Dopamine Queen

Posted on April 26, 2009 by onesanevoice

You may not consider a massive, crevice-polishing cleaning of the house something that might trigger pleasure sensors in the brain, but there are those of us who would disagree.  And then only in Spring.  When the days are cold, and it gets dark five hours after breakfast, noticing spider webs wrapped around the table legs is no big wup.  Sunlight deprivation sucks the urge to Swiffer right out of the frontal cortex.  But April?  Lemon Pledge me a river.

I even felt compelled to conquer the Last Frontier:  Son’s former room.  This is directly across the hall from my office, formerly Daughter’s room.  It lies behind a door that has been closed since late 2007 when Son moved out for the last time at 23.  And since he bought a house this year, barring any seismic shifts in the Earth’s rotation, he is now an honored dinner guest rather than a laundry producing resident.

When we were all together at my friend Caryn’s for Passover, I informed Son of my plans to tackle his old room, and requested that he make himself available to help.

SON:  Sure.  With what?  I’ve already taken everything out of there.

OSV:  Everything except the books, videotapes, obsolete electronics, science projects under the bed, and the thirty or so athletic trophies.  Do you still want those or should I just get rid of them?

SON:  Do I want them?  They’re called “trophies,” Mom.  If they were meant to be thrown away, they’d be called something else.  When do you want me over?

This year’s Passover was highlighted by the newly renovated bathroom at the Caryn house.  My friend and I had been talking about doing our bathrooms since our children were in elementary school, and it’s ironic we both did them after the kids are all adults and on their own.

Of particular discussion was Caryn’s sonic toilet and vent fan, both made by some foreign country that specializes in state-of-the-art waste suction.  Son did the bathroom in his new house as well, and he and Caryn had a lively conversation about the differing imported brands they bought and their relative performance and power.  I don’t know, Husband and I pulled an American crapper off the shelf at Home Depot and it’s been doing the job just fine.  American crap, American crapper.

When Son came over the other night to wade through the baseball cleats in the bottom of his old closet, I asked what he thought of the new Caryn bathroom in light of all the work he’s done on his own place.

SON:  The tile work is excellent, and they picked awesome cabinets.  It’s a great job all around.  I didn’t want to say anything, but my flush is way more fierce.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos say “and….Action!”

roof jumping teachers

roof jumping teachers

there goes the bride

there goes the bride

keep crossing

keep crossing

keep busy

keep busy

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Beauty and the Beat

Posted on April 22, 2009 by onesanevoice

My childhood was filled with pithy sayings, courtesy of my mom, who never heard a catchy phrase she didn’t adopt.  “You get more with honey than you do with vinegar,” she’d advise me sagely if I snapped at her after not getting my way.  Some of her momisms were memorable for their wisdom, while others linger in my head as snippets from an era of myopic thinking, like “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

I remember reading a magazine back in my teens in which a newly married pop singer shared her secret for keeping romance alive.  She confided that she set the clock to get up before her husband and made sure that when he first saw her in the morning, she had done her hair and makeup and was wearing a pretty dress.  That way he’d have a beautiful picture in his mind all day long.  Even for someone like me who was weaned on Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, that statement sounded moronic.

The years that passed between my being a teen and having a teen saw our country weather both a war and a revolution.  Like many women who were raised by the full-time homemakers of the fifties, I sought to instill a certain sensibility in my daughter, a confidence and independence more relevant to the current times.  And still I found that the status quo in the schoolyard hadn’t changed a bit.

Growing up, Daughter was burdened with becoming very tall very quickly, along with being extremely slender.  Arriving as the new kid in a cliqued-off class resulted in every obvious difference being scrutinized and then called to her attention regularly.  One of her chief tormentors was a diminutive little snot who perhaps sensed she would one day score an 800 on the Math SAT and get into all the colleges that waitlisted him.

Always outgoing, empathetic and creative, Daughter struggled to reconcile the positive person she was with the negative remarks from her peers.  Feeling her frustration, I searched for a way to preserve her healthy self-image, and in her early teens, shocked even myself by suggesting modeling school.  I figured if genetics was any example, she’d continue to get taller and would always be more slender than most.  What better place to learn to appreciate the traits her schoolmates derided?

Who we are as adults is comprised of an infinite number of experiences, choices, and simple twists of fate.  Daughter was always beautiful; she just needed to keep feeling it inside and wear it like skin.  I thought of this lately as a contestant on Britain’s version of American Idol made the news.  Apparently, both the judges and the audience decided she wasn’t any good the moment she took the stage.  They could see she was neither young nor pretty.  For what must have seemed to Susan Boyle an eternity, she stood before a universal schoolyard rolling their eyes.  And in the end, she stood tall.

Give yourself a treat and give Susan Boyle a listen in this clip from Britain’s Got Talent

Daughter’s Featured Fotos catch New Yorkers at their New Yorkiest

flaunting

flaunting

body languaging

body languaging

schmoozing

schmoozing

chilling

chilling

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An American in Perugia

Posted on April 18, 2009 by onesanevoice

Although I’ve written in these pages about murder cases before, I promise you I’m not obsessed with the subject.  Maybe it’s my newspaper background, or the fact that Daughter studied abroad in the same city, but I’ve been following the case of the American college student in Perugia, Italy on trial for killing her roommate.  Recently, the case was featured on the CBS News show 48 Hours.

Up until watching this program, the only real fact I knew was that a 21-year-old student from Seattle named Amanda Knox was on trial, along with her Italian boyfriend, for killing her British roommate, Meredith Kercher in 2007.  It caught my interest back when it first appeared in the news because Daughter had studied in Perugia five years earlier.  Hers was the first group her university sent abroad after 9/11, and Italy changed over from the lira to the euro while she was there.  She felt a part of history.  Husband and I visited her in the early spring and were charmed by the medieval walled city and its inhabitants.  Where this murder case is concerned, ‘medieval’ may be the key word.

You can read the entire transcript from the program right here, but I will summarize the salient points quickly.  Ms. Kercher was found brutally raped and murdered the day after Halloween 2007 in the apartment she shared with Ms. Knox.  A 22-year-old transient with a record of violence was identified by DNA in the apartment and on the victim.  He has since been convicted of the crime and is serving his 30-year sentence.

The prosecutor, Guiliano Mignini, unsatisfied with one conviction, maintained the murderer had not acted alone.  It was a Satanic killing, and the roommate and her boyfriend were part of the cult.  Although there was no evidence to support this theory – in fact, all evidence discredited it – Mr. Mignini managed to implicate the student and her boyfriend after a 14-hour interrogation that Ms. Knox attests became physical.  She has been jailed in Perugia ever since, and the subject of extensive defamation by the Italian media.

Mr. Mignini has cited the MySpace pages of the Seattle student and her Italian boyfriend as evidence of their moral decay.  He presents a videotape of the pair hugging and kissing at the crime scene after Ms. Kercher’s body was discovered, saying it screams conspiracy.  His assertion of the Satanic murder theory results from having seen it on a website by a blogger whose beliefs he is devoted to.  A blogger who says that Satan walks among us and is responsible for all the brutal killings attributed to man.  A blogger.

We Americans are not immune to prosecutors looking to further their careers with a high profile conviction.  The Duke Lacrosse team comes to mind.  The kicker is that here we also try to prosecute the prosecutors if that becomes necessary.  Hopefully, we do it enough.  Guiliano Mignini, on the other hand, is already under indictment in Italy for abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and illegally wiretapping journalists.  A big win on this American student thing could bring him vindication.

Mr. Mignini has tried before to advance his Satanic cult theory regarding crimes in Italy.  American novelist Doug Preston reports being held without charge in 2006 by the same prosecutor, and Preston was only writing about a decades-old serial murder case in Florence.  The author says he was interrogated aggressively for three hours, and even he, an adult professional who had been nowhere near a dead body, felt his knees shaking, unsure if he’d ever see his wife and children again.

Preston, who came home to the U.S. the day after he was released, says that after her forced confession, Amanda Knox will likely not be as lucky.  In the 48 Hours segment, he said, “I mean say goodbye to Amanda.  She will return from her semester abroad a 50-year-old Italian woman after her 30 years in prison.”  And he was a mature family man interrogated for three hours.  Do not underestimate how young the students studying abroad really are, especially in foreign surroundings.

On our visit to Daughter’s apartment in Perugia seven years ago, one of her roommates showed me to the bathroom.  When she opened the door, I said, “Oh, you have a bidet.”  The roommate looked across the room to where I was pointing, at the fixture that wasn’t a toilet next to the toilet.  “Yeah,” she said, shrugging, “we don’t really know what that is, but it comes in handy when we mop the floor.”

That’s nineteen.  I guarantee you, after 14 hours of interrogation, I could have convinced her it was an ice bucket.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos examine Verbs

bathing

bathing

bugged

bugged

swirling

swirling

ripped and falling

ripped and falling

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Chocolate-covered bacon

Posted on April 14, 2009 by onesanevoice

During Passover this year at my friend Caryn’s, Daughter asked the young guests at her end of the table if they’d ever tasted the above-mentioned treat.  She apologized first for bringing up bacon on Passover, but in light of past, present and future holiday conversations at Caryn’s, it was a relatively tame subject.  And apparently, those two foods together are just a delicious flavor combination, which I would have guessed on my own since everything tastes better with bacon.  Especially when someone else makes it.

Turns out bacon would reappear for me before the week was over.  A few days later, I read a humorous story sent by the instructor who runs the online program I’m enrolled in while on a leave of absence from my regular school.  He was relating the importance of completing the job at hand in a professional manner, regardless of outside factors.  Seems when he first began teaching, he was reading an exercise to his mostly women students, and in his nervousness at being new in front of a class, misspoke one of the words and wound up clearly enunciating a female body part.

He looked up past his red face to see the class gawking at him in silence.  He excused himself briefly and went down the hall to the bathroom to decide exactly where he would slash his wrists.  But after a moment, he came to his senses and marched back into the room, finished reading the exercise, and regained control of the situation.  I laughed when I read his story, both because he told it well and because it called to mind one of my own.

While on a summer break from college back in the seventies, I worked as a waitress in a busy Manhattan coffee shop.  It was located on the ground floor of a large, midtown office building, and served the local business crowd for breakfast and lunch.  As lowest on the seniority ladder, I was assigned the counter where the tips were smaller since most diners were eating alone.

One of my regulars was an impossibly attractive young businessman around thirty.  He always had a polite, easy way about him, in his nice suit, tie, and handsome smile.  He worked in one of the offices upstairs, and coffee shop rumor had it that his family owned the building.  Which made his sitting at my station even more devastating for a 20-year-old at a gritty job in an ugly uniform.

He always ordered a grilled cheese and bacon with chocolate milk, and left at least a dollar tip.  Very nice.  Then one day I arrived to take his order and to my surprise he said, “I’ll have a scoop of tuna on a bed of lettuce and a Coke, please.”  I was walking away when I noticed he hadn’t given a beverage size.  I spun around quickly to ask what size Coke he wanted, but instead fell into his ocean blue eyes and blurted out, “Large or small bed?”

His eyebrows went up, but I didn’t stick around to exchange words.  With my whole head on fire, I strode into the kitchen and pressed my face against the door of the walk-in freezer.  I might still be standing there if the cook hadn’t yelled to me, “Hey, princess!  You got orders sittin’ up here.  Let’s go!”  With plates stacked all the way up my arm, I cruised past the Dreamweaver and said in my most professional voice, “Your order will be up in a moment, sir.”  Unbeknown to me, I had instantly learned my instructor’s lesson.  No matter how big that bed of lettuce might be, I wasn’t going anywhere near it.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos show us a Touch of Philly

philadelphia murals

philadelphia murals

snyderman art gallery

snyderman art gallery

prophetic motto

prophetic motto

feed me!

feed me!

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Time to Spare

Posted on April 10, 2009 by onesanevoice

Lately, I’ve been getting back in touch with friends I miss seeing.  Last week, I met a bunch of my former fellow students at the diner for a catch-up.  They’re still at the school I’ve taken a leave of absence from due to my recent surgery, and I sucked up all the gossip they could throw down like a top of the line Hoover.  Ironically, I’ve been making better progress in my online program than I had been at school, so I extended my leave of absence until the summer.  The school administration was not pleased when I told them, but we all did a lot of smiling anyway.

Then, earlier this week, I went Asian dining with two longtime friends whose children my kids grew up with.  All our kids are pretty grown now, either in college or beyond, and it amuses me to think that Daughter once baby sat for these families.  For many years now, both these friends have been caregivers for aging parents, now hitting their nineties.  One remarked that she has been taking care of her mother longer than her mother spent raising her.  Both have children in college, and parents too advanced in age to be living alone, but who steadfastly resist doing otherwise.  My friends work full-time and have husbands who work full-time.  Their lives are in high gear round-the-clock.  They weren’t complaining, just saying how it is, that you care for your loved ones.  You carry the ball.  And whatever price gets paid, you find out later.

Sitting back and listening at dinner, it struck me that the two generations we look after in our middle years are like two sides of the same coin.  Our kids go to college on the promise of a solid future, but when they graduate with staggering student loans, there aren’t really jobs available.  Our parents have medical science to thank for their lengthy lives, but then struggle to be independent with less and less ability, and more and more medication.  It’s all an elderly person can do these days to keep from tumbling into the Medicare donut hole and the great unknown that lies beyond.

It reminds me of the space program back in the sixties.  A gazillion dollars to reach another planet and then what?  Yes, we can repeat our triumphs in a new galaxy, but what good if we clone our mistakes as well?  The human life cycle is clearly on the move.  I’ll be 55 next month, and I’m training for a new career.  As a baby boomer, I wonder how much I’m innocently adding to the future imbalance.  We are an inquisitive and adaptable species.  Maybe one of my peers will invent the next big thing:  The University of Assisted Living.

Helen Levitt, one of the giants of 20th century photography, died last month at 95.  New Yorkers have long revered her unique gift for capturing moments in time on their city streets.  In her memory, and in celebration of another photographer whose original works seem at times to parallel Ms. Levitt’s vision, I have chosen some of my favorite photos from Daughter’s Portfolio to appear here once again.

Daily chat, Upper East Side

Daily chat, Upper East Side

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam

Atlanta Aquarium

Atlanta Aquarium

Plum

Plum

Bicycles, New Orleans

Bicycles, New Orleans

Deitch Art Parade, Manhattan (click link for more Deitch photos)

Deitch Art Parade, Manhattan

Another foggy New York night

Another foggy New York night

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“Without losers, where would the winners be?” – Casey Stengel

Posted on April 6, 2009 by onesanevoice

Husband was exhausted Saturday night so he crashed by nine, leaving me all alone with Channel Thirteen and Neal Gabler.  It was kind of fitting, though, since Thirteen reminds me of my father, who passed away this time of year in 2004.  My dad was a generous supporter of public television, and when I was growing up, there was always some Thirteen tote bag, coffee mug, or other bonus item lying around the house as evidence of my father’s sponsorship ethic.  He always encouraged me to become a member as well, which I’m ashamed to say I never actually did.

Saturday nights on Reel 13, Neal Gabler introduces three films in succession:  a classic, a short, and an indie.  The short is chosen by viewers who vote online for their favorite among that week’s offerings.  I don’t vote (I try and be consistent here since I’m not a member) but if I did, I would have lined up behind the winner.  I decided to take a pass on the indie, which was Hotel Rwanda and started at midnight.  But I did fall right into the classic, that Spencer Tracy/Fredric March scenery-chewfest we know as Inherit the Wind.

My mom, who died less than four months before my dad, was a HUGE fan of the old studio movies, and Spencer Tracy was a real favorite of hers.  The other was Lana Turner.  My mom was never one to gossip, so in a way I think those two stars being her favorites was significant.  In an era of movie-making when film moguls took great pains to protect their stars’ images, Tracy and Turner were each involved in major public scandals the studios could do nothing about – Spencer Tracy in his lengthy extramarital affair with Katharine Hepburn, and Lana Turner in the murder of her gangster boyfriend by her teenage daughter.  I think more than any other Hollywood names, those two satisfied my mom’s closet need for real-life melodrama.

The week’s winning short film was New York Talk, a perfect accompaniment to my parental reminiscences that night.  My dad was a quintessential New Yorker; the city’s biggest fan.  He’d sit in the front seat with the cabbie and discuss landmarks long gone and mayors like Ed Koch who could say the word schmuck and mean it.  If you have 3 minutes and 30 seconds to spare, click on the following link and it’ll take you to a YouTube site where you can watch New York Talk.  For some reason, I had trouble downloading it off the official Thirteen website.  Maybe they could tell I wasn’t a member.

Holiday Greetings via images from Daughter
The first is her own, the second an anonymous keeper

Happy Passover

Happy Passover

peepshow (photographer unknown)

peepshow (photographer unknown)

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Rich Like Us

Posted on April 2, 2009 by onesanevoice

Husband gets several magazines delivered to the house, and I usually pick and choose the articles that appeal to me in The Economist or Forbes, and leave the rest to him.  I wrote about my understanding of economics a couple of years ago in Blogoir, and my basic grasp is not particularly impressive.  Or pretty.  Ask my very patient accountant, who just last week devoted his valuable time to explaining the Alternative Minimum Tax to me.  He kept looking up at my face saying, “Are you with me?” and I kept nodding like a bobble-head.  Neither of us was fooled.

So it was a surprise even to me that I read this week’s Forbes cover to cover.  The March 30th issue was devoted to stories about billionaires who have lost billions in our current global economic crisis.  Some aren’t even billionaires anymore, just multimillionaires.  As someone richer than poor but way poorer than the rich being written about, it was strangely comforting.

Like everyone else, I’ve watched my IRA of 25 years tank.  I’ve seen people on our block lose their homes to foreclosure.  It brings me no joy that I am better off than them.  If I were to lose an arm, I would take no comfort in seeing someone who lost both arms.  But a billionaire stuck with a $50 million jet because there’s no one to buy it; that might just make me smile.

What we’re living through right now, what do we call it?  They called World War I “The Great War” before they knew to number them.  Since we’ve already had The Great Depression, does that make this ‘The Great Depression, Open New Tab’?  As my father once said when I asked him during Watergate if this was how Nixon would be remembered, “You won’t know until your children bring home their history books.”

What I do know is I’ll be thinking differently of L’Oreal, even as I color my hair with their new 10-minute Excellence To Go.  Elsewhere in Forbes was a story about Lilliane Bettencourt, the 86-year-old heiress of the L’Oreal fortune, Europe’s richest woman with $13.4 billion.  For years, she has been shamelessly fleeced by a much younger gay male companion.  Her daughter, who is about my age, has sought involvement from the French authorities, saying the man is preying on her vulnerable, stinking rich mother, and if this goes on unabated, there will be much less stink for her to inherit when the final whistle blows.  So far, the unsurprising response from the courts has been, “These affairs of the heart, they are so difficult to prove.”  I’ll bet that sounded gorgeous in French.

It all made for a very satisfying read, and the travails of the uber rich left me feeling grateful.  Sometimes more to have just means more to lose, as illustrated in one of my all-time favorite shows.  Midway through season 4 of The Wire, Omar Little busts into Marlo Stanfield’s poker game and proceeds to rob all the cash on the table.  Marlo protests with, “That’s my money.”  Omar gives his philosophical half sneer/half grin and says, “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”  Indeed.

Daughter’s Fotos sing These Are The People In My Neighborhood

Work To Do art show

Work To Do art show

sassy

sassy

Joe Ades, the memorable Union Square vegetable peeler salesman, died in February. This is his replacement

Joe Ades, the memorable Union Square vegetable peeler salesman, died in February.
This is his replacement

RIP Joe Ades

RIP Joe Ades, photo courtesy http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html

 

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Boy Rides

Posted on March 29, 2009 by onesanevoice

Among the many things that men and women feel differently about, cars might just be at the top of the list.  Personal experience has shown me that women want cars to take them from one place to the other, while men want cars to span all the territory between whatever was missing in their childhood up through the day they die.  Maybe I’m overstating it, but I don’t think so.

My first glimmer of this was when my date for the Junior Prom in high school picked me up in his father’s VW bug.  My prom date was a guitar-playing Art Garfunkel type – sensitive, polite, and never one to call attention to himself.  With that in mind, I made my father promise not to make him pose for any pictures.  Swearing he wouldn’t even suggest it, my dad photographed me in my dress before Art arrived.

After giving me my corsage, Art nodded to my parents as we walked out.  Then, turning around suddenly at the front door, he gestured to the camera in my father’s hand and blurted, “Do you think you could take a picture of us together?”  “Why, of course!” my father responded, and said for us to stand by the door and he’d take one right away.

“Well,” Art stammered, “I’d really like one outside.”  So we walked out to the driveway, and Art positioned me right in front of the VW.  Then he put his arm around my shoulder, and with a huge smile, motioned for my dad to snap the picture.  It was a great shot, and it’s still in a photo album somewhere.  For years, every time I looked at it, I wondered what exactly Art meant when he said “a picture of us together” – him and me, or him and the car.

A few years ago, Husband and I both needed our cars replaced at the same time.  Husband visited dozens of showrooms, exploring the available crop of vehicles, and deciding which one spoke to his inner driver.  I tagged along because I needed a car, too.  And once again, I discovered that where men and cars are concerned, it’s about larger things than the driving.  It’s more like a pilgrimage.

As Husband lingered with the Nissan salesman, thumbed through color brochures, and went for test drives, I walked over to a Sentra and sat in the driver’s seat.  Then I walked back to Husband and the salesman.

OSV:  It’s very comfortable, but I’m not in love with the color.

SALESMAN:  It’s the last one left in any color.

OSV:  I wasn’t really thinking silver.

SALESMAN:  It’s not silver.  It’s radium.

OSV:  Oh, okay then.  Write it up.

Husband looked at me in amazement, like how could I decide in a split second that this was the vehicle worthy of sharing all my four-wheeled memories, my yearning for the distant horizon, my hopes and dreams for the future.  “It’s just a car,” I said, shrugging.  “Not shoes.”

Daughter’s Featured Fotos leave Room for Questions

the horse's mouth

the horse’s mouth

who's the boss?

who’s the boss?

the monster front

the monster front

boy rides 4 mole_people_below

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City Serenade

Posted on March 25, 2009 by onesanevoice

I met Husband on the Upper East Side last night to have dinner with one of his former work colleagues and the colleague’s fiancé.  Is the female fiancé or fiancée?  I could look it up but it’s easier to ask you since you’re already here.  Anyway, we had a lovely evening with delicious food (I had the rigatoni with Italian sausage, roasted tomatoes, and TWO glasses of Pinot Grigio, so you know I was very chatty) and Husband had free-range chicken and wasabi mashed potatoes, so he was the one with smoke coming out of his ears.  The colleague and his fiancé(e) were really good company and we hope to see them again.  Maybe even before their wedding.

To get into the city, I decided to walk to the train station from our house.  It’s a little bit of a hoof, but it beats looking for a parking spot at the station at 3:00 in the afternoon.  I looked out the window before I left, and the kids coming out of the school across the street were in sweatshirts, so I dressed accordingly.  Poor choice.  By the time I hit the main road, my eyes were tearing from the wind and my ears were frozen.  So much for second-hand weather reports.

When my eyes tear excessively in the cold, I tend to get a blocked tear duct.  Yes, I am very high maintenance.  A real delicate flower.  So I’m walking with my head bowed into the wind, water running from my left eye, and I’m remembering the last time this happened and I wound up in my ophthalmologist’s office.  He’s kind of a quirky guy, like many of my doctors, and he told me before he began the procedure exactly what it entailed.

DR. EYE:  (standing over me)  I’d like you to fold your hands in your lap.

OSV:  Why?

DR. EYE:  Because when I do what I’m going to do to clear the duct, I don’t want your hand to spasmodically grab any part of my body that may be within reach.

I looked down to see my hand resting on the arm of the treatment chair parallel to his crotch.

OSV:  What are you going to do to me?

DR. EYE:  I’m going to insert a needle through your tear duct down into the nasal passage to clear it.  Sometimes this causes the patient’s arms to flail.

OSV:  (tasting panic)  Aren’t you going to give me something?

DR. EYE:  I’m giving you the advice to fold your hands in your lap.

The needle came at me and I clasped my hands together between my legs.  I had no desire — sober or sedated — to distract my doctor by grabbing his goodies.  As the needle descended into the inner corner of my eye, I heard him say, “Don’t blink,” and I have to tell you, if ever there was an instruction I would have died trying to follow, that was it.

So now I probably don’t have to explain the two glasses of wine at dinner.

Hear the Urban Music in Daughter’s Featured Fotos

work to do art show

work to do art show

the J train and the bridge

the J train and the bridge

manufactured breeze or bent flowers?

manufactured breeze or bent flowers?

music video at flatiron

music video at flatiron

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You said it, pardner

Posted on March 21, 2009 by onesanevoice

One of the things I love about traveling outside my native New York is how surprised people are when they find out where I’m from.  It’s like when I say, “New York City,” I’m supposed to be snotty or rob them or take my top off and sing show tunes.  The really surprised ones say they’ve always wanted to go to New York, and then they remark that it was easy to tell I wasn’t local.  Maybe it’s the ethnic curls (albeit enhanced), or the lack of color in my basic black (but not goth) wardrobe.  Anyway, like My Cousin Vinny, it would seem I don’t blend.

It’s my opinion that New Yorkers are not exactly rude; there’s just a real edge to their attitude.  They have a way of making it seem like they’re doing you a favor by trying to be nice to you.  It’s almost a constipated friendliness.  Maybe subconsciously they want to show how stressful their lives are, or how stressful the city is.  In any event, if you want genuine, if-I-were-a-puppy-I-would-lick-you friendliness, you can’t beat Arizona and New Mexico.

Which is why an antique store in Jerome, Arizona gave me such a kick.  Jerome is a very small, former copper mining town in northern Arizona with a population under 500.  In recent years, it has become a magnet for tourists due to its thriving artist community and spectacular views.  It was while browsing in one of the antique stores there that I spotted a vintage silver spoon bracelet.  Since Daughter has a spoon ring she often wears, I thought it might make a nice souvenir to take home for her.

The saleswoman was about thirty years old and looked like Amy Winehouse, with her mane of disheveled, black hair and otherworldly expression.  I pointed to the case with the bracelet and asked to see it.  Amy stretched her arm into the case and then looked up.

AMY:  I can’t reach it.

OSV:  Okay.  (pause)  I’d still like to see it.

She just stared at me, and I broke into a huge, grateful smile because this is the service I have come to know and thrive on back in New York.  You have to REALLY want something to be willing to wrestle with that kind of disinterest and laziness.

OSV:  I can’t see any markings from here.  Is it sterling?

AMY:  (her hand still inches from the bracelet)  How should I know?  It’s under $20.  What do you think?

OSV:  I’ll take it.

Husband is always trying to interest me in relocating out west after retirement.  He cites the mild climate, clean air, and relaxed pace.  If we’re in a small town, he makes sure to point out the building that serves as the theater or cultural venue, and reminds me that once we have friends there, it won’t bother us that both the restaurants close at 8:00 p.m.  As we were driving around Albuquerque, he called out for my benefit, “Look!  They have a Chico’s!”  He’s so adorable, and Albuquerque is quite lovely.

But it’s while we’re traveling through deserted canyons and rural mountain areas that he pulls out the hard sell.  How peaceful.  How deeply submerged in nature and the way man was meant to live.  How completely real and almost spiritual.  He’ll point to a cabin standing alone in the desert and say, “Imagine the life we could have here, just the two of us.”  And I smile at him lovingly and think, “Yup, just you and my dead body.”

With that in mind, Daughter’s Fotos yank us out of the west and Into The Subway

the long wait for the R train

the long wait for the R train

walking the line

walking the line

subterranean hendrix

subterranean hendrix

what the rain left behind

what the rain left behind

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