Bungalow Babe in the Big City

How to be a Real (Un-Entitled) Mother Superior

2012-02-13T19:45:00.001-05:00

The Tiger Mom is so 2011.

New year, new Superior Mom meme.

Welcome, readers and trend-watchers, to the latest mishigoss, the Bebe Mom, aka Pamela Druckerman, author of the recently published instant bestseller Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, which casts a reproving eye at indulgent, no boundaries, graceless American parenting and finds a more commendable model in the way it is done in the birthplace of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

(Actually, there is something else far more compelling that relates to Strauss-Kahn and Druckerman that I am ALSO writing about, so stay tuned...but first read on....)

Whether the Chinese or the French have nailed the secret to successful mothering is obviously up for a good, long debate...as is the question of which nationality will vie for the title of Mother Superior next.

One thing is for certain: as of yesterday, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was not even in the running, based on a random sampling of the mommies shepherding their kiddies to and from afternoon swimming at the JCC in Manhattan. For them, I would have to invent an entirely new competition with several, closely related categories: Most Self-Involved Mother; Most Obnoxious Mother; Most Inconsiderate Mother; Mother Most Oblivious to the Elderly Woman Waiting for a Shower; Mother Most Rapidly Texting While Her Kid Slams a Locker Door In Someone's Face; Mother Most Likely to Trammel Over the Needs of Everyone Who is Not Her Own Kid.

These clever categories were inspired by the crop of moms I encountered circa 1:15 p.m. in several areas of the women's locker room -- in the shower section, in the blow-drying section and the section set off by a curtain and festooned with two legible signs that proclaim the area for Adults Only, no kids under the age of 14 allowed.

Last week, I wrote about Subway Blindness Syndrome but this ailment has obviously spread aboveground for as recently as yesterday afternoon, old ladies waiting in towels for showers became amazingly invisible to the young women who were hellbent on showering their kiddies and getting on with their own busy, busy days. You could tell just how busy these women were by the amount of texts they sent during the time they were ignoring the old women -- and most everyone else -- around them.

It evidently never occurred to any of these mothers to let one of the elderly women ahead of their own kid. As I stood in my towel, I can report that the wait for an available shower was at least ten minutes long. Ten chilly, humiliating minutes for a senior citizen to stand in a towel while little kids scampered around her and mothers were utterly blind to basic principles of respect.

Which brings me to the Adults-Only section of the locker room.

In this area, as I previously stated, signs proclaiming the area off-limits to kids are mounted on opposite sides of the room which is set off by a curtain, to further underscore the idea that this area was for people who sought some privacy.

Which is why I was more than a little surprised to walk into the area and find an entire bench monopolized by a thirtyish mother and her young charges, changing into their clothes after an afternoon swim. Surrounding the bench were mounds of their soggy towels. Surrounding the soggy towels were their open bags, clothes spilling out.

In short, to access my locker, I had to push a used towel with my foot and step over a bag.

To gain a couple of inches of bench space, I was forced to ask the mother to move her stuff over.

So, when she said to me, "Two more people are coming," instead of "Sure," or "No problem," or -- horrors! -- "Sorry," I felt moved to direct her gaze to one of the wall signs that designated the area for adults only. "Not to be nasty, BUT...." I said.

Still, nothing registered in this woman's countenance except for some kind of miffed annoyance. She moved not an inch. Her little kids, though, stopped getting dressed and became watchful, evidently feeling the tension. Poor things, it wasn't their fault their mother was a failure at the rudiments of social etiquette.

Certain I wanted to avoid an all-out confrontation, I took a giant step around the mother, her brood and their mess and skipped off to fetch the Ruler of the Locker Room, a sassy, super-competant salt 'n pepper-haired JCC staffer who is regarded as a cross between an oracle, a goddess, a beloved grandmother and a celebrity for her sometimes caustic yet invariably wise, no-nonsense approach to, well, everything.

Fortunately, she was seated at the welcome desk.

As I explained the scenario, she rose from her seat. "They still there?" she asked me, heading for the locker room, but not before retrieving a moving coat rack from the clutches of a three-year-old boy whose mother or nanny was texting madly (again the texting!!!) on a nearby bench. As she entered the locker room, she turned to give me a look.

It said, "We're in this together, kid."

It meant, "Someone's gotta enforce the rules."

It allowed me to let go, if only for a moment, of my on-going irritation at the unbearable entitlement I encounter daily -- in the locker room of an Upper West Side community center, in stores, in restaurants, on public transportation and private events alike -- that is exhibited by parents who behave as if they and their off-spring were the absolute epicenter of a universe presided over by the God of Extreme and Utter Selfishness, Moral Myopia and Rude Disregard of Others, Especially Old Ladies Shivering in Towels.

Loco Parentis: Or How An Entire Generation of American Day School Parents Lost Their Minds and Sent Their Kids to Wacked-Out, Right-Wing, Repressive and Otherwise Insane Israeli Yeshivot

2012-02-11T23:33:00.004-05:00

This afternoon, I was utterly mesmerized by Gary Rosenblatt's column in the recent issue of the New York Jewish Week.

Entitled, "Lessons from the Rav Bina Story" it was a follow-up piece to an article that appeared two weeks earlier, co-authored by Rosenblatt and Yedidya Gorsetman, a Yeshiva University senior and the younger brother of my friend Atara. The two presented a disturbing portrait of the charismatic but highly controversial Rav Aharon Bina, the head or rosh hayeshiva of Netiv Aryeh, a popular boys Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem's Old City, endorsed by many important Jewish institutions, including Yeshiva University. Netiv Aryeh is one of many Israeli yeshivot where Jewish high school graduates spend a year (or two) before starting college. The trend to send one's son or daughter to Israel before college has grown dramatically over the past two decades, becoming something akin to a religious obligation, a badge of allegiance to Jewish peoplehood, a way for parents to inoculate their nice Jewish offspring against the Sodom and Gemorrah of the American college campus...or so they think.

Returning to Rav Bina, the issue raised by Rosenblatt and Gorsetman in their well-researched article is his, um, unorthodox approach to education and discipline:

Supporters call it “tough love”; critics call it abuse.

Credited with transforming many troubled American students who had been branded hopeless by other educators, and taking motivated young men to a higher level of learning, the 63-year-old rabbi is praised by several leading American rabbis as having been a wonderful educator for more than three decades. And his yeshiva, supported by prominent philanthropists, including businessman Ira Rennert, is a major — and approved — feeder school to Yeshiva University.

But a significant minority of former students, employees and colleagues maintain that Rav Bina is controlling, manipulative and emotionally coercive in ways that would never be accepted in other schools. In what has become known throughout Israeli yeshivot as “Bina Stories,” he is said to regularly yell at, humiliate and insult students in public; threaten to expel them for seemingly no reason (and make good on that promise with a few every fall, sometimes without first notifying the parents); press psychologists he hires to share private information about the students he has sent them; and tell those in disfavor that they are cursed.

The January 27th Jewish Week article ignited a firestorm of response, some of it defensive, most of it corroborating the allegations of abuse. Rosenblatt's column in this week's paper opens with the nearly unbelievable Facebook message Gorsetman received from Rabbi Avi Fuld, also of Netiv Aryeh:

“I don’t know who you are and I am not trying to threaten you in any way,” the rabbi began. “I see that you are friends on FB [Facebook] with many Netiv guys and I hope they come to their senses and drop you like a dead fish.

“I truly believe you are an evil person” for “trying to murder Rav Bina with your pen,” the rabbi continued, speculating that Yedidya, a senior at Yeshiva University and an editor of the school newspaper, “is not frum [observant]” and that he wrote the article because “you hate the fact that Rav Bina has such a positive effect on his kids [students].

“You are an evil immoral individual” whose intention “wasn’t the safety of the kids but how you can hurt Rav Bina.”

The sheer craziness of this missive from an educator, no less a rabbi, is utterly breathtaking and provides insight as to how far gone the judgement of those teaching at Netiv Aryeh actually is. As Rosenblatt writes:

And while I suspect defenders of the yeshiva will rationalize Rabbi Fuld’s deeply disturbing comments as an aberration, as they do decades’ worth of complaints about Rav Bina’s treatment of some students, I worry that this rebbe’s comments reflect, at the very least, the antithesis not only of rabbinic behavior, but of the foremost Torah value of seeing each and every person as created in God’s image.

The entire sordid matter unfolds now, in cyberspace -- the response to the response to the response...he said/he said. Former victims are coming forward, verifying, affirming, finding solidarity. And of course, Rav Bina's defenders are countering the charges. Yeshiva University, notes Rosenblatt, has remained silent on the matter.

Of course, I am in no position to gauge Rav Bina's guilt or innocence. No one I know went to Netiv Aryeh and frankly, it is one of the last places I would ever send one of my kids during their Gap Year.

Which brings me to the insanity that seems to have swept an entire generation of parents of kids enrolled in Modern Orthodox high schools who virtually trip over themselves to ship their teens off to single-sex Israeli institutions where modernity is the enemy, where secular colleges are sneered at, where repressive rules relate to their recreational lives and where, some say, they are brainwashed to break away from their families, forsake their former educational plans and pursue an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle.

I have sat at Israel Program Night at my kids' various high schools, open-mouthed with shock at some of the schools my peers are considering for their sons and daughters. Sitting at one such event held at the Ramaz Upper School several years ago, Middle Babe and I actually began giggling in the middle of the presentation made by a madly shuckling rabbi who depicted a school environment that sounded more like solitary confinement in a maximum security prison than a Gap Year abroad adventure.

As Middle Babe frantically tried to shush me, I cast my gaze around the room and saw seemingly hypnotized moms and dads nodding in appreciation of the program being described by the rabbi. I had to ask myself, at one point, whether I was the crazy one. What was I missing that these other people found so appealing?

The only reason we were even in that session was that Middle Babe's outrageously nervy Jewish studies teacher insisted she apply to at least one yeshiva...despite my daughter's insistence that she preferred a more liberal, hands-on program of work, learning and travel. Ultimately she chose Young Judea's Year Course and had an enriching year without any extreme ideology, coercion or belittling from her educators. Once she got into trouble for sneaking her then-boyfriend's dog into her dorm. She got dehydrated and had to go to Soroka Medical Center for IV treatment. She had the typical year-abroad misadventures but she wasn't punished for having a boyfriend or for going out with friends or for wearing shorts and tank tops, which she donned every day as part of her three-month stint as a ranger at Ein Gedi. She wasn't told to rescind her registration at Goucher College and switch to Stern College. She wasn't told that her liberal Upper West Side parents were goyim. If we had a problem with the program leaders, it was that some of them were young and inexperienced.

In the original Jewish Week article, psychiatrist Michelle Friedman, also a friend, outlines the failure of critical thinking that occurs among some parents when they choose a Gap Year school -- or educator -- that raises red flags:

Dr. Michelle Friedman, a Manhattan psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who directs the pastoral counseling program at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, says she has heard a number of disturbing stories about Rav Bina over the years.

She has written professionally about what she calls “the power and peril of rabbinic charisma,” and speaks of the need for a rabbi’s self-awareness about his or her control over congregants or students, as well as the importance of establishing boundaries.

She questions why parents who are “so concerned about the quality of the food and laundry service” at Israeli yeshivas where they send their children are not more involved in choosing the right psychological environment.

“You’re sending your child thousands of miles away for a year in late adolescence for an intense, isolated experience,” she said, and yet she finds “an unquestioning reverence for what goes on there. It just amazes me.”

In regards to reports about Rav Bina, she asked: “Why are we so accepting? Are we so fearful of critiquing authority? Do parents think, ‘he’s doing a great job, and if we criticize it we’ll be on the outside,’ so they just say nothing?”

Actually, I think that Friedman nails it in her final comment. These Day School parents, typically so assertive when it comes to advocating for their kids -- let's face it, typically hovercraft, helicopter types -- utterly abandon their protective instinct based on the belief that the admittedly eccentric rabbi in the Israeli yeshiva has some secret trick, some magic method to make their kid a better Jew and, as a bonus, protect them from all the harm in the world.

It doesn't take a PhD to diagnose that kind of thinking as primitive.

Operation Red Corduroy Jeans

2012-02-09T09:05:00.003-05:00

We've been sleeping in the living room of our Morningside Heights apartment for the past week, our massive king-size bed entirely filling the square of space in our north/west facing living room.

Due to the exposure, sweet cold air swirls around us at night and sunshine spills in early in the morning. Because we overlook the Columbia campus and face classrooms and dorm rooms alike, we dress and undress in total darkness or with shades drawn or in another room.

The renovation, ordered by Columbia University, began a little over a week ago and as these things go, it is taking longer than anticipated. Our bedroom has been a worksite for the past eight days with floors ripped up and replaced, the ceiling pulled down and rebuilt, the walls primed for a fresh coat of paint -- a vibrant Benjamin Moore blue whose swatch card and name and number I cannot find because I am typing on a folding card table in the dining room surrounded by mounds of furniture, clothes and dogs.

I have been circulating the same outfits over three or four days, too stressed at the prospect of digging through drawers that open only a couple of inches or entering the walk-in closet that is stuffed with suitcases and books and other stuff that had formerly been in our room. I am trying to look as clean as possible, make sure that at least I have on clean underclothes.

Because the workers arrive so early and the bathroom is opposite my bedroom, aka the construction site, I am trying to shower at the gym, then again, I haven't been getting there every day.

HOBB and I are about to kill each other, in fact, he went psycho on Sunday night when I returned from watching the beginning of the Super Bowl at a bar on Amsterdam Avenue. Well, he waited until after we ate our dinner of fresh salmon, which I picked up at Fairway before going to the bar. And then he went psycho, compelling me to leave our apartment/construction zone and watch the final hour of the Super Bowl at another bar on Amsterdam Avenue.

En route to the bar (the second time) I called Little Babe (who was in his bedroom doing a lab report for Physics at the time) to make sure he knew that everything his father had yelled at me was due to the extreme stress he was enduring in the construction zone of our apartment.

Which doesn't mean that I am as understanding...or forgiving.

Regarding the displacement of the construction, I am hardly complaining. This is one of the perks of living in faculty housing -- an apartment facelift that costs us nada or next to nada. Two weeks ago I picked out new appliances, haunting the PC Richards website, visiting the showroom, speaking with customer service representatives, trying to find the best model that still adhered to the Columbia budget. I pondered paint shades for hours, taping swatches to the walls of the various rooms and contemplating them from afar. I still have to scoot down to W72nd Street to pick out tiles for the kitchen.

And oh yeah, I forgot I need to finalize my dishwasher choice.

As anyone who lived through a renovation can attest, the process is stressful but it is also an opportunity for goal-setting, life-assessment and, of course, cleaning out that which is weighing you down...or that you simply do not need anymore.

As a pack-rat (i.e., horder) the most challenging part of living in an apartment is the difficulty of holding onto all the clothes and chatchkes I have ever acquired. Loathe to part with anything I purchased in a moment of passion, I have stored most of my clothes, even the teeny-weeny shorts I wore when I weighed 112 pounds, which was about ten years ago when I went on the Atkins Diet.

In the process of clearing out our room for the workers, we had to unload the clothes and boxes on top of the loft in our bedroom because the loft had to be dismantled under engineer's orders. This forced me to go through the bags and boxes I had thrown up there over the past decade. This forced me, now ten years older and more pragmatic, to acknowledge the unlikelihood of ever wearing 2/3rds of those micro-sized clothes again.

Thus I bagged and discarded, donating my beloved former threads to some skinny person in need.

But I did save a few items, either because they had generous proportions or because the prospect of fitting into them again was not the stuff of dreams.

One such item was a pair of red corduroy jeans, size 6, from Old Navy, suddenly back in style, small, to be sure, but not ludicrous, perhaps a size or two away from my present proportions.

An attainable goal, I say, despite the challenge of menopausal weight loss. "Have you gained any weight over the past year?" asked Nancy, the CNM I saw yesterday at my yearly OB-GYN visit, my practitioner for the past fifteen years.

I laughed in response and she laughed in fellowship, five years my senior.

Moved to give away the Guess cut-off jeans, size 27, and the size 2 chinos and shirts that will not even button around my boobs anymore (one nice aspect of the aforementioned menopausal spike in weight), I am nevertheless holding onto my Old Navy red cords, hoping to squeeze my butt into them some day soon.

Resting on a pile of stuff inside my stuffed walk-in closet, they are a friendly inducement for weight loss, a textile incarnation of a personal trainer, a reminder of who I was, not so very long ago, and who I might be again, in the very near future.

Subway Blindness Syndrome

2012-01-31T15:29:00.001-05:00

In the past week, as I rode the NYC subway, I have given my seat up for:

One elderly woman late at night
One tired looking middle aged woman early one afternoon
One woman holding a baby on a Sunday afternoon
One man wearing a baby in a front carrier later on the same Sunday afternoon
One old and shaky man early in the morning during the previous week
One very pregnant woman later that same day
One mildly pregnant woman the following afternoon

And these are only the incidents I can recall.

The point of this list is not to brag about my amazingly compassionate nature or to pat myself on the back, God forbid. I hardly think of myself as saintly or extraordinarily considerate for my deed.

The point of this is to state that, in each instance, I was surrounded by scads of seated people, many of them much younger than me.

There were groups of loudly giggling girls. There were packs of tough young guys. There were people of my age in professional attire. There were young women in lycra with yoga mats on their laps. There were tourists and natives alike; parents with children, couples, solitary riders.

And while many of the aforementioned people were thoroughly (and disturbingly) captivated by some electronic device (iPad, iPod, iPhone, etc...) therefore oblivious to anything around them, many were not. Some stared stolidly ahead of them. Some stared stonily at the person in question who unquestionably deserved a seat more than they, or would at least have appreciated the offer to sit.

In each instance I waited a count or two just to see if anyone else would react. In one instance, that of the visibly exhausted middle-aged woman (just a few years older than me, I think) I worried that my offer might offend, so I let two or three stops pass before I spoke out. Yet in each instance, my offer of a seat was gratefully accepted.

Even though it's been a while, I well remember the subway blindness syndrome that suddenly afflicted my fellow passengers when I was pregnant, remember staring down teenage boys and girls, to no avail. (It was my freelance observation that the teen girls were the absolute worst, followed by youngish professional men.)

I remember holding onto a pole or strap with my belly practically in someone's face, yet somehow invisible.

I recall the profound gratitude that swept over me when a seat was offered.

Like littering and seat-hogging and loud cellphone conversations in public and cab stealing, subway blindness syndrome really gets under my skin. It is a selective affliction, of course, a willful obliviousness, a defense, an excuse, a reason not to compromise one's comfort.

It makes me want to yell, to shake my fellow riders out of their selfishness, to don a prophet's robe and preach from a hilltop or street corner or subway platform.

Instead, I react by example, hoping that someone else is paying attention and feeling shamed -- or inspired -- into giving up their seat next time...before I do.

It's Not My Bag, Baby

2012-01-23T09:23:00.000-05:00

For the space of nearly two decades, the space between my maple dresser and the west-facing wall of my bedroom has served as a cubbyhole, bin, repository, open air closet and erstwhile storage area for an assortment of handbags -- some commodious as duffel bags, others modest as sandwich-size baggies and every size in between.

Predominantly black, of course.

Accompanying the handbags in this pile were tote bags from such far-flung places as the Berlin film festival and a flea market in Ireland, those ubiquitous recycled shopping totes from such local emporia as Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters and nearly a dozen trademark glossy black and white Sephora bags in a variety of dimensions, bearing mute witness to my consumer habits.

There were also three $12 faux fur handbags purchased from Old Navy more than a decade earlier, a set in red, black and leopard print that accompanied me to scores of parties and never failed to elicit rave reviews for their blend of whimsy and elegance. There were ironic fake vintage lunch boxes from fifties/sixties TV shows ("I Love Lucy," "Lassie" and "The Munsters") that I employed in lieu of grown-up evening bags and as repositories for my keys, lip gloss and other essentials for synagogue services on Shabbat and holidays...lest I be seen toting a regular workaday purse on the Sabbath.

There were a few actual evening bags -- the tiny silver embossed bag I saved from my mother's discard pile when she recently cleaned out her Great Neck home, a black crocodile clutch from my late mother-in-law, a velvet handbag from Nine West I swore I had never seen before and therefore must have snagged on sale at a place like Woodbury Commons in a fugue state induced by retail overload.

There were stylish bags I had utterly forgotten about -- a crazy Zebra skin satchel from Loehmann's accented with red patent leather, a microfiber backpack purchased in Paris several years earlier, a handsome Italian leather number my sister had bought in Italy and never used, a lush suede bag my mother had purchased from TJ Maxx, complete with tags, never worn.

The pile of bags has bothered me on and off but like so many other household projects, it took a backseat to other pressing items: work, family, exercise, hosting, cooking, travel, haircuts, manicures, the need to have a full extracurricular life. If our Amsterdam Avenue apartment wins praise for anything, it is for its laissez faire, eclectic style, which blends vibrant walls, artifacts of our travels, an insane amount of books, movie posters, unique (and cheap!) artwork, nutty chachkas and cool cast-off furniture with the best of Ikea and Bloomingdale's warehouse...together with the somehow charming domestic detritus of a family of five.

The west and northfacing views of the Columbia University campus also have something to do with our apartment's appeal. So do our Pomeranians, Alfie and Nala, whose sheer cuteness serves as a visual distraction.

I make no secret of the fact that though I am an avid cook and host, I consider cleaning (and most household projects that take more than, say, 10 minutes) a vast waste of my time and talents. Even when we could not afford to do so, we have had a cleaning lady in because I cannot abide a dirty home and hate doing laundry.

Though I recoil from filth (click below to read the rest of the post)...

Though I recoil from filth, I have a certain tolerance for mess and this relaxed attitude is reflected in the fact that our interestingly accessorized home often is marred by piles of stuff...on surfaces and on floors and in closets and in crevices and corners such as the one between my dresser and my bedroom wall.

And though I will go to great lengths to avoid cleaning, I will also launch focused, high-energy sifting/organizing/categorizing/tossing fests every so often because the mess just gets to me.

By which I mean that the fact that I do not know what is contained in closets, corners, piles and bags really begins to freak me out.

I am not sure why but lately I have been taking on household cleaning, sifting and organizing projects, often begun on Shabbat afternoons.

A month ago, I tackled Little Babe's room with him, a project that ate up an entire day but yielded a renovated room with a new feature: floorspace. Together, we filled five large white garbage bags worth of stuff that had no place in his adolescent lair.

Last week I decided to mate the single socks stored in two pillowcases in my closet, a project which produced more than 20 new pairs. I felt as joyous as a matchmaker, bringing two lonely souls together...again and again and again. Looking in on me, sitting cross-legged on our king-sized bed, HOBB remarked, "I hate to say it but you look as happy as a pig in..."

The result of my bag cubbyhole search, destroy and store mission produced quantifiable results: at the end of my project, not only do I have a cleaner bedroom but I scored 27 pens, 12 make-up items, many of them believed lost forever, ticket stubs, receipts and programs that provided a sweet trip down memory lane and the biggest surprise...$79.12 in coins, redeemed yesterday at the coin machine at TD Bank, where I won a prize for guessing the amount within two dollars. (I guessed $78. I don't know why.)

In the course of my mission, some bags were tossed, the rest stored in the walk-in closet in a somewhat haphazard but fully visible pile placed atop a newly empty shelf. (I had also discarded four cardboard boxes filled with clothes that I was fairly certain I would never wear again because of the extreme improbability that I will ever weigh 112 pounds again.)

Last night, just as I was pondering whether I had been too hasty to toss certain bags, I chanced upon a young guy who looked familiar as I was running into Trader Joe's on Broadway and 72nd Street. In less than half a minute we broke into smiles of recognition. "Hey, you're the guy who stood behind me at TD Bank this morning!" I blurted out.

"Yeah," he said. "You had a lot of coinage. What was your take?"

I drew myself up proudly. "$79.12," I announced. The guy's eyes widened in admiration.

"Wow," he said. "Was that money just lying around your house?"

"Nah," I said. "I found it in my old handbags. I went on a mad cleaning spree."

The guy broke into a mischievous grin. "Hey," he said. "I'm gonna offer to help my girlfriend clean out her closet. You never know what you might find."

The Eighteen Minutes

2012-01-20T11:04:00.001-05:00

It's been a week, the kind of week that makes you want to shout "THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY" if only you could find enough strength to speak above a hoarse whisper.

Or, if you are of the observant Jewish persuasion -- "THANK GOD FOR SHABBAT!!!"

That's where I'm at right now, sleep-deprived, working at home in my goth nightie (a faded black Converse sundress that I got at Target and should have discarded centuries ago), red woolen lumberjack shirt, thermal socks and Zabar's baseball cap, thinking of the weekend that looms before me.

Passing the front hall mirror as I just returned from locking the door after HOBB, I note that I look homeless yet happy. Cold air from the building hallway whooshes into the apartment with the opening of the door and I feel reluctant to combat the elements, consider staying inside for the day, watching a few episodes of Law and Order on Netflix, cooking for Shabbat in a leisurely manner, perhaps taking a long hot bath with lavender oil.

But as quickly as this joyfully slothful vision appears to me, it is stamped out vigorously because the entire point of Shabbat is to have it serve as a counterpoint to the crazy stressful kinetic nature of the workweek.

And this Shabbat holds special relaxation potential as it is our second pre-empty-nest Shabbat in as many weeks. With Middle Babe spending the weekend at the Long Island home of her Gentleman Caller and Little Babe attending the Junior Shabbaton at SAR High School (and Big Babe residing in Berlin) HOBB and I will be alone. Again. Last week saw us lingering over a delicious dinner, reading like old married people (which I guess we are) and then having a killer Scrabble tournament that lasted for hours.

HOBB fell sleep before we played out but in case you are wondering, I was winning by nearly 100 points.

To unleash the full power of Shabbat, a frenetic Friday is an invaluable asset. Therefore, I'll be springing into Yiddishe hausfrau mode in minutes to cook (fresh tuna, sauteed green beans, spinach souffle, baked apples). Afterwards (we're talking 30 minutes, max. I am the original speedchef. I have domesticity A.D.D.) I'll be dragging myself out of my gothic nightie and into workout clothes for a turbo workout. Following a midday conference call, I plan to head to the ICP to catch the Weegee exhibition -- Murder is My Business. At 3:15, HOBB and I are planning to meet at the Met to see the new American Wing and hear The Asphalt Orchestra.

We plan to grab a cab home at 4:40 (the start of the 18 minutes*) so we can be home for Shabbat.

More than anything, it's the fresh tuna and Scrabble that I cannot wait for. And the reading. And the coziness. And the empty-nest feeling.

Thank God it's almost Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom!
_______________________________________________________________________________
*After the start of candlelighting, there is an 18 minute "emergency" extension in which to perform necessary tasks that are not otherwise appropriate for the Sabbath, aka, riding in a taxi crosstown. Yes, I'm taking liberties with the concept of "emergency." I'm not Orthodox but I am observant and doing the best I can to uphold the law of Moses and still lead a life that makes sense to me.

Matza with Anthony, Flea, Chad and Josh

2012-01-12T00:39:00.000-05:00

It is late in the evening of the day that Big Babe went back to Berlin after a three week visit to the Urban Bungalow. It was a period of intensity and hilarity, of conflict and connection, of sweet sibling bonding and new fellowship, especially between my two sons, separated by a daunting gulf of eleven years.

In my iconoclastic eldest child I discerned a diffuse dissatisfaction during this visit, a grumpy touchiness that signaled to me that he was possibly paused between stations along his life's journey, contemplating the next leg of the adventure.

He was tired on the drive to the airport and so I kept my conversation gentle. Yet when we hugged goodbye outside the Continental Airlines terminal at Newark, I found myself telling him to think about coming home soon for the first time since he left the U.S. to live as an expat American in Berlin.

After four years and much creative and entrepreneurial productivity, I believe it is time for this chapter of Big Babe's European adventure to draw to a close. It is not that I am ideologically opposed to his living abroad; I simply see his path as leading back home, at least for now. There is a process of professional education and building that needs to take place. Berlin, more than any other city I have visited, facilitates a form of long-range slackerdom. It is too easy to drift there, stoking a low-grade ambition, living comfortably in that exciting, low-cost cultural mecca.

As critical as I am about the American impulse towards overachievement, I want my son to be reanimated by the quest to succeed wildly in his chosen profession -- arts journalism.

Arriving home, I put myself on a marathon of productivity, playing catch up on some of the pressing tasks that took a backseat during the time of Big Babe's visit and the holiday season itself, which brought a great influx of family members. Once I was satisfied that I had set the requisite number of plates spinning, I set upon a dreaded task: getting American Express to reschedule my non-refundable/non-changeable flights and hotel for my January 25th trip to Charlotte, NC with Little Babe to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform to April 9th, when the band will be performing in Greensboro.

This switch had nothing to do with my personal preference. Instead, it was dictated by Anthony Kiedis, the band's frontman, who broke his foot so completely that, as a result, the band had to postpone its performances for two-plus months in order to him to recuperate.

As my flights and hotel were purchased through Amex Thank You points (which has ten million pages of rules about the complete and utter non-refundability/non-adjustibility of tickets) I spent about half an hour screeching insanely earlier in the day when I learned about Kiedis's injury... and that the January 25th concert in Charlotte, NC was postponed for April 6th, aka the first Seder night and Shabbos to boot.

Emerging from the shower, Big Babe came running out of the bathroom in a towel to see why I was carrying on so. The reason was that I had saved up 61,000 Thank You points for this adventure. The reason was that had I meticulously planned every last aspect of the trip for maximum fun with Little Babe, whose RHCP fandom got me into their music to begin with. The reason was that just earlier in the day, I sent article pitches out for a story about my impending adventure. It was supposed to be the last word in awesome, a mother/son road trip to remember. Now, everything seemed to be evaporating before my eyes.

Yet I harbored hope that some compassionate Amex agent might hear my plight and declare Kiedis's broken foot an act of God and therefore completely beyond my control, which indeed it was.
This clear-as-daylight extenuating circumstance, in turn, would compel Amex to bypass the million pages of non-refundability/non-changability of its Thank You rules, enabling me to change my flights and hotel reservation for the only other concert date in this leg of the Peppers' American tour that was available and feasible for me: April 9th in Greensboro, NC.

Yet when I called American Express, I did not get the caring, reasonable kind of customer service rep I had hoped for. Instead, I got some wacko named Steven who had an unhealthy love of rules, a mean streak and a condition akin to echolalia, where the afflicted individual cannot help repeating him or herself. Steve's echolalia had to do with death, illness or military service -- evidently the only three reasons why Amex might adjust or refund airline tickets or hotel reservations purchased with Thank You points. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, I looked something like this:

In addition to repeating the Thou Shalt Nots of Amex Thank You Points to me over and over, Steve went ahead and cancelled my reservations without my permission, telling me that it is not Amex's fault if I change my mind and don't want to travel on the dates I bought my original tickets. When I asked for the airline and hotel's numbers, he refused to give them to me, saying that there was no way to change my reservations. When I asked for his supervisor, he told me he didn't have one but gave me an email address where he said someone might respond to my query within two to three months.

It is late in the evening and I am falling asleep as I write. Suffice it to say that I ended up hanging up on Sadistic Steve and called Amex minutes later, whereupon a sane, compassionate and super-competant customer service guy named Kurt took my call and set everything right. Turns out that Steve was not just some bizarre automaton-like staffer, he also was a slacker, leaving no notes for his very real supervisor as to the nature of our one hour long conversation, failing to follow basic Amex customer service protocol and yes, canceling my reservation without my permission.

As a result, I got everything switched with only a minor adjustment fee. Yes, it took about 90 minutes with Kurt as he went back and forth from supervisor to airline to hotel and THREE hours from start to finish, yes, my phone battery burned out in the process and HOBB got mad at me because I promised to cook dinner and hadn't because I was totally consumed with my task at hand but at the end of the day, the awesome mom/teenage son rock 'n roll road trip is ON.

Little Babe and I will be spending the fourth night of Passover in Greensboro, NC with the Funky Monks themselves - the Red Hot Chili Peppers, our joint favorite band.

Anthony, Flea, Chad and Josh...if you guys are reading my blog, just know that what I went through today was totally worth it. I'll even bring extra matza to share with you guys. It's really tasty with cream cheese or chocolate spread. And Anthony, I hope that the healing process goes well. Little Babe's cast for his broken hand just came off yesterday morning. You two can trade stories of broken bones when we meet backstage after the show.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Thanks to the supercool Lisa Alcalay Klug for her book cover, which appears above. It, more than anything else I could find, captures how cool it will be to hear the Peppers performing on Passover. Getting my reservation changed today feels miraculous, sorta like the splitting of the Red Sea. As I am prone to hyperbole, let me state that I feel as if I escaped from a Pharoah of sorts in the form of a customer service task-master, a petty-minded tyrant who creates a reign of terror through his tiny pulpit, magnifying his own authority by trying to make other people miserable.

Red Hot Chili Mess

2012-01-11T11:51:00.002-05:00

File this under really sucky karma.

While visiting Spin's website half an hour ago, I learned that the Red Hot Chili Peppers' American concert tour was FREAKING POSTPONED because Anthony FREAKING Kiedis broke his FREAKING foot.

The reason I am freaking out is because I had two FREAKING tickets to the January FREAKING 25th concert in Charlotte, FREAKING North Carolina for me and Little Babe.

Moreover, just this Monday, I sent a FREAKING article proposal to a major FREAKING publication to do a road-trip article. I also spoke with the RHCP's FREAKING press agent in LA. I am attaching said proposal below.

Adding insult to injury (oy, now I have to get my plane tix refunded and hotel refunded and concert tickets refunded) the new FREAKING concert date is April 6th, which has the distinction of being not only the FREAKING first night of Passover BUT also Friday night, aka SHABBAT.

To paraphrase John Goodman, I am "Shomer Freaking Shabbos!" and that presents one FREAKING problem for me.

In other words, I cannot go on April 6th. In other words, I have to see if there are available tickets elsewhere. In other words, I want to run screaming down Amsterdam Avenue.

At this moment, I do not want to ruin Little Babe's day so I'll wait to share the news with him when he returns home.

In the meantime, there's probably a story in this....

And I am really sorry, TMZ, for using your picture without permission. I'm just really freaking out.

Oh, and here's my article pitch:

On January 25th, I will be attending the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Charlotte, NC with my 16-year-old son, a rock musician. Yes, we are journeying from Manhattan to Charlotte for this show. Yes, I am taking him out of his private school for two days. Yes, everyone thinks I am a terrible mom with an age-inappropriate crush on a rock band.

My proposed article deals with my belated awakening to the RHCP through the fandom of my son Judah, now renamed Jude in his too-cool-for-school adolescent phase of life. I only started listening to their music in earnest two summers ago, after Judah returned from a teen trip to Israel where his friend Joe Teglasi turned him on to their music.

Suddenly, my classical cello-playing kid had taught himself electric guitar and bass and heretofore unheard songs filled our Morningside Heights apartment: "Aeroplane," "Soul to Squeeze," "Wet Sand," "Dosed," "Otherside." The serious fascination with the Peppers started, for me, when he played Stadium Arcadium (the double album, not the song) for me and now I am a full-fledged fanatic who runs four miles every day to their music, sings their songs at Karaoke bars, cooks to their music, belts out their songs while driving and analyzes their lyrics as I would a literary text...or page of Talmud.

I am riveted by their harmonies, their personalities and the evolution of their band. I thought I would not survive the 2009 departure of John Frusciante but Josh Klinghoffer has filled the void. As a contemporary of Anthony Kiedis and Flea, I want to talk with them about turning 50.

Though I do not think that "I'm With You," their latest album, is anything approaching a masterpiece, there are moments of RHCP transcendence therein. As with all enduring romances, I continue to love the band despite the disappointing tracks. In the course of my article, I hope to identify just what I find so compelling about the Peppers' music. I also intend to capture a phenomenon that is specific to my generation of parents, namely, our willingness to be influenced by the culture of our kids. My RHCP road trip is a manifestation of intergenerational cultural openness that simply did not exist in my parents' generation. The prospect of my mom and dad inspired to attend a Talking Heads, Ramones, Squeeze or even an Elton John concert with me is an hilarious thought.

I intend my Peppers piece to be culturally compelling, lively and insightful, "On the Road" meets "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" meets "Thelma and Louise," minus the drugs, sex, female bonding and death. But mom/teen son bonding will be part of this story. In advance of my trip, I reached out to the RHCP's press agent in LA who tells me he can get me an interview with the band after the show...with an assignment from a solid publication.

What I am proposing is an offbeat, funny, touching and thoroughly memorable mother/son road trip to the Red Hot Chili Peppers January 25th concert in Charlotte, NC, complete with photographs and possibly video from the concert for the website. With advance planning, we should be able to videotape my interview with them, which would also include my son.

I hope you think that the NAME BLOCKED OUT is a good venue for such a piece of writing.

Riding in Cars with Boys

2012-01-10T15:34:00.004-05:00

One month ago, Little Babe broke his hand in a bit of teenage drama that I will leave for him to tell one day, if he so wishes. This morning, the cast he has worn for the past three weeks came off, together with the metal rod that had been inserted into his hand to allow his metacarpal bone to fuse and heal. Had he not told the orthopedic surgeon at the ER that he was a musician, surgery might not have been recommended. But when the bone didn't set at the hospital, we were referred to a hand surgeon who works with members of the New York Philharmonic.

Because of his injury, HOBB and I have been picking our sixteen-year-old son up from school to spare him the draining bus 'n subway shlep back from SAR High School in Riverdale. As we live just opposite Columbia University on Amsterdam Avenue and W116th Street, this is hardly a major imposition on us. Door-to-door, barring traffic, the journey is typically less than 20 minutes.

Little Babe's easygoing yet wry disposition never fails to make the journey entertaining. Armed with his iPod and the auxiliary cable, our trips home have been somewhat like being inside a DJ's sound booth or what I imagine a date with Fresh Air's Terry Gross to be like. Playing his favorite songs by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Bowie, The Talking Heads, Cake, Pink Floyd, the Kinks and a host of other bands whose music I actually like, the time is spent singing, talking and often laughing.

When I picked him up from school last night, I was aware of the completion of this small chapter in our lives wherein our mature and self-reliant youngest child reverted to a state of dependency upon us, for at least his transportation home from school. As we drove down the West Side Highway, Cake's "Wheel" was playing.

"Man, I love these lyrics," Little Babe exclaimed. "They are completely insane! Especially the third verse." I paused to listen:

In a seedy karaoke bar
By the banks of the mighty Bosphorus
Is a Japanese man in a business suit
Singing, smoke gets in your eyes
And the muscular cyborg German dudes
Dance with sexy French-Canadians
While the overweight Americans
Wear their patriotic jumpsuits

I laughed, agreeing that the lyrics were indeed insane. "Listen to the horns," my son further instructed me.

I listened to the horns. They were great, lending the song a sly Klezmer quality. "Wheel" featured a fusion of cynical and lyrical qualities, rock 'n roll for a cerebral, sophisticated 21st century teen. I could see why he loved the song. The concluding wail, "Why you say you are not in love with me?" repeated over and over, lodged inside my heart.

Passing Fairway's uptown location on 12th Avenue as we eased off the highway "Wheel" gave way to "Comfort Eagle" whose beat can only be described as the percussion equivalent of pure testosterone. I made a note to add the song to my workout playlist; it was funny and irreverent and sharply snide, a critique of the recording industry, it seemed.

"Did you catch that synth?" he asked me, my instructor, my youngest son.

I smiled. Because I was listening with him, there was no chance I would miss the synth.

This morning I drove Little Babe to school after his rod was removed. After the procedure, he had spent not less than 10 minutes scrubbing his hand and arm to rid it of the "cast smell." The car smelled like Axe Shock. Mock-sternly, I told him that the end of the period of his teachers' compassion had arrived; there were assignments to write, tests to take now that he had command of his right hand again. While we spoke, Cake's "Sheep Go to Heaven" was playing. There was something about these days that called for Cake's go-to-hell funk and horn-driven madness.

When we arrived at school, Little Babe pulled his iPod from the auxiliary cable, kicked the front door open with his right foot, grabbed his knapsack from the back seat, shut both doors, bending to give me a salute and a sweet half-smile. It was quiet in the car with him gone. I sat for one minute longer than I needed to, watching my youngest son enter his High School, the period of his broken hand behind him and everything looming ahead.

Then I pulled my own iPod out of my gym bag, plugged it into the auxiliary cable and headed for the West Side Highway with the music of The Red Hot Chili Peppers playing way too loudly for any sane adult, the percussion of "Hump De Bump," acting like sonic testosterone, pumping straight into my bloodstream, the smell of Axe Shock faintly discernible, the memory of these past three weeks lodged inside my heart.

Hearing Occupy Wall Street with a Jewish Ear

2012-01-09T13:23:00.000-05:00

READERS: Here is my second Jerusalem Report article on Occupy Wall Street. I hope that my reporting corrects some of the misleading views of the demonstration.

Demonstrating Jewishly

12/30/2011 20:42 By SHIRA DICKER

Jewish activists in the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Judaism movements aim to 'reoccupy values.'

Photo by: Courtesy/Liz Nord

BY ORDER OF NEW YORK Mayor Michael Bloomberg, city police raided the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstration November 15, storming Zuccotti Park, evicting the protesters, and clearing the area.

To Daniel Sieradski, founder of the Occupy Judaism movement, the ad hoc group of Jewish OWS activists who had organized Jewish events, including Kol Nidrei services, at the site, the desolation of the area that had held the tents and the energy reminded him of nothing less than the exile of the Jewish people from their land.

Passionately, he wrote in the November 16 online edition of the New York-based “The Forward”: “Occupy Wall Street is in exile. Her benches, once bountiful, lay barren. Her sidewalks – a wasteland. Where there were tents bustling with life, there is breeze. As the Book of Lamentations wonders, ʽHow does the city sit solitary that was full of people?ʼ”

Using the portal of Jewish history and liturgy, Sieradski posed the question “how does the city sit solitary” and presented the solution: “As Jews we know: Exile is not nearly the end.”

Although Zuccotti Park was the “ground zero” for both OWS and Occupy Judaism, Jewish participation in the movement has not been restricted to the park. Congregation Ramath Orah in Morningside Heights hosted a contentious public conversation at the synagogue in early November featuring Sieradski and Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz, an educator involved with the tent protest movement in Israel.

Congregation B’nai Jeshurun has inaugurated a series of public programs directly inspired by the protest. “Occupy Wall Street is putting on the table one of the most important conversations that this country should have about values, our relationship with money, the dream of America and where we want to go,” congregation rabbi Marcelo Bronstein tells The Report. “We don’t believe in blaming Wall Street, or in class warfare. We believe in the fact that this is a tremendously important conversation. We want to reoccupy values.”

A heavy spirit hung over the former encampment at a Rosh Hodesh celebration in late November. Following the service, most of the participants dispersed, since there was nothing else to be done – no petitions to sign, no drum circles to join, no ragtag protesters to feed. A lone demonstrator held up a poster, worn and weathered.

Moshe Sayer was one of those who lingered at the site. An Israeli-born Reconstructionist Jew, living on the Upper West Side and now retired from a career in high-tech, Sayer had been a steady volunteer at Zuccotti Park, especially working in the People’s Kitchen. Within its five weeks of activity, the People’s Kitchen, Sayer tells The Report with evident pride, had become the most active and largest soup kitchen in Manhattan.

Sayer says the number of guards and policemen now gives him a “police state feeling.”

Rabbi Jill Hammer, director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, New York, says she was so shaken by the “harsh treatment of people and extreme way that the breaking up was done” that she could not sleep at night.

“I was really aware of being scared of being around police at the Rosh Hodesh event,” she tells The Report. “Seeing videos of people being pepper-sprayed was traumatic… in a Jewish way. It reminded me of militarized, state-sponsored violence.”

Continuing Sieradski’s analogy, the “post-exilic phase of Occupy Wall Street” has begun. And this transition has ushered in a very Jewish endeavor – the creation of a body of commentary on the meaning, success and legacy of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Judaism for the Jewish community.

“THERE’S NO DOUBT IN my mind that there’s a direct line between the Jewish prophetic voice and modern protests of all sorts, whether one agrees with it or not,” says Scott Shay, chairman of the board of Signature Bank, author of “Getting our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry” (2006) and an observer of the Jewish community.

“There’s a Jewish impulse to speak truth to power,” Shay explains to The Report.

“Jeremiah made his most passionate prophecies about the hollowing out of the Jewish ruling class when he was in a dungeon; Elijah, who spoke to the rulers in the north, the king and his wife, is part of this impulse. There’s also a direct line of Jews being involved in protest movements [and]… in the Labor movements. Having a strong Jewish presence is not surprising.”

Jews, he says, tend to be activists because they are sensitive to feeling marginalized or members of persecuted social classes. “We’ve been in all of them,” he adds.

Shay sees no contradiction between his role as a bank chairman and his sympathy for the protest movement that vilifies banks and bankers. “My parents were definitely working-circle kind of folks. Mom was a member of the Teamsters Union and my dad was part of a carpenter’s union,” he reveals, adding that initially it was a teamster’s scholarship that paid his college tuition.

Referring to the OWS slogan that the protest represents the 99 percent majority of Americans, Sieradski has declared that Jews in America “are the one percent.” Although he was more cautious in his initial statements, Sieradski has since become more forceful and critical, implying that Jewish organizations are unwilling to support OWS because their support comes from this financial elite.

But Shay asserts, “Jews are used to moving between the 99 and one percent and back again... I grew up in the lower middle class.”

Like Shay, Rabbi Morris Allen, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Jacob in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, who created Magen Tzedek, an ethical certification for kosher food, says the protests are “inherently Jewish. OWS movements arise in society when concern for profits overwhelms the concern for human dignity. We are living in a time when the ethical prescriptions by which we are to live are often ignored – in secular society and in the religious community,” he says.

According to historian Jonathan Sarna, two lessons emerge from the protest. The first lesson, he tells The Report in an e-mail exchange, is that a movement needs to have a clear, crisp and easily articulated message. The second lesson is that a movement needs to be aware of the collateral damage that it causes, referring to charges that the protest disrupted local business to the point that the Milk Street Café, a new kosher restaurant that employed 100 people, nearly closed.

Yet despite these reservations, Sarna, who is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the new National Museum of American Jewish History, concludes that “OWS reflects deep frustration with the state of the economy, the country and the world from which young Jews are not immune. Such frustration… suggests that governments ignore such expressions of frustration and dissatisfaction at their great peril.”

However, the Jewish establishment has made little attempt to come to grips with the implications of the OWS and OJ movements. Requests for statements or interviews about the movements were politely declined by many organizations, including the UJAFederation of New York, The American Jewish World Service, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Orthodox Union.

The head of an urban communal organization speaks with The Report, but only on condition of anonymity. Describing himself as “a child of the sixties,” he says that the protests against the Vietnam War are an example of the ideal demonstrations and the OWS protests fell far short. Unlike Sarna, he believes that OWS does not pose a challenge to the organized Jewish community.

“OWS is a phenomenon but it is not a movement,” he says. For those who attended Jewish summer camps, it was “a cool kind of thing… that might remind you of those outdoors, moving, meaningful programs.” Terming OWS a “telegenic” event, this leader says he doubts the protest had any impact on the leaders of other Jewish organizations, either. Holding demonstrations in “a small tiny park” is not the way to create a meaningful movement capable of social change, he argues.

Rabbi Greg Wall of the Sixth Street Synagogue says that one of the shortcomings of the protest was the inability to articulate a core message that would have gained greater support. “I would have preferred to see a message emerge out of OWS that we will not stand idly by while the government encourages greed and continues to pass laws that make it possible to abuse the system according to the spirit of the law, that penalizes honesty and ethical behavior from businesses, and allows the bad apples to stink up the entire barrel,” he says.

In conversations with The Report, numerous Jewish leaders and activists express their disappointment at the lack of support from mainstream Jewish organizations and leaders. Says Hammer, “In terms of the organized Jewish community, I’ve heard a deafening silence… I don’t think that the mainstream Jewish community is looking to majorly shift the economic structure of the country.”

Sayer is especially critical of the lack of solidarity with OWS-related causes such as the rising tuition prices at the City University of New York (CUNY) schools. “The fact that the Jews were the biggest beneficiaries of the CUNY system gives them the responsibility to speak out,” he explains. “It seems to me that the Jewish community – even though it speaks about kindness and generosity – is conservative in action, afraid to say anything that may change the status quo. I am very disappointed in American Jewry with this movement. It seems that no one is trying to show up, speak up or say something in support.”

According to Sayer , OWS is still alive; the action has just moved elsewhere. There are daily meetings in downtown buildings and General Assembly gatherings every other night. A 24-hour art activity took place in early December. Demonstrations are ongoing; one such protest took place when US President Barack Obama was in town a few days earlier.

Occupy Judaism’s electronic mailing list and discussions are livelier than ever. Its next big initiative is Occupy Beit Midrash, a program where people can get together to study Jewish texts about ethics and justice, says Sieradski. And activists are busy preparing an “Occupy Hanukka” event to continue the momentum.

Uri L’Tzedek, a relatively young organization that works to promote social justice infused by Torah values, has endorsed the efforts of Occupy Judaism. Echoing Bronstein, Rabbi Ari Weiss, Uri L’Tzedek’s director of Orthodox Social Justice, sees the protests as reflective of the contemporary harsh economic reality.

“The fact that OWS has caught on reflects the economic hardship many in this country, including within the Jewish community, are feeling. There have been some promising things emerging from the movement and some disturbing ones. We hope that the conversation around justice, greed and equality continues to flourish and grow within and outside of the Orthodox community,” he tells The Report.

Hammer notes that one of the measures of how successful Occupy Wall Street was is that synagogues in Manhattan “took a hit” in Yom Kippur attendance because so many Jews flocked down to be part of services across the street from Zuccotti Park. She says she “draws strength from the conversion of drab city plazas into sacred spaces due to the rituals and prayers performed there.”

Just as Jewish ritual was appropriated as a means of protest, so too, Jewish teachings and social practice might ultimately be appropriated as correctives to the current social and economic problems, she argues.

Shay, of Signature Bank, agrees. “More than 2,000 years before economists had the notion of a redistributive tax system, Jews had already implemented one,” he says. “The Mishna codified the Torah idea of leaving pe’ah (corners of the field) for the poor – about 2 percent, ma’aser rishon to the Levites and ma’aser sheni to the poor and Jerusalemites essentially. In addition, there were the ‘taxes’ of leket, peret and shikheha. Finally and on top of all this there was the community fund. All in all, the redistributive component tax rate was some 30 percent.... The redistributive taxes were effectively enforced via ostracism [for those who failed to contribute].”

Sayer concludes optimistically. “This movement has changed the public discussion. Justice, equality and corruption are matters we are all talking about suddenly.”

About that Ackerman Girl...

2012-01-09T10:56:00.000-05:00

Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off NYU student.

Check out the email trail of Sara Ackerman, who attempted to refuse the ethnographic assignment her Society and Cultural Analysis professor, Caitlin Zaloom, gave her at the famously pricey downtown Manhattan college. After the fact, Ackerman launched a very public crusade against the professor, who allegedly "forced" her to fulfill her academic obligation. She also takes on the "unappealing underbelly of NYU bureaucracy" in her correspondence. Ackerman's efforts have earned her indefinite academic suspension from NYU. Just yesterday, she ~~kvetched~~ posted on her Facebook Wall that NYU has (unsurprisingly) terminated her student email address.

The offending assignment: to go to Zuccotti Park and report on Occupy Wall Street.

Ackerman's refusal was based in her stated fear for her safety but from her screed, it seems she also had some political disagreement with OWS. But she did actually go and in one of her emails, to NYU President John Sexton, she describes the following:

Although it went against my core values, moral beliefs, and also made me feel unsafe, I ultimately did go to Occupy Wall Street with my class group——-two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don't look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc.——just to see if I was being as melodramatic as Professor Zaloom made me feel I was.***I won't go into detail here, but let me just tell you that if anything, I had previously underestimated how awful Occupy Wall Street was, and I left the park feeling as though I had escaped an extremely dangerous—-and even, life-threatening—-situation

As someone who has reported on OWS for the Jerusalem Report (also, see the post above with my most recent article), I have to wonder at her description. Grungy is probably the most accurate description of the encampment. Life threatening? Um....hardly, unless you are fatally allergic to the sight (and scent) of people who have not showered in a month. Actually, come to think of it, I was followed by a guy who taunted me with "F*(k You!!!" for about 20 minutes for passing on the opportunity to share my email address with him but I was no more threatened by him than by the prospect of impending rain.

Taking full advantage of the existence of the Internet, Ackerman makes her long, rambling and disturbing emails available to the public through a website called NYULocal.

She seems to imagine herself as conducting some sort of expose against Professor Zaloom and NYU. The only problem is that what emerges is the portrait of someone who is seriously deranged.

She calls for the firing of her professor, proclaims that she "knows people" and threatens the university with exposure via the media:

****President Sexton, you have already been alerted to all other details of the situation via the emails I have been cc'ing you on over the last 3 months, and you have yet to do anything for me.****Now would be a good time to step in—-unless of course, you still think that I am bluffing about going to the press—remember, I know people—close family friends, in fact—who work for:1. WSJ2. The NY Observer3. NYT4. The Washington PostI have already written the op-ed, and a draft has been approved by one of the reputable newspapers listed above.

In this op-ed, I name you, Dean Richard Kalb, and Mary-Louise Pratt——all those people who are meant to have some power to check on Professor Zaloom, and all of you have profoundly failed in this regard.

What Ackerman does here is such profoundly CRAZY PERSON behavior that reading the emails, I found that I was holding my breath. Yes, I can understand why observers of this situation have branded her entitled or spoiled. In her emails, she paints herself not only as the nightmare student but as a future employee or girlfriend/spouse whose default mode is vindictive attack. Obviously, any attempts to brand her undoing specifically ethnic are deplorable, as Jewish girls, even affluent ones, hardly have the monopoly on entitled, obnoxious behavior.

Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I will say that the poor kid has flipped out completely. The irony, of course, is that she has proven herself to be far crazier and possibly dangerous than any of the OWS denizens.

In her quest to take a principled stand, Sara Ackerman has become a public laughing stock. The drama is reminiscent of the moment when Britney Spears shaved her head and had her very public meltdown and the media was there to record every pathetic moment. The difference here is that Ackerman is training the camera on herself and asking everyone to tune in. In addition to the public emails, she is masterminding much of the publicity through her Facebook Wall, which weirdly features links to the cornucopia of articles and blogs that proclaim her utterly batty.

As the mother of two college graduates, I watch in complete bafflement, wondering WHERE ARE HER PARENTS? Why haven't they trundled her off, far away from a laptop or Internet access in an effort to staunch the bleeding out of her reputation as a sane person? Have they even seen her Facebook Wall? If they are not "friends" they should send her a request ASAP because she seems to be building her FB friend list right now in an effort to promote her cause. Ackerman's Facebook Wall is simply chilling. Upon it, she is chronicling her own undoing, losing it more and more every day. Perhaps she hasn't noticed but she has very little support from her "friends." Only a few have publicly offered support.

There have been some anti-establishmentarian, Obama-hating sorts who are giving her a cyber High Five. Their encouragement reminds me of the bloodthirsty cheering that goes on at cockfights. With friends like these...

To quote the concerned young person who granted me access to Ackerman's wall, only a short while ago "she appeared perfectly normal." Now, a whole community of flesh and blood friends -- many of them Greater New York area Jewish Day School alum -- are watching the slo-mo car wreck that is Sara Ackerman's life.

The good ones care. Everyone else is simply gawking.

A Modest Proposal

2011-12-28T00:50:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, while reading the Huffington Post, a sidebar headline caught my eye -- "In Defense of Bridal Boudoir." Curiously, I clicked on the link and was led to a piece promoting the practice of so-called Bridal Boudoir pictures, those soft-core porn pix some women pose for when they become engaged or are newly married. Hawked hilariously as "tasteful," these photos are intended to be keepsakes or trophies of you at that moment in your life when you are/were at your most delectable and nubile.

But it wasn't just that the article was silly and written in breathless advertorial tones, it was actually offensive, urging women to get those portraits done before everything goes to hell:

But brides face tough questions in deciding whether or not to book a boudoir session: Should I let it all hang out? Will he still love me tomorrow?

I'm here to say yes and yes! Yes for many reasons, some of which a young woman may understand now and some which she will not understand until she hits 50 and her tightly toned triceps just flutter in the breeze. And not everyone is Madonna, so don't even go there.

All young women are beautiful. This is not a cliché, this is nature or God's plan or whatever you want to call it, but it's as true as all babies are beautiful. My best friend is really beautiful, we're talking Angelina Jolie beautiful and there's about a handful of pictures of her in existence. We spoke of it recently and she insisted that no one ever took her photo and I was dumbfounded because everyone TRIED to take her photo and she would put her hand up to block them. I reminded her of this and she looked sad and said, "Oh yeah, why did I do that?"

So much is wrong with this writer's thinking that it is hard to know how to begin to respond. Misguided concepts like Bridal Boudoir (the consumerism! the objectification of women! the ageism!) invariably compel me to respond, so I fired off a few salvos within the comments section to the article.

However, because I do not actually care about this subject for more than the three minutes it engaged me online, I blithely skipped away for a couple of weeks, only to be drawn back to the forum this evening when a notice stating that someone had responded to my comments popped up in the sidebar section of the HuffPo, obviously the source of all distraction in life.

In a state of semi-horrified fascination, I read the comment posted by someone called Ogaraj. Ogaraj is infuriated by my critique but what is really striking is how up close and personal he makes his response, using my actual name, ranting and raving.There is something both creepy and interesting about his counter-offensive. He is livid about my "passing judgment" on him and his wife, who are evidently ~~sleazebag~~ consumers of this dubious service. It is kind of funny that he cares what I personally think of Bridal Boudoir and it is not-so-funny that he believes I am critiquing him and his wife.

What's weird is that I stumbled upon this lost correspondence as I was preparing to research a related topic: Orthodox Jewish women who dress in a sexy or provocative manner, in defiance of the laws of tsniut or modesty.

I somehow get the impression that Ogaraj is not an MOT and would therefore not be useful to an exploration of this trend. For this, I am relieved because he obviously cannot draw the distinction between expressing an opinion and passing judgment. I would caution him to avoid reading negative reviews of movies, books, plays, restaurants or anything else that he likes. The judgment might be too much to bear.

Here is my volley with Ogaraj, from the comment section of the HuffPo. You can link through to the original piece here.

In Defense Of Bridal Boudoir

While it is customary for couples to book wedding and engagement photography sessions, a whole new world of possibilities hangs over the bride with the rising trend of the "boudoir" photo shoot.

Shira Dicker Wow. The fact that you see someone having posed, soft-core porn shots taken of herself as a sign that she is in command of her sexuality is the essence of the problem.This is hardly a liberated gesture; it's pathetic. I feel the same way, incidentally, about the so-called Slut Walk; in fact I blogged about it. When women conform to MALE ideals of sexuality, that's not liberated.

Bring on empowered female sexuality. But this, my friend, is not one of its manifestations.

posted Dec 21, 2011 at 07:04:37

Reply | Link

ogaraj First, you implied that my wife, (along with the many other women out there who have done boudoir), lacks dignity for doing so. Then, you raise that ante by determining that it qualifies as soft-core porn, and go so far as to call it pathetic. You even go on to foolishly imply that there are largely differing male and female ideals of sexuality, but pass judgement on what does or does not qualify as liberated.

Your insults and hateful judgement says far more about you and your own (fear? loathing? hatred? confusion?) of your own sexuality than it does about the women and men you pass judgement on. The photos my wife (and many other women, along with those in the article) had done have her wearing more clothing than women wear out for a day on the beach with family. Hardly porn. No nudity involved. Hardly undignified. Very classy. Very sexy, and very beautiful.

Most importantly, she enjoyed doing the photos, and enjoyed my response to them. In the end, it was something that she found empowering and fun, despite whatever repressed sexual ideal that Shira Dicker thinks she should conform to. You close by hypocritically saying "bring on empowered female sexuality." In what form- the kind that you approve of? What are the rules that my wife needs to conform to that Shira Decker will accept as a manifestation of what is sexually empowering to a female? Next, are you going to say that a mom wearing a two piece at the beach with her family and posts it to facebook is a bad mother? Better yet, since you see yourself as the authority on female sexual expression, are you going to instruct wives everywhere on what positions are acceptable for a woman to perform in the bedroom as part of *your* opinion of what is empoweredhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-haberland/to-boudoir-or-not-to-boud_b_1151755.html

Christmas Heroes

2011-12-25T09:19:00.004-05:00

On this Christmas Day, I want to honor two heros: Pope Benedict XVI, for railing against the blingy consumerism that has become synonymous with the season and this little girl who takes on gender stereotyping in toys.

Both messages are as appropriate for Christians as they are for the rest of humanity.

Merry Christmas! And oh yeah, Happy Chanuka!!!

It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing!

2011-12-23T00:51:00.001-05:00

For my MA thesis at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I researched young American expats in Berlin, an undertaking which compelled me to spend time in bars and clubs.

In tomorrow's Weekend section of the New York Times, my article on Manhattan's Swing Dance Demimonde appears. My research compelled me to spend time going to swing dance clubs and parties.

There is a lesson in this:

Do what you love and your work will never feel like work.

The Red Wallet. A True Urban Tale.

2011-12-15T12:11:00.002-05:00

One week ago, I found a small red wallet in the street outside of the 8th Avenue entrance to Penn Station.

It was 12:30 a.m. Having been out the previous three nights, I was eager to get home quickly. Though I was not more than a five minute walk from the subway, I gave into temptation and hailed a cab.

As I sprinted towards the car that was in the process of discharging a passenger -- a small man with an over-large suitcase -- I saw the wallet winking up at me from the pavement. It was a woman's wallet, probably freshly fallen. Holding the back door of the cab open, I craned my neck around, checking out the street-scape. A young girl was making out with a guy against a building. Some young toughs glared and glowered as they trumbled by. A bunch of British businessmen walked briskly, talking in that too-bright, too-loud voice of the intoxicated. There was a high concentration of questionable people on the street; any number would have loved to claim the wallet as their own.

So I scooped it up and jumped into the cab.

"Amsterdam and 116th and can I have a light back here?!" I shouted to the driver.

I felt a jolt of adrenalin, a surge of sudden wakefulness. My palms were sweaty. Guilt mixed with curiosity and excitement.

Whose wallet was this???

And what if there was the proverbial million bucks inside? Would I have the moral integrity to return the wallet to its owner?

I opened up the wallet and peered inside. There was not, as it turned out, a million bucks. The sum was closer to one hundred dollars.

There were seven credit cards, an employee ID and a driver's license, with an address. The owner of the wallet was a 26-year-old woman from Long Island who worked in Manhattan. She had long blondish hair, parted in the middle. She was the kind of young woman who blended into a crowd. Nice looking but utterly unremarkable. Kind of bland. She had receipts from several meals. She had store charge cards. I counted her credit cards again. Seven credit cards for a 26-year-old. Huh.

Peering in the inadequate light, I called information on my BlackBerry and fed them the address on the driver's license. Within minutes, I was speaking with a woman who was completely awake, not sleep-saturated, as I had feared. The wallet belonged to her daughter, she told me, but she hadn't come home yet and there was no indication that she even knew the wallet was missing.

I was thanked profusely and praised for my honesty; arrangements were made by the parents to retrieve the wallet the following day. But the next day I got a call from the father who was at a holiday party and couldn't make it and asked would I mind babysitting the wallet until Monday.

Somewhat surprised that he trusted a complete stranger with his kid's seven credit cards and cash over the weekend, I agreed.

The weekend came and went. On Monday afternoon I got a call from the father. He would be coming to my home, by subway, to meet me and get his daughter's wallet back. Feeling sorry for him for having to make the shlep uptown, I arranged to meet by the gates of the Columbia campus.

The appointed time arrived. The father showed up at the Columbia gate, looking out of place. He had white hair and wore a boxy black coat. His face, as they say, had the map of Ireland etched upon it. He thanked me sincerely. I handed him the wallet out of my bag. Awkwardly he gave me a small box his wife had "thrown together." I told him a gift was unnecessary. He said that when his daughter returned home at 3 a.m. that morning, she hadn't even noticed that her wallet was missing. He borrowed my phone to call her, since his phone battery had died. He got his daughter's voice mail and arranged to meet her at Macy's to do Christmas shopping.

Handing the phone back to me, he waved goodbye and left for the downtown subway. I crossed the Columbia campus, heading home. Something nagged at me but I couldn't put my finger on it.

It's been a week since I found the red wallet. I now realize what was amiss, indeed, every time I think of this small saga, I am struck by the same three things:

The fact that the father made all the arrangements and traveled to pick the wallet up for his adult daughter
The fact that the adult daughter didn't notice her wallet missing all evening. (Was she drunk or very drunk?)
The fact that the adult daughter didn't once contact the person who found her wallet

I don't need to be thanked. That's not what I'm saying. But I am truly astonished that not even once, not even by text or email or Facebook message, did I hear from the owner of the missing wallet. Not the evening it went missing, not the following morning, not that Friday when her dad was going to retrieve it, not over the weekend and not the day I gave it back or the next day or any day since. Not out of a sense of anxiety or gratitude. There was a silence so strange that, before I heard from the father on Friday afternoon, I feared the young woman had met up with trouble and perhaps the wallet might turn into a clue in a crime scene.

Her glaring absence from the retrieval process made it seem like the wallet did not really belong to her. Though the wallet contained a driver's license that bore the face and name of a 26-year-old girl and there were lots of credit cards in her name and certainly a decent amount of cash, she appears to be a phantom, a figment of my imagination.

But the wallet's owner actually does exist. I found her on Linked-In. I Googled her and learned where she went to school. And now, because her father used my phone to call her, I have her cell number as well. I admit it. I'm tempted to send her a single text. It would say "hey kaitlyn! yr wlcm!"* One week after I found the red wallet, the conclusion I've come to is that, unless her parents are covering up for some terrible thing that happened that evening, the wallet's MIA owner is a 26-year-old child --someone with a case of impaired responsibility, faulty decision making and an stunted sense of menschlichkeit**.
_____________________________________________________________________________
*You're welcome
**Human decency

Sister (and Brother) Act or YouTube Lunch Break

2011-12-08T13:26:00.001-05:00

My morning was spent working on a book launch for a new Bible commentary and fact-checking my second Occupy Wall Street article for the Jerusalem Report; my afternoon will be booked with final interviews for an article on Swing Dance for a great metropolitan newspaper -- due tomorrow (!) -- and groveling before press agents to request an interview with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in advance of their January 25th concert in Charlotte, NC.

The Swing Dance article necessitates that I attend a party tonight which begins at 9 and goes on until the wee hours of the morning. The groveling before press agents probably requires booze but I never drink before 6 p.m.

Bleary-eyed and mush-mouthed, I needed a little break without going too far from my computer and found it in the following video, courtesy of two talented kids and one of my favorite songs of all times from one of my favorite groups of all times, "Psycho Killer" by The Talking Heads.

Oh, and speaking of killer, these kids KILLED the song.

Fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa.

Diaspora-Bashing. The Sport Continues...

2011-12-06T08:11:00.001-05:00

First came the video ads in such shockingly poor taste as to appear like Saturday Night Live parodies of commercials -- the Israeli grandparents enjoying a Skype conversation with their grandchild in America during Chanuka until the little girl proudly announces the name of the holiday -- "Christmas;" the little boy nudging his sleeping father with the mantra "Daddy. Daddy. Daddy...." switching finally to "Aba!" which works its magic; the American boyfriend clueless in the face of his Israeli girlfriend's sadness on Yom HaZikaron, Israel's Memorial Day.

These ads were the brainchildren of the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, part of their "Returning Home" project. The tagline of the campaign: They will always stay Israeli. Their children will not. Help them return home. The message rendered loud and clear was: The Diaspora is toxic. Move there and lose your Jewish identity, memory and soul.

Then came the scores of incredulous Facebook postings and sharing, the outraged response by American Jewry to the ads' implicit message. For it was not just any old outpost of the galut that was portrayed; it was that goldeneh medinah of diasporas: the United States of America. You know, that country that is Israel's staunchest ally, with the world's largest concentration of Jews outside of Israel (or maybe also inside Israel?), that nation that gives untold sums of money in government aid and private donations, where so many consider Israel their far-flung home-away-from-home.

The media went nuts (I got contacted by several reporters working on stories, including a CNN producer) when the ads came to the attention of the public, seeking commentary from those newly-appointed agents of assimilation -- American Jews. I suddenly envisioned myself standing in dark glasses and a trench coat on street corners, targeting Israelis newly arrived to New York with the words -- "Hey kid! Have I got something for you!" -- handing out vials of American Dream assimilation potion.

Now here was a story! Not "man bites dog" but "dog pees on the leg of the man who pets him."

The New York Times put Joseph Berger in New York and Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem on the case to cover the next phase of the story: man shouts at the dog that peed on him. In other words, the campaign had been pulled because of the loud public outcry from American Jews, including prominent community leaders. To quote the late Amy Winehouse, theirs' was a unanimous chorus of "No, no, no!"

The outpouring of outrage died down and the ads became ghostly reminders of a dumb idea or the butt of jokes told around the Shabbat table, a welcome bit of comic relief from the not-funny-in-the-least SAT cheating scandal which tragically was a Jewish story as well.

Yet this morning I found a piece of writing on a Forward blog that is even more baffling to me than the ads themselves because it is written by an American Israeli, an educator and a public intellectual. The essay, by David Hazony, posits that the voluble and unified reaction of the American Jewish community indicates that the ads touched a nerve not because they were tacky but because of the truth they contain.

In other words, the American Diaspora, really is a Roach Motel of Jewish continuity where Israelis check in as Jews but they don't check out. Or they check out as Goyim.

Hazony writes:

These ads are ill-thought out. But a secure, self-assured, thriving Jewish culture would have just shrugged them off. Instead, we get responses that are totally out of whack — suggesting that the Israelis really stepped on a live wire in the American Jewish psyche.

As the daughter of a rabbi who became a clinical psychologist when she was a teen (therefore I have a PhD in psych by proxy, as well as millions of reasons to be in therapy, which I am), I seize the authority to state that Hazony's analysis not only insults American Jews by claiming that their response was "out of whack" (earlier he calls it hysterical) and accusing them of being insecure members of a Jewish culture that is failing to thrive, he also demonstrates an utter lack of intellectual sophistication by resorting to this sophomoric "psychological" interpretation.

I wonder why Hazony needs to believe that American Jews are not "self-assured." We are actually the most self-assured Jewish community of all time, proudly and publicly and proactively Jewish. And as the assertive, in-your-face Jews that we are, it is incumbent upon us to stand up to what amounts to a smear campaign that sadly illuminates the insecure ability, or perhaps the inability, of the Israeli government to hold onto its citizenry.

Notes on a Scandal

2011-12-04T08:03:00.001-05:00

If you want to hear a range of opinions and reactions that might blow your mind, ask people what they think about the recent SAT cheating scandal on Long Island.

As the incident has been forefront in my mind, that's what I've been doing. Herewith, a brief playback of actual commentary, gleaned from recent conversations:

The SAT scandal is the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the cheating that goes on.

The prosecution targeted a Jewish community. Once the investigation gathers momentum they will find the Asian kids who cheat as well.

Queens College has an elaborate tests-for-drugs network in place, administered by Yeshiva kids from Long Island.

They nailed the Long Island kids. Wait until they find out what's going on in Indiana.

Test cheating at Yeshiva of Flatbush was so pervasive that I (a total straight arrow) started cheating just not to be at a disadvantage.

I remember that Yeshiva kids stole the trig Regents exam sometime in the mid-seventies, causing the test to be cancelled that year. We were overjoyed.

It was gratuitous for the newspapers -- especially the New York Jewish Week -- to name names. For instance, no one needed to know that one of the test-takers-for-money was the son of a past president of a Great Neck synagogue.

Kids routinely outsource the writing of term papers for entire courses.

At Columbia University, cheating is just a fact of college life. Some do and some don't.

How is this scandal different from hiring high-price tutors for the SAT's? Really??

The fact that the test takers were largely the sons of successful, prominent people is significant. It signals their sadly misguided attempt to also be powerful and successful.

The scandal is part of a culture of entitlement. Parents are raising kids to believe that anything -- including undeserved grades -- can be purchased.

Some of the parents had to know this was going on.

The scandal does not accidentally involve Jewish kids. Cheating on tests is simply not believed to be wrong in some pockets of the community.

In the past, private school principals protected cheaters when they were the scions of wealthy and powerful parents. I can recall at least two incidents like this when I was in high school. This time, the head of Great Neck North, a public school, was able to speak out because his funding is not dependent on protecting the guilty.

In about 40 minutes, I will head over to the Jewish Theological Seminary to teach three classes to the fine students of the Rebecca and Israel Ivry Prozdor program. In my classes I will be talking about the cheating scandal, eager to hear what the students think. But I will not report on my findings. Instead, I will leave it to the students to blog or report or talk about, adding their voices to the on-going conversation about a rip in our social and ethical fabric that saddens me so much I want to cry.

Gloria, Don't You Think You're Fallin' OR Yet Another Chapter in the Ongoing Public Humiliation of the American Wife

2011-12-02T07:44:00.001-05:00

Another day, another tidbit of information about the slo-mo undoing of Herman Cain, presidential candidate.

This time, as told to Sean Hannity, hardly a member of the so-called liberal media, Mr. Cain told America that Mrs. Cain -- his loyal wife Gloria -- didn't know about his 13-year friendship with Ginger White. Check out the deets here.

Forget all the allegations of sexual harassment. Herman Cain is SO busted with the surfacing of Ginger White because she has the evidence in hand: text message trails, books inscribed with sexually suggestive notes and a money trail, of course, making her an official, old school kind of mistress.

And then, again, there is the matter of a close friendship with a woman for, oh, over a decade that Herman somehow neglected to share with Gloria. There is the matter of him not asking his wife how she felt about him receiving texts at 4 a..m. and paying another woman's rent and living expenses.

The degree of marital infidelity inherent in these two acts alone seals the deal for me....and for most married women with even a nominal shred of dignity and self-respect, I would hope.

Ginger White's latest public statement that her heart bleeds for Gloria Cain just offers further confirmation of the sexual nature of this friendship. White expresses deep remorse and shame. Only a guilty adulteress would think in that direction.

Which makes the disintegration of Cain's campaign a spectator sport right now. His arrogance in the face of these new and very credible allegations borders on the delusional. Forget about his horn dog ways. It is this moral ruthlessness, this bold belief that he can lie to his wife and the media and the American people and STILL pursue the nation's highest office that sends chills up my spine.

And the pleasure of watching this unworthy candidate fall is undercut by the tragic spectacle of yet another American wife being humiliated in a public arena where literally billions are watching.

My Super-Chill High Schooler

2011-11-29T08:20:00.001-05:00

Last week, fresh off the plane from our Italian excursion, HOBB and I drove up to SAR High School in Riverdale for that stress-fest known as Parent-Teacher Conferences.

Being an SAR event, much of the stress factor was absent, though we basically showed up without appointments, having screwed up the online registration process just before we left the country.

As it was the equivalent of three in the morning for us, jet-lag further shaped our perceptions and reactions. Also, given that exhaustion makes me punchy, I could not stop giggling. In retrospect, I worry that I must have appeared stoned to half of our son's teachers.

But the real factor in defusing the experience that typically unnerves parents is the nature of Little Babe, our youngest child, a high school junior.

Little Babe is a sweet, diligent, respectful, smart... and very relaxed student.

The teachers typically adore him. He participates in class. He has creative insights. He has quirky interest and abilities. He is kind-hearted. His worst offense is talking to friends.

And not completing his assignments.

Little Babe's performance on tests is also less-than-stellar, reflecting his underlying learning issues and ADD...and also his penchant for minimalistic studying.

For years, we have left parent-teacher conferences with broad smiles of pride and furrowed brows of concern.

The concern we feel has been further compounded by our son's unflappably stress-free attitude. Maybe it's our own fault because we don't pitch parental fits, but there is no way to get our son to care about getting better grades.

While we are far from Tiger Parents, we would frankly like to see him break a sweat over his schoolwork. But he is neither a slacker nor a scofflaw. He just invests his academic energies solely into what takes place inside the classroom.

Once he is out of the classroom, music subsumes his life. He sleeps in a room with several instruments and amps. He wakes up and plugs in his electric guitar or bass. He leaves the house wearing his headphones. He composes and orchestrates and records his music. He writes lyrics. He plays and sings and teaches himself new instruments. Without a single lesson, he now plays piano well enough that he is composing pieces for the keyboard. He stays late to jam with other students and teachers and participates in practically every musical after school club.

Little Babe is the third child in the family, the youngest sibling of two students who strove to achieve good grades. Middle Babe was especially tormented by her grades in her final two years of high school but her own diligence was nothing compared with the nervous breakdowns most of her friends were experiencing. Big Babe's high school classmates were similarly poisoned by the conviction that unless they got into Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Penn-Cornell-Brown (Columbia was considered a safety school), their lives were over.

Last year, when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I was a complete sleepless lunatic, chasing down deadlines, working on my assignments, wishing to distinguish myself through my schoolwork. Little Babe awoke and fell asleep to the sight of me working on my various projects at the dining room table. Though I am still incredulous at having gotten my MA at the age of 50, secretly, I am plotting to go for my doctorate.

At one point last year, on the night before a test, I interrupted Little Babe's private Red Hot Chili Peppers jam session to goad him into studying for more than half an hour. After he stared at me impassively, I blurted out, in sheer frustration, "Aren't I a good student role model for you?"

"Not at all," he coolly informed me. "You are completely obsessed. I'm not like that."

Indeed he is not.

And suddenly, I am completely okay with that.

The recent SAT cheating scandal -- centered in the Great Neck of my childhood -- has made me see Little Babe's chill attitude towards schoolwork and academic overachievement in a new and healthy light.

The network of privileged students who bought themselves high scores or earned dirty money achieving high scores for others brings into sharp focus the multiple problems of academic overachievement to begin with.

Obviously, it is false to claim that the kids arrested in the scandal were powerless to resist the urge to cheat, driven by overwhelming social or parental pressure to commit what amounts to hardcore criminal acts, but it is also foolish to pretend that there is not a harmful emphasis on academic super achievement and a short A-list of schools that many ambitious, high achieving parents consider acceptable for their own children.

Add the affluence factor that enables mediocre students to pay up to $3,500 for stellar SAT or ACT scores -- and perhaps a tacit message from parents that this kind of thing is not so bad, after all, what do standardized tests prove anyway? -- and buying your way into a top university becomes a consumer sport, akin to buying a pair of shoes on Zappos.com.

The hysterical quest for perfect grades, the Tiger Mother goal of getting your kid into Harvard or Yale only is so wrongheaded that I cannot believe it is still upheld by intelligent people. No question, the pedigree accompanies you for life, opening doors, making you a member of an elite but at what cost to one's sanity and humanity? Why do parents think that it is commendable to have kids who are grinds? And what is this kind of elitism all about, anyway?

Yes, I still want Little Babe to break more of a sweat over his schoolwork and do better on tests and score decently enough on his SATs or ACTs to get into a good college. But I now see his academic attitude as tinged with civil disobedience; it appears an act of quiet rebellion against the pervasive ethic of academic overachievement. Little Babe, like his older siblings, is a superstar, but most importantly, he is a teenage boy and a mensch.

Death (of Objects) in Venice

2011-11-27T07:57:00.001-05:00

One week ago today, I awoke to a foggy day in Venice, awash in the fairy tale feeling of being in that exquisite, impossible city.

The Venetian adventure was Part II of my weeklong trip to Italy, which began in Rome with HOBB and moved to Venice, where we were joined by Big Babe who flew in to meet us from his home in Berlin. Though this was not my first time in either city, it was the only time I had journeyed directly from Rome to Venice and the transition was stark and bracing. Rome is rooted by the presence of the Papacy and the ruins and the famous film sites and the grand fountains and the piazzas and the ubiquity of people of the cloth scurrying through the streets -- priests, monks, nuns, seminarians; the occasional rabbi or imam.

Venice, on the other hand, is a dreamscape, no less historic, in fact, shockingly ancient and unmodernized but hardly rooted, in fact sinking, drifting downward and upward at the same time.

There is much to unpack about my trip to both places, an orgy of walking and wine and delectable food and sites and sights to incite the imagination; the countless conversations with my husband and eldest son, our fond friction, the fractious way we connect after long absence.

But on this Sunday morning in Manhattan, I wish to ponder the melancholy meditation I had while in Venice about recently lost garments, a new habit of mine which began last winter in Berlin.

Walking through the winding alleyways and streets, crossing the squares and bridges, I found myself taking stock of clothes I had abandoned in public places: the black Adidas jacket I left in a club in Berlin, the off-white Gap jacket I left in a bar in Nyack, the vintage plaid cap I left at a wedding on Long Island, the black H&M sweater and street vendor white straw fedora I left in a retreat center in Connecticut, the Topshop black sweater hoodie I left in a New York synagogue...and grieving for them, now likely the property of strangers.

An one who is emotionally bonded to her clothes, this new habit of mine is intriguing in its novelty and also its out-of-character-ness.

A wearer of scent (Burberry Weekend has been my trademark for almost two decades, sometimes accompanied by Origin's Ginger, patchouli oil and now, a new Burberry -- Body) I imagined the rogue wearers of my lost garments stealing my smell, an unpardonable crime, a most intimate form of identity theft.

Crossing the Rialto, the Ghetto, the Grand Canal, the Bridge of Whispers and St. Marks Square with my husband and oldest son, lost for hours, I pondered the sudden divestment of my vestments and whether their disappearance made me lighter, enabling me to travel, to fly, perhaps even teleport beyond the bounds of space and time.

Bungalow Babe on the Big (or Flat) Screen!

2011-11-14T00:30:00.001-05:00

Here's the piece on NY1News about Flash Mobs, featuring....ME!!!

Flash Mobs Let Anyone Become A Surprise Performer - NY1.com

Enjoy!

Beauty for the 99 Percent. Or Occupy Sephora!

2011-11-10T08:47:00.000-05:00

Soap & Glory's Glow Lotion is one of those miracles in a bottle, a shimmery, pink feel-good concoction that has an utterly transformative effect on my skin.

I discovered the Glow Lotion at that repository of retail Nirvana, Target, about four years ago and went through dozens of bottles of the stuff @ $9.99 a pop.

Then suddenly, it disappeared from the shelves.

Various phone conversations with Target customer service representatives and Soap & Glory personnel located across the pond (the company is based in England) and Internet searches later, I learned that the line was coming to Sephora.

Oh joy, I thought.

Well...Soap & Glory has indeed arrived at Sephora and I now have in my possession one precious bottle of Glow Lotion, the first one I have laid my hands on in about two years.

The only hitch is, my magical elixir has DOUBLED in price.

Yep, to redeem my pink glow from days of yore I forked over twenty buckaroos to the matte-faced sales girl with aggressively red lips at the check-out counter.

This act bothers me conceptually more than it does financially.

The ramifications of a beauty product going from affordable to upscale are troubling in these times.

Leading me to wonder if I should set up a tent outside of Sephora headquarters, voicing my belief that beauty products should be available and affordable to the 99 percent as well as the privileged micro-minority for whom the Glow Lotion, even at $20, is a bargain.

Cooking Karma

2011-11-08T08:23:00.001-05:00

One of the many benefits of working at home is the ability to cook while working, not that I do it often enough.

But yesterday afternoon I recalled the marinated Ahi Tuna I had bought at Trader Joe's the week before and it seemed that a side of sauteed red cabbage with ginger would look good next to it and I just happened to have a humongous head of said cabbage loitering in my fridge, purchased from Bazzini's on Broadway.

The chicken-less chicken soup prepared by HOBB the night before was fairly crying out to be included in the party and once I put up the tray of pesto Eggplant Parmesan -- also from Trader Joe's -- which I found sleeping in the back of the freezer, the penne was a natural complement.

My hearty Monday night dinner yielded maximal appreciation from HOBB and Little Babe (Middle Babe, my vegan daughter, supped with friends) and I admit to basking in a rare hausfrau afterglow.

My kitchen mitzvah was amply rewarded two hours later when -- in the midst of a late night walk down Broadway -- HOBB and I chose to have tea at the Thalia Cafe at Symphony Space instead of the crowded Starbucks around the corner.

Perched on tabletops throughout the cozy bar were trays of food: cheese and crackers, chocolate-covered strawberries, mounds of blackberries and raspberries, small toast rounds with sauteed mushrooms. Stealing glances at the trays -- and wondering if we had wandered into a private party -- we sat down tentatively on the banquette. Shortly, the bartender came by to inform us that the food was ours for the taking, leftovers from a WNET screening and after party that had just ended.

Joyfully, we jumped up to pile our plates high, concluding our dinner with a dessert course of berries and cheese, chatting comfortably for over an hour, awash in Monday night Manhattan magic.

The Ginsbergian Howl That is Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-07T19:41:00.001-05:00

Friends, this just went live on The Jerusalem Report yesterday. Because it is, most flatteringly, PREMIUM content, I cannot link directly to the magazine so I copied it here.

With thanks to my amazing editors at The Jerusalem Report, here is my report from Occupy Wall Street.

Jerusalem Report

The Ginsbergian Howl that is Occupy Wall Street

11/06/2011 17:44 By SHIRA DICKER

We stood together, turning our individual howls into a collective Halleluyah, fighting to restore our nation to its status as a “Goldeneh Medinah,” with justice for all.

Photo by: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

At 11:20 in the morning on the last Shabbat of October, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I found myself in the middle of a surreal scenario.

As if out of nowhere, large, doughy snowflakes fell out of the sky, at first tentatively and then with great vigor and purpose, targeting the people below.

True, the front page of “The New York Times” had promised a “major storm.”

Still, I considered the possibility of snow in October to be as plausible as sudden peace in the Middle East. This freakish autumn snowfall was bound to pass quickly, I decided. Squaring my shoulders, I turned up the collar of my winter coat and pulled down the wide brim of my black felt cowboy hat.

My synagogue, Anshei Hesed, is located one mile from my home and it typically takes me 20 minutes to get there in my Shabbat shoes, or in this case, boots.

In any other city – or perhaps, any other synagogue – it would be sheer hutzpa to arrive at Sabbath services close to the noon hour. However, when I finally joined Minyan M’at in their fifth floor sanctuary, I was astonished and relieved to discover that the service had not progressed past the middle of the Torah reading.

As I found a seat in the crowded room, I was jolted into a sudden and terrible awareness that the dozens of protesters occupying thin nylon tents in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan – just a few miles from where I sat in happy comfort – were likely freezing half to death.

Especially since Mayor Michael Bloomberg had ordered an end to generators and space heaters at Occupy Wall Street the day before.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a phenomenon of civil disobedience that began on September 17, 2011, in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, which is in the financial district and close to Ground Zero. Consisting of day protesters as wellas protesters who are camping in tents, OWS is a demonstration against corporate greed, bailouts in the financial industry, corruption, foreclosures, joblessness and economic injustice in America.

Inspired by similar protests in Israel and throughout the Arab world, OWS is a movement led by citizens that has spread from NYC to hundreds of cities around the nation and world.

I tried to banish my uneasy thoughts and concentrate on the Shabbat service, but to no avail. It wasn’t some reflexive social justice awareness that bonded me to the people who were camped out at Occupy Wall Street, nor was I trying on a new hippy-dippy, radical chic,kumbaya consciousness. Having just been down to Zuccotti Park two days earlier, on Thursday afternoon – the latest of several visits, including the much-documented Simchat Torah celebration where we unfurled a sefer torah on the plaza across from Zuccotti Park – I felt a keen brothers’-keeper connection with the Wall Street Occupiers, they who are bold or desperate or crazy enough to shake the public out of its slumber by loudly proclaiming that the American Dream is dead.

I suppose I had come to see Occupy Wall Street as a form of davening (praying) and Zuccotti Park as a shul of sorts… perhaps more of a shul than the one I currently occupied. Maybe that’s why I was so restless.

Occupy Wall Street had been going on for a solid month before I found my way downtown. Part of the explanation for this long delay was related to work commitments and the disruption of the High Holidays, but part of it was due to circumspection. I was skeptical, unsure that the protest had integrity or even staying power.

But I support any effort to curb corporate greed and had been amused, scandalized and horrified by the demonization of the protest by such venues as FoxNews.

My affinity with Occupy Wall Street was perhaps inevitable, given the events of the day that I first made its acquaintance, which was Sunday, October 16th – Hol Hamoed Sukkot. Finding that we had a couple of hours free in the afternoon, my husband and I took the subway downtown to check out Occupy Wall Street for ourselves.

I was vaguely worried that I might find the protesters extreme or perhaps laughable, grist for the mill of my ideological nemeses, those smug, affluent arch conservatives I seem to always sit next to at family events. At these dinners, whenever my new acquaintance and I start to speak about the economic downturn in America, I am stunned by what seems to me to be ethical myopia or simply blindness to the fact that within our nation resides a tiny class of the super-privileged and powerful, while the majority of the nation struggles and stumbles as it slips rapidly into a state of crisis.

I needn’t have worried. What I found at Zuccotti Park on that sparkling Sunday in mid-October was gritty, passionate outrage, a kinetic hothouse of agitation, a laboratory of tikkun olam. All around me were people who felt betrayed by America.

There were filthy, pierced and tattooed twenty-somethings and there were buttoned-up, sober fifty-year-olds. There were the unemployed. There were the uninsured. There were the homeless.

There were the foreclosed. There were the political dissenters and the disappointed.

A petite silver-haired woman strode past wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed “Grandmothers Support Occupy Wall Street.” A sweet-faced young journalism school graduate pitched her services, handing out copies of her résumé to passersby. Flyers were everywhere. A meeting was going to take place later that night to assign cleaning responsibilities.

The recession was Obama’s fault. The recession was Bush’s fault. The recession was the War Against Terror’s fault.

Zuccotti Park is a maze of causes and alleyways, a shuk of complaints. At the west end of Zuccotti Park was a drum circle with painted, bare-chested boys dancing with frenzied abandon. At the south end of the park was free food – crisp yellow and red apples from a local farm. On the east side of Zuccotti Park, men and women were preaching like prophets. There were circles of people echoing the words of the self-appointed spokespeople, forming a human microphone to carry the message out to the crowd. There were lone guitar players sitting cross-legged on the steps. There was a Native American man collecting signatures. There was a handsome young former businessman with a poster board telling his tale of personal woe.

At the north end we found a small sukka erected by Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JFREJ). When we arrived, a prayer service was in progress. Men and women sang “Open the Gates of Justice,” many wearing kippot and tallitot. A Habad man circulated with a lulav andetrog, asking passersby if they were Jewish. A man from Romemu, a liberal Upper West Side synagogue, taunted the Habadnik, telling him that he would recite the blessings over the lulavand etrog only if the Hasid visited Romemu, which meets in a church. Near the sukka was a lending library called The People’s Library.

Zuccotti Park is the heart of Occupy Wall Street. It is a messy, magnificent collective of human beings who feel empowered and/or desperate enough to gather their grievances in one place and air them in a gesture of defiance – at the foot of the financial district.

Their various complaints form a symphony, a 21st century Ginsbergian howl. The denizens of Zuccotti Park are leaning out of a great metaphorical American window and shouting that they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

But I would be disingenuous if I were to draw a divide between the demonstrators in Zuccotti Park and myself. True, they were involved in the active role of protesting and I was merely a tourist, taking note of their signage and garb, listening to their native song, beholding, quite literally, their indigenous dance. Yet what happened to me as I walked through the snaking pathways between protesters is that a myriad of maladies crystallized and I felt that I was part of the fellowship of wounded American citizenry. I, too, have felt my back bent beneath the bulky cost of living; I am she who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars when the real estate market crashed in 1987, who narrowly avoided foreclosure on her home, and whose respectable income has always been inadequate to cover the cost of Jewish education, not to mention private American college.

More pointedly, I am the mother of a 27-year-old journalist who might be handing out copies of his résumé here had he not decided to relocate to Berlin, where he has a thriving career as a freelance arts writer and lives well because of the affordable rent on his apartment, which is a tenth of what a comparable apartment rental might be in Manhattan.

At Zuccotti Park, I experienced the camaraderie one often feels in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. We were united in our woundedness, dazed survivors of the same cataclysm.

Straight from the heady civil disobedience of Zuccotti Park, I journeyed uptown to watch “Wall Street,” a film that is as spookily prescient about the outer limits of greed as it is an artistic masterpiece. if my earlier excursion hadn’t converted me to the cause of campaigning for capitalism with a conscience, the recognition of Gordon Gekko in a procession of real-life scoundrels sealed my resolve to join the protest.

I am an observant Jew and the way I found to protest was organic.

My first opportunity presented itself the following week at the erev Simchat Torah celebration at B’nai Jeshurun. The next day, occupy Judaism was organizing a Simchat Torah event on the plaza opposite Zuccotti Park, where hundreds of Jews had previously gathered on Yom Kippur. An energetic global grassroots effort created by Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish activist, Occupy Judaism seeks to enforce the messages of occupy Wall Street through Jewish rituals and observances and through the lens of Jewish tradition and ethical teachings; it is also publicly critical of Jewish institutional organizations for their complacency on the issue of economic injustice. Within moments i knew that I would join them.

When i reached the plaza in front of Brown Brothers Harriman – where, incidentally or not, heavy-hitting members of Jewish communal organizations are employed – a loose smattering of tentative individuals and communal leaders had gathered around Amichai Lau-Lavie and Naomi Less, both leaders of Storahtelling, an educational group that calls itself “a radical fusion of storytelling, torah, contemporary performance, art and ritual theater.”

After singing nigunim (wordless tunes) to the accompaniment of Less’s guitar and freelance musicians, the moment of truth arrived, the reason we had journeyed so far from our homes and synagogues on the holiday.

Cleaning our hands first with Purell, Lau-Lavie and his helpers ordered us to form a tight circle and then instructed us to hold tightly to the torah scroll as it was unfurled.

Once the holy parchment was fully revealed, Amichai went around the circle, yad (pointer) in hand, touching the text and guiding us through the glorious narrative, highlighting the innumerable ethical teachings: “Clothe the naked.” “Protect the weak and vulnerable.” “Love the stranger.” “Do not steal.” “Leave the corners of your field for the poor.” “Do not covet.” “Do not worship idols.” “Do not kill.”

And on and on and on; until the circle was complete and the end flowed into the beginning. tears streaming down our cheeks, smiling, singing and swaying, we gave each other blessings rooted in the Torah, blessings that compelled us to undertake bold acts of tikkun olam.

On a chilly Friday afternoon in October, we stood together as Jews and Americans, protesters, agitators for change, celebrants of Simchat Torah at occupy Wall Street, turning our individual howls into a collective Halleluyah, fighting the good fight to restore our lost nation to its original status as a “Goldeneh Medinah,” with justice for all.

Beyond the Kardashian Wedding; Some Words on the Essence of Marriage

2011-11-01T07:41:00.002-04:00

There are a number of things about contemporary pop culture I will never understand. One is the appeal of so-called Reality Television. The second, closely-related, is the public's interest in the stars of this realm, chiefly the insipid bunch known as the Kardashians.

I'll skip the feminist rhetoric about how heinous these young women are as role models for girls and the moral finger-wagging about the shallow, mega-materialistic values they hold. I'll even mute my own outrage at the media for being as fascinated with them as they are with themselves. What astonishes me beyond belief is the press coverage that the $10 mil ~~coronation~~ wedding received and now, 72 days later, its unraveling.

Waking up today, my Twitter feed is flooded with items related to the pseudo-news of Kim and Kris's pending divorce. Naturally, I am hard-pressed to believe anyone took the marriage seriously to begin with, but that's another matter. To counteract the annoyance that is beginning to cloak me like an itchy garment, I scroll back three days to recall a rather remarkable talk I heard about the essence of real life-partnership.

This past Saturday, I, like many devoted shul-goers, trudged through the prematurely wild and without-warning winter weather to make it to services. My resolve to endure the mile-long hike while large, yeasty snowflakes flew all around me was hardly inspired by religious motivation; rather, it was an expedient, diplomatic move. An inconstant member of my minyan, I wanted to show my face in services at least once before next week when I am scheduled to read Torah.

While initially grumbling to myself that I picked a doozy of a day to put in face-time at shul, I found my devotion rewarded a short while later. There was an aufruf taking place for Elana Berkowitz -- the daughter of Dina Rosenfeld and Howard Berkowitz, one of Minyan M'at's founding families -- and her fiance. I grabbed a siddur and a seat. As my nose, toes and fingers thawed, I was treated to an exquisitely-wrought address by the bride-to-be's father on the essence of marriage, that is, life-long partnership.

Though the hour was late -- well past the noon mark that often signals the natural end of Shabbat services -- there was not an impatient listener in the crowded fifth-floor room. In fact, as I looked around the room, I saw people actively sniffling, dabbing at their eyes and, in a few cases, sobbing quietly.

For those who were married and those who were about to be married and those who wished to be married, Howard Berkowitz presented a vision of this partnership's potential. Here is an excerpt:

Elana, Ed, on your e-invitations to the wedding you had animage of a two-seater bicycle with the statement “we have decided to go tandemfor life.” The word “conjugal” inLatin means “to be yoked together”- to go tandem. Whether it is side-by-side or fore-and-aft, you have decidedto make the commitment to become sustaining companions for life, to pulltogether to get wherever you are going, to accomplish collaboratively whateverin this world you set out to do. This corresponds to the Rabbinic ideal of marriage as therelationship of re’im ahuvim, loving friends. This was so important it was enshrined in the sixth of theseven blessings which are said at a Jewish wedding: “O make these lovingfriends greatly rejoice even as You did rejoice your creation in the Garden ofEden of old. Blessed are you, OLord, who makes the bridegroom and bride to rejoice.” In the Song of Songs (5:16) we read: “This is my beloved andthis is my friend.” The first “notgood” in the Torah is found in Genesis 2:18-where it was not good for Adam tobe alone. Milton even had Adamchoosing knowingly to eat of the forbidden fruit so as not to be separated fromEve. The importance of romance inmarriage is attested to by the most romantic statement in the Torah (Genesis29:20): “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a fewdays because of his love for her.” Chayim-“life”- a word we refer to constantly in Judaism, isactually a plural-“to lives, to lives, l’chaim….”

Inyour aufruf parsha, God chooses Noach of all people living as a partner to dothe work of saving a remnant of life on earth because Noach was found to be“blameless in his age” and God tells him “…you alone have I found righteousbefore Me in this generation.” These two hedging comments suggest that Noach was simply the best of a mediocrebunch. Last week, in Bereshit, weheard, in a long list of Adam’s descendants, how the repeated pattern of thegenerations was disrupted with the entry for Enoch: “..Enoch walked with God 300 years…Enoch walked with God;then he was no more, for God took him.” (Gen. 5:22-24) Later God will establish favoredrelationships with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph with only the first beingin any real sense reciprocal. Godcasts about in each generation seeking some sort of partner to work with. But God does not find a great and truelove until Moses. The intimaterelationship between God and Moses is perhaps best hinted at by this passagefrom Exodus (32:9-11): “The Lordfurther said to Moses, ‘I see that this is a stiffnecked people. Now, let Me be, that My anger may blazeforth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a greatnation.’ But Moses implored theLord his God, saying, ‘Let not Your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against Yourpeople….’” As with any goodcouple, God shares thoughts with Moses in order to elicit a response and thehelp needed. Exodus Rabbah boldlymakes this emotional reciprocity overt in stating that when God waxed hot,Moses would be cool and when Moses waxed hot, God would be cool. Their unique relationship is clearlystated by the Torah in Exodus (33:11): “The Lord would speak to Moses face toface, as one man speaks to another” and Deuteronomy (34:10): “Never again didthere arise in Israel a prophet like Moses-whom the Lord singled out, face toface….” It is almost as if themetaphor of the marriage of God and the people Israel, which is usedextensively throughout Tanach and Midrash, is said of God on the rebound fromGod’s grief over the loss of Moses. To human understanding, even God needs to be married.

Fire and Rain

2011-10-27T09:43:00.004-04:00

After my dental appointment this morning, I will be pulling on my wellies, plunking on a baseball cap and heading down to Zuccotti Park to report on Occupy Wall Street for The Jerusalem Report.

From the comfort of my dining room on Amsterdam Avenue and West 116th Street, the vista is uninviting...to say the least. The trees on the Columbia University campus are being rattled by the winds. Pedestrians hurry past, squaring their shoulders. The sky is gunmetal grey. It is a day to stay indoors.

I am an activist with a conditional sense of commitment....that is, once I have to sit outside in the rain, my commitment begins to waver. I can do heat. I can do cold in limited doses. But rain is the deal-breaker for me.

On the cozy red armchair that Big Babe rescued from the trash about ten years ago, Nala the Pomeranian snoozes. Alfie, her big brother, is asleep on the couch. They are dozing off the trauma of their morning walk in the rain. Curling up and sleeping seems a lovely activity just about now.

If this sounds like a kvetch it is. I kvetch therefore I am. And kvetching, after all, is really just a form of protesting. I am protesting against the elements that change Occupy Wall Street from a hippie street fair to something else, something I haven't yet seen.

Cold Comfort

2011-10-26T10:06:00.000-04:00

Motivated to start my Wednesday with a workout, I just slipped on my shorts, sports bra, tank top and sneakers, plunked a Zabar's baseball hat atop my messy morning hair, threw some professional attire in my gym bag for later meetings... and then I remembered.

There is no hot water at the JCC fitness center.

There is no hot water but but there is a new complimentary coffee bar, a peace offering to all the disgruntled patrons who have endured freezing cold showers -- or no showers -- for the past week. True, some workout without showering but many of the regulars seem to have taken a mini-vacation during this shower-free period.

As someone who is a proud, profuse sweater, there is not a chance I could leave the gym without showering unless it was summer and I had no more professional commitments and I'd be walking the two miles to my home in order to shower there.

Therefore, I've endured several cold showers over the past week, having figured out a system to make them less painful.

This system involves an overly-long preparatory session in the steam room, racing into a shower stall where I dance beneath wet icicles while gasping audibly....and following up the ordeal with another steam room visit.

When I finally leave the JCC, dressed, warm and fully dry, I must admit that I feel a rare sense of wellbeing, a heroic intimation of achievement, smug satisfaction.

Like those brave souls at Coney Island in the middle of winter, I am tough enough to be called a Polar Bear or at least a true New Yorker.

The Unbearable Mondayness of Monday and Other Musings on Time

2011-10-24T15:32:00.002-04:00

About one hour ago, the miserable Mondayness of today began to slowly morph into a more manageable beginning-of-the-work-week optimism and I abandoned the urge to flee my own life, eventually finding that I was actually humming between phone calls instead of grinding my teeth in despair.

As I have proposed in previous posts on this matter, Monday should NEVER begin earlier than noon. It is far too traumatic to jolt people out of their weekends anytime before that and I will bet that one day, some scientist will discover that there is a quantifiable quality to Monday mornings, kind of like the veneer of dusty grease that begins to form on walls near one's stove.

Indeed, as I write these very words, HOBB called to bemoan the Mondayness of today. "I cannot believe it's only Monday!" he wailed.

His words are a cri de coeur, an existential plea, a Ginsbergian howl.

Since I'm meditating upon the matter of TIME, I wanted to share a cataclysmic realization I had this past week on one of the Jewish holidays, either Hoshana Raba, Shmini Atzeret or Simchat Torah (who can remember anymore, they all begin to blend and blur until they are one mass of calories and prayerbooks and festive clothes).

The realization went like this: 365 days -- that is, a year -- is only the briefest building block of time, not the epic monument I had always regarded it to be.

Unbelievably, this realization dawned on me NOW for the very first time in my life. Until last week, I considered a year to be a substantial measure of time.

Now it seems to me as skimpy as a string bikini, covering only the essential parts, leaving too much exposed, virtually weightless, folding up into practically nothing, in perpetual danger of getting lost or misplaced or destroyed in the wash.

Acharei Ha-Chagim

2011-10-23T00:48:00.001-04:00

This is decadence: golden forkfuls of custardy bread pudding with chocolate chips and a tart glass of Shiraz. The bread pudding is an artifact of the Jewish holiday season that was, made with Zadie's challah. Zadie's produces the greatest baked kosher food in creation, specifically their pull-apart challah which is eggy and dense and sweet. I just learned that my cousin's son, Eric, moved to an apartment down the block from Zadie's Bakery in Fair Lawn, NJ. I had no idea that there was an actual retail outlet where these amazing baked items could be procured fresh from the oven. I just assumed there was a factory, an assembly line, something tucked away off a highway somewhere. The fact of a neighborhood shop is uplifting news, a hopeful sign in an Occupy Wall Street world.

It is Saturday night, about 20 minutes shy of midnight. While I finish the bread pudding, I am contemplating crashing my daughter's best friend's 23rd birthday party at a karaoke bar in the East Village. Naturally, it would be awkward to the max if I were to show up (which I probably will not, chiefly because HOBB has a horrible cold and what kind of wife goes out bar-hopping when her husband is ill???) but I am tempted because people my age don't do stuff like this. I actually just pitched an editor a feature based on the concept of a fun-loving 50-year-old. Do not steal this idea. You will be caught because it can be traced to this blog post.

After a seemingly interminable stretch, the Jewish holidays are finally at an end, having departed at 6:51 p.m. We are now in that longed-for period called Acharei Ha-Chagim -- literally "After the Holidays." While the whole megillah began on the eve of September 28th, with Rosh Hashana, I am already nostalgic for them, especially after this final stretch of Simchat Torah/Shabbat.

Between the mosh-pit-like madness of BJ (Bnai Jeshurun) on Thursday night, with its hour-long wait to get in and sweaty, joyous dancing/davening/Torah reading/socializing, my subsequent wanderings afterwards (which landed me at a party at a posh highrise on Columbus Avenue where scores of drunken twenty and thirty-somethings lolled around on the furniture)...and the following day's transcendentally spiritual Occupy Wall Street Simchat Torah celebration, I feel uplifted and armed for whatever life throws my way.

While they were here, there was a sense that the Jewish holidays were an alien spaceship that had invaded Earth, taking observant Jews hostage. "Omigod!" we kvetched loudly to each other. "It's just too much! It's impossible to get work done! It's so fattening! I'm spending so much money on food! I don't know what day of the week it is anymore!"

Within the cocoon of the chagim, we rolled from Rosh Hashana to the surprising ease of Yom Kippur to Sukkot to this last mishmash of Hoshana Raba/Shemini Azeret/Simchat Torah, which was of course accompanied by Shabbat...as all the days of observance were this year, creating the Triple Whammy effect (see my previous writings about Triple Whammies).

We said we felt trapped and removed from the outside world...and we were, to a certain degree. We complained we were cut off from real life, shuttling between home and the synagogue. For those of us who eschew computers, televisions or other modes of communication during these days, we found ourselves in a news blackout. For those of us who shun work and the marketplace, we found ourselves in an office and store-free world; there were numerous days we left home without Metrocards, credit cards, cash, iPod, laptop or mobile devices of any kind.

It felt like a prison of sorts or at least a holding cell and we said we longed for the moment we would regain our access to the real world. My Friday afternoon excursion down to the Simchat Torah celebration across from Zuccotti Park bridged the divide between the insular holiday observance and the world-at-large, enabling me to observe the holiday while also being at the epicenter of a huge global news story and social happening.

And now, the holiday-free zone has arrived. HOBB is sleeping. Middle Babe is at her best friend's party and Little Babe has just gone to bed, having shown me some rare Red Hot Chili Pepper concert clips from Off the Map. I sit at my dining room table with an wine-stained goblet. The bowl that recently held my Zadie's challah bread pudding is empty but the taste of custard lingers in my mouth. I long for the precious period that has just ended because I just remembered that real life is vastly overrated.

What I Saw at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-19T08:51:00.000-04:00

FINALLY, I had a couple of hours to go down to the FiDi yesterday where I joined the hundreds of people who formed the messy, glorious, thoroughly inspiring be-in called Occupy Wall Street. I saw drummers and dancers. I saw Native Americans and Hasidic Jews. I saw an impromptu lending library. I saw crates of freshly-picked apples provided by a local farms. I saw filthy, tattooed young people. I saw elderly folks. I heard poets. I was cursed out for several minutes for refusing to give a guy my email address; his chorus of "F#$% You"s became part of the soundscape of the gathering, illuminated his bitterness.

I read placards and bios and signs and slogans. I saw America in tatters, I saw America refusing to be down for the count. I felt the spirit of Emma Lazarus, Ben Franklin, Susan B. Anthony and the agitators across the centuries, toiling for a cause.

At Zuccotti Park, I saw the future of America. Here is some of what I saw:

Double-Edged Dream

2011-10-18T10:20:00.000-04:00

I stayed awake as long as I could, close to 3:30 a.m. listening to the rapid-fire Hebrew patter of the Ynet anchors. Gilad Shalit was passed from Hamas to the Egyptian authorities. The International Red Cross was monitoring the progress of the transaction. Shalit was met by an IDF representative. His family was gathering. Medical personnel were standing by.

Unable to stay awake, I fell asleep before Shalit entered Israel and was reunited with his family though the photographs of the Shalit family waiting for their son made my heart overflow with prayer that he arrive whole in spirit, body and mind.

Declared healthy, this young former captive is thin and pale and weak...no surprise for someone held in a Hamas cell for five years. Further medical tests will probe his fitness further. There is a limp, possibly from the confrontation that led to his capture. Something appears to have happened to one of his hands. More insults to his body and mind might be revealed.

Over the past week, since the deal was announced, I've read pundits and predictions on all sides of this terrible negotiation. Stating the obvious, the prospect of terrorists being released is not only galling on a moral level but carries significant risk. I cannot think of anything to add to the debate other than expressions of sympathy for the families of those killed in terrorist attacks. Whatever they say or think is wholly justified. The murderers of their loved ones have gone free together with Shalit.

Listening to the news last night I found myself slipping into a realm of magical thinking, recalling my childhood belief in the possibility of Biblical miracles, the kind wrought for Israel by God. I considered a Jericho-like tumbling of walls, a plague, a brilliant military strategy worthy of King David dealing immediate justice to those released killers. I summoned up Samson in the temple of the Philistines, taking down the entire murderous nation before I realized that Samson's heroic act was one of martyrdom.

When I was a teenager, I found myself obsessed less with Biblical justice than with the ethics of survival during the Shoah. Of particular fascination to me were stories of Jewish women who slept with Nazi officers to save themselves or family members.

I was appalled. I was intrigued. I asked myself whether I could ever become a Nazi's whore to earn my life or the wellbeing of my family. I pondered the suicide pact of the 93 Jewish school girls from the Beth Jacob (Bais Yaacov) school in Warsaw who chose death over defilement with Nazis soldiers. I determined that I would have only pretended to take the poison, knowing myself to be a coward, preferring to gamble with my body for the sake of my life.

Maybe Israel has become a Nazi's whore. Maybe the purist solution was the one chosen by the girls who ingested poison and maybe I have no moral compass. It is true that negotiations with the devil have never gone well.

But it is also true that in the epic battle between Good and Evil, Good ultimately wins. The body count may be high but Evil is eventually vanquished.

Baruch Mateer Assurim; Baruch Dayan Ha-Emet

2011-10-12T08:17:00.000-04:00

This is the crazy jumble of life:

While gathering yesterday afternoon at a New Jersey cemetery for the funeral of my friend Judy's father, Michael, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, two calls came through.

The first, on HOBB's iPhone, informed him that his elderly Aunt Sylvia had just died.

The second, on my BlackBerry, informed me that Gilad Shalit would be coming home.

This is the crazy jumble of life:

Aunt Sylvia is the older sister of Marvin, HOBB's father, whose yahrzeit is today.We are leaving for her funeral in Queens right after my husband returns from minyan at Congregation Ramath Orah, where he will have recited kaddish in memory of his father.

Tonight is the start of the joyous festival of Sukkot, mere days after the solemn introspection of Yom Kippur.

For the next week, we are commanded to celebrate and build beautiful, if temporary huts where we will take our meals. The huts -- called Sukkot, the plural form of Sukkah -- commemorate the temporary dwellings built by the Israelites as they fled the captivity of Egypt on their way to the Promised Land.

Yesterday, a deal was brokered. It might be a terrible deal but the impetus is the release of a young Israeli held captive for five long years. Yom Kippur is over and Sukkot is upon us. Gilad Shalit has been in a terrible Sukkah, He is on his way to the Promised Land. There is joy. There is skepticism. We are on our way to Aunt Sylvia's funeral. It is HOBB's father's yahrzeit. My friend Judy is sitting shiva today for her father, just one day before the holiday begins and mourning must cease. Aunt Sylvia's family will have only two hours of shiva before they must get up.

This is the crazy jumble of life.

The Name Game

2011-10-11T10:10:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure when it happened but sometime between 1960 when I was ONE of maybe THREE Shiras in the entire United States of America and five seconds ago, my foreign, undesirable name became popular, beautiful and even ubiquitous in some places, for instance, Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Next to the invention of the Internet, the transformation of my name from weird to wonderful is one of the marvels of the modern world.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, no one could relate to the name Shira. It was often misheard as Sheila or Shari or Sherry or Sharon or, heaven forbid, Shirley.

If Shirley Temple was all the rage in the thirties, it was the very last name a child of the sixties wanted to have.

But it wasn't that I had an embarrassingly old world name with Yiddish overtones; after all, I wasn't a Faigy or Raizey or Pesha or Bluma or Berel.

I may not have had a Grandma name but I did have a Hebrew name and during my childhood years, Hebrew names were hardly in vogue. Case in point: I was the only student with a Hebrew name in my grade at the North Shore Hebrew Academy. Note the ironic fact that the word "Hebrew" appears in the school's name. Instead of evoking the strong, suntanned denizens of the modern State of Israel, Hebrew names at that time belonged to the Bible, a faraway place with deserts and camels and Arabs and no television, mythical like Atlantis.

Shira was the sound of social isolation, the name of the rabbi's daughter, forever branded as different from all the other kids. Shira was the name of someone who could never be effortlessly natural or normal or native -- a visitor, an interloper, an outsider, an alien. It didn't help that I looked Israeli to everyone or "Mediterranean" which was likely the pre-PC way of saying Israeli.

That was long ago and far away, in the pre-ethnic, pre-alternative, pre-diversity era. That was before Black is Beautiful caught traction in my little neck of Great Neck (which I doubt it actually ever did) or "Free to Be You and Me" was the score that every liberated child was singing or "Our Bodies Ourselves" taught women to look at their hoo-hahs with a handheld mirror.

As if teleported by De Lorean or hot tub, I have arrived in a future where Shira has been normalized. Suddenly there are scores of little girls who happily answer to Shira. There are little blond Shiras and brunette Shiras and redheaded Shiras. There are journalists and authors with the name Shira. There is a famous judge with the name Shira. There are sexy and serious Shiras. There is a popular prayer group in Israel that begins with Shira. And most thrillingly for me, the Hebrew word "Ashira" was heard loud, proud and set to music during the exodus scene in "Prince of Egypt."

It took half a century but suddenly Shira is part of the American -- or perhaps just the New York City -- soundscape. It is a name whose meaning is known and not just by other Hebrew speakers. Last week, the young black cashier at Fairway looked at my receipt and proudly informed me that she knew that my name meant song...and that her best friend was named Shira. Last year, a friend sent me a link to a porn site from Australia where a young Indian girl named Sheera can be seen doing lesbianish things.

And then, there is She-Ra, Princess of Power, my leggy, blond superhero alter-ego.

Half a century ago, I was an uncomfortable pioneer of the name Shira.

Now, I am a veteran of the name, proud and relieved to be a big old Shira-fish in the not-so-small pond of other smaller and younger Shiras.

Paul Shapiro's Midnight Minyan as Tree of Life

2011-10-06T10:38:00.001-04:00

Yom Kippur freaks me out every single year. I start dreading it the second Tisha B'Av ends with my terror escalating by the time Rosh Hashana rolls around. It's not just that I am a terrible faster with unstable blood sugar, constant thirst, a caffeine addiction and a thyroid condition; it's the prospect of being imprisoned within a 25-hour-long cell of prayer, devotion and Jewish community that gets to me.

When I think of my ideal Yom Kippur it involves being in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or outdoors in a beautiful natural setting. I envision spending the day reading, sitting under a leafy tree and thinking deep or random thoughts, focusing on God, eternity, my soul, my life and how to be a better person.

There was a year, maybe two decades ago, that HOBB and I hosted a home Kol Nidre service in our beloved Westchester home on Aberfoyle Road in New Rochelle. The year in question, Yom Kippur came "early," that is to say it was summery and I wore a white linen dress. Our friends gathered with us on the floor of our living room. To begin, we played Ernst Bloch's "Kol Nidre." We read from our machzorim and spoke about repentance and forgiveness.

The experience was memorable, beautiful, perfect.

These days, the daunting institutional structure of Judaism is too much with me. Synagogues seem to separate me from my soul and the outdoors, where I long to be. Sitting in shul I long for escape.

And it's not that prayer doesn't speak to me; it's that long distance davening wears me out -- the thick siddur, the myriad pages to leaf through, the standing and sitting and ark opening and closing and silent and responsive reading, on and on for hours on end.

I have written in the past about having DADD -- Davening Attention Deficit Disorder.

The quantity of the prayer and possibly its structured, codified, canonized nature tends to dismay and alienate me. I know it can be otherwise.

Which brings me to the remarkable surprise of last night at the Sixth Street Shul and Paul Shapiro's Midnight Minyan which performed the most marvelous, maniacal, jazz-infused renditions of original music inspired by Jewish chants, melodies and prayer.

The pic above was taken by my friend Ricky Orbach, the formidable Kohane of Newark.

Riffing on the Jewish liturgical archive -- including "Etz Chaim He," the blessings before the Haftorah, the "Ashamnu" and Fiddler's "To Life - L'Chaim!" -- Paul Shapiro and his guys put on a show that was staggeringly, transcendently fantastic.

It was cool. It had swing. It blew my mind. It sparked my soul. It made me dance in my seat. It made me smile and wish for more.

From now until Yom Kippur, I will be listening to Paul Shapiro's mad music again and again, seeking shelter beneath the leafy canopy of his meshuga melodies, knowing them to be a manifestation of the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life.

Scenes from 82nd Street and Broadway in the Middle of a Sunny Day in Early October

2011-10-05T17:08:00.001-04:00

Leaving my therapist's office on West End Avenue around midday, I headed over to Broadway to grab a salad at Hale and Hearty. As it was spectacularly sunny, I decided to sit outside and eat my lunch on a bench in the middle of Broadway and 82nd Street.

Here are some cool things I saw:

Near the elevator, Barnes and Noble has a great new section called Discover New Writers.

It was the perfect kick in the pants for a writer who has managed to avoid writing the book that her writing professor and literary agent are both waiting for her to write.

I also bought a couple of Nicholson Baker novels and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, encouraged by the example set by my friend Jane, who read the latter with one of her sons over the summer.

I still cannot get over the sight of that dog sitting in the stroller.

SlutWalking in Morningside Heights

2011-10-04T12:56:00.001-04:00

I'm a mom; that's the first fact I'd like to disclose. My daughter is a recent college grad and I have two sons, one an adult, the other a high school junior. The matter I raise in this post is one we have often talked about amongst ourselves. Amazingly, it is something we all seem to agree on.

I'm also a grown-up who loves parties, is comfortable going to bars, singing karaoke and wearing miniskirts though my fashion sensibility precludes tight clothing or excessive cleavage.

To my taste, such attire is tacky or, in the parlance of my mom's generation, cheap.

When I feel buff enough to carry off the look, I've even been known to wear bikinis, though of the early sixties, wholesome American kids at a beach party variety, with a bottom never ending more than a couple of inches below my navel.

Thong? No thongs.

A product of the freewheeling seventies who hates the fetishism inherent in the concept of female virtue and virginity, who treasures the exclusivity of a committed relationship but also believes that, in the absence of such a bond, sex can be recreational or deep and meaningful, I am continually appalled by the depersonalized sexuality of the hook-up generation, the randomness of romantic alliances, the consumerist activity of accumulating sex partners, the culture of drunken make-out sessions that often culminate in one or both people sleeping with someone they would ordinarily shun if sober, the "evolved" contention that making something that used to be called love is no big deal, an activity on par with, say, toothbrushing or going to the gym.

Hand-in-hand with reports from the friends-with-benefits front come the nightly sightings of young women dressed like what my Grandma Dorothy used to term "floozies." As I live across the street from the Columbia University campus, where I was a graduate student last year, I need only look out my living room window to catch sight of college girls looking tacky, cheap and worse.

By worse I mean embodiments of male pornographic fantasies, strutting capitulations to XXX-video jackets, sex kittens come to life, eager participants in the objectification of themselves, that is to say, all women.

Which brings me to the word "slut" and to this past weekend's SlutWalk, which was an anti-rape demonstration where women were encouraged to wear skimpy clothes and march to promote the idea that no matter how slutty she dresses, a woman does not deserve to be raped.

Naturally this is true.

Naturally it is also true that men as well as women are raped. Grandmothers and nuns are raped. Little girls and boys are raped. People are raped regardless of their sexual aura or age or attire.

Rape is an act of violence where sex is the weapon.

Naturally, none of the young women parading through Morningside Heights or anywhere deserve to be raped or so much as touched without their consent.

As the protestors said, slutty attire is not an invitation.

Except when it sometimes is an invitation, that is, at the behest of the young woman.

The problem, for me at least, is that the new slutty sartorial sensibility coexists with slutty sexual mores...on the part of men as well as women, then again, men have always been sluttier than women.

Let's just put that on the table.

And while its unconscionable to blame the victim of a crime I would like to ask the uncomfortable, possibly unPC question: why do young women increasingly feel compelled to dress like sluts?

Of course, I am going out on a shaky limb by posing this question, aware of the subjectivity of the concept of skimpy attire, fully cognizant of the fact that in some part of the world, the sight of a woman's face is considered a provocation. I've gotten into arguments with HOBB over my own attire; accused of dressing immodestly. He's usually right. I am dressing inappropriately, my secret rebellion for being forced to attend a religious event outside of my belief system and comfort zone.

Yes, what one terms scandalous attire may in fact be relative but within a given culture, there are agreed-upon norms or at least parameters. I would venture to say that everyone reading this post has a concept of what constitutes slutty attire.

Sometimes even by the woman so dressed. In the coverage I read of the SlutWalk, young women spoke of the empowerment of dressing sluttishly.

So here's where I'm lost. I fail to see the empowerment inherent in looking like a pole dancer in public unless empowerment is code for extended adolescent rebelliousness against some amorphous parental figure. Or the government. Or God. Or the patriarchy. Or capitalism. Or Wall Street...though I believe that demonstration is still ongoing.

This fun-loving, sometimes hard-drinking, karaoke-singing, mini-skirted feminist mom would like to sit down with some of the young women -- younger than my daughter -- who parade past my apartment on their own SlutWalks in an effort to understand why we see things so differently, why the clothing they see as their ticket to liberation is, for me, the 21st century's version of the apron, the corset, the child-sized shoe that binds, constricts, hobbles and disfigures.

Approach/Avoid: High Holiday Edition

2011-10-01T22:58:00.000-04:00

It is the night after the Shabbat following Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

In our family, we call it a Triple Whammy, this glut of days of observance. Family togetherness is mandated, a wonderful and terrifying thing. If one adheres to Jewish tradition -- eschewing phones, computers, and other electronic intrusions, not to mention shopping, work and travel -- there can be a cloistered, claustrophobic quality to the days. Yet the three-day chag also creates an island of time, set apart from the secular mainland, a magical realm where a special set of rules apply.

Our Rosh Hashana Triple Whammy included sumptuous meals with friends and family, long walks in Central Park and Riverside Park, museum visits and our trademark killer competition Scrabble games. (I won. Twice. The second time by a huge margin of over 100 points. I am an insufferable winner and a sore loser.)

My typical ambivalence about merging with community for prayer was greater than usual this year; indeed I only made it to shul two out of the three days and for a respectable amount of time only on the first day.

I felt sad and sorry not to be part of the kehillah when I was playing hooky from shul yet unhappy to be part of it while I was there.

Everything bothered me. It wasn't the particular shul; it was Shul itself -- the edifice, the chairs, the walls, the people. My overwhelming desire was to run away and be alone with my thoughts in an evocative setting.

As I shifted in my folding chair in Ansche Chesed's Hirsch Hall, crossing and recrossing my legs, images of seashores, mountain tops, rivers, lakefronts and my beloved summer bungalow swam before my mind's eye.

I longed for the company of my parents; I wished to be in Israel, preferably in the Negev or perhaps up north, in the verdant Galilee.

Situated on the super-Jewish Upper West Side, I somehow felt exiled, far away from the place where I wished to speak with God.

But of course, God is everywhere and I was nowhere, lost.

Burning Down the House

2011-09-22T08:45:00.001-04:00

From Merry Old England comes a mega-depressing story about how riots by rabidly anti-Israel protestors -- most of them Palestinian -- in London's Covent Gardens succeeded in closing down the Ahava store, leading purveyor of Dead Sea beauty products.

Reminds me of how different Europe and the United States are though surely similar protests have started here. I will remain optimistic that public outcry would prevent such a thing -- the actual shuttering of a business -- from happening on American soil.

This story reinforces my belief that European anti-Semitism did not end in the post-Shoah era; it just became unbearably gauche...for, oh, about half a century.

Now it has become socially acceptable as long as it masquerades as anti-Zionism.

Ironic note: Ahava means LOVE.

Shana Tova from the Shofar FlashMobbers

2011-09-21T10:12:00.002-04:00

Dip Your Apple!

2011-09-16T12:31:00.003-04:00

As I wrote yesterday, the hoofbeats of the High Holidays are coming ever closer...so, why not do some hoofing of your own to the tune of "Dip Your Apple" the YouTube delight by my friends -- the Ein Prat Fountainheads of Israel.

Join me this Sunday at the JCC in Manhattan at 4:10 p.m. for a joyous outdoors FlashMob dance. The dance is but one component of a great happening that begins at 2:30 with the first-ever global Shofar FlashMob. The Shofar FlashMob is a production of Art Kibbutz NYC.

The awesome yet easy choreography for "Dip Your Apple" is below, much to the mortification of all my family members.

And join me again NEXT SUNDAY at 5 pm at the fountain at Columbus Circle where we will do it again!

Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!

Being on My Best Behavior

2011-09-15T17:02:00.003-04:00

Little Babe is an 11th grader.

Little Babe is in 11th grade.

Little Babe is a High School Junior.

No matter how many ways I phrase it, I simply do not believe it, even after spending more than three hours last night traipsing from session to session with similarly bleary-eyed parents of my son's schoolmates at the Open House program of the excellent SAR High School in Riverdale; even after being reassured by my older kids that there are things about their little brother I do not know. (I was a teen during the seventies. How shocked would I be?)

Little Babe is reading Hemingway and Twain and Fitzgerald and Salinger and Buber and Agnon.

Little Babe is thinking of colleges and whether he wants to spend his gap year in Israel.

Little Babe has a NY State Learner's Permit and can apply for his license in February after 50 hours of accompanied driving.

Little Babe has sideburns and furry legs that remind me of our Pomeranians.

Little Babe does stuff I will never be able to, like create original songs on Garage Band.

Little Babe...okay, enough of these expressions of shock and awe, the melodramatic moaning over the passage of time and life's ephemeral nature and gosh, but they grow up so darn fast!

My youngest kid has passed the midpoint of his adolescence, yes, but what I wanted to note is the fact that because he is back in school, I have to adjust my affect, brush up on my behavior, vacuum my vocabulary, hide evidence of excessive pursuits of fun and modify my summer self until I morph back into something resembling a responsible mother.

I must suddenly exude the aura of one who reads The Wall Street Journal and not The Weekly World News (now online); one who fears Internet predators and isn't a cyber-stalker herself; one who frets over grades and nutrition.

(I actually do care -- deeply -- about nutrition and a bit about grades but over the summer all bets are off and it's hard kicking my butt back into gear. See my previous post.)

I should really stop feeling sorry for myself; after all, this metamorphosis happens every year. At the first event of the school year, I'm conscious of arriving just a tad too tanned, a little too loose-limbed, a couple of degrees too casual. Even at a school like SAR which taunts me with visions of WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN had it only existed when I was a turbulent teen, I have to fight the impulse to sneer at the idea of sitting still at a desk, chase away cynical thoughts about everything from the curriculum to the outfit the teacher is wearing, suppress mean thoughts about my peers, i.e. -- the other parents.

Just like a high schooler, I note those who are small and those who are large... especially those who are thinner than me. (A growing number.) I take mental stock of fashionable attire...or the lack thereof. I catalog visible signs of aging. I stare in chagrin at the svelte, well-dressed, supernaturally young-looking women, mentally accusing them of Botox, liposuction and anorexia, not to mention prescription drug abuse. I surreptitiously stare at the good-looking guys. (A shrinking number.)

I wonder how I rank.

It is raining outside. Though the weather is warm, summer is unquestionably over. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. The hoofbeats of the High Holidays are getting closer.

Both in school and out of school, the transformation is underway -- spirit of the summer wind captured and cultivated, sculpted into something that looks like an adult woman, someone's mother.

Life After Drinking...Four Days In

2011-09-14T05:48:00.001-04:00

In the middle of my year at J School I was fond of joking to my friends that I had become an alcoholic.

This joke had great resonance because I have been known as such a health fiend that people still think I am a vegetarian decades after I became an omnivore, believe that I live at the gym, refuse to eat sugar or refined carbs, eschew coffee for green tea, down herbs and supplements and am generally virtuous to the point of obsession.

There is some justification for this image. I do go to the gym or exercise nearly every day of the week. I am on constant carb patrol. I only started drinking coffee in earnest in my late 30's and am a proponent of green tea and its healthful properties. I read food ingredients religiously. I took a course in herbal medicine. I enlisted midwives for the births of my two younger children...being greatly critical of the conventional medical approach to pregnancy and childbirth.

Therefore, the image of myself as a raging alcoholic was comical to me more than anyone else...in the way that it is amusing to see your straight-laced aunt get plastered at a family Bar Mitzvah.

As someone who barely needs substances to do wacky things, wine and tequila tend to push me waaaaay over the top. Which is a fun fact, except in the opinion of a select few family members who do not relish the sight of me singing in karaoke bars, dancing with strangers or making provocative pronouncements.

But the wake-up call came as I realized that the price of being constantly drunkish was -- HORRORS!!! -- weight gain.

After posting on Facebook about the dark lining on the silver cloud of drinking mid-summer, which sparked dozens of responses, I realized I wasn't alone. The battle of Booze vs. Body is waged by many, mostly women, it seems, though some men weighed in (pardon the pun) with one concerned fellow giving me his cellphone number in case I needed "to talk."

Yet I let things coast during the summer months, working by day, living La Vida Loca by night, becoming a 50-year-old party girl with eating habits that were more appropriate to, say, a teenage boy.

That is, potato chips suddenly became a food group in my personal pyramid. Ten string cheeses seemed an appropriate dinner choice. Popcorn was my friend. Pizza (okay, without the crust, but still) was a perfect lunch. Ooey gooey power bars looked like dinner. I wasn't eating a lot...just the wrong stuff.

HOWEVER...with the return to my urban life (farewell Love Shack, closed up this past Sunday!) the extra poundage has compelled me to change my lifestyle. After all, I've got miniskirts to rock, cute dresses to zip over my hips, bodices that do not accommodate my suddenly-zaftig bosom.

Stay tuned for news of my post-alcoholic life, which includes a nutritional overhaul as well. Farewell potato chips. String cheese, it's been good to know ya. There are other measures as well, including those that have to be squeezed, those that are sprinkled over salad and those that are sold at Vitamin Shoppe.

Also, as the daughter of a shrink, I'm curious to find out just what lies beneath my recently-discovered love of being blitzed, interested in seeing what my life looks like without the filter of booze, wondering whether my adventures in alcohol were just that...or something else; liquid escape, a form of self-medication.

September 11, 2011. No Words.

2011-09-11T09:00:00.002-04:00

Bungalow of the Mind

2011-09-08T14:55:00.002-04:00

Was it the late night hamburger and french fries at Noah's Ark on Grand Street? The two glasses of wine prior to that at the Embodied Light exhibition opening at the Educational Alliance? The frenzied, hour-long exercise-fest at the JCC? The trip to Lincoln Center earlier to scout out a location for the September 18th Shofar FlashMob? Work-related emails that were read and responded to starting at 11 p.m.?

Or was it the driving, incessant rain that turned the Hudson River red, flooded roads, wrecked my hair as I dashed to meetings and parties and soaked my sneakers as I dragged Alfie and Nala outside on walks? Locally, the rain is but a mild manifestation of the wrathful weather experienced by neighboring states and communities; still, it serves to literally wash away memories of the summer that was, the long, sun-soaked days, the view from the porch of my bungalow, Shabbat walks along quiet roads, peaceful floating in Walton Lake, the skunks, deer and raccoons, a season that played hard to get and then refused to linger.

Perhaps it is the cumulative stress from the dozens of hours I spent in my car over the past week, sitting in weather and weekend-related traffic; perhaps it is dismay relating to plans that were ruined. Maybe it has to do with a grander and sadder matter relating to the weather...the awareness that Planet Earth is showing signs of Post Traumatic Stress from the abuse she has suffered at humankind's hand.

It could be a million things and it probably is. On Monday morning we packed up our belongings and moved back to Manhattan. There were many events over the weekend, a visit from my sister, a wedding, celebratory dinners, hours lost in rural New Jersey, a trip to Connecticut, just on the border of Massachusetts. I am surely sleep-deprived. I could be eating better. I could be drinking less.

And then, spread out like a canopy that all but blocks our view of the sky, is the impending anniversary of September 11, 2001 in New York City. Normally drawn to the maudlin and melancholy, I find myself unable to tune in to anything commemorative so I tune out. Emotionally, that is. I show up at the events and the exhibition openings. I even contribute my memories and thoughts. I listen and applaud. I nod. I look like I am paying attention.

But I am not here now. I am a million miles away. I am in a place that is eternal summer. I am elsewhere, residing in a bungalow of the mind.

The Calm Before the Storm

2011-08-28T01:03:00.006-04:00

Anticipating the approach of Irene, I set out at four this afternoon with HOBB to stroll through our Morningside Heights neighborhood.

My original plan was to walk along the Hudson from Fairway at 125th Street till the little red lighthouse right under the GW Bridge. I could see that the river was calm and the air was thick, still and weirdly warm. I knew it would be cooler and possibly breezier by the water and wanted to connect with a beloved patch of the island before everything got tossed around.

But before we had even walked up to Grant's Tomb, HOBB proclaimed himself out of breath, sweaty and generally unable to take a step further.

Though disappointed that our excursion had come to a screeching halt (and a tad alarmed), I couldn't fail to notice the strange quality of the air, which was so heavy as to be suffocating. We found a bench and sat down while HOBB caught his breath. Sparse groups of people walked by; mostly tourists, judging from their accents. The sky was dull grey. There were no birds. There was a distinctly ominous feeling.

It was then that it hit me -- "the calm before the storm" was upon us, deceptive as the quiet and ordinary psychopath-next-door.

Our traditional Shabbat walk was chaperoned by a dangerous incarnation of Mother Nature.

More Hurricane Music

2011-08-26T11:14:00.001-04:00

Believe it or not...Adam Sandler singing "Like a Hurricane" on Letterman in 1995.

A Hurricane Playlist

2011-08-26T09:42:00.004-04:00

I admit it.

I am a breaking news addict. Compounding this is the fact that my parents are semi-professional weather watchers and Middle Babe is beginning to exhibit weather obsession tendencies as well.

Which means that right about now, the only thing on my mind is Hurricane Irene.

I'm up in the bungalow, scheduled to spend the weekend in the Urban Bungalow. Little Babe and I had planned to drive in around 5ish. Now, however, I'm wondering about the wisdom of this plan.

I'm possibly influenced by my mother's 8 a.m. panicked phone call and visits to half a dozen websites where phrases like "nightmare scenario" flew off the screen and stuck in my brain.

The trunk of the Honda is packed with water, pretzels, peanut butter, granola bars and other essentials. I will gas up before heading down to the city. But I am also thinking about stopping at Home Depot or Lowes in order to buy sheets of plywood.

For our apartment windows, of course, which face north and west.

We've got a great view of the Columbia University campus.

And that means that Irene might think we've invited her into our living room for Shabbos lunch or Sunday brunch.

Enough. I'm turning to music in order soothe my savage breast. Below, some suggestions to ride out the storm:

From Ben Greenman at The New Yorker, this coolness:

The iPod of the Hurricane: Songs for a Windy Weekend

Posted by Ben Greenman

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called for caution. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared a state of emergency. And as Hurricane Irene moves up the East Coast, worried citizens are stocking up on supplies. In light of that, here is our Hurricane Irene playlist. We have excluded the Scorpions’s “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane,” and The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.” Song choices are not meant to undermine the potential severity of the storm and should not be considered appropriate substitutes for water, canned goods, and batteries.

1. Wynonie Harris, “She’s Gone with the Wind”: Some people say Irene is the biggest storm since 2005. Others believe that it’s the greatest threat since 1985. And some are reaching all the way back to 1944, to the Great Atlantic Hurricane. This Wynonie Harris song dates from the following year.

2. The Delfonics, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”: It’s the supreme seventies sweet-soul anthem. Aretha Franklin has covered it, as has Millie Jackson. It’s also the song that makes Max Cherry fall for Jackie Brown. In this video clip, William Hart’s beard looks like a map of a hurricane. (A live version is below.)

3. Ella Fitzgerald, “Ill Wind (You’re Blowing Me No Good)”: Ella was a hurricane herself, and her version of this Harold Arlen song is filled with gusty vibrato. But it’s also full of rue and regret. Frank Sinatra also sang it, as did Tony Bennett, as did everyone else.

4. Robin Williams, “Blow Me Down”: Harry Nilsson wrote the soundtrack for Robert Altman’s doomed adaptation of “Popeye,” and this breezy song is one of the highlights, though Robin Williams’s performance of it in the film is—like the rest of the film—somewhat ramshackle. Nilsson’s version is available on various bootlegs.

5. The Carpenters, “Rainy Days and Mondays”: Irene is probably coming Sunday to the New York City area, but that seems like a quibble.

6. Tom Waits, “Blow Wind Blow”: Tom Waits just announced his new album, “Bad As Me,” in which he will deliver yet more of his trademark mix of junkyard rock and blues ballads. This official video for this song—which appeared on “Franks Wild Years” in 1987—features Waits, balloons, ventriloquist dummies, and top hats. There are no hurricanes, though there is a big fan.

7. Ian Hunter, “Irene Wilde”: The obvious choice would be “Goodnight Irene,” the folk standard originally recorded by Lead Belly, popularized by the Weavers, and covered by everyone from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Meat Puppets. But if it’s Irenes you want, why not try out this Ian Hunter love song, here performed live with Mick Ronson.

8. Bob Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D”: It’s easy to pick a Dylan song, but hard to pick the right one. Not “Hurricane”: it’s not about weather. Not “Blowin’ in the Wind”: there’s weather, but it’s political, metaphorical, and, by this point, cliché. Not “Shelter from the Storm”: too obvious. Not “Idiot Wind”: too long. In the end, we parsed lyrics, and found three candidates: “The wind began to howl” (from “All Along the Watchtower”); “I’d jump up in the wind, do a somersault and spin” (from the early “All Over You,” recently released on the Witmark Demos); and “The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet,” from this plaintive, sometimes bitter ballad. It’s about the late Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s early-sixties girlfriend, and Dylan later looked back on it with regret: “Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”

Or this from an NBC blog:

“Who’ll Stop the Rain?” - Creedence Clearwater Revival: A natural fit for the upcoming dumping we are about to receive. This song is an open plea to Mother Nature in the hopes she will take it easy on us.

“Katrina” - Black Lips: This is just a reminder to all the New Yorkers bemoaning our current forecast; we’ll never have it as bad as the city of New Orleans did in 2005.

“Riders on the Storm” - The Doors: As you can imagine there is going to be a lot weather related tracks on this playlist and it wouldn’t be complete without this psychedelic jam.

“Let’s Get It On” - Marvin Gaye: If you are lucky enough to be shut in with a loved one throughout the course of the storm, there is no reason you shouldn’t work on making a little Irene of your own.

“Entrance Song (Rain Dance Version)” - The Black Angels: If you get bored during Irene, blast this song, make a headdress and dance around your living room giving yourself credit for the weather event.

“Blizzard of ‘96” - The Walkmen: At the end of the day there is one thing about this rain that can make us all happy – it is not snow.

“Summertime” - Sam Cooke: Though all may seem bleak, don’t forget that next week should be a breeze and it leads into the final blowout weekend of the summer which is followed by a short work week.

“The Rain” - Missy Elliot: By Sunday evening you’ll be taking this chorus as gospel and even if you can’t stand this track, you can certainly kill some time watching Missy’s entertaining video.

“Hurricane” - Bob Dylan: Yes, I know this song is originally about Denzel Washington and not a weather event, but we are taking the liberty to alter the meaning of this great poet’s song to fit our current situation.

“Singing in the Rain” - Gene Kelly: There is no reason to let the rain get you down. Take a page from this classic, get on the street and dance around like a kid hitting every puddle in your path.

Or this more extreme list from Grooveshark.

Stay safe and dry, New York! May Irene inspire us all. In a good way.

Horror Show at Harriman Army-Navy

2011-08-25T09:54:00.008-04:00

As a confident fashionista with an edgy style all my own, I rarely find myself forced to try on clothing that constitutes a sheer and utter sartorial disaster. I am the mistress of my own dressing destiny and know - by the ripe age of 50 - what looks good on my form...and what does not.

Therefore, I am still astonished that yesterday afternoon, I found myself talked into trying on a dress that could only be described as Morticia Addamsesque...or perhaps Drag Queen Fabulous.

It happened at the Harriman Army-Navy, where I had popped in to look at the evening wear for an ultra-Orthodox wedding next week. That's right, Harriman Army-Navy. I was as surprised as you no doubt are but over breakfast at the Monroe Diner last week, my friends Mary Ann and Judy raved about the unexpected collection of gowns and dresses they carried, alongside the jeans, army boots, hunting knives and other staples of any good army-navy store.

Possessed of a few free hours while Little Babe took his pre-certification Driver's Ed class, I figured what the heck.

I shoulda been thinking more along the lines of WTF.

Spying me flipping through the clothing racks in my Champion workout gear, unwashed hair tucked beneath my black Zabar's baseball cap, sports bra holding my assets tightly -- in advance of my upcoming workout at Straub's -- the saleslady swooped in, determined to transform this tomboy into a princess.

She lectured and opined, pointing out form-fitting polyester numbers with sequining and mesh. Perhaps she thought I said I was a Vegas performer? Politely, I explained that my style was typically a 50's style dress, cinched at the waist, full-skirted, sleeveless and several inches above my knees.

But the Army-Navy saleslady knew better. Enough with that look! So nineteen fifties! What I needed was something "edgy."

My eyebrows went up to the rim of my Zabar's cap. Really? Okay, I was decked out in workout gear but everything -- shorts, tank-top and hoodie around my waist-- was BLACK...and kinda faded. My bangs practically hid my eyes. I have many piercings and am contemplating a tattoo. I am dangerously tanned, which enhances my muscle-tone, giving me anything but a suburban look. Did she notice my edgy yellow Nikes, perchance? Did she note my Forever 21 canvas bag??? The five o'clock shadow on my legs? The copy of The New Yorker peeking out over the top of my bag? Excuse me but here in Orange County, New York, I own the "edgy" label, hands-down.

She pulled out a truly heinous number from the rack. I thought Cher, Liza Minelli, Lola Falana and Charo. I restrained my Columbia J School self from chastising her for abusing the English language because what she meant by the use of the word "edgy" was clearly "tacky."

I smiled and said I knew what fit me. And this wouldn't.

But she held her ground and gave a secret superior smile. Everyone loves this dress, she said. It's magic. Everyone cannot believe how good they look in it.

The gauntlet was thrown. Okay, I said, shrugging my bag to the ground, untying my hoodie from my waist. I will try it on.

But even before I zipped the monstrous creation up, I wanted to escape through the back of the dressing room, find a "Chronicles of Narnia"-kind of escapeway.

I looked worse than ridiculous, worse than tacky.

In the magical dress I looked fat and middle-aged.

Okay! I called to her from inside my cubicle. It's horrible, but I'm coming out!

I watched the saleswoman's face go from smug to shocked.

It's a disaster, I said, gesturing to my reflection in the mirror, stating the obvious.

I kind of see what you mean, she kind of admitted, playing around with the fabric, showing me how it might work better, telling me that I had a "cute" figure.

But I had reached my limit.

Listen, I said, turning to her, hand on hip. You don't know me at all. I am a writer and a publicist. I live in Manhattan. I go to lots of parties. I'm 50 years old and I know what looks good on me.

Meekly, she nodded.

And, I added, heading back inside the cubicle where I planned to tear the monstrosity off my "cute" figure, you obviously cannot tell but I'm pretty edgy. I am known and admired for my edgy fashion sensibility. And this...this dress...is the complete opposite. Just saying.

The Imminent Departure of the Music

2011-08-24T15:49:00.017-04:00

It is a day of technological glitches, too boring to explain.

It is also a day of firsts: Little Babe's first driving lesson, one day after he got his Learner's Permit at the Goshen DMV. Mazel Tov Little Babe, the first of The Three Babes to achieve this milestone! Tonight he will sit through a 5-hour session while I skip off to Straub's Fitness ("Searching for Bobby Fischer" is playing at the Cardio Theatre) and possibly putter up to the Barnes and Noble in Newburgh to buy my son the Hemingway work that is required summer reading for Junior year English. (What? Hey, there are two weeks left until school starts!)

Behold my youngest child under the trees by the edge of the woods, playing his new Marcus Miller Jazz Bass, which he spent his entire camp salary on. We bought it last night at the Guitar Center on Route 17 in New Jersey, capping off a two-plus hour visit where we jammed, sang in the guitar room ("Let it Be" and "Landslide" sounded especially great on the 12-string Martin) and schmoozed with customers and salesmen alike. It made me happy that the drum dude recognized me from my last visit two months earlier. We talked about finding a comfortable distance between throne and drum kit. I bought a copy of Drum! magazine (with Chad Smith of the RHCP on the cover!!!) and a couple of sets of sticks to show how serious a musician I am, a rocker chick in my own right, not just the mother of the kid contemplating buying an $800 jazz bass. The drum dude showed me the used drum kits but I was not ready to commit to a purchase though I long to play in the privacy of my own space, a girl drummer, not a girl anymore.

Little Babe's purchase, however, more than justified our visit. Lovingly, he lay the instrument down in the back seat of our Honda and when we returned to the bungalow, he lifted it out gingerly, joyfully, like a father bringing a newborn child home from the hospital. I fell asleep to the sound of him playing, well after midnight.

And here is the Love Shack, already wearing a look of melancholy at the approach of Labor Day, the imminent departure of the music.

The News from Israel...in a Middle of a Carefree American Summer Day

2011-08-18T16:15:00.004-04:00

"It's been too quiet," said my sister over the phone, my baby sister, the mother of three boys, who lives in Israel, which means that her sons are all/will all be soldiers.

The eldest had just been released from his military duty last month having received the highest honors of officer. The middle one, the sensitive musician, the budding socialist, had just been inducted last Monday, Big Babe's birthday.

As news from today's terrorist attack in Israel filtered through on my BlackBerry, my laptop, my iPad, I thought of the Egged Bus I took last year from Jerusalem to Eilat and shivered. Was it that bus that was attacked, I asked my sister?

No, she said. That is a different bus. This one left Beersheva for Eilat, taking a special road that Bedouins control.

I noted that the wounded and dead were taken to Soroka Hospital, where Middle Babe was taken when she became dehydrated in the Negev four years earlier. I noted that one of the dead Israelis was a 22-year-old Golani soldier.

Two sisters talk on the phone, one in the middle of a carefree American summer day, one in the somber Israeli night after a terrorist attack on civilians, the mother of little boys who grow up to be soldiers in a country where the concept of a carefree summer day does not exist.

Hava Nagila Wake-Up

2011-08-18T10:12:00.003-04:00

So, I overslept this morning because of the venti cup of Starbucks I had at 8 p.m. last night on my way to the free screening of Mars Attack on the Pier 1 on the Hudson river at about 70th Street, which made me remain wide-eyed until 2 a.m. forced to watch the traffic along Amsterdam while attempting to catch up on work.

It seems my life can be measured by cups of coffee. Now I'm sitting at the dining room table in the urban bungalow guzzling my second cup of Zabar's French Italian blend. My eyes look heavy-lidded in Middle Babe's make-up mirror. Briefly, I contemplate sticking my face in a bowl of ice water. Isn't that from some movie? Or from the video of Huey Lewis and the News's "I Want a New Drug?"

While talking to Big Babe in Berlin, I pulled up a video clip of 17-year-old Olympic contender Alexandra Raisman doing an extraordinary gymnastic routine to the tune of "Hava Nagila."

Watch it and wake up:

Groove Without End: Ayn Sof Arkestra on the Hudson. Moon Included.

2011-08-17T14:32:00.009-04:00

If you think this looks like a spaceship has just landed on the banks of the Hudson, you're not completely out of your mind.

This is a picture of last night's Mostly Music performance by the Ayn Sof Arkestra at Memorial Park in Nyack and to borrow a cliche, it was out of this world; groove without end, musical mayhem, shock waves of aesthetic ecstasy.

Sometimes frantic, always funky, Ayn Sof Arkestra is a host of stellar musicians who delight and swing with their original compositions. Founded by musical gedolim Rabbi Greg Wall and Frank London, ASA fuses klezmer, jazz, soul, secret agent tracks, funk and hipster sounds. With young talent Zach Mayer, (son of my friend Lisa Mayer, a klezmer queen herself) as well as grown-up greats Jordan Hirsch, Paul Shapiro, Mike Cohen, Jessica Lurie, Marty Fogel, Rob Henke, Pam Fleming, Ben Williams, Art Baron, Aaron Alexander, Uri Sharlin, Fima Ephron and Yoshie Fruchter, they left me plotzing, kvelling, rocking, rolling and reeling.

Ayn Sof Arkestra presented a holistic, body-slamming, mind-bending trip last night to everyone who was lucky enough to be there. As a huge orange moon rose over the Hudson, I thought I discerned the silhouettes of angels hovering over the bandshell.

What Lies Beneath

2011-08-17T08:15:00.005-04:00

Well, one of the central mysteries of our summer has now been solved.

While approaching the bungalow upon his return from camp yesterday, Little Babe announced, "Nala is playing with an animal skull. So that's why she's basically been under the cabin all summer."

Stalking outdoors, I saw, indeed, that our pudgy little Pom was babysitting skeletal remains...with teeth. Some were attached, others had fallen onto the ground. Little Babe and his camp buddies looked on with mildly horrified gazes.

When I reached out my hand to retrieve my Little Pomette from beneath the bungalow, she growled at me...as she had done all summer when I sought to coax her out and into the sunshine.

Suddenly, everything was illuminated. But I wasn't really surprised. I knew there was some reason our little dog was drawn to sit in the dank underbelly of our summer shack, a task she had undertaken, a dedicated stewardship, a mission, a cause that helped shape her days, giving her a reason for being.

At Four in the Afternoon, After the Rain

2011-08-16T15:57:00.006-04:00

At four in the afternoon

After the rain

Comes the blessing of sweet summer wind

Rays of sun shimmying between branches

A solitary white chair declares the greenness of the grass;

It is a soundstage for the songs of innumerable birds

The nearby woods a velvet curtain

I sit on my summer porch

Eating two peaches and a plum

Their tart juice surprised my tongue

Words of praise dance on my lips

Morning Has Broken

2011-08-15T09:06:00.015-04:00

This is the last week of Rosmarins Day Camp. I'm pretty sure I discerned a heavy spirit draped around Little Babe as he diligently set off for his Monday morning staff meeting at 8:30...the final one of the season.

It's been an extraordinary summer for the Three Babes. My youngest had his first job -- Junior Counselor for 9-year-old boys. When he wasn't at camp, his time was filled with music and friends, romance and midnight swims, jam sessions, pizza and hamburgers. A week from today, he is scheduled to apply for his Learner's Permit at the Orange County DMV in nearby Goshen so that he can take driving lessons in the relative sanity of Monroe instead of Manhattan's stressful streets. We tease our older kids that their baby brother will be the first of the sibling group with a Driver's License. Big Babe, who favors European cities, has no use for cars and Middle Babe has a GC (Gentleman Caller) with his own wheels. (I know that sounds old-fashioned and sexist so let me add that she also has many female friends with cars. Besides, like Big Babe, she hardly ever finds herself anywhere without a great public transportation system.)

Middle Babe had her first post-college summer, complete with a full-time salaried position and all that goes with it -- lunch breaks, office mates, staff retreats, casual Fridays. I am proud and amazed that she, like her little brother, has a diligent work ethic. She also has a volunteer ethic. This Thursday, she is coordinating a fundraiser for Jewish Heart for Africa at an Upper East Side bar and I have volunteered to come early to help her set up, but mostly, I want to watch my little girl in action. Besides her GC, whom we all love dearly, she has many BFFs. Her summer was a jumble of sleepovers with friends and parties and weddings and weekend excursions.

And then there is my eldest, Big Babe, who turned 27 last week and whom I haven't seen since January. He, too, is thriving -- writing and traveling and doing his signature Borscht Belt comedy, leading tours of Jewish Berlin, working on a novel, hosting Shabbat and holiday meals, enjoying love of his own. Even with him so far away, I feel his presence in the midst of my bungalow summer. He is virtually here through the magic of Skype and our regular phone conversations.

Finally, HOBB and I shared some marital magic in the course of a project we jointly undertook, which provided proof of the very thing we are best at -- creative collaboration. After working feverishly on the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir for months, my husband felt that the project still needed much work and asked me to read/edit it/interact with it. Reticent for just a millisecond (a workaholic/selfish inner voice tried to tell me that my first priority was my own overwhelming writing projects) I delved into the project with tremendous curiosity and just a tad of trepidation tempered with the confidence that I possessed the alchemical ability to sharpen dull insights, shine dusty prose, focus nebulous narrative; in other words, transform his work-in-progress into a modern literary masterpiece.

The opportunity to interact with the first draft of HOBB's efforts proved thrilling. I was greatly honored to be granted access to this work. Completely absorbed, I felt like a seamstress, a plastic surgeon, a construction worker, an executioner. I cheered and berated him, I challenged and needled him, I struck out words that served as dead weight; I wrote in details and passages that seemed glaringly absent. The process took several weeks. It involved close reading, reacting, yelling, guffawing, cursing, congratulating, praising, gnashing my teeth, long walks, hour-long phone conversations, arguments and ultimately breakthroughs. I woke up early and stayed up late. My eyes blurred. I took to wearing the quaint/cool red reading glasses from Ricky's that I had bought on sale for my old age.

Pacing until the newly-edited pages were ready to be pounced on, HOBB was delighted, declaring the work reshaped in important ways, proclaiming that I forced positive change in his writing, pushed him past mediocrity, discovered truths hidden between the lines. We marveled, through the process, that we had discovered a new amity 28 years into our union, one which we had briefly tasted but which had never been so sustained and so strong.

Passion we have always had. My husband and I do not lack for crimson emotions, fur flying, words careening off walls, shouts, hugs, clashes, blood, sweat, tears, ecstasy and hysterical laughter.

But this was something new. This was passion that was focused and wholly positive. It did not exclude impassioned argument -- a hallmark of our relationship -- but the basis of the argument was conceptual...not personal. Nurturing not volatile.

This new form of friendship filled me with warmth and generosity of spirit. We both marveled at the magic that had overtaken us. We felt we were our highest selves, the best form of us ever. Truly BFF.

Now the manuscript has been rewritten and passed onto a posse of new readers including close friends and our own children. Comments are coming back. HOBB is feeling grateful but also overwhelmed, confused, sick of the project or at least the endless work.

At this moment, the role I need to play is clear to me. The selfish/workaholic voice inside me has not totally disappeared but I have a really strong set of lungs and can out-shout anyone, if necessary. The last time I felt so unambiguous about assuming a responsibility on behalf of someone else was when I first became a parent.

This analogy is apt because writing anything of worth is akin to giving birth.

The marital magic we gained during our collaboration still suffuses the summer. The way we fit together as creative collaborators still dazzles us. It is the thing I had foreseen when first we met, nearly 28 years ago. It was the carrot dangled before me, a glimmer of Eden, a wisp of a promise.

It was the promise of such a partnership that I pinned all my youthful dreams on, the hope that I might find in this man a journalistic yang to my literary yin, a stable center to my thirst for adventure. This was the bashert I believed in all along.

Oh, and in case you hadn't figured it out, the video at the top of this post features our pooches, Alfie and Nala. It was filmed in my bungalow bedroom early this the morning and captures their inimitable cuteness and chemistry, proving that bashert is hardly the exclusive domain of humans.

It Takes Two to Tango...or Does It?

2011-08-14T07:02:00.010-04:00

Alright, alright...

Seems that everybody and their uncle has been posting about HOBB's bold article in the recent NY Jewish Week which critiques the NY Times's coverage of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, detailing how the paper falsely framed the resulting anti-Jewish violence as an even-handed racial conflict.

So I guess it is time for me to opine about the piece as well, which I did tweet about and post to my Facebook wall on Thursday.

But in order to do so, I must forgo writing about the drama at Straub's Fitness on Friday morning when one woman decided to hog the elliptical machine in the Cardio Theatre for the entire duration of The King's Speech, nearly touching off a rumble with another woman, the mother of 5-year-old triplets who was almost in tears because her workout had been hijacked.

Which brings me to my mother, who was fond of aphorisms.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans!" she liked to say as part of her ongoing effort to force me to conform with her ideal of how I ought to act, speak, dress and think.

"It takes two to tango!" she would proclaim when one of us came to her complaining that the other provoked a fight.

Though it was a few years before I learned that the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and therefore, should never invoked as role models by Jews, I knew at a young age that this "two to tango" business was complete BS.

Any kid who has ever been bullied could tell you that.

Yet, in covering violent clashes, many newspapers persist in sustaining the "two to tango" trope, possibly because they don't want to give the appearance of bias or in pursuit of that impossible ideal -- fairness -- or commendably, owing to their commitment to objectivity.

As HOBB reports, the Times bungled the story behind the Crown Heights riots big time, spinning it as a conflict between blacks and Jews...when it fact it was open season on the local Jewish community by local blacks enraged by the tragic yet accidental death of a young black boy. That terrible and regrettable death led, in turn, to the vengeance murder of a rabbinical student visiting from Australia.

Wow. Writing that paragraph felt really uncomfortable because I had to keep inserting the word "black" as a modifier. I thought to use "African American" to mix things up but that would not be accurate as many of the residents of Crown Heights during that time were West Indian and Caribbean; indeed the parents of Gavin Cato, the 7-year-old who was killed were Guyanese immigrants.

Referring to Jews, however, I was able to vary my vocabulary by using both "Jew," "Jewish," and even "rabbinical."

Still, in its coverage of the Crown Heights riot, the Times adopted my mom's mantra: "It takes two to tango."

Twenty years ago, telling the truth about what was going on in Crown Heights would have entailed employing two highly uncomfortable stereotypes -- angry black people and victimized Jews.

Though it appears that the Times's error in framing the story as a "he said/she said" spat was motivated by editorial queasiness over portraying blacks as angry and violent, perhaps it was the nature of the second stereotype that really shaped the story.

As uncomfortable as it was to report on out-of-control black people, maybe the notion of Jews becoming the targets of racial hatred on the streets of New York City during the regime of its first black mayor was just too frightening for some Jewish editors at the Times, too creepily close to a trope that has a habit of recurring throughout history.

Twenty years after he shouted to his editor into a pay phone that the newspaper of record was getting the story wrong, my husband took it upon himself to set the record straight.

I was not on the streets of Crown Heights in August of 1991. But I was at Straub's Fitness this Friday morning and can report that in the case of the Elliptical Machine Almost-Rumble, one party was guilty of being a rude and inconsiderate machine hog, the other party robbed of her right to exercise during her one free hour a day as a busy mom of young triplets.

This is a trite comparison with a profound lesson. In the gym, as on the streets of a city, innocent people sometimes get kicked in the face in the course of something that is supposed to be a dance.

Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Out of this World

2011-08-11T08:23:00.005-04:00

Here's the view from the 12th row center from last night's wildly energetic/hallucinogenic show @ Lincoln Center Out of Doors.

On stage is the outrageously inventive composer and digital violinist Todd Reynolds with wackadoodle/completely out of his mind "singer/multi-instrumentalist provocateur" Sxip Shirey, beat box god Adam Matta and a chorus of young violinists plus a tuba guy whose name I do not know. Their set of sheer amazingness was followed by dreamy prose and music by Laurie Anderson who was joined at the end by Lou Reed. Anderson's performance had a social critique/seventies-fabulous quality to it, reminding me of just how cutting-edge she was...and still is.

For those who have not experienced the magic of Damrosch Park on a summer night for the FREE cultural cornucopia of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, teleport yourselves there ASAP!!! Indeed, following last night's magic, I am about to can my plans for tonight in Nyack (a great destination in its own right) and beg, cajole and otherwise convince my friend Pesha to meet me back @ Lincoln Center for tonight's performances.

A shout-out to my good friend and J School classmate Vivien for inviting me to join her and her kick-ass friends Sally and Marilyn last night. After the show, Viv and I walked from Lincoln Center to the Hummus Place on Amsterdam and then, all the way, all the way, all the way home to Morningside Heights.

Music. Wine. Falafel. Friendship. New York City on a summer night.

It doesn't get better than that.

Here's what's on for tonight:

The funk is on when award-winning choreographer David Dorfman and his troupe join the musicians of The Family Stone for the world premiere of a new work on August 11, Prophets of Funk (Concert Edition). With its hits “Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” the Family Stone was synonymous with soul and funk and was also one of the first major bands on the national scene integrated along race and gender lines. Inspired by their groove, David Dorfman Dance unveils a 3 concert edition of a full-company work. Featuring a live band performance, outrageous costumes, striking lighting and visual effects, and gorgeous dance, it’s a non-stop celebration, in Dorfman’s words of, “the funk and joy of everyday life.”

Debo Band, which shares the August 11 bill is a Boston-based, Ethio-groove collective led by Danny Mekonnen. The band’s unique instrumentation—including horns, strings and accordion—was inspired by the Golden Age of Ethiopian music in the late 1960s and early 70s, but its accomplished musicians are giving new voice to that sound. Joining Debo is Ethiopian traditional dance and music troupe, Fendika, amazing young Azmari artists led by one of Ethiopia’s leading dancers Melaku Belay. Belay, one of the most active artists and arts advocates on the Addis Ababa scene today, is an innovative and virtuoso interpreter of Eskiska a traditional Ethiopian “shoulder dance”. He appeared at Out of Doors in 2008 dancing with Gétatchèw Mèkurya and The Ex.

Look for me in the 12th row center.

Break-Fast of Champions

2011-08-10T01:38:00.018-04:00

Briefly, because HOBB really wants to go to sleep and the glare of the laptop acts like a searchlight in an otherwise-dark bungalow, here's what I did once Tisha B'Av ended at 8:35 p.m:

Ate (scrambled eggs, avocado, tomatoes, sharp cheddar cheese) and drank (lots of water and a strong cup of Oren's Beowulf Blend coffee w/organic half and half)
Hightailed it to Straub's Fitness @ 9:20 to run three miles on the elliptical machine while watching the first 36 minutes of Let Me In in the Cardio Theater...once again. (Actually I had only previously seen the first 30 minutes so I saw 6 scary new minutes!)
Drove to the ShopRite just up the hill and sashayed through the nearly empty store, singing aloud to the BeeGees songs they were playing, getting scared afresh by the middle-aged clerk with the black hair who looks like an escaped mental patient, wondering if I could really pull off a Flash Mob dance in the freezer section, and, oh yeah, buying stuff
Came home and ate the nectarines I bought at ShopRite while HOBB yelled at the customer service people at Netflix because we couldn't download the movie program from their site
Snuggled with HOBB on our creaky bungalow bed a short while later to watch The Resident on Netflix, probably the dumbest and most boring thriller I have ever seen (my choice, because HOBB was too burnt out to even think about making a movie selection)

Before I left Straub's I found out that they're showing The Bodyguard tomorrow -- which is actually later today -- so I've gotta sign off in order to get there @ 7 a.m. to get in my workout before a killer-diller work day in Manhattan followed by the FREE Laurie Anderson concert at Lincoln Center Out of Doors and a business meeting/karaoke at Soldier McGee's around 10 p.m.

And late, late, late at night -- which might technically be tomorrow morning -- HOBB gets to choose the Netflix movie, which we'll watch together on the non-creaky king-size bed of our apartment if I choose to stay in the city overnight, trading in one paradise for another.

Jerusalem, Viewed from the 9th of Av

2011-08-09T12:06:00.027-04:00

On Sunday afternoon, I sat by the waters of Walton Lake and explained Tisha B'Av to my friend Sam, an interfaith minister whose real name is Joanna and who was raised Catholic.

Tisha B'Av is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, I said. Unlike Yom Kippur -- which is not supposed to be a somber day -- Tisha B'Av is a day of mourning, commemorating many Jewish calamities, including the destruction of the first (586 BCE) and second (70 CE) Temples in Jerusalem, the murder of over 100,000 Jews in the city of Betar by the Romans in 132 CE, which signaled the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, I explained.

According to Jewish history, Tisha B'Av -- literally the 9th day of the month of Av -- has bad karma. As anyone who has attended a Jewish summer camp can attest, the commemoration of the day often includes a litany of other tragic national events as well as readings or study about the contemporary uber-calamity for the Jews -- the Shoah.

A 25-hour fast day, Tisha B'Av is synonymous with exile, dispersion, wandering, homelessness, the longing for Zion.

Fasting aside, I was telling Sam how much I love Tisha B'Av, love to sink deep into sorrow, love to read the haunting poetry of the Book of Lamentations -- Eicha -- written by the prophet Jeremiah.

I told her how having lived in Jerusalem as a child, the stories of the Jewish people, even those contained in the Five Books of Moses and the books of the Prophets were immediate to me, that the characters therein were my kin.

And then last night, for the first time in my life, I realized something else about my connection to Tisha B'Av.

We were sitting in the Beit Knesset, the prayer house, at Camp Ramah in Nyack, visitors at their Tisha B'Av program. We had already heard a moving reading of Eicha in a candle-lit room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Afterwards, we walked wordlessly outside with the staff of the camp to hear kinnot (dirges) sung by a choir of counselors while the word Yizkhor (remember) was lit aflame on a metal scaffold. When the fire burned out, we walked back to the Beit Knesset as young people formed a path, brandishing Israeli flags.

Inside the Beit Knesset there was more singing of mournful, beautiful melodies. An essay was read, a man with a distinctive Israeli accent began singing Naomi Shemer's classic "Jerusalem of Gold." A screen showed a 3-D depiction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And then, suddenly, there was footage from the Six Day War, film of Israeli soldiers fighting in the streets of Jerusalem.

My eyes filled with tears. On the screen was my Jerusalem, first encountered in that magical moment after the unlikely victory in 1967, the year before I arrived, the 7-year-old daughter of an American rabbi on sabbatical. The city that had been twice destroyed, and now, miraculously reclaimed was the one I first encountered. Watching the black and white film, I dwelled in recollection of that moment in history; it preceded the poisonous political pronouncements about the State of Israel or the rights of the Jews to the land or a state of their own or the misappropriation of the word "Nazi" to refer to the very people who were Nazism's primary target. It was a moment of pure celebration, of global goodwill towards the tiny country that successfully fended off an attack from its neighbors. That moment, that year in Israel following the '67 victory was one of unambiguous joy for the Jewish people. I interpreted it as a second significant sign that the world had emerged from darkness into light and what happened to Jews in the past would not happen anymore. The first was the establishment of Israel after the Shoah; it seemed to me akin to the rainbow after Noah's flood -- a sign of God's covenant and protection.

On Sunday afternoon, Sam listened to me speak about Tisha B'Av then pressed me to explain what the day meant to me. At first I was baffled, then frustrated, then annoyed. I had never sought to analyze my love of Tisha B'Av; indeed, it seemed pretty straightforward to me. Moreover, I was uncomfortable trying to extract a personal message from Tisha B'Av; it is a communal commemoration, as relevant to me as to any Jew in any place throughout time. Tisha B'Av is a link to the Jewish past. It is a moment to mourn without the complexity attached to consideration of Israel; it exists apart from discussions and debates and recognition of policies gone wrong or injustice or social problems in the Jewish state.

Isn't that enough?

Yet last night at Camp Ramah, I gained an insight, which is perhaps the explanation Sam was looking for all along. The lamentation over a Jerusalem Temple destroyed centuries ago evokes tangible grief in me not only because of my early encounter with the land of Israel but because of the particular moment our histories collided. Tisha B'Av is a living day of commemoration for me for I am an American Jew who first met Jerusalem in the heady aftermath of the Six Day War. Even with my feet planted in the soil of the 21st Century, the prophet Jeremiah's poetry surges through my veins, the destroyed Jerusalem Temple is my recent tragedy, the dispersed people are my family, I recall the bitter taste of recent exile. I access the sorrow of the day because I experienced its antithesis. Wondrous, I visited the newly-returned Western Wall, climbed Jerusalem's olive trees and and breathed in the dust of the Old City, walked her streets and walls and prayed in her holy tongue, understanding, for the first time, the meaning of the words. I am the child whose heart was pierced by the joyous present, but also the tragic past, who could never forget Jerusalem, who will forever see herself as a true daughter of Zion.

Birthday in Paris

2011-08-08T12:24:00.008-04:00

At 7:33 in the morning, while walking around Goose Pond in downtown Monroe, I called Big Babe to wish him a Happy Birthday.

Twenty-seven years ago, after a troubled pregnancy that never went to term, my first-born child came hurtling into the world, hastening an event that I was hardly prepared for.

I was 23 and newly-married, a contradictory creature -- a young sophisticate/rebel/intellectual/tomboy/Lolita/troublemaker/spy/writer-at-large/abandoned child wanting to be saved. Having a kid was not the last thing on my mind; it was the very thing I was certain would never happen to me.

Yet love, marriage and a baby carriage came upon me in terrifying speed. So fast that it seemed the baby was about to be lost.

But my tiny son proved resilient, with powerful lungs and a feisty spirit. His Apgar score of 9 made me as proud as if he had aced the SATs. Within milliseconds of making his acquaintance, I fell utterly and heedlessly in love with the uninvited, underweight child placed perfunctorily on my chest before being whisked off to the newborn ICU. "Hello, Adam," I murmured, kissing the top of his head.

The thing I thought would signify the death of my youth offered, instead, the most profound spiritual and creative rebirth, the truest reason for being. The wound in my adopted-child soul was healed. I knew myself to be deeply blessed.

My little premie is in Paris today. Last night he sent me an email detailing the magic of his trip, the multiple ways in which his life intersected with the plot of the improbable yet charming Woody Allen film he just saw, Midnight in Paris, which finally made it across the pond. This morning, we spoke briefly as he was going into the Centre Pompidou. I was awash in love and longing...for Paris in the summer, yes, but mostly for my son.

Hanging up, a thousand memories came flooding over me -- the tiny infant, the curly-haired cherub, the chubby grade schooler, the cerebral teen, the young adult with whom I traveled to museums and European cities alike. We have shared a myriad movies, shows, afternoon trips to parks and zoos, adventures good and bad, illnesses, arguments, school performances, graduations, opinions, operas; all the mess and marvelousness of life.

Passing the morning walkers around Goose Pond, I was nearly consumed with pain over the passage of time, the sudden need to see my son, to hold him, to revisit everything that was, to immerse myself in remembrance of things past and moments sweet and forever gone.

But to exist in that place is maudlin and maddening. There is the matter of the here and now, the work requiring my attention, the matter of living, the task of turning pages, stepping forward into the future. I have always been bad at this even as I crave newness and beginnings. Secretly, I am sentimental, something I share with my firstborn.

And so, with great reluctance, I shook off the cloak of nostalgia and climbed out of my mental attic, replacing musty albums on shelves, returning to the Monday morning of a 50-year-old Manhattanite ambling around a pond in downtown Monroe, New York, foothill of the Catskills, repository of memories.

Black Cherries

2011-08-07T22:16:00.005-04:00

It is after the deluge.

Crickets and cicadas chirp in the sweet night air outside my bungalow.

A two-thirds moon hangs pendulous in the cloud-spotted sky.

Tired pups rest on the kitchen floor.

A teenage boy -- my youngest -- plays guitar in the back room.

I sit on the screened porch facing the night forest, eating black cherries, my fingers sticky, remembering my Grandma Blanche, who loved black cherries, too.

The Forty-Five Minute Movie Club

2011-08-02T17:43:00.030-04:00

B est in Show, the hilarious 2000 mockumentary directed by Christopher Guest that parodies the world of competitive dog shows, has always been one of my fave films... even in my B.C. (before canines) days, before I really knew how crazy dog owners could be.

I've probably seen it more than ten times -- in movie theaters, on TMC on Sunday afternoons at the JCC gym, aboard planes, in hotel rooms, on DVD -- never tiring of the razor-edged spoofery, kooky subplots and the spot-on performances from Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Michael McKean and Christopher G. himself.

The movie is so beloved to me that, in about ten minutes, I'll be dashing out of the bungalow and driving to Goshen so I can relive the hilarity...while also burning hundreds of calories, sweating like a beast, building my abs, glutes, quads, biceps and triceps and keeping my heart rate elevated.

Where can such an awesome experience be had?

At the Cardio Theater at my summer gym, Straub's Fitness -- a darkened room with ellipticals and stationary bikes instead of seats, a wide movie screen and extreme air conditioning -- the perfect fusion of culture, comfort and calisthenics.

The Cardio Theater at Straub's offers one film per day (which they replay over and over) ranging from the highly acclaimed to the inexplicable. Over the past ten days I saw Blue Velvet; Let Me In; Pulp Fiction and The Fighter...as well as a few other flicks whose names I cannot recall.

Oh wait. I did see something inane called My Fellow Americans. It had something to do with presidents and had an all-star, if elderly, cast. And then there was that clunky movie with Drew Barrymore where she plays a pregnant unmarried girl whose married lover is killed by her new boyfriend played by Owen Wilson. And then there was the one with Ben Kingsley where he plays a psychic psycho who kills people in really sick ways, carving out their eyes or something... I'm not sure because I was only semi-watching.

Yet, the sheer awfulness of these movies make them perfect for the Cardio Theater experience because they mildly entertain, or at least distract me from my exertion and then I have no problem walking away for I harbor no curiosity about the outcome of the plot nor the fate of the characters. It's kinda like a Zipless you-know-what.

Within the context of the Cardio Theater, awful is an asset because it enables me to adhere to my 45 minute cardio routine and then move onto other parts of my workout. In fact, when a movie is truly great, it is painful to leave just when the plot starts thickening. In the case of the quirky and creative Aussie flick Muriel's Wedding, I was so bereft to leave prematurely that I talked friends into renting it later that week so I could find out what happens.

Since Memorial Day weekend, I have seen the first 45 minutes of over 20 movies. Sometimes, my stay at the Cardio Theater is abbreviated because of prior plans (such as last night, where my limited time actually saved me as Let Me In got seriously gruesome around the 27 minute mark) and once or twice a summer I will actually stay for the ENTIRE film.

When this happens, I am left to bathe in the warm afterglow of holistic fulfillment. And wonderment. In a world where so much is wrong, I simply cannot believe that something as amazing as the Cardio Theater exists.

The Cardio Theater offers guilt-free (and FREE!!!) movie-going...any time I want (that is, between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. five days a week and 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekends...not bad). But the absolute greatest (and most mysterious...to my mind) aspect of the Cardio Theater is that it is the least popular feature at Straub's Fitness, meaning that it is completely underutilized, meaning that it is VIRTUALLY FREAKING EMPTY whenever I arrive!!!!

This means that I not only get the absolute BEST "seat" in the house, smack-dab in the middle of the room, but I score the best machine (the Precor elliptical with the yellow handles) AND THE TRAINER GRACIOUSLY STARTS THE MOVIE FOR ME AT THE BEGINNING AND I get to yap on my cell phone if I want because no one else is in the room with me so I don't become that jerk talking on the cell phone during the movie. I can also text with impunity, unconcerned that I am causing other movie-goers to squint at the glare from my LCD.

This, dear reader, is Bungalow Babe's definition of Nirvana.

Well, I've gotta get to Goshen because I intend to watch an entire movie tonight at the Cardio Theater and it'll take me about 15 minutes to get to the gym. But don't admire my devotion. I'm not being virtuous by planning to exercise for 90 minutes straight. This is sheer indulgence.

And oh, there is a Straub's much closer to me than the Goshen location. My local Straub's is about 5 minutes away, in downtown Monroe, but the movie they are showing today is The Name of the Rose. I saw that on a plane.

I recall that it kinda sucked.

Which would make it absolutely perfect for a 45 minute viewing at the Cardio Theatre if only Best in Show wasn't playing in Goshen.

UPDATE: 10:09 p.m.

I am back in the bungalow, sweaty but happy. Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians can hardly believe their good fortune; their mistress is a human salt stick. They are licking my legs and feet. Now, they have jumped up on the bed and are licking my arms.

When I left the bungalow, I realized that I really didn't want to travel to Goshen because I had driven there earlier in the day with Little Babe to apply for his Learner's Permit at the county DMV. And just before my Goshen run, I had done a round-trip to Manhattan in order to teach a morning class on the Upper West Side. So, with a sigh and a shrug, I turned left off of Route 17M into the parking lot of the Straub's in downtown Monroe.

After all, I can see Best in Show whenever I want. Perhaps on my laptop. I think I even saw it for sale at Shoprite.

Entering the luxuriously empty Cardio Theater, I plunked my bag down, claimed the best machine, took out my BlackBerry and put it on the monitor, removed my tank top and baseball hat and spent 48 minutes running in my sports bra and shorts to one of the most entertainingly bad films ever made: The Name of the Rose.

Alone in the dark room, I screeched with laughter, groaned, snorted, hooted, heckled, conducted a phone conversation, talked back to the screen and generally had a blast. I hardly know what to praise first: the cliched dialogue, the ominous music, the hideous monks, the requisite hunchback, the grotesque murders, the hint of Satan, the creepy castle, the semi-hot nude sex scene featuring a young Christian Slater or Sean Connery as the world's most implausible celibate. Four miles later, I was in a state of ecstasy. And because the movie sucked so badly, it was easy to leave in order to finish my workout in the weight room where I was so inspired that I found myself doing extra reps, which I haven't done in, oh, years.

It was a night to remember at Straub's Cardio Theater.

The Macbethification of America

2011-07-28T09:52:00.007-04:00

I've been thinking about some of my favorite recent works of fiction and was surprised, but not really, when I realized that many of them presented a dystopian or simply bleak vision of life in the near-future of the United States of America.

I include in this group Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and my absolute top of the list fave -- Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

The idea of America going down the tubes -- socially, politically, economically and spiritually -- resounds for me because it is exactly what I believe is happening.

America's economic melt-down is obvious and ubiquitous. With the sore-loserism exhibited by a large faction of the Republican party after Barack Obama's election a new phase in the history of our nation was ushered in, characterized by a shocking lack of civil discourse, insane accusations and, most scarily, the subversion of reality.

The force promoting these behaviors with great zeal is, of course, the so-called Tea Party.

Generally, I try to tune them out because I find the Tea Party spokespeople unspeakably stupid AND shockingly arrogant, a lethal combination. When I am feeling less charitable, I entertain fantasies of their imminent demise through a variety of means -- natural, extraterrestrial, man-made and otherwise.

Because I am so aggravated and unnerved by their disrespect of our president, I try not even to tune into the news but being a gym rat, it is hard to escape their talking heads on CNN and Fox News.

Though I tried valiantly to close my eyes and run to the music of "Stadium Arcadium" last night at the JCC fitness room, the huge television monitor over my head had a report on denials by leaders of the Tea Party that there is a debt crisis currently underway in the US.

While most sane American busy themselves with understanding the dimensions of this crisis, we have Sarah Palin, Herman Cain and others stating that Obama is exaggerating the problem and, in fact, there is not really a problem.

This one took my breath away.

It also put me in mind of the milieu of Macbeth, a world gone awry, a dimension where witches host the evening news, reminding us that we have entered a place where reality is subverted, where fair is foul and foul is fair.

This place also goes by another name.

America. Summer 2011.

I Kid You Not

2011-07-26T10:52:00.013-04:00

Another day, another revelation.

Instead of merely making a personal choice not to breed, there appears to be a cohesive Child-Free movement that seeks to justify the choice not to have kids...as if there was raging opposition to NOT HAVING KIDS, a concerted campaign that sought to force women to open their wombs.

I discovered this demimonde by following a Facebook conversation last week on Lilit Marcus's wall. Lilit is a young writer who has gone public about her decision not to have kids. She feels that having proclaimed herself Child-Free, she is up against a certain amount of prejudice, pressure or simply people who chuckle indulgently, convinced that she is making a premature proclamation and will change her mind in time. (She does appear to be pretty young, perhaps south of 30.)

Checking in throughout the day, I found myself fascinated/horrified by the hatred expressed by those who seem to be less of the Child-Free gang and more of the Anti-Kid society weighing in on Lilit's wall. Evidently, there is a hater branch of this movement consisting of people who actively dislike kids and the adults who have them. They hate the large strollers taking up sidewalk and bar space. They smirk at the smug dumbasses who breed.

Through private message, I shared my surprise with a FB friend of Lilit's whom I didn't personally know but whose incredulous comments I found gutsy. We agreed that something else might be going on for these people than a personal decision not to become parents; we compassionately opined that they might be among the walking wounded. This hunch was confirmed when I started Googling "child-free" and came upon websites hosted by people who seem less than liberated by their decision and more burdened by some heavy-duty emotional issues about becoming parents. Check out Happily Child-Free, which reads as anything but happy; indeed, there is overt hostility towards the act of parenting on that site. The most bizarre page is the one for people who are on the fence about having kids. It provides reasons why NOT to have kids.

Anyhoo...at the bottom of this post I've attached a really unenlightening clip from the Today show, on which Lilit appeared yesterday. Though she is articulate about her stated decision not to have kids, I will bet that more than one viewer might conclude that being Child-Free is not necessarily her final answer. This hunch is based not on the assumption that all women want to or must have children but Lilit's obvious youth. On the show, she says she would love to have a life-long partner, looks forward to marriage. I can't help it, but listening to Lilit -- who has a charming , child-like quality -- the ditty ran through my head, "first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage."

Of course, choosing to be Child-Free is a legitimate life choice. I am hard pressed to think of anyone I know (including my parents!!!) who would contest that. Therefore, what struck me as rather silly is the ridiculous teaser question posed by the show, "Is it wrong for women not to have children?"

Shooting kids at a summer camp in Norway is wrong. Kidnapping, murdering and dismembering a kid is wrong.

Not having kids?

I fail to see the moral dimension of this personal decision. But I do think it is wrong to have on a Today show segment an expert who states that being a parent is not a way of being but a role that people can choose not to play.

Correction. Being a parent is not merely a role. That's completely missing the point. Becoming a parent means entering into a lifelong relationship -- one of the deepest, most intense, most passionate, magnificent and sometimes difficult relationships in the entire world.

But then again, there is no way to understand that from the outside looking in.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's Electric! Boogie Woogie Woogie Woogie!!!

2011-07-25T16:21:00.005-04:00

A pretty crazy thing happened to me this morning in the bungalow.

After getting off of a phone call while fiddling around with wires to figure out why my internet connection had suddenly gone down, a cloud of pale brown smoke suddenly puffed out of my mouth, filling my nostrils with the smell of something burning while a metallic taste filled my mouth.

After which I got disoriented...which might have just been the result of being utterly freaked out by the sight, smell and taste of smoke coming out of my mouth.

As my mind frantically sought to diagnose the situation, my fingers dialed 911.

"I'm not crazy!" I hysterically sought to assure the operator. "But something in me seems to be burning. There is smoke coming out of my mouth! Could there be a fire inside of me??"

Wondering if my youngest son was going to return home to a pile of ashes and bone inside a pair of sneakers, I called HOBB and kept him on the phone while the ambulance arrived. The smell of burning was very pronounced where I was sitting so I went to another room in the bungalow but it remained. Then I stood outside and still smelled something burnt though it was raining outside. HOBB was trying to figure out what was going on with me.

In about 15 minutes, the ambulance came screaming down to the bungalow, by which time I was vacillating between panic, the fear that I might spontaneously combust (that could happen, couldn't it??) and the worry that I would look like a big idiot because nothing was actually the matter with me and I was making everything up.

After checking the bottoms of my feet and palms of my hands for burn marks (there were none) and hearing I had been fiddling with wires, the guys offered the opinion that I had received a mile electric shock and suggested that I go to the hospital to be further checked out. They were about to offer to take me when they got a call from the day camp across the road that a camper had a seizure.

I felt glad that they were able to be of service to someone more severely afflicted than me and rationalized that the true meaning of bringing them to my cabin was so they might help this girl. The bungalow colony owner, Scott, came down to check on me about half an hour later and told me that the burning smell in my nose was likely singed nose hairs. He also advised me to skip the ER visit, stating that I seemed okay to him. Not eager to spend my day traveling there and waiting to be seen, I took Scott's advice as I would my own doctor's.

It is now about six hours later. I still have the smell of burning something in my nostrils and a warm metallic sensation in my mouth. I feel somewhat disoriented, in fact, if I concentrate too much, my brain feels kind of...fried.

After Scott left, I had my drum lesson with Jeff, my fifth, probably my best one yet. I was able to drag really well and got the complicated jazz beat for the first time, the one I was unable to get last time, the one that requires four different motions from all four limbs. I worked on my rock beat, the one with the ghost notes, the one that works as well for "Californication" as it does for the majority of "Otherside." I practiced a couple of fills. I played a couple of RHCP songs perfectly in beat with the music.

As I played, I felt a new mastery and fluidity. I wondered if this was the result of practicing or whether the electric shock had rewired my brain circuitry, giving me enhanced musical abilities. Like some superhero animated by electricity, I closed my eyes and imagined myself newly possessed of super drummer abilities, jolted into greatness, She-Ra, Princess of Percussion.

Pup Meets Skunk

2011-07-24T02:37:00.003-04:00

Poor Alfie!

He was hiding under my bed at the bungalow when I arrived yesterday, recuperating from the harrowing experience he had the previous night -- his encounter with a skunk.

I knew about it, of course, as Little Babe texted me the previous night. Entering the cabin, I smelled something vile and pungent. The scent increased as I approached the bedroom.

Of course, it was the aftermath of Alfie's skunk-summit.

Poor little blonde Pomeranian! His fur was matted black and he reeked to the high heavens.

Two baths and one shower later, utilizing Palmolive and Pantene ProV alike, his fur is clean, and the skunky scent is subtle.

Now, he slumbers blissfully on the couch.

Tonight, will he relive the surprise assault in his dreams?

And if so, will he remember it in the morning?

Raccoons in the Trash

2011-07-20T02:35:00.012-04:00

I wasn't really sleeping so I can't claim that the raccoons rifling through my trash woke me up. Still, once I realized what the knocking sound was on the side of my cabin, I was jolted into complete wakefulness.

On my bed, Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians dozed happily, if noisily. Nala, possibly the world's pudgiest Pom, snores. Alfie sleeps as if dead -- silently and in one place -- and then, most adorably, he barks in his sleep. I like to imagine that he is having an adventure dream -- chasing a squirrel, an ice cream truck, saving someone's life by alerting the authorities, being rewarded by a belly rub and large steak.

In the back room, Little Babe and his friend Gabe slept. Finally. They have to be up early for their jobs as counselors at Rosmarins Day Camp. Tomorrow is 80's Dress-Up Day and they have to spend some time putting their outfits together in the morning. Their 7-hour camp day is followed by several hours of hanging out and, in Little Babe's case, music playing. And of course, cyber-socializing through Facebook and texts. Though Little Babe is my third child, I still cannot get over the new reality of adolescent communication, try to imagine what my teen years might have been like if I had access to a smartphone.

Around 10 pm, when I returned from the gym and supermarket, Little Babe commenced making hamburgers. On the counter next to him, his phone kept bleeping and buzzing but he was cool, unconcerned that he was missing the chance to respond ASAP. Believing that he was caught up in the faux-urgent ethos, I volunteered to text whomever it was that Judah was momentarily unable to respond to, worried that he was worried.

Yet my youngest shot me a strange look and returned to his task. He shaped and seasoned the burgers leisurely. When he did pick up the phone, after carefully washing his hands, he read me the dispatches, offering wry commentary, responding even as he read the next text coming in. They were from a girl I had met briefly earlier in the evening. It was a flirtatious exchange, with a quirky twist. The girl was portraying herself as the offspring of two over-protective, possibly psychotic parents, providing examples of the loopy lengths her parents have gone to ensure her safety. She was inventing a persona for herself through the medium of the SMS, something slightly outrageous but not beyond the bounds of credibility. In his responding texts, Little Babe drew her out, sometimes questioning her assertions, other times offering affirmation, steering clear of the acronymic crutches of SMS-speak.

Listening to the banter unfold in real time, I felt like a visitor from Colonial America. Though I actually text with regularity, I've never engaged in anything I might consider a meaningful exchange of ideas or emotions. Also, every time I have a prolonged text conversation, I think to myself, "wow, I'm having a prolonged text conversation."

That was hours ago. Little Babe has gone to bed with his private thoughts about the girl and a stomach full of hamburgers. I retreated to my bedroom to work, to catch up on the various scandals rocking the news world, glibly skipping through half a dozen websites and blogs. Hours passed. Finally, I turned out the light. Shortly thereafter, the raccoons began their rampage through my trash.

By now, the marauders have left, or at least, are quiet. There is the faint smell of skunk in the air. Though they unsettle me, these nighttime creatures have a right to be here, are an integral part of my bungalow summer. I pick up the Pamuk book bedside and ponder reading myself to sleep. But I am deep in thought, unable to lose myself in fiction.

It occurs to me that the nocturnal pests serve as a perfect metaphor for the wretchedness that coexists alongside the idyllic perfection of my personal paradise. In the middle of the night, I ponder the suffering I know about -- strictly secondhand -- and the suffering I may never even hear about. I think about the parents of Leiby Kletzky in their week of shiva, I think of Lauren Spierer's family lying awake at night, wondering where their child is, missing over a month ago from Indiana State University. I think about the Rand family of Manhattan who lost a teenage son in a swimming accident at Cornell University a few weeks ago. I think of Middle Babe's friend Caroline whose mother died of cancer last month. I think about my friend Judy whose 90 year old dad, a Holocaust survivor, just survived heart failure. I think about my own parents in their home in Great Neck, hoping they are comfortable and well. I think of the bereaved and the hungry and the lonely, the names and faces I know as well as those I don't. I think about the neglected and the abused. I think about victims and survivors of acts of God and mankind alike. And then I feel very tired, much as I imagine God does when contemplating the scope of human suffering.

Summer Report, Hastily Rendered

2011-07-19T14:53:00.015-04:00

I am typing quickly, before anything happens to take my focus away from the task at hand: blogging.

Or that is, completing a blog post.

And posting the damn thing.

You see, I have about 11 drafts for posts, composed over the past month. None were completed.

I am determined that this one will be.

So I am typing fast.

Forgive any typos that might occur.

The reason I have been unable to even finish a blog post is because this summer is freaking awesome.

Freaking. Awesome.

And busy. Insanely so until last week, possibly just as insane by tomorrow but for the past two days, there was time to breathe and most importantly, think.

I am not in Europe. I am not in the Hamptons. I am not anywhere near the Mediterranean. I am up at my beloved bungalow in the lower Catskills, have been here pretty much full time since the end of Little Babe's school one month ago, though we were spending weekends here since Memorial Day. I've been back and forth to our Manhattan apartment (the urban bungalow) and to meetings, parties, events and other happenings in the city, but am frankly trying to avoid doing so because of the shlep. And the weather. I've gotta go in tomorrow and already am strategizing how to stay cool, what to wear, how to avoid my hair frizzing up into a mushroom formation.

It is a hot, hot summer, in fact, I just took a shower break and am typing with wet hair, a fan blowing warm air on me. Did I say my hair was wet? It was. Briefly. It dried in under 2 minutes.

What makes this summer so freaking awesome? Being at the bungalow, of course, facing the woods while I work on my porch, waking up to greet the sweet new day right outside my window, walking Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians along a quiet country road, being in splendid isolation during work hours, getting crazy social the minute my work ends, returning to my porch at midnight to watch the moon high up in the sky, watching the shadows of my porch light dancing on the trees, stepping outside barefoot to feel the already dewy grass beneath my toes.

Our bungalow weekends are especially awesome. Shabbat is NIRVANA. Delicious dinners late on Friday morning on the porch of the bungalow, just the Bungalow Bunch. Walks early Saturday morning with HOBB along Gatehouse Road. Our havurah on Saturdays at noon when we gather to discuss Robert Alter's astonishing work, "The David Story," a guided reading of the David narrative in the biblical books Samuel l and ll. A pot luck lunch after the learning, including kiddush and hamotzi. A Scrabble game with HOBB, conversations with Little Babe and Middle Babe. Lazy afternoons at Walton Lake, a short walk for us through the woods. Nighttime movies, parties or comedy shows at the Rosmarins casino where classic Borscht Belt fare is served weekly. Sunday bike rides, visits to wineries, jam sessions with musician friends, drum lessons (for me!!!), books, newspapers, trashy magazines, visits from city folk, local culture, Shakespeare in the park, drive-in movies in Fair Oak, hours spent sweating at the local gym, fresh salads, ample sunshine, goblets of wine, blessings without end.

In absolute shock, I noted that I graduated from Columbia J School two months ago yesterday. It feels like a century has elapsed. It feels like it happened just last week. It feels like it happened to someone other than me. Seriously, who is that person who wrote an 11,000 word thesis and a 17,000 word book proposal, who read thousands of pages of articles and a dozen or so books, who hung out with people in their 20's, 30's and 40's over coffee, over wine, overnight??

Now, my days are full of writing assignments and consulting projects and I spent the month of June teaching ethical communications for clergy at a seminary in New York City. Thrillingly, I have been asked to return in the fall, when I will also begin a part time gig teaching spiritual autobiography to high school kids and managing a student paper.

By the fall, I'm also hoping to have completed work on two rather ambitious projects. More deets about these when the time comes.

And I have finally moved into the very place I wanted to be vis a vis my PR and marketing work, guiding one important work through its publication and advising on some other projects, all of which feed my soul, all of which put me in direct contact with great people.

There's my drumming, a brand new undertaking, just a month old. I'm already in love, amazed I never thought to do this sooner. The drum sticks feel natural in my hands. Playing percussion helps to make this summer freaking awesome. I had two lessons over the past two days and rented a rehearsal space this morning at a local music store where I banged away to my heart's delight to the songs of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I did "Otherside," "Dosed," "Dani California," and "Californication." That's me in the picture on top, jamming with my bungalow friends on Sunday afternoon. That's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight.

When I emerged from the studio earlier today, the store owner, Greg, told me I sounded good . I've been smiling ever since, imagining myself playing with the Peppers or as part of a girl group or even a Jewish wedding band. The presence of Little Babe, now 16 and a fabulous musician, helps to fuel my rocker dreams. In the city, we jam on Sunday mornings, me on keyboard, him on electric guitar or bass or cello. Little Babe is a junior counselor this summer at Rosmarins Day Camp. He's up at the bungalow with his good school buddy Gabe, known here as the Italian Stallion...which worries me just a tad. In the morning, before camp, Little Babe plugs in before he brushes his teeth and plays after camp, sometimes well past midnight. Recently, he reconnected with his summer-time childhood friend Chris over music, in fact, I came home from the gym last night to encounter an unrecognizable Chris sitting on our porch. Little Babe plays with my musician friends here on Sunday afternoons, more than holding his own. He's our homegrown superstar. Sharing a bungalow with him is awesomeness in itself.

Anyway, before I write one more word, I am going to press "Publish Post." I have to do this quickly because there is so much more I want to say, how my fitness club in the country has a room called the Cardio Theatre where they are showing "Pulp Fiction" today; how I am reading Orhan Pamuk's "Museum of Innocence," which I heard him read from two years ago at Humboldt University in Berlin. How I've done a couple of flash mob dances, how I'm planning a global musical flash mob event with a group of artist friends in the fall. How I've reconnected with dear old friends, how being 50 is pretty awesome in itself, a time to simply relax into oneself and then push oneself outside of one's comfort zone. It is also a time to step up one's humanitarianism, giving to people and causes who deserve it while pulling the plug on those who really don't.

Big thanks go to Middle Babe, my wise and beautiful daughter, for helping me articulate an understanding of this last point. It is rather profound, having to do with arriving at the realization that some of the people you considered friends don't actually care for you and no effort on your part will change that. Though this sounds depressing, it is actually liberating. Letting go of lousy friends enhances your sense of awesomeness.

There are so many more reasons why things are awesome but unless I post this now, the world won't know even some of them. Besides, the Cardio Theatre won't be playing "Pulp Fiction" all night.