I watched the TV on foot, not even sitting on my sofa. I saw aerial images of the L.A. hospital where they had taken him, the fans beginning to gather under the glaring sun, in a energy-filled vigil.

Then Wolf Blitzer confirmed it. Michael Jackson was dead. Dead at age 50.

My head was spinning. Jesus Christ, I thought, who's next today? John Travolta? Cher? Both Donny AND Marie?

My Facebook homepage brimmed with statuses about Michael Jackson, along with photos and video clips of his performances. Then CNN showed a clip of him, as a beautiful young boy, singing "I Want You Back" with The Jackson Five, and I had to admit it, I cried. Not a lot, but some tears did flow.

For the last 15 years or so, I've done nothing but ridicule Michael Jackson. The fact that I had loved The Jackson Five as a small child, that I thought "Off the Wall" was the most amazing album I had ever heard my last year of elementary school, that "Thriller" was THE soundtrack to my last year of intermediate school AND my first year of high school, that "Bad" was the biggest album my first year of college... all of that had been washed away by events of the '90s.

I hated what he did to his face, the way he mutilated it with those horrific plastic surgeries, to the point where his face was no longer a face, but a white mask, a dainty, feminine, white kabuki mask. He was his own Dr. Frankenstein, and his own Frankenstein's monster.

He had a sex change and a race change, I had felt. His marriage to Lisa Marie Presley was a sham, as were all his romantic relationships with women, I had felt. He was lying to say he was the biological father of those three children, when they obviously were the product of two white parents, I had felt. It was bizarre to make those kids wear masks and veils, I had felt. It was creepy to spend so much time socializing with other peoples' children, whether he molested them or not, I had felt. I had felt for the longest time that this great, amazing talent from my youth had become the ultimate freak roadshow.

Yet despite all that, I cried today watching him as a boy sing "I Want You Back". I wondered what had happened to that innocent boy. How can a boy with such an angelic face, voice and demeanor, become what he had become? What had happened in that head of his? How could he have known at that age that he would become the most famous person on the planet, and that he would morph into an unrecognizable being, the figure of such international adulation and scorn?

I also got emotional seeing him sing "I Want You Back" because my sister used to have the 45 record of that song. The record player was in her room. I was only like 6-years-old, and not deemed old enough by my parents to have a record player, so I used to go into my sister's room, and annoy the hell out of her by playing her records.

I loved "I Want You Back". I loved Little Michael. Even though he was older and thus bigger than me, he was the littlest of the Jacksons. I loved that the youngest Jackson brother was the biggest star. I too was the youngest, and I always felt like I was second-fiddle to my sister. Little Michael wasn't second-fiddle to his big brothers. He was THE fiddle.

I, Little Larry (which was my real nickname--my dad was Big Larry), would play that record, and hold some object in my hand to represent a microphone, and I would dance on my sister's bed and hop up and down on it until she would scream and push me off and tell me to stay out of her room.

I'd go back to my room, which in a couple of years would be graced with Farrah Fawcett-Majors posters, and kill some time, and wait for my sister to leave her room... then, I'd return and play the record again, and mount her bed with my fake mic and sing with Michael: "When I had you to myself, I didn't want you around..."

And there he was on CNN today, 34 years later, looking about the same as I had remembered him in first grade, singing, "...those pretty faces always made you stand out in a crowd..."

Despite the appalling surgeries, the dreadful skin whitenings, the perplexing child molestation trials, he was still a beautifully black little boy on my TV screen, like he was when I was 6, singing, "Oh baby give me one more chance..."

How could I not cry? First Farrah, now Little Michael.

Today was a sad day for us children of the '70s.

"Everybody Votes for the Other Guy, But..."

2009-06-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday Iran had their presidential election.

It was pretty impressive seeing the lead-up to it on TV. Tons of people, masses of them turned up in droves to the polls. Lines stretched on forever. Polling places had to extend their hours. There was an energy and anticipation that emanated from the TV screen; I could feel that this election was incredibly important to the Iranians. They really seem highly invested in the concept that the choice of the majority of voters would win.

The election was between the current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the internationally renowned kookball who needs no description, and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, his reformist challenger.

I thought Mousavi was going to win in a landslide. Granted, I knew nothing of the polling, but I again saw the images on TV, and I figured such excitement for an election bodes well for the challenger. Also, I had faith that the Iranian people had caught on that Ahmadinejad is a total kookball.

Well, curiously, Ahmadinejad won! Suprise-surprise! What is even more curious is, not only did he win, but he won with 69% of the vote, even sweeping Mousavi's home district!

Curiouser and curiouser.

I'm trying to imagine John McCain having swept the votes on the south side of Chicago or in Honolulu, delivering a decisive defeat to Barack Obama, even on his home turf.

Curiouser and curiouser, it would have been.

The supreme leader of Iran is not the president. The supreme leader is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the supreme leader was in favor of Ahmadinejad.

Curiouser and curiouser, Mr. Ayatollah.

In Iran, 70% of the vote comes from urban areas, and the urban areas were heavily favored to Mousavi. Yet Ahmadinejad easily won the urban vote.

Curiouser and curiouser, the inverted urban vote.

Not surprisingly, Tehran, the largest urban area of the country, has erupted in riots. Disgruntled voters are taking to the streets, throwing objects, burning tires, displaying banners, and being greeted by police and security forces bearing truncheons. Cell phone networks were shut down. Satellite news channels were scrambled. Mousavi tried to have a news conference, but journalists were not allowed to attend. Riot police clad in body armor beat marchers and passersby, and still, the voters keep on protesting with fury.

I can imagine their anger.

Imagine standing in line to vote--standing in line for hours--for A LOT of hours. Imagine the buzz in the city, the thrilling feeling of transition in the air, which makes the victory of Mousavi seem assured... then Ahmadinejad wins, and wins BIG. It's like being spit on in the face.

I myself feel like joining in the protests. I don't know crap about Mousavi, but I do know what it's like to be incensed by a stolen election. I remember Bush vs. Gore 2000. But that election was contested by only a few thousand votes. Yesterday in Iran, Ahmadinejad miraculously won in a landslide.

You would think that if they were going to rig an election, they would have chosen to be a bit more subtle. They could have staged Ahamadinejad's win as a squeaker, rather than as a routing. His winning buy such a large margin is adding insult to injury. It's so transparent, and such a slap in the face.

But what is even more insulting, what is not so much a slap in the face as a punch in the gut, is that they declared Ahamadinejad the winner before all the votes were even in. And it's not as if there were only 20% of the votes left TO BE counted. No, he was declared the winner with only 20% of the votes COUNTED. For those of you with dyscalculia, Ahmadinejad was said to have won a mandate with 80% of the votes yet to be counted.

They might as well have erected a huge, blinking neon sign over the capitol building that said in Farsi, "UP YOURS. THIS IS FLAGRANTLY RIGGED."

This all reminds me of a young Serbian woman named Natasha.

When I lived in New York City, I worked with her, and we used to talk quite a bit. This was in 1998 and '99, during the Kosovo crisis.

Natasha was a tall, striking woman who had worked as a professional model in Milan. She was no poli-sci major. She had a very home-spun way of talking politics.

Once, when talking of the Serbian siege of Pristina (the capitol city of Kosovo) she said in her thick Serbo-Croat accent, "The common people of Serbia don't care crap about Kosovo. This is all Milosevic. The Serbian people hate Milosevic and don't want this war. I don't know anybody in Serbia who give a shit about Pristina. Who want Pristina? Who want to go there? It's boring. In Pristina there is nothing... no discos, no night life. There is just babushka."

With a quote like that, you may see why I loved talking politics with Natasha.

Another time she made a comment that is actually the inspiration for my writing this piece. This other comment of Natasha's was the very first thing that I thought of when I heard of Ahmadinejad's inexplicable victory...

I asked her why, if Milosevic is so hated by his people, why is he still in power, given that there are elections. She said with a shrug, "Yes, there is elections, and every election, everybody votes for the other guy, but Milosevic always wins."

And that, in my opinion, is what it boils down to with Iran: Everybody voted for the other guy, but Ahamadinejad won.

And today, people in Tehran rage against the machine. I wish them all the best, because they deserve nothing less.

The Best Nation That Has Ever Existed?

2009-06-11T22:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I was watching Larry King Live, and he had a segment with James Carville and Liz Cheney. The two debated current events, with James representing liberal thought, and Liz representing conservative thought.

At the end of the segment, they were rating President Obama overall, and Liz Cheney said, "One of the things that is troubling to Americans is the extent to which this administration is focused on the president's popularity overseas."

I've never understood this Republican attitude that it is not important that the president be liked in other countries, and that it is certainly not important enough to warrant much focus. Lately it has gotten to the point where they think that being well-liked abroad is a bad thing, and being ADORED by foreigners... well, that's downright un-American and deserving of suspicion.

Much of it, I suspect, has to to with George W. Bush. As his presidency progressed, he became more and more disliked overseas (not to mention HERE) to the point where he was virtually an international pariah. That famous video clip that was shot towards the end of his second term, of the Iraqi man throwing his shoes at him, became to me the symbol what most people in the world thought of Bush.

It therefore doesn't surprise me that Republicans have made being loathed in other countries a badge of honor. They've made it seem like being abhorred abroad shores up your America First bona-fides.

What really flummoxed me (and the word "flummoxed" was used three times last night) was when Ms. Cheney went on to say that it was disturbing that, while overseas, Obama, "has not been willing to say flat-out, 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally and unapologetically that America is the best nation that has ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.'"

This is why I am soooooo happy that these people are out of power.

Imagine somebody from Texas coming to California and saying that about their state. Imagine somebody from San Francisco coming to San Diego and saying that about their city. How many friends would they make? How many bridges would they build? How much cooperation would they encourage?

It seems to me that such talk is a perfect recipe for instant antagonism and animosity. Is that what the USA wants from the other countries of the world?

I'm really trying to imagine it now... Obama having done as Ms. Cheney desired... in London, he says to Queen Elizabeth II, in Paris, he says to President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Prague and in Cairo, he says to the assembled crowds, "I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally and unapologetically that America is the best nation that has ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today."

Imagine Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy coming to the USA and telling our people, "Io credo nell'eccezionalismo italiano. Io credo in modo inequivocabile e senza scuse che l'Italia e' la migliore nazione che mai esisteva nella storia, e chiaramente che esiste oggi."

Wouldn't that be off-putting? Wouldn't that make him reminiscent of Benito Mussolini?

And let's be honest with ourselves. ARE we the best nation that has ever existed? I would say no, because there IS no such thing as a best nation.

I know because I've been to other countries, quite a few of them, like 20. I am always amazed by Americans who say that life is the best here of any country in the world, and yet they've never stepped foot in another country.

I myself can really only make the comparison with Western Europe, though. It's the only part of the world where I have spent a substantial amount of time in. I have only spent a total of five weeks in Latin America, a week in the Middle East, and have never been to Africa or Asia.

So the USA is the best country, Liz Cheney says. Has she lived in Europe?

I've seen that in Western Europe, people work to live, not live to work. In Italy, they have the entire month of August off. They call it "Ferragosto", and they spend it usually on a beach, or traveling to another country. Here, we are lucky to get 2 weeks of paid vacation.

In Spain, I saw people in their 60s and 70s up late at night, at 2am, drinking sangria out outdoor tables having fun and chatting the night away. Here, the elderly in general are in bed by 9pm.

In Holland, I saw so many people on bicycles going to work (even in their suits) that it simply astounded me. No wonder they are all so thin and lean. And it's not just due to bicycling. They eat better in Europe, and not such gargantuan portions. They don't have the obesity, diabetes and heart problems that we have. They live longer.

As I traveled through Europe, I saw so many regional festivals.... each region with its own native dance, music and cuisine... the giant puppet heads, the costumes, the torches, the fireworks. I wish we had that here in the USA.

If you get sick in Europe, you don't have to worry about sliding into bankruptcy. And people don't hold off going to the doctor because they don't have insurance, or because they do, but they are afraid that their premiums will go up. I got ill when I lived in Milan, and I went to the doctor, and I was shocked when no one asked me upfront how I was going to pay. I didn't pay because it was free. And I did not have to wait a long time to see a doctor.

Are there negatives about life in Europe? Sure. Aspirin can only be bought in little boxes of 20 aspirin each, and there is only one brand--Bayer. In the USA you can buy a bottle of 300 aspirin for $13, and you can choose among brands. In Europe, you'd have to buy 15 boxes of aspirin to get that many tablets, costing you the equivalent $60 total.

Milk in the grocery store can only be bought in liter boxes. The equivalent of a gallon of milk would cost you $8.

Stores and shops close early, or in the middle of the day, or for entire days, and for any unpredictable amount of time. It is not a consumer-first society. It seemed to me that in Europe, the customer is always wrong.

And let's not get started on the price of gas. It can cost you the equivalent of $80 to fill your tank (but hey--the trains run on time and they are fast and frequent).

Sound bad? Well, keep in mind that going to a university will cost you almost nothing. Students don't graduate from college in Europe saddled with debt.

They also graduate with a much more profound knowledge of the world at-large, and I mean after graduating from high school. They don't have superficial testing there; no multiple choice or True-or-False questions. You read whole books and write essays to prove your understanding of the material. You don't forget what you learned a few years after graduation. And you are also capable of speaking a foreign language or two.

The stereotype of the ignorant American is a stereotype because, for the most part, it is true. We have an amazing amount of ignorant people for a country that is so rich and powerful. Americans and world maps are like oil and water.

But hey, here in the USA, there is much more of a sense of freedom in switching jobs, changing your career, that's good. That's personal liberty. In Europe, once you have a job, YOU KEEP IT. Preferably for life.

What I'm trying to get at, even at this simplistic level, is that there are pros and cons to life in every country.

I do think one can say that America is the greatest country on earth, if you mean "great" in the sense of being powerful and dominant both pop-culturally and militarily. This greatness is not to be the disputed because it is so obvious.

But if you mean greatest as in "best", then no, America is not the best country, because NO country is.

I'm just really glad that Obama has never said such a thing abroad, and that he cares that we are liked in the rest of the world, and that he IS liked.

That's a nice change after the past eight years. I want my president to be liked. Sorry Liz. That is not something that is "troubling" to THIS American.

My Anonymous Hero

2009-06-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of heroes. Most of them are freedom fighters. Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Joe Marti, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Benjamin Franklin... and a skinny Chinese guy in a white shirt and black pants holding two plastic bags, standing defiantly in front of a line of army tanks on Chang'an Avenue, near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

I have no idea who this hero of mine is. Nobody does. The anonymous man stepped in front of the rolling tanks and stepped in photographic history at the same time, as a handful of photographers took still photographs and shot a video of his gut reaction to having the seem the "People's" Army massacre the People the night before, in the mammoth square.

He stood before the tanks, blocking their path. Then the tanks tried to go around him, and he moved in the tanks' way. Finally, he climbed up on top of the first tank and banged on the lid. A soldier within opened the lid and they spoke. Who knows what they said. Perhaps the brave civilian said,

"Brother soldier, why are you killing our people? Do you want to kill one more? Well, here I am, my brother."

That's what I imagine he said, but then again, it's pure imagination, because this man is a figure of my imagination, and has been for 20 years.

Yes, 20 exact years. He stepped in the path of the those tanks on June 5, 1989.

For 20 years, whenever I see that iconic image of him, I've wondered, What was he doing there? Was he coming home from work? Why was he holding plastic grocery bags? Did they have food in them? Was he bringing home the food that he would cook for dinner? Was he a factory worker? Maybe the bags had his sweaty work clothes in them. Was he a university student who had been involved in the protests? Did he live nearby? Was he a survivor of the previous night's massacre in the square? Did he just happen to be at that moment crossing the street when he saw the tanks and said,

"I've had it. ENOUGH. Enough already"

and, despite all the carnage that the army had unleashed on unarmed civilians, he, an unarmed civilian, stepped in front of those tanks, making himself a human shield, shielding an already overwrought populace from more government reprisals.

And then, what happened to him afterwards? On the video, you can see that he was whisked away by a few men. I've always had the gut feeling that those men who led them away were not connected with the Chinese government. I don't think they were leading him away to be arrested. There is something about their body language that to me, says that they were trying to get him away before he got himself killed. They looked like concerned pedestrians.

But did the police find the tank man? The area, after all, was crawling with police and state security. If he was found, he was surely executed.

I imagine that he wasn't found, though. I imagine that he blended back into the masses as seamlessly as he stepped out of them. I imagine that he had a solitary moment of promininence, when it was JUST HIM in the spotlight, and that immediately after, he returned to being what he always was: just another face in a country of a billion faces.

But again, this is just pure imagination, because this man has been a figure of my imagination for 20 years.

In June of 1989, I was a college student, just like the protestors in Tiananmen Square. I had just completed my second year of college, and was still living in Clear Lake City, a suburb of Houston, Texas.

To me, college was acting in the theater. For two years, I had gone from one play to another in my college's theater department. I had acted in like ten plays. When I wasn't rehearsing or performing, I was in class... English Literature, Botany, American Government, what have you. My spare time was spent hanging out in the green room backstage, socializing with my theater friends. We often spent our nights drinking beer and driving around.

I was NOT a politically involved youth. Seven months before the events of Tiananmen Square, I had voted in my first presidential election. I voted for George Herbert Walker Bush, because my father had voted for George Herbert Walker Bush. In retrospect, I shouldn't have even voted, because I had no idea about what the election was about, except that Bush visited flag factories and Michael Dukakis looked silly driving an army tank.

So when the Tiananmen Square protest began to dominate the news, I finally paid attention. I paid attention because these were STUDENTS, like me. Students who didn't have the right to vote like I did, and if they HAD had the right to vote, they would have made a more informed decision than mine, they would have had more appreciation for that right to vote.

These students weren't hanging out with their friends, goofing around, drinking beer and acting in school plays. They were acting on the WORLD stage, openly rebelling against a totalitarian regime, showing little fear of the consequences, with the TV cameras of countless countries focused on their bravery.

I knew what that meant, defying the regime, because despite my political apathy, I do come from a Cuban family--mother, father, grandparents, all exiles from Communism. My father did time in a Castro prision. I had heard stories all my life about the repression of a Communist regime. So I looked at those students on my TV in wonder, they were my contemporaries, and I felt a sense of shame for being such a fluffball at my age.

Then the massacre came on the night of June 4th. Horror.

Then the following day, the sun rose and was shining bright, and a column of tanks was leaving the square, where the night before they had squashed the students like so many cockroaches.

THEN: a skinny guy in a white shirt and black pants stepped in front of the tanks, and he stood his ground.

And I cried.

Tears flowed down my face, and from then on, I paid attention to politics, and kept myself informed of what was happening on the world stage, and by the next presidential election, I had realized that the Republican party may mesh with my father's views, but it didn't with mine; and I became a Democrat.

The tank man has been a big influence on my life. As I watched him and saw the photos of him in the papers, I thought, I'm not fit to shine that guy's shoes.

And actually, I still don't think I am.

That man is a hero to me. He's an international icon of defiance in the face of oppression-- the everyman against the grinding machine.

May he still be living today, and may he know that what he did in those few minutes has been seen and admired by millions of people around the globe. I imagine he knows this, and is keeping his renowned heroism a secret with a slight smile.

But again, this is just a bright scenario which is a product of my imagination, because that wonderful man has been a product of my imagination for 20 years and counting.

La Citta' Piu Bella del Mondo

2009-06-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

The night before last, I went to the Los Feliz Cinema to see the movie Angels and Demons. I was disappointed in the Da Vinci Code, yet I wanted to see this movie anyway, because I knew that it was filmed on location in Rome.

IO ADORO ROMA.

My adoration for it was only strengthened by seeing it used as a backdrop for a pretty preposterous thriller. While the movie did keep me on the edge of my seat and never had a dull moment, the story was rather ridiculous. As it progressed, and I saw The Eternal City swirling around behind Tom Hanks, I couldn't help but marvel at how even the most absurd plotline could not diminish Rome's warm, elegant, earthy beauty.

In my opinion, Rome is the most beautiful city in the world.

I know, I know, I haven't been to every city in the world, so it's silly of me to have such an opinion. But still, I have been to an awful lot of cities that are internationally renowned for their beauty... Venice, Florence, Siena, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Paris, London, New York, Bruges, Dublin, Boston, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Jerusalem, Havana, Quebec, Morelia, Buenos Aires...

Granted, I haven't been to Prague or San Francisco or Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro, nor to any city in Asia, but still, I don't think that if I visited them I would find them more beautiful than Rome.

Rome was the first city in a foreign country that I had ever visited. I was 25-years-old, and I had never been out of the USA. I couldn't have chosen a better city to get my first taste of the Old World. I had a Roman holiday that lasted two weeks, and I also spent three days in Florence and a day in Pisa, but man, they weren't Rome...

Rome is, quite simply, an extravaganza. To me, what makes a city beautiful is the natural setting, the architecture, and the street life.

Some cities have a beautiful natural setting, but unremarkable architecture. Others have beautiful architecture, but the natural setting is not at all remarkable.

For example, Seville is a remarkably lovely city architecturally, as is Florence. However, for me, Florence trumps Seville, because Seville is located on a plain, while Florence is nestled in a valley surrounded by high hills, which "ups" its fairy tale quotient. Florence has the gorgeous natural setting that Seville lacks AND the architecture and street life that is equal to Seville's.

Well Rome, like Florence, has both.

There are the famous seven hills of Rome (a spectacular natural setting), as well as the architectural treasures which overwhelm those of Florence (or Venice or Paris or London).

Rome is not called The Eternal City for nothing. As you walk through the streets, you see Classical buildings of the ancient city, as well as Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque buildings, all seamlessly mixed together. Sometimes you'll see ancient columns incorporated into a newer building (and in Rome, "newer" is 300-years-old).

What other beautiful Baroque or Renaissance or Medieval city has the ancient forums-- a grand, monumental series of ruins from the Republican and Imperial epochs... the ancient triumphal arches... not to mention the Colosseum... the Baths of Caracalla... the ruins of Largo Argentina... the Portico of Octavia... the Temple of Vesta... the Temple of Fortuna Virilis... the Theater of Marcellus... the tomb of Augustus... the Porta Maggiore... the Porta Asinaria... the Pantheon... my God, the Pantheon alone would be the most stunning structure of the majority of the world's great cities.

Not only is the Pantheon a utter wonder, but it has at its entrance one of the loveliest squares anywhere on earth, Piazza della Rotonda.

What makes a great street life to me is the presence of beautiful town squares, lots of them. Well, the piazze of Rome are the most stunning squares in the world, and it's mainly due to the spectacular fountains.

The fountains the fountains the fountains....

...so many of them, each an utter work of art, designed by some of the world's most revered masters, and they're just THERE, in the piazza, or on a street corner, or at an intersection, out in the open. Any of those fountains in the USA would be in a museum, and if you touched them, the museum alarm would go *beep*beep*beep*.

Not in Rome. In Rome you can stroke the fountain, sit on its edge, take flash pictures of it, toss coins into it... and unlike in museums that close at 6pm, these works of art are available 24 hours a day. You can take a stroll at 3am, as I did, and be the only one in the piazza, just you and the magnificently sculpted fountain, with no museum guard watching your every move.

It seems that every square in Rome has a stunning fountain in it. This is not the case in other cities. The countries that I visited afterwards were England and Ireland, the following year. The year after that, I visited Spain and Portugal, and always, in every city I visited, I kept asking myself, Where are the fountains? Why do hardly any of these squares have fountains? Finally I gave up asking myself this question, when I realized that Rome is unique in this regard.

Beginning with Piazza di Trevi which contains what is perhaps the world's most famous fountain, the Trevi Fountain, and continuing on to Piazza Navona (my favorite square in the world) with its Four Rivers Fountain, the Neptune Fountain and the Moro fountain, Piazza del Popolo with its fountain ornamented by Egyptian lions, Piazza Mattei with its exquisite turtle fountain, Piazza di Spagna with its half-sunk boat fountain... I could go on and on.

Shall I mention the famous Spanish Steps that lead up the the church of Trinita' dei Monti? Or how about the monumental steps that lead of the Piazza del Campodoglio, from which you have a panoramic view of the ancient forums below.

There's the winding Tiber river, which has the Ponte Elio, a 2nd-century bridge lined with priceless statues that lead up the the Castel Sant'Angelo-- the mammoth mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian.

Beyond Castel Sant'Angelo is Vatican City, which technically isn't a part of Rome, but what the hell, it really is...

La Citta' del Vaticano... the amazing Piazza San Pietro, a.k.a. Saint Peter's Square, with its twin fountains, its Egyptian obelisk, its ring of colonnades surrounding it, and as its main feature: Saint Peter's Basilica---the largest church in the world, and the most magnificent.

I can't express just how far my jaw dropped and how much my eyes widened when I first entered Saint Peter's and eye-witnessed its grandeur. Words can't describe it, photos can't, videos can't. You must enter and see the gargantuan dimensions for yourself... the soft, warm light, the details of the interior decor and design.

What is truly memorable for me is that I visited Saint Peter's again, when I was in Rome 5 years later, and my jaw dropped even lower the second time than it did the first; it's that much of a marvel.

And don't even get me started on the Vatican Museums. The Sistine Chapel... I just wanted to expel all the other tourists from it so that I could lie down on the floor, and gaze up at the ceiling for hours, studying every detail. And then there are the Raphael rooms... Mmm!

Is this getting boring? Sorry, if you've never been to Rome, it probably is, because without photographs, these words can be pretty meaningless.

So I'll just try to convey something that can be felt without having visited the city. The colors. The colors of Rome are uniformly warm. There really don't exist cold colors in Rome... no blues, no grays... at least none that I can remember, and if they do exist, they are in such miniscule numbers that they don't register on the eye.

The whole city has a warm glow of orange, gold, copper, burnt umber, what have you. All the buildings are painted in the orange/tan/copper-hued palate. The colors of Rome are the colors of the sunset.

After I first saw Rome in 1994, I kept telling myself that I had to see Paris before I could definitively say that Rome is the world's most beautiful city. After all, Paris is Paris.

Well, I finally visited Paris the last week of 1999 and the first week of 2000, and I thought it was an utterly beautiful city. So stately, so sophisticated, so finely ornamented... yet so cold (and I don't mean the weather). The color that I remember most is gray. Almost all the buildings are gray. It's a truly beautiful city, but it's a cold beauty. Place Vendome is utter perfection, but it's cold. It doesn't have warmth of Piazza Navona or Piazza della Rontonda or Campo de' Fiori.

What makes Rome a cut above the rest is (in addition to all the reasons stated above) its calming, soothing warmth. That a person can feel soothed and calm in such a crazy, haphazard city is a testament to what a lot of beauty can do for the soul.

Here Today, Struck by Lightning Tomorrow

2009-06-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

Today was a rare day in Los Angeles, I mean rare, rare, RARE. It rained. In June.

It rained in Los Angeles in JUNE.

I had an audition in Santa Monica, and I was nervous because, well, it was RAINING. In Los Angeles. In June. And well, the people here don't know how do drive in the rain, especially when it hasn't rained for a few months. To put it bluntly, the folks here can't drive for shit in the rain.

I live in Hollywood, which is pretty far from Santa Monica. Yet today, I did not take the freeway. I went the long way: Sunset to Santa Monica to Wilshire until I got to Santa Monica. I was not gonna get on the freeway in the rain, 'cuz folks here can't drive for shit in the rain.

Even as I drove along the 40 m.p.h. speed-limited, two-lane Santa Monica Boulevard, I kept hearing cars skidding and slamming on the brakes, and I kept thinking, Please let me get to this audition alive, 'cuz folks here can't drive for shit in the rain.

My fear though, should not have been a car crash, due to the rain. My fear should rather have been of electrocution due to the lightning.

Two women were struck by lightning today.

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. In southern California. In JUNE.

One woman survived, the other died.

I learned about the lightning-struck women on the radio as I was driving home after my audition. I couldn't stop thinking about the woman who had died.

All I heard on the radio was that she lived in Fontana, she was 35-years-old, and she was standing next to a tree when it happened, at 4:30 in the afternoon.

4:30 in the afternoon. The time that I was in the waiting room of the casting office, waiting to audition. My audition was for 4:10, but there was a delay, and I remember at one point, I glanced at the clock in the waiting room, and saw that it was 4:30.

I couldn't help but think this as I drove home, how much life is the accident of where fate puts us. Why was I indoors, in a studio in Santa Monica where no lightning struck, while she was outdoors, standing next to a tree, in Fontana, where lightning DID strike?

Life leads you in different directions, that's why. Somehow, the path of her life led her to Fontana CA, and today, for some reason, she was outdoors beside a tree, which is a prime conductant for lightning during a storm. The path of my life has led me to Hollywood CA, and for some reason (my agent having called me and told me where to go, to be precise), I was inside a waiting room, and waiting rooms, as a rule, are not a lightning conductors.

The drive home from Santa Monica was eternal. As I kept inching along in rush hour traffic, I began to criticize myself for thinking about the matter in such a trite, cliche' way.

"Paths leading us in different directions: one to an audition, and one to lightning." How trite. How cliche'.

There has to be a deeper meaning, and as I sat, stuck in traffic, it came to me: the most bizarre thing about that woman's death...

Just yesterday, she obviously couldn't have dreamed in a million years that tomorrow she would be dead, and of A LIGHTNING STRIKE. I mean, I remember yesterday. It was sunny. It was another typical day in southern California: yet another sunny day in a chain of sunny days that would continue uninterrupted until November.

To think you're going to die of a lightning strike in southern California in June is tantamount to thinking you're going to die of drowning in the Sahara desert in June. It just doesn't happen.

But it can.

Life can be taken from you any time, any place, for any reason, no matter how fantastic and unexpected.

Yesterday I was taking photos of the royal palm trees on my block. They are like 60-feet-tall. As I craned my neck up to take pictures of the tops of the trees, the sun blinded me. I had to photograph in the other direction, so that the backdrop of the trees would simply be the light blue sky. If somebody had told me yesterday, as I looked at that relentlessly blue sky, "Be careful tomorrow, Larry. You could get stuck by lightning and die."

I would have thought they were on crack.

I'm sure that the woman who died today would have had a similar reaction. "You think I'm gonna die tomorrow due to a LIGHTNING strike? Are you on crack?"

Of COURSE her reaction would have been something like that. After all, she was living her life. Perhaps she had plans for tonight. Maybe she was going to do something special over the weekend. Maybe this summer she had a vacation to Europe planned. Maybe in the fall she was going to start taking a class, or maybe she had a wedding to go to-- a friend's or her own. Whatever her plans may have been, they have been cancelled now, because

TODAY SHE WAS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.

In southern California. In JUNE.

At this point, I am tempted to say that this is an example of how Life should never be taken for granted, that we should live our lives day by day, that we should live each day as if it were our last. Carpe diem! Here today, gone tomorrow!

Hmm. I'll resist the temptation to say those things (even though I totally feel that way) because they are so trite, so cliche'.

Justice, Be a Lady

2009-06-02T19:21:00.001-07:00

I'll start out by saying that I don't know crapola about the law. I'm a reasonably well-read person, and I'm always watching news programs and documentaries, I've known American lawyers and Italian magistrates on a social level, and I've seen lots of serious courtroom dramas, like Judgment at Nuremberg and My Cousin Vinny, so I have a rudimentary idea of the law which is perhaps even better than crapola.

So, I've got a problem with the way the California Supreme Court ruled in the Proposition 8 issue.

I know they ruled on this a week ago, but somehow I forgot to write about it in my blog, and just now, I was looking at some photos of protest march that I attended the evening of the ruling, so my mind is on the topic again.

Last Tuesday, Lady Justice was not being very lady-like when the state Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, which eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry in the state of California. People who are against legal same-sex marriage were very happy, because "the will of the voters was not overturned by the court".

But my issue is this: Did the voters even have the right to take away a civil right from a minority of the population?

I mean, the 50 states of the union all have their constitutions, but all of the states are bound by the federal constitution. I am fully aware that the Declaration of Independence is a separate document from the Constitution of the United States, but still, don't the famous words of the Declaration (Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness) still pertain?

And isn't the ability to marry the person you love and want to share the rest of your life with, isn't it a part of the "Liberty and pursuit of Happiness"? And doesn't the Declaration say that these are UNALIENABLE rights?

I just looked up "alienable" in the Webster's dictionary. The definition is: "Transferable to the ownership of another."

So UNalienable means NOT transferable.

So how could Proposition 8 have been kosher? It proposed that the rights of Liberty and pursuit of Happiness would be transferred from a group of people.

Unalienable rights are not to be put up for a vote. They can't be taken away from you. That's why they are called "unalienable".

And in any case, is this how it has been traditionally done in this country? Is this past practice? that the majority, by a referendum, can take way the rights of others?

It seems to me that in the past, when the constitution has been amended, it was to give people ADDITIONAL rights. The only instance I can think of, of an amendent taking away people's rights was the 18th amendment, a.k.a. Prohibition, which took away people's rights to buy and consume alcohol. But even then, it took away EVERYbody's rights, not a just a segment of the population, and it wasn't done by a referendum (because you can bet that had it been put to a popular vote, the majority of voters would not have eliminated their own right to get drunk).

So as far as I can tell, this popular vote which put the rights of gays and lesbians on the line, was an unjust method on deciding the same-sex marriage issue.

I mean really, if we had put up the most notable rights-gaining issues to a popular vote in the past, would this country have progressed as it has?

Do we really think that if we had put the slavery issue up to a vote in say, 1850 (a time when all the voters were white), that blacks would have won their freedom? If we had a referendum on women's suffrage in 1900 (a time when all the voters were men) would women have acquired the vote? What if, in 1950, we had put de-segregation on the ballot? Would it have won? And in 1960, when many states had miscegenation laws, would the majority have voted to say that it was okay for straight blacks to marry straight whites, and vice-versa?

In this country, the minority does not win equal rights by a popular vote of the majority. It is done in the courts and in the legislature. And constitutions are not amended to REMOVE rights from any one group.

The most bizarre thing to me though, about the California Supreme Court's ruling is that, while it upheld the elimination of the right to marry from same-sex couples, it DID permit those 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who had tied the knot before the Prop 8 vote to REMAIN married.

Now, I am very happy that those 18,000 couples were not forcibly divorced by the will of the "righteous" voters, but how can the court protect THEIR marriage rights, but not those of all the other gays and lesbians? How is that

EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW?

Again, I don't know much about the law, but it seems to me that these Supreme Court justices don't know much about the law either. They must have, in order get appointed, but since their appointment, has the California sun cooked their brains?

How is this justice? How is it just to uphold a popular vote that was unjust to begin with?

How is it justice to tell one segment of the minority that they have a right that other members of their minority no longer have, simply because they had the good luck to meet their life-partners and marry them before November 7, 2008?

This is equal protection?

I may not know much about the law, but I can say this: Lady Justice is not a lady in the state of contradiction that is California.

My Post-Apocalyptic Audition

2009-06-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Look at the photo above. It's a still frame of a video shot of me yesterday, as I was auditioning for an independent feature film.

Now, by looking at my face, does it look like I am

A. Falling asleep.
B. Receiving fellatio.
C. Getting stoned.
D. Dying a painful, hideous death in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where everything I ingest causes horrific infections: food, water, air, etc.

If I were not the person who had actually auditioned, among the multiple choice answers, I would choose B.

Yesterday, I was told that the character I was auditioning for, was literally minutes from death, a grueling, torturous death, his body plagued by all sorts of insidious infections. He is lying on the floor, begging his brother to take him to a hospital (but there ARE no hospitals, because they are in a post-apocalyptic L.A.)

I was told to lie on the floor, use my messenger bag as a pillow, and say to my invisible brother, "Hey, I need a hospital. Why aren't you taking me to a hospital? It hurts so bad, why aren't you taking me? No. I'm not gonna die. You can't let me die..."

I was told to portray a dread and fear and fragility and pain that shows how close I am to death.

Oh boy. This one's gonna be tough, I thought.

I have had some tough auditions in the past. I have auditioned for plays written by Shakespeare, Brecht, Strindberg, Moliere... I have auditioned in Milan Italy, doing a monologue from Chekhov's The Seagull, in ITALIAN (molto difficile)... I have even auditioned for Miss Saigon on Broadway, despite the fact that I am a mediocre singer at best.

But this audition yesterday took the cake.

A DEATH SCENE, on the floor, in a Hollywood casting studio, with a video camera pointed at my face. One minute I was trying to find parking, the next I was on the floor, dying.

I realized yesterday how hard it is to authentically act like I'm dying. I trembled, I winced, I closed my eyes and withstood the relentless pain...I thought I pulled it off rather well, given the circumstances (having to die on-cue, with no real knowledge of who the character is).

Well, maybe I didn't do it rather well after all...

The casting office sent me an e-mail with a link to my audition, in which I could watch the video. I didn't watch it, because I would have had to pay an annual membership of $59.99, and I don't know if in the next year, I'll be auditioning there enough to merit paying 60 bucks to watch my audition videos. I certainly didn't think it was worth 60 bucks just to watch one, 5-minute audition, so I had to settle for just seeing a still frame of me in the audition video, in which, to my chagrin, I did not look like I was about to die, but rather, I looked like I was

A. Falling asleep.
B. Receiving fellatio.
C. Getting stoned.

I'm Peach

2009-05-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

I was just reading my previous post in which I wrote about Tom Tancredo calling Sonia Sotomayor "a brown woman" who thinks she's better than "white men" like himself, and I commented that Sotomayor's skin is actually whiter than Tancredo's. This got me to thinking...

I think it is so absurd, this system we have set up describe people by color. Whites and blacks are of course white and black, even though neither are white nor black.

Latinos and Asians? Brown and yellow.

Asians, yellow? Last week I met a Korean with skin as white as milk, and last night, I met a Filipino with skin and brown as a caffe latte.

Latinos, brown? First off, Latino isn't even a race. It is simply the Spanish (and Portuguese and Italian) word for "Latin", and while the peoples of Latin America speak languages derived from Latin, and are a part of a culture which is highly influenced by Latin Europe, a great many of them have no Latin ancestry at all (especially when you consider that Latin comes from the Italian peninsula).

Latin America is a place with people of many different races... Amerindian (Aztec, Maya, Inca, etc.), African, European, Asian... some people are of 100% Amerindian ancestry, and even speak the native language at home and in the towns where they live. Some are of 100% African ancestry, some are of 100% European ancestry... and so many are a mix of some or all of the above, which is where the Spanish words "mestizo" (mixed Amerindian and European) and "mulato" (mixed African and European) come in.

To call Latinos "brown" is insulting to me, NOT because there is anything wrong with being brown, but because to say that Latinos (or Hispanics or whatever euphemism you prefer) are all one color, is to ignore the racial and ethnic diversity of Latin America. It's like saying that everybody in the USA is white, just because they speak English and are raised in an Anglo society and culture.

I am not brown. And here's how I know:

When I was a child, I used to love to draw pictures of myself with crayons. I remember one day, maybe I was 6 or 7-years-old, I was trying to find the right color to color in my skin in a drawing of me. The paper was white, and so it was too light to be my skin, and had to be colored in. I tried the color brown, it was too dark. I kept testing colors on the paper and then putting my arm next to it, to see if the color matched the skin of my arm.

Finally, I found the closest color to my skin tone: "Peach".

I'M PEACH, I thought.

And from that day on, I always colored my skin in with the peach crayon. If I was at school, and the box of crayons I was using didn't have a peach crayon, I would walk around and ask the other children if I could use their Peach.

So this has given me some inspiration.

People always ask me where I'm from. I always say, "Originally from the suburbs of Houston, Texas, although I was born in Newark, New Jersey." I say this, because the look on their face afterwards always betrays their disappointment at my answer. What they reeeally want to know is what my ethnic background is.

They want to know this, because there is a weird curiosity in this country of trying to discern what is the ethic background of an otherwise "white" person who has black hair, brown eyes and dark skin, as if having dark features throws a boomerang into the Caucasian race.

After all, this question is rarely asked of an American with blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. It's not as if blond Americans are always asked, "Where are you from? Because I can't tell if you're Dutch or Swedish or German or Estonian or Polish..."

Well, I'm always asked this "where are you from" question, and after I throw them for a loop by telling them where I was raised, I often say, "Oh, you want to know why I have dark hair and skin! Okay. It's because my family is from Cuba."

Then they usually say, "Ooooh! Because I wondering. I didn't know if you were Hispanic or Italian or Greek or even Middle Eastern..."

(Did you give a shit where he/she "was from" the last time you saw a blond?)

Sometimes, I am even asked this: "What are you?"

What AM I?

And this is where my inspiration comes in; the inspiration that I draw from the simple wisdom that I had as a child.

From now on, the next time somebody asks what I am, I'm going to proudly say,

"I'm Peach."

"Hispanic Chick Lady": RACIST!

2009-05-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

In my previous posting I wrote that I suspect that some of these Republican talking heads on the TV are really paid Democratic operatives.

I wrote that they are either that, or they are being supremely stupid by belittling the academic and career achievements of the first Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor (or, as Glenn Beck referred to her, "Hispanic Chick Lady").

I wrote that the GOP desperately needs to improve their numbers with Latino voters to remain a viable national party, and for them to say that a Puerto Rican woman who graduated as the top undergrad at Yale, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from there AND Harvard, and ran the Yale Law Review, and is one of the most renowned and esteemed appellate judges in the country.... to say that she was picked because she is Hispanic, is basically like saying to Hispanics, "Achieve what you will, but no matter how impressive it is, if you get a great gig, it's because your ethnicity, not your accomplishments".

This is not the way to get a greater number of Latinos to join the Republican bandwagon.

In recent days, the right-wingers have been becoming even MORE moronic, if that were possible. Now, she's not just unqualified, she is also A RACIST!

HISPANIC CHICK LADY ES UNA RACISTA!

Here's the Judge Sotomayor quote that has the right-wingers calling her a Latin American version of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard:

"I would hope that a wise Latino woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Wow. That comment is so flagrantly racist, that I can't help but imagine her with a little square moustache under her nose, speaking to rally full brownshirts, in a room bedecked with swastika-covered bunting.

Seemingly everybody on the right is right is calling her comments racist, or calling her a racist herself... Tom Tancredo, Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, G. Gordon Liddy, and the grand poubah of them all, Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh compared the Democrats nominating her as being as outrageous a nomination as the Republicans nominating David Duke, the notorious former KKK member turned aspiring politician. He called her a "reverse racist" and "a bigot". He also said, "How do you get promoted in the Obama administration? By hating white people."

Really? Sonia Sotomayor hates white people? Rush was able to glean that from that one quote? Hmm. Like George W. Bush was able to do with Vladimir Putin, Rush is able to get a sense of Sonia's soul, without the help of any concrete evidence.

Tom Tancredo, a total whackadoodle, started to stir up the ethnic pot by morphing his belief that Judge Sotomayor is a racist, to implying that the members of the popular Latino political advocacy group La Raza are racists, because he considers La Raza to be, "a Latino KKK without the hoods or nooses".

G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate whackjob, said basically the same thing. In addition to saying that he hopes that she won't be participating in any key conferences while she's menstruating, he also said, "Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in Illegal Alien, 'The Race', and that should not surprise anyone, because she's already on record with a number of racist comments."

So La Raza means "The Race" in Illegal Alien. I never knew that I spoke Illegal Alien. All these years, I thought I was speaking Spanish, that romance language that comes from the Castile region of Spain. Huh. So my mother and father's native language is Illegal Alien! I had no idea. King Juan Carlos of Spain speaks Illegal Alien. Miguel de Cervantes spoke Illegal Alien....

Oh wait. Sorry. I got side-tracked by my offense of hearing the language of my ancestors referred to as "Illegal Alien". Back to Sonia Sotomayor.

So now not only is SHE a racist, but the members of La Raza, and those who like and support that group, are racists too. That's a wonderful way to get Latinos into the Republican fold, Tom! And re-naming their lanuguage in a really insulting way will really win them over. Smart move, G.!

Hey Tom, another bit of advice, you should keep calling her "a brown woman", too. Her skin is whiter than yours, Mr. Perpetual Fake 'n Bake Tan, but keep calling her a person who thinks she's better than you white men because she's a "brown woman".

Keep it up! I WANT a permanent Democratic majority in Congress.

But anyway, let me wrap this up by showing why her comment was not racist.

"I would hope that a wise Latino woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

She said, "with the richness of her EXPERIENCES" not of her race or ethnicity. She was not saying that a Hispanic is superior than an Anglo by nature. If, for the last 232 years, black males had been at the top of the political and social hierarchy instead of white males, then she likely would have ended the sentence with, "a better conclusion than a black male who hasn't lived that life".

It's about hierarchy, not race.

But since I did bring up black males, let me end with this:

In the notorious 1857 Dred Scott case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African slaves and their descendants, whether they were freed or not, were not legal human beings and could never be citizens of the USA.

They were chattel under the law.

Now: do you think that case would have been ruled in same way, had the members of the Supreme Court been 9 black men, instead of 9 white men?

"The richness of experiences"

I REST MY CASE.

"Hispanic Chick Lady" and Other Offensive Comments

2009-05-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Sonia Sotomayor is President Obama's first Supreme Court pick.

It is my hope that she will be his first pick of many (because it is my hope that Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts and Samuel Alito will all retire within the next four years. Please please pleeeeeeeease...)

"Sonia Sotomayor". Do you find that Spanish name difficult to pronounce? That's okay, because you could always call her, "Hispanic Chick Lady". After all, this is what Obama calls her, according to Glenn Beck. He reduced Obama's choice of a new justice to this: "Hey! Hispanic Chick Lady! You're empathetic. You're in!"

She has worked as a district attorney, a corporate attorney, a district court judge on the federal bench, and as an appellate court judge, but according to Glenn Douchebag, she got picked because she's an empathetic Hispanic chick lady.

Pat Buchanan made basically the same assertion, albeit not with such douchebag language as Glenn Beck. Pat called her "an affirmative action pick", and compared her to Harriet Miers.

Remember Harriet Miers? Wasn't she George W. Bush's secretary or something? a person who had never studied Law? a person so unqualified for the job that her nomination had to be withdrawn? someone who was chosen just because she admired her boss and supported him adoringly?

Judge Sotomayor has 17 years of experience on the bench, but she's another Harriet Miers. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and Yale, but she's another Harriet Miers. She ran the Yale Law Review, but she's another Harriet Miers. She has as much, or more, judicial experience as anyone ever nominated to the top court, yet because she is a woman of Latin American heritage, she's another Harriet Miers... or another Anita in West Side Story.

"I want to be in Amer-i-ca, I go to Yale in Amer-i-ca, I be a judge in Amer-i-ca, on Supreme Court in Amer-EEE-ca..."

If that weren't insulting enough, on top of being a personal favortism choice, a la Madame Miers, she is also "an affirmative action pick".

Pat Buchanan is not the only Conservative saying this about her. Rush Limbaugh, Fred Barnes, Bill Bennett... all of them said she was an affirmative action pick, with Bennett going so far as to say that she got into Princeton by affirmative action.

Do you want to know who really DID get into a prestigious Ivy League University via affirmative action? George W. Bush.

That slacker George Dubya only got into Yale because he was a legacy. "What's 'a legacy'?" you may ask. Well, a legacy is AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR RICH WHITE DUDES.

Then, in addition to belittling her achievements by calling her an affirmative action pick, they also doubt her intelligence!

Let's hear again from Mr. Douchebag extraordinaire, Glenn Beck: "She's not that intellectually bright, she's almost a bully; she just likes to hear herself talk."

Karl Rove didn't say she was not intellectually bright, but he did say that she was not "intellectually strong" and doubted that she had the "broad, intellectual powers" to be an influential Supreme Court justice.

I wish Karl Rove had cared so much about a strong, broad intellect when he shoved the mediocre-minded Texas governor George W. Bush down the country's throat.

I'm starting to wonder if people like Limbaugh, Beck, Bennett, Barnes, Rove, et al, are paid Democratic operatives. Here's why...

Republicans these days are looking with worry at the statistics. They are way down in the polls with Latinos, Blacks, Women and Youngsters. But it is the Latino numbers that should really have them crapping in their pants, because Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the USA. It is my belief that by the end of this century, they may be the majority. Unless Republicans can improve their numbers with Latinos, they are "jodido". Do you know what that means in Spanish? Go look it up: "Jodido". I'll give you a hint: in English, it starts with an F.

The GOP desperately needs to improve its image with Latinos. So what do these geniuses do? When the first Latino Supreme Court nominee makes history by BEING the first, they say she's an affirmative action pick BECAUSE she's Latino. She was picked just because she's Puerto Rican... or from whatever of those countries to the south.

Her qualifications? Screw those. She studied her ass off at Yale, graduating as the top undergrad in the entire university? So what. Harvard, too? So what. Phi Beta Kappa? Taco Burrito Enchilada. Ran the Yale law review? "No importa para nada".

What these old elephants are saying is, no matter how hard you study, no matter how you excel, no matter what your impressive accomplishments are, no matter what hurdles you jump over... poor immigrant family, father dead in childhood, raised by a single mother, raised in a housing project in the Bronx... yet you become the top student at the Ivy Leagues, then later a nationally renowned, esteemed appellate judge...

None of that matters, because you are a Latino. A Hispanic. THAT's why you got picked.

Arrrriba! Ole! Ay caramba!

No matter WHAT you achieve, if you get picked for something really important and prestigious, it is because of your ethnicity, NOT your accomplishments.

Wow. This is quite a way to win Hispanics over to the Republican party, amigos. You guys are muy inteligentes. As a person of Cuban heritage, you are reeeeeally tempting me to become a Republican. Muy muy mucho.

IDIOTAS DE MIERDA.

It Wasn't a Booking

2009-05-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

That on avail that I wrote about yesterday... well, I was right. It wasn't a booking. Today's the 28th. I found out what I predicted I would find out: it wasn't a booking.

Is my name Larry, or Cassandra?

Once again, the on avail was just that: an on avail.

See? It's not that I'm a pessimist. It ended up being exactly what I thought it was... what it ALWAYS is... which is why I was happy, but not excited. Smart me.

On Avail

2009-05-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

Oh, that word: on avail. Actually it's two words. Actually it's a word and a half, because "avail" is half of the word "available".

For those of you who are wise enough not to be in the entertainment industry, "on avail" means that you, the actor, have virtually booked the job, but you haven't YET, or you may not AT ALL.

Confused? Okay...like, it's between you and another actor, and they want you, but not totally (because you might be the back-up choice) OR totally (because you could me the primary choice) OR you could be the back-up choice and they change their minds and make you the primary choice. Make sense?

As usual in biz, you are powerless in this choice, and you just have to wait for a call from your agent. You're on hold to actually book it. I think it should be changed from "on avail" to "limbo".

TELEPHONE limbo. You need the phone to ring, and to tell you that the avail has become a job. As usual with actors, you are powerless, and all you can do is wait for that PHONE to RING.

I am writing about this because today, I got a call from my agent telling me that I was an on avail for a commercial that I auditioned for yesterday.

When I first started to audition for commercials, I thought that getting an on avail was good news. Well, it IS good news. It's more than a callback. It means that you booked the job (but you haven't yet or you may not at all).

However, I have never had an on avail that has turned into a real booking. Every commercial that I've ever booked, I had the callback, and the next day or the day after, my agent called me and said, "You booked it!" they've never said, "You're on avail" and then I get the job. So perhaps it's just an illusion that has been created by my own experience, but an on avail doesn't excite me, because it's not a real booking.

A real booking. You know... me getting fitted by wardrobe... showing up on set... sitting in the makeup chair... killing time in my trailer... pigging out at the craft services table... shooting the actual commercial... waiting and waiting to shoot some more... shooting some more... and then hopefully in a month or so, I'll realize that I haven't been edited out of it, or that the spot has been dropped... rather, I'll discover that it had aired, with me in it, and, the grand hope of all, that it airs nationally.

I have had many on avails, and my agent gives me the avail date, which, hopefully, is not too far off in the future, so that you won't be left hanging and hoping for too long.

I'm lucky. My avail date for this most recent on avail is May 28. That's tomorrow. At least I won't be in limbo for long.

I'm not remotely thinking that I will actually film this commercial. I'm not the only one who feels this way...

Last night I was at a protest march in West Hollywood with my friends Jana and Matt, both actors. I told them that earlier in the day I had had an audition which was a callback, and Matt, who has booked many commercials, brought up on avails.

"Have you ever had an on avail, Larry?"

"Have *I* ever had an on avail? Uh, ya. Quite a few. Whoopee."

"They never become real bookings, EVER!"

"I knooooow!"

"You too? I've never had an on avail that meant me getting the job. Ever. I don't even care when I get them anymore."

"Matt, you're preaching to the choir. Believe me, if my agent calls me tomorrow and tells me that I'm on avail for this job, I won't get remotely excited. I'll be happy that I got it, but I won't get excited."

So imagine my surprise when my agent calls me today and tells me that I'm on avail. What a coincidence, after last night's conversation. And what excitement. Whoopee.

But please don't think that I'm bitching, or that I'm a "glass half empty" kind of guy. Even though I'm 98% sure that tomorrow I'll be released from avail with no job actually booked, I am glad that I got another on avail.

I'm happy because I got called in to read for this commercial by people at a casting office that I really like. I like the people that work there, because a dear friend of mine used to work there, and I've seen them socially, at parties outside of work, and they are really terrific people. The fact that THAT casting office called me in to read, and I got an on avail from it is great. I want them to be glad that they called me in to audition, because I have such a high regard for them.

An on avail also shows to my agent that I am auditioning well, and that's never bad.

So I'm happy. I'm just not excited. I think it's good that I'm not excited, because if tomorrow I discover that I actually booked it, it will be a pleasant surprise, and if I don't actually book it, it will not be a let down.

"Memorial" Day

2009-05-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

Today was Memorial Day, and it was a long day. First I went to a barbeque in Sherman Oaks, then I went to another barbeque in Los Feliz, then I went to a dinner in Koreatown.

Not once, at all these social events, were the fallen men and women of our armed forces ever mentioned. No one mentioned the troops, no one mentioned anything armed forces-related, including me.

There was nothing "memorializing" about this day, at least not from what I saw and did.

I'm not being judgmental, I'm just making an observation. I had a really fun day, but it dawned on me when I got home: "Hey wait, WHAT was today about?"

I wondered if anyone I hung out with today knew that today was about our troops, and not about having the day off and eating barbeque.

I knew, but I also forgot.

To Catch a Predator in the Colosseum

2009-05-24T23:12:00.000-07:00

Today I wasn't feeling very well, and spent most of the day lying around watching TV. While channel surfing, I caught on MSNBC, an episode of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator". Lucky me, it was a To Catch a Predator "marathon", and I could watch hour after hour of men's lives being ruined before my very eyes.

I didn't watch hour after hour, though. I watched for two hours only. I wouldn't have watched even 20 minutes, because I have seen the show before and many of the men whose lives were being ruined, I've seen before.

"Oh, that's the rabbi who tried hook up with a 13-year-old boy, the one with the desperate, horrified eyes", I thought, "And look, I know that guy. He's the Baptist minister of tried to make it with a 14-year-old girl, the one who wept like a baby... Oh, there's the Iraq War vet who thinks he's gonna do it with a 15-year-old girl, the one who got on his knees and begged to be forgiven..."

It was like catching a rerun. Well hell, it WAS a rerun. The Best of Predator! I imagine what these busted men must feel, knowing they will be playing in perpetuity via reruns, as though they were Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke.

The reason I watched two hours' worth was because I became fascinated by how this show is so successful. When I say "successful", I don't mean in catching online predators (which it eminently is). I mean successful as a popular TV show, as entertainment.

I'll first make it clear that I am all for catching men who try to hook up with young kids online. There should be more sting operations, because the more there are, the more men will think twice before driving out to some 14 year-old girl's house to commit statutory rape.

I just have an issue with the public spectacle of it, the idea of being entertained by seeing some man realize, as he's confronted by Chris Hansen on camera, that his life as he knew it is basically over. This country does not tolerate sexual offenses towards minors. Once you've done it, it's the scarlet letter that you wear until you die.

I think that To Catch a Predator is a form of public entertainment that is somewhat reminiscent of the Colosseum in ancient Rome.

Granted, it's not bloody and savage. Nobody is being fed to lions, but they are being fed to the viewers, who can then say, "Oh, look at that pathetic pervert. He's sick. What a loser." In an off-hand way, I think the appeal of this show is that it makes the viewers feel better about themselves: "I may not like my job and be trapped in an unhappy marriage, but hey: at least I'm not driving 3 hours to hook up with a 9th grader and get busted on national TV for it."

I cringe watching this show. Sure, I don't cringe as dramatically as I would were I watching two gladiators slicing each other open, but I cringe just the same. It's a slight cringe, but it's a cringe. Often I have to look away from the TV set, because I feel so embarrassed for these men.

If you've never seen the show, the set-up is basically this:

There's a group called "Perverted Justice" and they chat online in certain chat rooms where men looking for hookups are usually found. The decoys pretend to be a girl (and sometimes a boy) who is between the ages of 13 and 16.

These decoys chat with men and let them know that they are willing to have sex with them. They give the men the address to their house. The house is actually a house which is loaded with hidden cameras, as well as a full camera crew from Dateline NBC, and Chris Hansen, the show's host, and also, an armed police squad at the ready.

The always unattractive and often butt-ugly man then shows up at the house, usually carrying condoms and alcohol, and sometimes with porno DVDs, marijuana and lube. A young-looking 19-year-old actress is there at the door when he arrives, holding a laundry basket full of clothes and saying the same line almost every time in an innocent, girlish voice:

"Hi! I've got to put these clothes in the dryer, otherwise they'll get all wrinkled! Come on in to the kitchen! I made you some sweet tea! It's on the table! Pour yourself a glass and I'll be right out!"

I'm actually surprised they keep using this line, because this show has been on TV for a long time and many people have seen it, and if I were one of these guys, the moment I see a girl holding a laundry basket and offering sweet tea, I would run away like a gazelle.

However, the man never suspects, and always goes directly into the kitchen and heads straight for that pitcher of sweet tea. As he pours his glass, Chris Hansen comes out and says, "How's that sweet tea?" or "How was your drive?" or "Making yourself at home, huh?"

The men always look at Chris with a look of complete and total shock. They don't think he's the host of a TV show (the cameras are hidden). They almost always assume that he's a police detective, and sometimes, the girl's father. The moment they see him instead of the girl come out of the supposed laundry room, it almost always looks like their life is flashing before their eyes. It's actually really hard to come up with words to accurately describe the expressions on their faces, because the look of humiliation and fear and realization, and DREAD, is so complete and palpable, that it often makes me look away in embarrassment.

So Chris asks, with a fraternal yet paternal tone, "What're ya doing here?"

The man will feebly reply, "I came to meet ____."

"What for?"

"Just to meet her. Hang out. Maybe watch some TV and talk."

"Really? Because I have your chat log right here. Didn't you say, 'Babe, I'm gonna spread your soft legs wide, get out my strawberry-flavored lube and---' "

"PLEASE. There's no need to keep reading it. I know what I wrote."

"...it may hurt the first time, but I got experience with virgins, I'll soften you up 'til you--"

"PLEASE. You don't need to keep reading it. Please."

What then follows is the man trying to convince Chris Hansen that having sex with the kid was not his intention. Some platonic reason is always given for the visit, to which Chris will say,

"Then why did you bring these condoms? Trojans. EXTRA SENSITIVE..."

The excuses continue, and they are always so ridiculous, such blatant, desperate attempts to win clemency, and so often spoken with such a plaintive voice, so feeble and imploring. Many times what they implore is that nobody else needs to know about this, to which Chris will say,

"Well, there's something you should know: I'm Chris Hansen, the host of Dateline NBC's 'To Catch a Predator' "

At that moment, the camera men come out, pointing their cameras to the pervert, who gives a look of utter horror or humiliation and covers his face, ignorant of the fact that he's been already filmed on hidden camera.

Chris asks, "Is there anything else you'd like to say?"

"No."

"Then you're free to go."

At which point the man high-tails it out of there, thinking he's free with just the humiliation as his punishment, but nope, because the police squad is out there ready, pointing their firearms at him, and shouting, "FREEZE! ON THE GROUND! FACE DOWN! HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK!"

As the man is face down on the grass being handcuffed, you can often hear him wailing with utter despair.

But that's not the end, because the on-camera questioning continues with the police detective asking things like, "Why did you write in the chat, 'I want to pop your cherry'?" and "Why did you bring this: AstroGlide Lube?"

Then after that, we are treated to seeing the incarcerated guy in his striped jail pajamas, sitting before a widescreen TV, on which is a judge who is in another room, charging him with his crimes.

One pervert charged, cut to the NEXT guy approaching the house and being offered sweet tea, and the whole process begins again, man after man, show after show. Another man enters the arena of the Colosseum, to be destroyed for the audience's entertainment.

Yes, destroyed. Many of the men are married. Their marriage is over. Many of them have kids the same age as the supposed girl they are going to meet for sex. Their relationship with their kids is damaged. Many of them have jobs which they will now lose. A couple have been school teachers.

I'm not saying that it's bad for them to lose their job if they are a school teacher, but I do think it's wrong for these men to be put on TV if they have kids. I remember what it was like to be in Intermediate school. School is tough enough without having your dad on TV starring as a pervert.

As I mentioned before, today on the show, I saw a married man with a daughter, an Iraq war vet, ON HIS KNEES before Chris Hansen. He literally kneeled before him, and the whole interview took place with this man pathetically on his knees as though Chris were the King of Siam.

We don't need to see this.

We don't need Chris trying to understand these men later, saying to the camera for the umpteenth time, "This man drove three hours for this encounter. Why?"

BECAUSE HE NEVER GETS ANY SEX! LOOK AT HIM. THE GUY COULDN'T BE UGLIER!

"Here's a man with a good job and a stable life. Why would he risk so much for this encounter?"

BECAUSE NO WOMAN WANTS TO TOUCH HIM! LOOK AT HIM. HE'S REPULSIVE!

And what is really repulsive, is this show, because it's about schadenfreude, it's not about justice. If you want justice, then do the sting without it becoming a reality TV show. Why have the spectacle of it on TV? So that we can delight in the misfortune of others? So we can feel better about ourselves? So we can be like the crowds in the Colosseum, feeling superior to those condemned men in the arena?

That truly is "Perverted Justice".

Desi Arnaz: Cuban or Pakistani?

2009-05-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about internet social networking sites is that you get to meet people on other sides of the planet whom you otherwise would never know existed. In addition, the online chat makes it possible to converse with them, without costing you a fortune in long-distance telephone charges. You can chat with them every day, and it doesn't cost you an extra penny. During these chats you can learn new things about them, their culture and their country.

I started meeting people online after I moved to Los Angeles, because I was finding it hard to meet people, and to make and maintain friendships here. Before I came here a little over 3 years ago, it never crossed my mind to put up an online profile anywhere.

Many of the people from other countries that I have met, surprisingly, have been from Pakistan. They live in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, and a couple of them live outside of Pakistan, in the United Arab Emirates and Canada.

It has been very interesting for me, because I never thought much about Pakistan before getting to know these Pakistanis online. To me, Pakistan was just a Muslim version of India, except with a closed society, but with the same overcrowding and poverty. Pakistan to me was just a dangerous place, prone to dictatorships and military coups, where western journalists like Daniel Pearl are kidnapped and beheaded by Muslim extremists.

It never dawned on me that Pakistan is full of ethnic and cultural diversity, that it has lots of bohemians, progressives and intellectuals who are savvy and sophisticated... that there are people there who are modern and stylish, and strikingly good-looking, with stunning faces and swirling social lives, who are totally in tune with western pop culture.

I'm ashamed of my former ignorance, really.

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a Pakistani friend, and I asked him if there was a word for people from Pakistan, India , Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the way "Latino" is a word for people from the various countries of Latin America. He said that there was a indeed a word: "Desi". A Pakistani is a Desi, and so is an Indian. The word is "Desi".

DESI?

THAT's the word to describe the peoples of the Indian subcontinent?

Desi?

To me, Desi is a word that I would imagine would be used to describe ME, a person from a Cuban family. The reason, of course, is Desi Arnaz. You know, Desi Arnaz, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo on "I Love Lucy". Before Gloria Estefan came along, Desi Arnaz was the most famous Cuban in Anglo America. He WAS Cuba, years before Fidel Castro hit the world stage.

Before this month, if someone had asked me, "Who is your favorite Desi singer?" I would have probably said Celia Cruz. If the question were, "Who is your favorite Desi actor?" my likely answer would have been Andy Garcia (I certainly would not have said Feroze Khan).

So I've been having some fun using this new, weird word, and another one of my Pakistani friends, noting how I would insert the word in conversations whenever I had the chance, suggested that for fun, I go online and look at some of the Desi websites. He suggested one, called "Desi Rater". I googled it, and in doing so, also found another called, "Rate Desi".

Hmmm, I thought, Desi Rater and Rate Desi... what could this be about?

Well, I discovered that on these sites, Desi men and women who consider themselves attractive, post photos of themselves, and above their photos is a rating scale, from 1 to 10. You click on the number that you think their looks merit, and that number is tabulated into their average rating. The men and women with the highest average ratings are the Top Desis, and as you scroll down, the Desis will presumably get less attractive and less attractive, because their rating is lower.

I immediately formed the opinion that the people who frequent this website have a strange idea of what beauty is, because both the men and the women who were rating a 6 were generally more naturally attractive than those who had rated a 10.

In any case, this got me wondering. Is this just a Desi thing? This practice of putting yourself online just so that you can get your looks rated by strangers, so that you can see how you compare to the other people with photos on the site?

I found it strange, especially because all the people on the site were of the same race or ethnicity or whatever. I mean, it's rather like The Westminster Dog Show, where, in course of competition, the dogs are rated by breed. But these aren't dogs on these websites. These are human beings... human beings who aspire to be rated "Best in Breed".

Again: Is this just a Desi thing?

Curious to find out, I googled "Asian Rater", "African Rater", "Euro Rater" and "Latino Rater".

Well, it seems like Africans, Europeans and Latin Americans have no desire to be rated online, because I found no websites like the Desi ones. The only thing I found was a Euro Rater, but it was a financial website which rated the new European currency, not the Europeans themselves.

I DID find a website that rated people and not money, and that site was called, "Rate This Asian", and the first photo I saw was of a pretty young woman who looked like she could be a successful geisha. So it looks like not only Indians and Pakistanis are the only ones into being rated, but the Japanese and the Koreans are, too. Okay, this is an Asian thing then, since India and Pakistan are technically in Asia...

Well, now I'm curious... how would *I* rate on one of these websites? Granted, I would never pass for Japanese or Korean in a million years, so "Rate This Asian" is off limits to me, but I COULD pass for Indian or Pakistani. In the summer, I can get extremely tan. I bet I could find some summer pictures of me in which I look Desi-esque. A few times in Europe when I was super tanned, people would ask me if I was Middle Eastern.

Actually, I wouldn't even need to find photos of me in which I look darker. There are lots of light-skinned Desis. Actually, in India, it is considered an asset in sexual attraction, being fair-skinned. Sadly, people bleach their skin there. Also, I remember once a friend of mine showed me the personal ads section in an Indian newspaper. Almost every ad in the personals said,

"Alliance Wanted. Fair-skinned man seeks fair-skinned woman."

"Alliance Wanted. I am light-skinned. U.B.2."

"Alliance Wanted. Fair-skinned woman for fair-skinned man."

I cringed when reading those ads, but now I see that the favortism towards lighter skin could actually work in my favor on RateDesi.com, and many would be eager to "ally" themselves with me. I could change my name from Larry to Arshad or Sameer or Wasif or Bhagat.

How would I rate among my fellow Desi men? I want to know. I'm such an attention whore anyway. Okay, I do it! I'll get Desi rated! I'm gonna start looking for photos of me to upload ASAP. After all, there's really no downside to it. If I rate a 10, I could say, "Hey, I'm a Top Desi and I'm not even a Desi!" and if I rate a 1, I could say, "Of course I got a low rating. They could see that I'm not a real Desi, that's why."

Above all else, if someone accuses me of being an impostor, I'll have a good excuse. I'll just say, "What? Hold on a second... you mean this isn't a website to rate CUBANS? I'm Cuban, so naturally I thought a Desi referred to us. You know, because of Desi Arnaz. DESI ARNAZ, the Cuban who played Ricky Ricardo on 'I Love Lucy'. He was married to Lucille Ball; her CUBAN husband, not her Pakistani husband. How was I supposed to know that a Desi is a guy from Pakistan and not from Cuba?"

Time Has No Meaning in L.A.

2009-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Today is yet another sunny day. Sure, there were a few clouds this morning, but of course, they are starting to disappear, and by 2:00 in the afternoon, the sky will be completely clear of everything--but the sun. The sun.

The sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun.

It has a megalomaniacal dominion of the sky. I can't escape it. It is constantly stalking me, the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun the sun...

Don't worry, I'm not going all Edgar Allen Poe on yo' ass. This posting won't go postal. I'm not going to write a cheap imitation of Poe's deliciously psychotic poem, "The Bells," renamed "The Sun."

It's just I feel that 9 months of pure sun, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, with no real change in the weather, with no seasons... well, it gets oppressive.

I never dreeeeeeamed I would ever be complaining of such a thing when I lived in Manhattan.

In NYC, the weather almost always harasses you... tempting you to endure the meteorological bullshit no longer, and move back to wherever you came from. It's oppressive. You freeze in the winter and sizzle in the summer. Spring and autumn are very brief. They come and go in the blink of an eye, giving you hardly any respite from the temperature extremes. The humidity is often at steam room levels. The rain can come at any time. Even if you wake up and the sky is completely blue, you had better take a compact umbrella with you, just in case... it may hail by rush hour. And did I already mention the winters? Don't make me start on the winters...the 5-month winters... the snow, the sleet, the ice, the sludge, the bells the bells the bells the bells the bells the bells the bells the bells the bells....!!!

Am I coming across as, not only a Poe wanna-be, but also as someone who is never satisfied?

Look, I don't want the weather to be hideous, like New York's. Honest I don't. I'd just like a few cloudy days. Some completely gray days. It doesn't have to rain. Just a change in the sky's palate to remind me that time EXISTS, that it has meaning, that each day is unique, that it's not one long day separated by 280 nights.

I just don't feel that I'm very productive here. I'm not as industrious as I was in NYC. I don't get as much done. And it's not just me. I am certain that it's not just me.

This was solidly confirmed a few weeks ago when I met a Lebanese filmmaker, a very talented young director. He divides his time between Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles. He told me that he loves Los Angeles, but after 6 months or so, he feels the need to go to Paris "Where it can rain sometimes."

(Ah, what a life... to be able to escape to Paris whenever you want a little rain)

In L.A., he said, the constant sun and lack of seasons makes him less productive, and less likely to meet deadlines, his projects don't get completed as efficiently here as they do in Paris or Beirut "Where there is weather."

Like me, the constant sun in L.A. gives him the illusion that he has more time to get things done, and he tends to procrastinate. The whole time he was telling me this I was saying, "Yes! YES! I know EXACTLY what you are talking about! You are precisely phrasing how I feel! Thank God I'm not alone in this!"

I know I'm not alone, because it's not just productivity that is affected. People here are major flakes. They forget about dates they have with you. They stand you up. They arrive late. You'll be sitting in the cafe, wondering where they are, because you were supposed to meet for brunch at noon and it's now 12:45, and you call their cell, and they'll say in a lackadaisical voice, "TODAY was the brunch? Aw, sorry, man! I'm in my car right now, on the way to Vegas!"

This has happened to me TWICE, by two different people. I kid you not (well, the other person was on his way to San Diego).

I guess I just have to accept that this goes with the territory when living in SoCal. Everything comes at a price: the weather is pure paradise, and the payback is that you are less productive, and people flake on you.

But hey: I'm working on MY part of the problem. I made a vow that I would be more productive with my writing, and write in this blog EVERY DAY. And so far, I have, from my first posting, on May 13. And so far, it has been sunny every day since May 13.

So now, instead of quoting Poe, I will quote Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

The fault, dear Larry, lies not in the sun, but in thyself, that thou art a slacker. So stoppeth complaining about the gorgeous weather, and get thy L.A. ass in gear.

Idol/Schmydol

2009-05-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

Last night was the final episode of American Idol, Season Whatever This One Is. Chris won, Adam lost. America is in shock.

I am not one of these American Idol groupies. I find the whole phenomenon to be... well... a phenomenon. Everyone seems to love Idol... children, teenagers, young adults, the middle-aged, the elderly... and I don't understand why.

From the outset I never watched it, then, two years ago, I started to watch it in the middle of the season. Reason being, there was a show that I used to watch on MSNBC called Scarborough Country, and in addition to 45 minutes of politics, Joe Scarborough would invariably do a segment on American Idol. The topic: SANJAYA.

Sanjaya was a cute, skinny Desi kid with crazy hair and a mediocre voice. Yet he kept advancing in the competition, and Joe would say, "Is this the end of Idol? Are voters purposely voting for the worst singer? Can Idol survive the sabotage?" Joe would have talking heads on the show, talking with great expertise about The Sanjaya Question.

So one day I started watching American Idol to see if this Sanjaya kid was so hideous as to trigger the downfall of the mighty TV franchise. And... I didn't see what the big deal was.

Sure, he wasn't as good a vocalist as the other contestants, but they weren't SO much better than him that it seemed absurd that he was sharing the stage with them. I mean, does Ashley Simpson have that strong of a singing voice? Does Britney Spears? Could you imagine Britney Spears singing, "And I Am Telling You, I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls? Sanjaya, with the proper props, could make good money as a performer.

But I'm getting off-topic. That one and only season that I watched, I have to admit, was rather engaging. I mean, the actual show itself was total cheese-ballery. The staging, the lighting, the visiting celebrities, the backstage documentaries, the way the kids seemed to do nothing but sing a famous song as well they could, usually by mimicking the voice of the song's original singer.

And the audience! The audience who had swallowed the magic of Idol-- hook, line and sinker. The ecstasy with which they would watch these amateurs sing, the giddy energy, the emotional involvement, the way they would boo when a judge made a criticism that they disagreed with, and cheer when a judge would praise a singer that they liked. Then there was the anticipation of the eliminations, the prognostications... It fascinated me.

Yet despite how awful and tacky the pageantry and spectacle and hype was, the show kept me engaged. The main reason was that I got to know the kids in contention, and grew fond of them... just these unknown kids with good voices who are now household names to millions of people. It had a nice Cinderella aspect to it.

Of that half-season that I watched, I thought Melinda to be the most talented, but suspected that it would be a showdown between Jordan and Blake. I was right. I thought Jordan would win. I was right. I had done my duty. I had watched half a season of American Idol. I became involved. I invested. And I have had no desire to watch another season again.

This year, like last year, Idol was completely off my radar screen. I HAD been hearing talk of Adam Lambert here and there, but that's all.

Adam Lambert Adam Lambert Adam Lambert Adam Lambert.

The mysterious name appeared on my friends' Facebook statuses. I heard people speak of him as I was waiting in line at the post office or the supermarket. A old friend of mine was visiting from out of town. Like me, she is 40-years-old, yet she talked about Adam Lambert as though she had a Tiger Beat centerfold of him thumb-tacked to her wall. This friend of mine is no ditz. She's a thinker, a reader, a well-traveled, worldly woman. But Adam Lambert brought out the teeny-bopper in her. He seemed to me the second coming of Christ for the music world, and I had no idea what he looked like or how he sounded.

So yesterday evening, I was on Facebook and saw some of my friends' statuses...

"It'll be Adam tonight!"

"I heart Adam!"

"I'm betting on an upset"

"I think Adam will make a great Idol after tonight"

"I'm betting this'll be the best season finale ever"

With that, I decided to forgo Anderson Cooper 360 and watch the season finale of American Idol.

I watched it from start to finish. IT WAS SO BAD.

Look, I'm really not a snob when it comes to entertainment. I love Broadway musicals, for example. They are hokey, but I love them. I even like Brigadoon. I'm susceptible to schmaltz. I'm not some armchair William F. Buckley. But really, come on. Last night's show was just a wee bit horrible, don'tcha think? In addition to being horrible, it was terrible, and in addition to being terrible, it was dreadful.

It was such an over-the-top variety show. It reminded me of that Love Boat episode where Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, Ann Miller and Della Reese put on a variety show in the ship's theater. I love each of those old broads individually, but having all four of them hamming it up at the same time was such "show-horse overload", that I felt like slitting my wrists.

Last night's finale contained so many gaudy musical acts, one after the other, relentless, illuminated with bombastic lighting and pyrotechnics, the performers dressed ridiculously, cheered on by a frenetically revved-up audience. Most of the musical numbers began with two or more of the top-13 finalists of the season singing a well-known song, then the original artist (often a has-been) would appear to complete the song with them.

Oh I have so many bad memories of last night's show...

It began with the top-13 finalists all dressed in white, singing a really insipid song from a group whose name is "Pink". The choreography was almost as bad as the song. The audience was in ecstasy.

After a few more bad numbers (I want to stress that the voices of the singers were good, but the musical numbers themselves were bad), last year's winner, David Cook, came out and sang a ballad. It was a beautiful song sung by a beautiful voice, but the horrible green lighting, and the audience members near the stage waving their arms ruined the song for me. Did they TELL the audience to do that, COMMAND it? for them to all, uniformly, en-masse wave their arms to his singing? Or have those people drunk THAT MUCH American Idol Kool-Aid? I really wanted to chop all their arms off.

There was only one completely untainted musical number all night long. It was when the female who made it the farthest in the competition beautifully sang "True Colors" with Cyndi Lauper, who was playing a dulcimer. Soulful, simple, heart-felt and real.

BUT THEN THE SHOW CONTINUED!

Adam Lambert appeared dressed as General Zod.

A few words about Adam Lambert. I finally saw what this guy looked like last night. My first thought when I laid eyes on him at the beginning of the show was that he looks like the Wonder Twins.

"Wonder Twin powers: ACTIVATE! Form of: an ICE ROCKET! Shape of: a MORAY EEL!"

I'm not kidding here. It was the very first thing that I thought when I saw his powder-white skin, his jet-black hair, which was oddly sculpted and cut into that unnatural 'do. His perfectly-shaped eyebrows, his elfin eyes, his notable height when standing next to his diminutive rival, Chris Allen.

Adam Lambert looked like he needed to be in lavender tights, turning himself into a form of water or an animal, saving people in need.

My second thought was that he was gay. I have pretty excellent gaydar, and it went *beep*beep*beep*. I said to the TV, "I don't know how to break it to you, America, but this one is gay" (today I found out that America already knows this, because he is OPENLY gay... and there I was, thinking myself so ahead of the curve).

Well, he reeeeeeally looked gay dressed as General Zod. I closed my eyes and thought, MY GOD, THIS SHOW IS SO TERRIBLE.

I opened my eyes again. That black leather outfit, those boots... "Rise before Zod. Now, KNEEL before Zod...." The guy was dressed for the homepage of a gay S&M website.

Then he started to sing the song "Beth" and I thought he should have renamed it to "Seth".

"Oh Seth what can I do? Seth what can I do...?"

But then it got worse. Kiss appeared.

KISS?!? Are they still together and all alive? It was hard to tell, because they were all wearing their makeup and so I couldn't tell if those were 65-year-old faces under all the greasepaint. They could very well be new, younger singers. Who could tell? Anyway, NOW I understood the General Zod costume. I had forgotten that "Beth" was a KISS song. I thought it was David Soul.

The moment Adam started singing "I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day" with those old campy, costumed creatures, it dawned on me that I--as a child--I had no taste in rock bands, and I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of straight tequila. Gran Centenario. Anejo. 100% Agave.

THIS SHOW IS NEVER GOING TO END. Drink. Pour second glass. Return to sofa.

It got even worse. Adam and Chris, dressed in white, started to sing "We Are the Champions" (Get it? They are the two champions of Idol this year?). Then QUEEN appeared behind them and started singing. Is this a TV show or a time warp? Am I back in 4th grade? I got up, went to the kitchen, and poured myself another tequila.

But the climax of horribleness was when all the male finalists, like eight guys or so, came out dressed like they were on the poster for the movie Reservoir Dogs.... or The Blues Brothers. Standing in a line, they sang, "If you want my body, and you think I'm sexy, come on sugar let me know..." Sexy? You guys? Dressed like the Blues Brothers? Sexy?

I clutched a throw pillow on my sofa and prepared for what I knew was to come: the appearance of Rod Stewart behind the guys to complete the song. I knew the drill by now. And out he came. Rod Stewart. He looked embalmed. Seriously. It looked like Rico from Six Feet Under had done his makeup. His voice was weak compared to those of the black-suited boys who were now singing backup.

THIS CAN'T GET WORSE, I thought. How can this show get worse? LIZA. Liza Minnelli. LIZA MINNELLI will come out, all bloated and slurring, and she will sing with all the female finalists next. They're gonna sing "New York, NY", dressed in red sequins, doing a kick-line as though they were the Rockettes. I need some more tequila.

Luckily, Liza didn't appear, the show was wrapping up, the moment of truth came. In a scene reminiscent of the Miss USA pageant, the two finalists stood together, arms around each others' backs, waiting to hear who won. But unlike Miss USA, it was two dudes.

I hadn't watched the show all season, but I knew that Adam would win, because I hadn't heard the name Chris Allen before that night, whereas the name Adam Lambert seemed to me the musical world's equivalent of the name Barack Obama.

And, the new American Idol iiiiiiiiissssssss.......... Chris Allen!!!!!!

Shock. Surprise. Jaws dropped. Eyes widened. Adam lost? America is astonished.

Okay, so NOW will this god-awful show end??

It did.

The irony of the awfulness that is American Idol, is that Simon Cowell presides over it all. I know there are other judges, but it is Simon who is the ringleader of this circus. The Englishman whose tastes are so refined, whose ear is so delicate, whose standards are so high, who is such an insufferable sophisticate, that he often reduces young aspiring singers into blood pudding with just one withering comment. He's the Christopher Hitchens of the entertainment world, and at the same time, he's the Dan Brown.

I admit that the show is engaging. It's like a Dan Brown novel: a real page-turner, full of great cliff-hangers, but the prose is atrocious. For me, to see this Brit who portrays himself as such an AESTHETE, to see him lording over this hodge-podge, this farrago, this stewpot of musical miscellany... is...

...well... I don't know... this is long, what I've written... what's the point of it?

I guess there is no point. What I've written is a pointless medley of thoughts, just like last night's show was a pointless medley of songs. So who am I to judge?

Sorry. Never mind. Tune into Idol next year. I know you will, and that's okay.

What the Wind Took Away

2009-05-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that today is Cuban Independence Day, May 20th.

Feliz 20 de Mayo!

It's a weird thing to think of, because really, the independent Cuba went from U.S. occupation, to the Magoon governorship, to the Machado dictatorship, to the Batista dictatorship, and finally, to the most durable dictatorship of the 20th century: Castro Bros., Inc.

But I don't want to write about Cuban politics today. It seems futile even at the best of times, and I'm not in a good mood today. Instead, I've decided to type here excerpts from one of the entries of the journal that I wrote when I first visited Havana, in May of 1998.

When I made that first trip to Cuba, I was 29. I wrote a journal that consisted of 350 hand-written pages. For the sake of brevity, I'll only include two of those pages below.

Let me give some background on what I was writing about.

My maternal grandmother's brother, Nestor, was the family's historian. Before I left for Cuba, he gave me a list of addresses of houses that the Sabi family had owned (Sabi is my grandmother's maiden name).

The most important address however, was that of the Sabi bakery. He told me that my great-great grandfather, Salvador Sabi, was born in 1848 in Barcelona, and immigrated to Cuba from Spain as a young man. He opened up a bakery at Calle Brasil 63 in the Old Havana section of the city. It made him a fortune, and he founded other businesses from there. He died a rich man, in Havana, in 1921. His immigrant success was quite evident to me by the huge Sabi houses that I had been looking for and photographing while I was in Havana.

So one day, I set out looking for my great-great grandfather's bakery. I highly doubted it would still be there, but I went looking for it just in case. This what I wrote in my journal at the end of that day...

Friday, May 15, 1998--

"...I walked until I got to the beginning of Calle Brasil, where it meets the Capitol Building. I remember that Tio Nestor told me that it would be there, and I checked on my address list. Yes, Calle Brasil, where my great-great grandfather started his first business in Cuba, no sooner than he had gotten off the boat from Spain.... I doubted very much when I talked to Nestor that the bakery would still be there, and now, after a few days in crumbling Havana, I doubted that the BUILDING would still be there...

"I walked and walked along Calle Brasil. I could tell that it would be at the very end of the street almost. The address is #63. By the time I reached the 60s, I had arrived at La Plaza Vieja. I suddenly got distracted from finding the address, because I was agape at this massive plaza, in TOTAL RUINS, which is in the process of being rebuilt.

"It must have been such a lovely square when my great-great grandfather had arrived from the old country. It's weird: today people emigrate TO Spain FROM Cuba. Back then, people came TO Cuba FROM Spain, for a better life. You can still see some faint traces of THAT Cuba on the remaining buildings of La Plaza Vieja, especially this magnificent Art Nouveau hotel, El Hotel Palacio, which is in one of the corners of the square.

"Man, the noise of the sawing and hammering...this is RECONSTRUCTION (as in post-American Civil War reconstruction). It reminds me of the scene in Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett and Mammy are walking through the streets of Atlanta (during reconstruction), Scarlett wearing that green velvet dress made of her mother's curtains, the 'portieres'...RECONSTRUCTION... the Havana after Castro will be like the Old South after the Civil War, and you can bet that there will be a lot of carpetbaggers invading Cuba, too.

"It's funny, because one of my cab drivers called Havana, or what WAS Havana, 'Lo que el viento se llevo' '--which is the Spanish title for Gone with the Wind. And Cuba itself is the Tara plantation for for most exiles... Scarlett coming back to Tara in the dead of night, dragging that dying horse, and Melanie, the baby, and Prissy with her. It's dark at night. She peers through the moonlight upon returning... 'Is it there? Is Tara still standing??' The full moon comes out from behind the clouds. She sees. 'It's still there! The Yankees haven't burned it down! Tara's still there! '...Oh, it's still there all right, but it's in rotten shape.

"Pedro Almodovar says that Scarlett O'Hara is the quintessential Manchega (a woman from the La Mancha region of Spain). But I disagree with him. Scarlett is the quintessential CUBANA. What's more, she's the quintessential HABANERA... her spitfire ways of coming out ahead and surviving, regardless of the disasters that are thrown her way.

"Anyhow, the building where #63 used to be has been knocked down, and a new building has been built. The Sabi bakery is definitely out of business."

And a page later, I wrote:

"...I thought about the telephone conversation with Mom Wednesday night, when she asked me about her lovely childhood house on Calzada 608. I didn't know how to break it to her, how ugly I thought that block was now, and how the interior of her house has been turned into a showcase for Che Guevara paintings on one side, and a low-budget apartment complex on the other. She had painted for me a very vivid picture of that charming street and house from her girlhood. She couldn't accept that it could be THAT ugly now. Even with the revolution, how could it disappear, the beauty, so quickly?

"I thought of La Plaza Vieja... I thought of the cab driver's comment... I thought of what I would tell my mother. 'I have the answer, Mom. Here it is in plain Spanish: ES LO QUE EL VIENTO SE LLEVO'. It's gone. All gone. Gone with the wind that swept through Cuba'.

"In Spanish, 'lo que el viento se llevo' ' does not literally mean 'gone with the wind'. Rather, it means, 'what the wind took away'. And that is why, I am sorry to say, that I don't like Havana. In a strange way, I hate it. Why...?

"Because everything that I would have loved about Havana, is what the wind took away."

Happy Cuban Independence Day.

No Wonder I Look Great in a Beret

2009-05-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

I just took an online quiz, and this was the result, copied and pasted below...

"Larry completed the quiz "What is your Euro-persona?" with the result French. You have an artistic, emotional personality and you prefer peaceful protest to violence. You are a natural romantic at heart, though you can have a highly critical personality at times. You like your humor sharp and cynical. Slice off a hunk of cheese with your whine, because you most closely resemble the people of France."

THIS IS SO TRUE ABOUT ME THAT IT IS SCARY.

I have never been so accurately analyzed in such few words... and such well-chosen words, because whine and wine are interchangeable when it comes to me.

And what is scarier is that this accurate analysis of me was done from my having answered just 20 multiple-choice questions. I thought these quizzes were bullshit, but now I'm not so sure.

Funny, when I took the quiz, I thought I'd be found to be Italian or Spanish, but French is close enough. The three countries are Latin, so ce n'est pas une grande difference.

Francais, moi? C'est bon.

Twin Bathtubs Are Not Sexy

2009-05-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Those Cialis bathtubs are driving me crazy.

Do you know what I'm referring to? I'm referring to those Cialis commercials that I see on CNN and MSNBC all the time. I always feel very young when I watch those two channels, because a lot of the commercials are geared towards people that need some sort of prescription medication for one malady or another, that the young never experience.

I don't need Cialis, nor any of the other drugs featured in the commercials (yet), so it makes me feel younger than I am (I'm 40). Watching a 24-hour news channel is like taking a dip in the Fountain of Youth for me. After all, you don't see Cialis commercials on MTV or VH1.

Cialis is a drug used by men who have erectile dysfunction, which explains why it's on CCN, because if it were on MTV, the drug in-need would be an erectile inhibitor.

And to give you an idea whom these commercials are geared to, there is always a subtitle that says, "See our ad in Golf Digest".

The Cialis spots always show a middle-aged or borderline-elderly man with an attractive woman whom we presume to be his wife. They smile with each other, hold hands, link arms, do some light dancing, maybe they're walking through an open field, hiking in the hills, or strolling barefoot on the beach.

No matter what geographical setting they may be in, they always end up sitting next to each other in separate, but equal, bathtubs. Side-by-side bathtubs. Big, claw-footed, white porcelain bathtubs. Like the ones that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert likely sat in to get themselves in the mood for some hot Victorian sex. How sexy. THAT will get my erection in gear.

Every commercial is a tad bit different... the twin bathtubs could be sitting on the edge of a cliff, offering the couple a panoramic view of a canyon... or they could be on the dock of lake, offering a view of the water... or they could be on the shore, with waves approaching the clawed-feet of the tubs. Last night I saw one where the bathtubs were actually IN the water, like, in a very shallow pond, if I recall correctly... perhaps in the marshlands of Louisiana.

That was really aggravating. Why be sitting in bathtubs when the bathtubs themselves are IN water?!? What's the use? That's like playing in a sandbox in the middle of the desert. It's unnecessary. Why then? Because it's sexier? More romantic?

I mean, last October, I was in Puerto Vallarta Mexico, on the beach, swimming in the water as the sun was setting. It was beautiful, like a Cialis commerical (because it's always sunset on the beach in a Cialis commercial).

However, never once did I want to get out of the warm water of the Pacific with its soft undulations, and get into a BATHTUB on the shoreline. And I was alone. Had I been with someone I loved, I would have wanted to be in the open waters, touching and caressing and embracing as the sun set, not separated by porcelain. Doing it in the open waters, with close bodily contact would make me go from flaccid to erect much more quickly than sitting separately in a tub.

Come to think of it, maybe these fictional men in these commercials don't have erectile dysfunction at all. Maybe they can't get it up because they are really hapless and lacking in good sense when it comes to creating a romantic atmosphere for their wife.

You see, I've taken a bath in a bathtub before, and I know that very soon, the water goes from being very warm to lukewarm, and then to room temperature, which to the body doesn't feel like room temperature, it feels COLD. This can be remedied though, because little drain below the faucet always lets a little water go away, so I keep adding more hot water in the tub to keep the water warm.

But even with doing this, staying in the tub for a long time is not desirable. My fingers and toes start to prune, and the residual soap in the water covers my arms and chest with an unpleasant film. Soon, I open the drain, and wash the soapy water off of me by standing up and turning on the shower. None of this is sexy to me.

Not that having sex in a bathtub with someone is NOT sexy. It can be very sexy, if both of you can comfortably fit in the bathtub. But: you must both be in the SAME BATHTUB. After all, you never see people making out in separate jacuzzis. They are in the same jacuzzi.

But forget romance. Let's talk logistics.

I look at these couples in the commercials, sitting in their bathtubs, out in the middle of Nature, far from any plumbing. Somehow, they must have lugged gallons and gallons of piping hot water to the top of that cliff, or to the middle of that field, or to the edge of that lake, to the shore of that beach. The water HAD to have been piping hot, because once you pour it into the porcelain tubs, OUTDOORS, the water's heat will slowly be taken away by the breeze (or quickly taken away by the wind), so the water will need to be boiling, in order to remain lukewarm for more than 20 minutes.

But let's say these married couples DO somehow transport gallons of boiling water into the great outdoors. Did they at the same time transport the bathtubs? Do you have any idea how much a 6-foot long, 3-foot deep, porcelain, claw-footed bathtub weighs? I don't, but I imagine it weighs a lot. But you don't only have to transport one, you've gotta move TWO out there, along with the water...

...the whole ordeal reminds me of those documentaries about Stonehenge and Easter Island, where the experts try to figure out how those ancient peoples were able to transport those heavy slabs of stone from the quarry to their location. I always feel like the archaelogists in those documentaries. I always think, "How did that ancient couple manage dragging those bathtubs out there?"

And then what? I mean, once you've avoided a hernia and third-degree water burns, then what? You sit in the tub next to your lady love, and look at the ocean... or the lake... or the pond... or the field... or the canyon... or the marshlands... and in 30 minutes, the water is freezing, your fingers look like raisins...

...and your penis is shriveled up.

GOOD THING YOU TOOK THAT CIALIS!

I Really Need to Learn How to Indentify an Earthquake

2009-05-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I was in Long Beach, with my friend Alexis and a new acquaintance whose name I've already forgotten.

We were leaving a bar, and heading towards my car, because it was time for me to head back to Los Angeles. We were walking on a sidewalk on Broadway, a main street of Long Beach, and yet a very quiet one, once the sun sets.

As we were walking, I saw a beauty salon, and admired its name, "Flaunt Salon". I thought that was a great name for a beauty salon; I liked it. Just then, the locked double doors of the closed salon started rattling. Then they started to shake. They were glass doors, so the shaking made a lot of noise. We stopped in our tracks just as were were in front of the doors.

It's amazing how many thoughts can pass through your head in just a few seconds.

At first, I thought the doors were shaking due to the wind, but there was no wind. The air was perfectly still. So then I thought that it was a poltergeist, even though I don't believe in ghosts.

I said, "Is that a poltergeist?!? Look!" and pointed at the glass doors.

Alexis said, "It's an earthquake. We having an earthquake!"

I focused on my feet, trying to discern if I could feel any trembling or shaking or rolling beneath them, but I couldn't. The concrete sidewalk seemed solidly still to me.

The three of us just stood there, watching the glass double doors of the salon until they stopped shaking.

"It's over" Alexis said, and I noticed that the three of us had big smiles on our faces... not smiles of nervousness, but smiles of excitement.

We started chatting about it... "Did you feel it?" "I didn't feel anything." "I felt a little." "Did you see the way the doors were shaking?" etc.

"I thought it was a ghost", I said, "what a relief that it was just a quake."

After walking another block, we saw a woman on the sidewalk who was holding a little girl in her arms. The little girl was wearing pink pajamas and had her blond hair tied back in a pony tail. She was resting her head on the woman's shoulder. She looked upset.

We asked the woman if they were on the sidewalk because of the quake. She said that inside her house, the quake felt very strong, that the house was shaking and things were rattling on their shelves. She had taken her little daughter outside because she was afraid to be in the house now.

"Awww, it's okay, nothing happened," we told the child soothingly, " it's all over now. You're gonna be just fine."

And we kept walking. I thought to myself how mean it would have been had I told the little girl, "Awww, don't worry. Your house wasn't shaking because of an earthquake. It was just a ghost. An angry ghost. Your house is just haunted, that's all."

As we crossed the next block, we saw a man out on the sidewalk, and he told us the same thing, that inside the house, it felt very strong.

I said to him, "Not outside. I didn't feel it at all. If it hadn't been for the doors of that Flaunt salon shaking, I wouldn't have even known it had happened."

This isn't the first time that I haven't been able to identify and earthquake.

Last July, I was in Santa Monica, at Ocean Park Casting, auditioning for a Chrysler commercial. I had lost my bar code, and had to go to the computer to print me another one. The computers are in a corner in which the walls aren't walls but windows... floor-to-ceiling windows.

So I'm sitting at the computer, and the windows next to me start shaking, and the floor was swaying. It took a few seconds for me to even realize that something unusual was happening. I asked the guy at the computer next to me why the windows were shaking, and he said, "Because it's an earthquake!" and just then, everybody started coming out of all the casting studios en-masse. We all stood around doing nothing, with bizarre smiles on our faces, just waiting for it to stop, which it did, shortly thereafter.

Well, that was my first earthquake ever, my very first. So perhaps I had an excuse not to know that it was a quake.

But what was my excuse last night? I am not a superstitious person. I do not believe in ghosts, or phantoms, or angels, or demons, or poltergeists, or haunted houses... much less haunted beauty salons.

Yet last night, when I saw those glass doors shaking, even after having seen the casting center's windows shaking during last summer's quake, what did I think?

"POLTERGEIST!"

WTF?!?

Who am I? Carol Ann?

"They're heeeeeeere!"

I have lived in Southern California for 3 & 1/2 years now. I really need to learn how to identify an earthquake.

"Because Nostradamus told me so"

2009-05-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was in Long Beach attending a big Italian luncheon at the house of a friend of a friend of mine. There were like ten of us there. Afterwards, all of us went to the back patio so that some of us could have a post-meal smoke. We started talking about various topics.

At one point, the conversation drifted to the AIDS epidemic, and how it is believed by many, that the HIV virus entered the USA in the summer of 1976, during the time of the bicentennial festivities, and that for 5 years, people were having unprotected sex and unknowingly spreading the unknown HIV virus, which started to transform into AIDS in 1981, thus making its presence known to the world.

Well, a guy sitting across from me stated that the HIV virus was created by the U.S. government in an attempt to wipe out gay people. It was created by using the Hepatitis virus, and it was done purposely, ordered by Richard Nixon, most likely.

This brought an awkward pause in the conversation. I ventured to speak.

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"Because Nostradamus told me so." he said.

A long pause. I looked in his eyes, as did the others. His eyes told it all: he was totally serious. Another pause. I proceeded with caution, and delicately asked him,

"Nostradamus? He died in the 1500s, didn't he?"

"Yes, but he still speaks to us today."

"He speaks to you? Nostradamus speaks to you?"

"Well no, not to me. He speaks to a woman that I know. She's a medium. He speaks to her, and she tells me what he says. He speaks to the world through her."

"So you think that the U.S. government invented HIV purposely, because a psychic woman you know told you that Nostradamus had told her so?"

"Yes." he said

"Okay." I said, and left it at that.

I decided not the press the topic. I mean, the guy looked to me like someone who, over the course of his life, has smoked enough marijuana to de-forest the Amazon. Enough said.

But I will say this: In the future, if anybody ever asks me why I believe something, I'm gonna say, "Because Nostradamus told me so."

The Gods Are Wonderful and They Also Suck

2009-05-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got into a religious back-and-forth on Facebook with a really smart and nice guy who lives in North Carolina and has a deep and devout faith in God.

You know, one of those people who, when using pronouns for God, writes He Him and His, instead of, he him and his... as if pressing the Caps Lock key for the letter H is really going the extra mile to show respect for God... as if a capital H is needed to show how important God really is... I mean, He supposedly created the universe, and He controls everything within it, but that capital H... well, we need it to stress His importance.

I don't mean to mock this Facebook friend of mine, though. He is a really cool guy. Very bright. Kind. A thinker. And he didn't invent this capital H tradition, so I'm not knocking him personally.

The reason we got into the topic was that he saw what I have written on my profile under the Religious Views heading. What I wrote there was: "If there's a God, he doesn't know who Larry is".

I stole that line from my aunt Maria. When I first heard her say it about her own views on God, I laughed out loud, because I feel the exact same way, and that one line expresses so many things so compactly and efficiently.

Well, this guy (whom I've never met in person) sends me a message offering me the good news that even if I don't think that God knows who I am, that He (note the capital H) really does know who I am, intimately. He cares about me, He loves me, and He is involved in my life.

As an Agnostic, I asked him what I always ask Believers: "How do you KNOW this?" Well, this guy told me what Believers often tell me: that God has revealed Himself to him. He has a personal experience with God. He feels His presence. To which I wrote:

"How do you, a mere fallible human being who hasn't lived in this teeny-tiny corner of this 15 billion year-old universe for more than a few decades KNOW this about God? Because you FEEL it. You feel his presence, right? Well, how do you know that you're not self-manufacturing that feeling?
For example, just to take a famous case, just because Joan of Arc heard voices from Heaven doesn't really mean she was actually hearing them. She was honest and sincere, she believed they were voices, she felt them in her heart and soul, but that doesn't mean those voices were real.
I simply don't know about God, whether he exists or not, and I don't presume to think myself wise or perceptive enough to be able to make statements about such profound and incomprehensible matters."

I then asked him what I have asked many religious people, and no one has ever been able to answer it to my satisfaction. It is the age-old question asked to people who believe in a single, loving, compassionate and OMNIPOTENT God:

"If God is loving, and compassionate and omnipotent, then why does he allow so much pain, suffering and injustice in the world?"

Well, this guy answered with a very loooooooooong written reply, which was actually very cogent. I could copy and paste it here, but he hasn't given me permission to do so. LET'S JUST SAY HE HAD ANSWERS. Lots of them. He wrote with such certainty, giving me examples, telling me what God thinks, what God's perspectives are, His desires, why He intervenes at certain times and doesn't intervene at other times, why He lets the good suffer and the bad be rewarded, what His scheme is in doing so, why He lets children suffer, what God expects from us, etc. etc. etc.

My head was spinning at this guy's hubris.

Again, he is a very nice guy. From what I know about him, I like him.

But Oh, the HUBRIS!

To think that you've got God figured out!

To be so goddamned CERTAIN and self-assured!

So I wrote to him:

"HOW DO YOU **KNOW** ALL THIS?!?
Man, I just looked on your profile. You are 23 years-old! At the ripe old age of 23 you've got God and his workings and perspectives all figured out, huh?
Please don't think I'm being dismissive or belittling of your opinions and your age, but really, think about it. You've been on this planet since **1985** (the year I got my driver's license) and you've already got God understood with a personal knowledge and self-assurance that would make me think that you and God hang out at Starbucks every day, discussing the great questions of eternity over a double soy vanilla latte."

(We both belong to a Facebook group called, "I Am Fluent in Sarcasm", so I knew that this sarcasm on my behalf wouldn't offend him)

I then went on to tell him what I've thought for a long time:

The ancient Greeks were religiously more logical and sophisticated.

The gods of the ancient Greeks were not totally benign and compassionate deities. They were vain, they were jealous, they took sides, they settled vendettas among themselves using human beings as pawns... they were fickle, at times irrational... as well as being loving and generous and rewarding.

In my opinion, the pagan Greeks didn't have this conundrum that Jews, Christians, Muslims and other present-day religions have. Their gods were imperfect, so they presided over an imperfect world. It made sense that they would allow, and even CAUSE, pain, suffering, catastrophe and injustice. Their gods often lacked compassion. But they were also marvelous. Just like Nature: often lacking compassion, but also marvelous.

I think that if I had lived in ancient Greece, I would not have lost my faith and become an Agnostic, because a lot of the intellectual questions that bar me from believing in the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would have been answered to me satisfactorily (and I wouldn't have had that pesky thing called MODERN SCIENCE to debunk all the myths).

Yes, I would have been a practicing pagan. The world is wonderful and it also sucks, because gods are wonderful, and they also suck.

Questions answered. Faith intact.

You Can't Pick & Choose Your Sins

2009-05-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this morning (well, not technically morning--I woke up at noon) I'm drinking my coffee and eating my oatmeal and watching CNN, and it's nothing but incessant coverage of President Obama's speech at the University of Notre Dame's commencement ceremony.

Lots of good Catholics are up in arms that a president who is pro-choice is going to speak on their sacred campus. The Catholic Church is pro-life, and many devout Notre Damers don't want a man who goes against so important a doctrine as Abortion Should Be Illegal, to speak at commencement. Abortion is a sin. Obama supports abortion rights. Therefore, Obama should be persona-non-grata at graduation.

People: you can't pick & choose your sins.

Case in point: George W. Bush.

Bush spoke at Notre Dame's commencement ceremony, and no one batted an eyelash. Bush? Totally cool. No problems. No protestors. Welcomed with open arms.

However, Bush was (and is) pro-death penalty. I mean, that man practically had a conveyor belt of executions running full-time when he was governor of Texas. The Catholic Church is against the death penalty (and against torture, which includes water-boarding). It makes sense that they FINALLY are, considering that their savior and redeemer was himself executed (and tortured). Also, Pope John Paul II was totally against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And which country did Bush invade..?

Neither Bush nor Obama are Catholics, but both as leaders went against the wishes of the Catholic Church, albeit in different ways.

So why is it okay for Bush to go against the Vatican and still get to speak at Notre Dame as a welcomed guest, but it's not okay for Obama to go against the Vatican. He's going to Notre Dame as a person of controversy. That's all CNN can talk about today... the controversy!

I AM SO SICK OF RELIGIOUS PEOPLE PICKING AND CHOOSING WHAT ARE SINS.

Catholics say the pope is infallible, but they pick & choose among what he says. Protestants say the Bible is the direct word of God, but they pick & choose which biblical admonitions to obey and which to ignore.

Case in point: Carrie Prejean, a.k.a Miss California 2009, and the lady in waiting to Miss USA 2009 (because if something happens to Kristen Dalton of North Carolina, Carrie, as first runner-up, will be our new nation's representative in the beauty department).

Carrie, when answering her final question the night of the Miss USA pageant, about legalizing gay marriage, said that she believed that marriage should remain only between a man and woman.

That's cool. Whatever. It's her opinion. That fact that I disagree with her is irrelevant. It's her opinion and she's entitled to it. No biggie.

But THEN, she starts making the media rounds because her answer started a hub-bub. She goes on Sean Hannity's TV show and says that it was more important for her to be "Biblically correct" rather than politically correct. This comment, "biblically correct", made her the darling of conservative Christians.

BIBLICALLY CORRECT?!? WTF?!?

What is she referring to? To the book of Leviticus? The book that says two men can't have sex, because it is an abomination and they must be put to death? Because that same book of the Bible says that if a man has sex with a woman, and also has sex with her mother, well, the three of them should be burned alive 'til they die. Imagine the movie The Graduate under those rules... Benjamin, Elaine and Mrs. Robinson, all three burned at the stake. What a fiery final scene THAT would have been.

Ah Leviticus... a woman who gives birth to a boy is defiled and impure for 7 days, and a woman who gives birth to a girl is defiled and impure for 14 days. She of course is impure and can't be touched when she's having her period. The furniture she sits on can't be touched either. Also, you can't eat rabbit meat, pork... no shrimp, no crab, no lobster... no garments made of two different fabrics may be worn (a fashion faux-pas AND a sin!).

The Bible has instructions for keeping slaves... for selling your daughters... it proscribes the death penalty for a myriad of "crimes" which today are routine behavior, even among practicing Jews and Christians.

So Miss California says she wants to be "biblically correct"?

What does she think the writers of the Bible (including the New Testament) would have done had they seen her traipsing around in a bikini in public, as she did on national television the night of the pageant?

THEY WOULD HAVE STONED HER TO DEATH.

Maybe, if she was lucky, Jesus would have strolled by, noticed the stoning, and stopped it. But after the rock-throwers had dispersed, he would have told her, "Go, AND SIN NO MORE" (in other words, "compete in the swimsuit competition no more... pose for semi-nude photos on the beach no more").

Biblically correct.... GIVE ME A BRRRRREAK.

I am so sick of relgious hypocrites picking & choosing... whether they be a bishop at Notre Dame or a 21 year-old girl in the Miss USA pageant.

ENOUGH!

"It's a turn-off for me, so it's wrong"

2009-05-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

Today I was listening to the Randi Rhodes Show on A.M. 1150, and she made a mistake. She said on the air that the California supreme court had declared that same-sex marriage is legal, that Proposition 8 had been overturned. "Great!", I exclaimed. Then after a commercial break, she said that she had read the wrong news flash, that it was a news flash from 2008, and she apologized for getting her listeners' hopes up.

Too late. Dudes were already calling. Randi's audience is primarily liberal, but the gay marriage thing gets the straight dudes a callin'. The first straight dude said that he doesn't like being called a bigot just because he's against gay marriage. He said that he was in favor of civil unions, but not for marriage, because male-female marriage is a tradition that goes back for thousands of years.

For some reason, that reasoning doesn't irk me so much, especially since he said he was for civil unions. I disagree with his reasoning, but it doesn't irk me at all. He wants to keep the tradition he values. Not that letting gays marry would keep him from partaking in that tradition, because he can still marry a woman, but fine. It makes no sense to me, but fine. To him, it's a tradition that he does not want altered.

What DOES irk me, big-time, is when he said that he thinks that homosexuality is wrong, that the behavior of it is wrong, that it's just, by his standards, WRONG. He claimed that he is not a bigot just because he thinks that gay sex and gay relationships are wrong. And the reason he is not a bigot is.... because he's for civil unions! He thinks gays should have civil rights, even though he thinks that being gay is wrong, so he CAN'T be a bigot!

Now: why IS gay sex wrong, according to him? I didn't hear him quoting the Bible or giving other religious reasons, so here's my theory: because it doesn't MAKE HIM HORNY. The idea of two dudes getting hot 'n heavy under the sheets is a turn-off for him. The idea of performing fellatio, and kissing a man, and having anal sex with a man is repulsive to him, so it's wrong.

Randi kept asking him WHY it was wrong to be gay, and he kept talking around her questions. He should have just been honest with himself and said, "It's wrong because I think it's gross." That would have been a good reply. This one would also have worked: "It's a turn-off for me, so it's wrong."

I don't understand this way of thinking. I don't think that any sexual activity that two, sane, CONSENTING adults do is wrong. As long as they are both adults, and no one is being coerced, or being taken advantage of for whatever reason, it's okay. Above all else, as long as it brings them both sexual gratification, then it's not wrong. It may be DISGUSTING to me, but it's not WRONG simply because I find it gross.

This made me think of my previous post here, about the Wall Street men who go to a dominatrix to get sexually aroused by her insulting them and humiliating them and abusing them. They get turned on, for example, by having her brush their hair severely, until the hairbrush makes their scalp sting and burn.

Do I think it's bizarre to get turned-on by getting your hair brushed until it causes scalp pain? Yes. Do I think that getting flogged is a weird way to get an erection? Absolutely. Does the idea of getting tied up, gagged and blindfolded make me shudder rather than make me horny? You betcha. And I won't even go into sexual defecation, because I may vomit. But I don't think it's wrong.

Whatever turns people on, turns people on. Whatever floats your boat. Just don't force someone to do it. Do it only with someone who is really willing. Do it in private if you think it'll scare the horses. And don't do it with kids. That's all. Otherwise, it is not wrong.

So why do these straight dudes think that homo sex is WRONG and hetero sex is RIGHT? Other than the fact that they are turned-on by hetero sex, I think...

...it's because they must feel a bit god-like, subconsciously.

I mean really, they DO, no? Deep down inside, I mean. They may not REALIZE that this is the reason, but it IS, isn't it? If you think your standards are universally right, then you must think yourself to be a bit god-like.

I was thinking this as the NEXT straight dude called the radio show and told Randi that gay sex is wrong because it's not natural. She told him that it's perfectly natural, that there is homosexuality in Nature, that many non-human animals have gay sex, and that people who are gay, are gay by nature. He said, "No, it's a FREAK of Nature".

Well, Randi went off on him for using the word "freak", and I started thinking, "Hmmm... this guy thinks he can proclaim what is a freak of Nature and what isn't. Subconsciously, he must fancy himself to be a bit god-like, too, huh?"

You know, I think that homosexuality is SO natural, SO a part of Nature. I think gay men and lesbians are Nature's way of trying to slow down population growth. Really. I do.

The population of the world doubled from 1960 to 20o9. Think of it. In a little less than 50 years, we produced the same amount of people that it took from the dawn of humanity all the way to 1960.

In 50 years, we did in population growth what took 400,000 years. WHOA.

So maybe Nature will produce more and more homosexuals as the years progress, in an attempt to slam on the brakes on over-population, and as a by-product, make the world more FAB-u-lous! As Rosalind Russell said in Auntie Mame, "What could possibly be more natural than that?"

Hmm... but maybe I'm subconsciously thinking myself to be a bit god-like, too... to think that that's case in Nature, just because I believe it. Maybe I'm no different than those bigoted dudes calling Randi's show...

Men: We're incorrigible.

Lamentations of a Wall Street Dominatrix

2009-05-14T22:24:00.000-07:00

Today on Facebook I was reading the comments that some of my friends had written under the status that I wrote on my wall: "Larry was just invited to a nude dinner party this Saturday evening. As Sarah Palin would say, 'Thanks, but no thanks'".

One of my friends commented that she had had a strange invitation recently, too. Someone had asked her if she wanted a job as a dominatrix. She turned the job offer down. I told her it was probably a good move, or lack of a move, on her part. Here's why:

When I lived in NYC, I was in a play, and in this play was an actress who worked as a dominatrix to pay the bills. We used to hang out backstage, and I would ask her about her job, because I was fascinated by the idea that one would do that for a living.

She told me that most of her clients were Wall Street bankers-- conservative men in suits who came to her to be degraded, who longed for degradation...

She said (and I'm paraphrasing, but it is almost word-for-word what she said), "You have no idea how exhausting it is to humiliate and abuse a man for 2 hours, to have to perceive what kind of humiliation and abuse arouses him, and to have to keep coming up with new ways to abuse him. After a half hour, you get so fatigued doing it, and after an hour, you begin to physically torture him, just because you hope it'll drive him to finally say the safe-word so that the damned session will be over"

That got me to thinking... I've never been someone who fantasizes about humiliating, degrading and abusing people (not that my actress friend has either--it was just a job for her), so I never contemplated what it entails, and the amount of imagination that must go into it being a dominatrix (or dominatOR...?... is that the word for the male version? dominator? I've never heard it said). It especially must be difficult if you have no personal sexual attraction to being cruel. I mean, if you're just doing it as a job and not a real hobby, you must use your imagination more to humiliate well.

Well, one night I closed my eyes and imagined it.... other than making them crawl on their knees, lick my boots, act like a dog or a pig, being insulted, take the whip... I couldn't come up with anything else. All those things I imagined couldn't have taken up more than 45 minutes. So the next time I saw her, I asked her what she does besides what I had imagined.

After complaining again about how greuling it is to come up with new ways as the session drags on, she then listed lots of pain 'n humiliation techniques, but the one that has stuck with me is that....

...she would brush their hair in a very harsh manner. That always turned them on, she said. She'd use a bristle brush, and brush very hard, with each vicious stroke of the brush saying,

"YOU'VE... (brush) ...BEEN... (brush) ...A... (brush) ...VERY.... (brush) ...BAD... (brush) ...PIG...

She'd brush them until their scalps were fire engine RED. She said that that always gave the men great pleasure, great release and relief.

That "hairbrush technique" stuck with me... it made me think of what a mysterious thing human sexuality is. I mean, I know there are kinky ways to have sex, I'm no innocent, I know that raunch can be hot. But getting your hair brushed with savage, plowing strokes until your scalp is burning red? WTF? How can that be sexually fulfilling? Do these men subconsciously feel the need to be punished for working as bankers? For making good money? For being venture capitalists? For voting Republican?

Who knows. Psychoanalyzing it is a useless endeavor. Human sexuality is a very mysterious thing. I'll just leave it at that.

A Saturday Night Dinner Invitation

2009-05-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

I was just invited to a nude dinner party this Saturday night. Uh, thanks but no thanks.

Have you ever noticed how nudists almost NEVER have nice bodies? They are almost always uniformly flabby, or nearly skeletal.

I think the reason may be that it's their way of saying, "Screw you, Society. To hell with you and your body-beautiful standards. See my flab? Love it. Admire it. It's yours to see if you so choose"

Anyway, I don't know any of the people at this dinner-to-be, but I suspect they will be of the flabby variety, rather than the skeletal.

But the real reason I declined the invitation was pure vanity. I have neglected the gym too much lately, and I fear that the sight of me nude may make the other invitees lose their appetite... or even worse, that I might sexually arouse some of them.

Eww.

OK, I got it right...

2009-05-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

...except that I misspelled the word "let".

Hmm.... THAT's a good start.... misspelling such a simple word as "let".

That's a very auspicious beginning to my first blog.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3...

2009-05-13T18:33:00.001-07:00

How does this blogging thing work? Lete me see how this looks. Just a sec...