Miss Piggy was honored with the Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s First Award Wednesday, joining a long list of powerful women like Sandra Day O’Connor, Toni Morrison and Anita Hill.

Despite being a puppet, Elizabeth Sackler, the founder-namesake of the awards told MSNBC that Piggy completely fit the bill: “We’re talking about tenacity, strength, intelligence, strategy, a sense of humor… She also believes that who you are is all you need to be and [to] really go for it.”

The award, according to the center website, is given to women “who are first in their fields” and was presented to Piggy by Gloria Steinem and Sackler at the Brooklyn Museum.

“She has spirit. She has determination. She has grit,” Sackler told USA Today. “She has inspired children to be who you are — and this squares very directly with feminism.”

While all of this mat be true, not everyone was super thrilled to see a Jim Henson “Muppet” walk away with the title apparently — particularly, one whose feminist values have been called into question many times before. MSNBC notes her leech-y relationship with Kermit, as well as a recent interview in which Piggy explicitly states that she is “not a feminist.”

Piggy addressed the naysayers, as well as her own backpedaling on the “f-word,” in her acceptance speech: “As of today, I am a feminist,” Piggy announced.

The post Feminism is for pigs too: Miss Piggy receives feminist award from Gloria Steinem appeared first on Salon.com.

In 1954, at the age of 16, my dad was living with my grandfather in the Bronx when he was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease, the preferred designation for leprosy. He was sent to Carville where he stayed under federal quarantine for nine years, until he was cured and discharged in 1963. Fifty-three years later, he was going back for the first time.

For my dad, our journey to Carville was a bittersweet homecoming. For me, it was both research trip and pilgrimage. I’d recently started writing my novel, “King of the Armadillos,” inspired by his experience, and he was helping me access material from the archives of the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Located on the grounds of the former institution, which is now partially occupied by the National Guard, the museum invited my dad to record his oral history, so we decided to go.

My husband stopped the car in front of a set of high, iron gates. A guard in military uniform directed us past a white plantation house with sweeping balconies and Corinthian columns, through an avenue of live oaks, old and gnarled, and draped with Spanish moss, to the infirmary. It had been converted into military conference accommodation where we were staying.

Founded in 1894 on the grounds of an abandoned sugar plantation, the 330 acres of the institution were well-manicured with neatly mown lawns, flowering bushes, ornate gardens, a lake, a golf course, and sprawling fields amid the Victorian-style dorms, covered walkways, and numerous amenities that made Carville look more like a prep school than a leprosarium. But just as it had been when my dad was there, all that beauty was surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

The post My father’s bittersweet homecoming: A family visit to the institution that treated him for leprosy appeared first on Salon.com.

“But I was doing good work, wasn’t I? Even Aaron said I had a good outline.” My voice went up an octave, squeaky in its terror.

The showrunner didn’t respond to me at first. Then, finally, he spoke. “You can take your stuff out of this office tonight. You can use my parking space if you want.”

His eyes weren’t even angry, just unemotional. My boss went back to his managerial duties. Perhaps he was going to look over an edit of Episode 108. Perhaps he was going to write the new season’s arc. I didn’t know. But my firing was just a quick part of his day, a checklist to finish before he moved on to other work. I took my “Empire Strikes Back” poster and some sundry supplies out of the office. My days as a professional screenwriter were done.

Driving home, my belongings in the backseat, I talked to myself. “There’s been tons of famous people who were fired, right?” I repeated, a desperate mantra. “Francis Ford Coppola. Didn’t he get fired from ‘The Godfather’? Or was it ‘Apocalypse Now’? Hmm. Spielberg. He got fired, too. What was his movie? ‘Jaws’? Can’t remember, but he definitely got fired from something.”

If somebody was watching me on the 405 Freeway, they would have seen a lone driver, sweating obscenely, mumbling to himself like a madman. People do indeed get fired in Hollywood every day; it’s not some world-altering event. But for me, on a high from my first television writing job, being fired so quickly plummeted me flat on my ass. Already the owner of an anxious and depressed nervous system, I was truly and devastatingly rocked. A wave of negative wouldn’t stop ricocheting in my head. “You’re a failure. You never had any talent in the first place. You didn’t deserve it. This is proof.”

A normal person might have been able to brush off the loss. But I had inherited my father’s depressed DNA, and like him, I couldn’t recover.

* * * 

The next day, I called my manager Paul, a kindly man in his late fifties, with frizzy hair and a gregarious manner. We met at a writing convention in Burbank a few years back. He liked a couple of my movie pitches and we developed a friendship, and from there, a working relationship.

“I need to talk to you, it’s important. Can we get together?” My voice on the phone was anxious.

He quickly agreed. My office belongings still packed up in my car, I drove to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. Paul and I sat across from each other, a bowl of matzo ball soup in front of each of us.

“I got fired yesterday.”

“I’m sorry, Kuang.” He looked at me kindly. “I could tell by the sound of your voice.”

“Thanks for being here.” I looked down at my matzo ball soup. It looked like a beached whale.

“It’s fine, buddy. This happens all the time. You write a new script, we get back right at it,” he said.

After that, we ate our food in mostly silence. As we left the deli, Paul handed me a ticket with a clown face on it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a stand-up comedy class. Comp ticket. I forgot to give it to you last time we met.”

“Um. Sure.” I shoved the ticket into my pocket, my shoulders slumped. Paul gave some more encouraging words about getting back to writing and a hug, and we parted ways.

The next morning, a dull dread enveloped me. I listened to a voicemail from my mother. “Kuang. Your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?” Talking to my Baba was the last thing I wanted to do. But I didn’t have a job to go to, and after wallowing in my own sweat for what seemed like hours, I pulled Paul’s crumbled comedy class ticket out of my jacket pocket.

I drove over to downtown Los Angeles’ Garment District, a neighborhood that wasn’t unsafe per se, but one I’d never visit if I didn’t have to. I looked up at my destination: a building with a bizarre extra-large clown head hung over its awning, with a sign, The Clown Palace, written in giant Comic Sans. My thoughts went into overdrive. This class, a gift from Paul, was supposed to just be a lark. I was supposed to squeeze this in between my Emmy Award party and a flight to Vancouver to oversee my season finale episode. It was supposed to be a cherry on top of my huge crest of success.

I walked inside a large studio filled with bizarre clown paraphernalia, and saw a group of aspiring stand-ups, old and young, of all races and body types, staring at a tallish man in cowboy boots standing beside a microphone stand on stage riser. That man turned to me.

“Kuammmggg right? Hey, have a seat!” A native Texan, the teacher, Cash, was a handsome man with craggy lines on his face, stamping down his shit-kicker boots onto the stained floor as he spoke. He looked at me with wide-open eyes, waiting for me to respond.

“Yeah. Kuang. That’s me,” I murmured.

“Sit over here. We’re clearing now.”

“Clearing?”

“Just sit, Kuanmmg.” He raised his voice, his hoarse Texas accent growing stronger. I went and sat in the back of the class, wary of the eyes of the other would-be comics surrounding me.

A bald middle-aged man stood up, “I’ve had sexual thoughts about my aunt. And my grandmother. And my kitten. All at the same time.” I squirmed in my seat.

One woman got up and simply shouted hoarsely into the mic for a minute, with no actual jokes. Or words. There were some funny folks who got up onstage, but Cash shouted out to them, “You don’t need to be funny! This is just clearing!”

For the next couple of hours, I got to understand what “clearing” was. It was getting onstage and just getting shit off of your chest. As the class cleared, I witnessed the greatest assortment of weirdos I’ve ever encountered. Hollywood burnouts, fringe folks, individuals with serious mental health problems. They were all here at the Clown Palace.

Then Cash himself went up to clear. He told us about how he self-destructed a promising comedy career to end up here, teaching comedy at the Clown Palace. “Here, I’m among my people, my fellow clowns.” Cash smiled wildly, pointing to the eerie jester statues and paintings throughout his studio. “There’s Jack, Devon, and Ulysses. They’re way better company than club promoters or industry people. They don’t talk!”

I wanted to get out of there. This wasn’t my tribe. I came from a good upbringing. I had Hollywood options. But here was the truth. Mental health struggles? Check. Hollywood reject? Check. Unemployed? Check.

“Kuannngggm? Do you want to go up and clear?” Cash again looked straight at me.

I looked away. “I’m sorry. No, I need to head home.”

He put up his hands, “It’s gonna be good for you, man, trust me.”

I grabbed my car keys and phone. “Sorry. Gotta go.” I rushed out of there. I quickly looked behind me, where the comedy weirdos watched me leave.

The next morning, my body and mind railed against me. I had nowhere to be, no real purpose. That realization expanded into an existential uselessness throughout the day. It only subsided in the late afternoon. The medication that my psychiatrist recommended? It wasn’t kicking in yet.

Glum, I listened to another voicemail from my mother. “You haven’t called in a few days. What’s going on?” I texted instead of calling her back. I wrote that I was fine. That it was just a work thing. She texted back immediately. “Did something happen with your job?” I ignored that text, but another one came quickly from her. “Kuang, your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?”

This wasn’t the first time my mother called on me on my father’s behalf. But that time, it was Baba’s depression she was concerned about, not mine.

* * * 

One evening, when I was a sophomore English major at UCLA, my mother called me at my dorm room, when I was about to go out to the apartment parties near campus. I was ready to drink cheap Keystone beer and meet girls.

“I think you need to come home for a few weeks”, she told me.

“Why?” I was looking out my dorm room window. The night beckoned. I could already hear the sounds of the Friday night partying, the tinkling laughter, the clinking of glasses. My friends had told me to meet them up at the party on the corner of Gayley and Westwood. Annie said she actually had some mushrooms tonight.

My mother’s voice knocked me out of my wishful thinking. “Your father’s having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Problems with his nao tze.” That was the Chinese word for brain. Looking back at it now, almost 25 years later, it’s significant that she didn’t actually say the word depression. That was typical of our family, and actually the entire Chinese culture: keeping a stoic face during a severe mental health crisis.

“Problems with his brain? Um. Can you give me a little more context?”

“Just come home. Tomorrow!” My mother’s brisk voice rattled into my landline phone. She had lost her patience with me. Click.

I came back home from UCLA, back to my suburban home in Agoura Hills to help take care of my father, because Baba’s depression (or problems with his nao tze), made him incapable of self-care. That was the first time I had heard of these words, this kind of mental health condition, and my mother tried her best not to talk about it while I was at home.

* * * 

After the Clown Palace encounter, I met with my own psychiatrist. Dr. Wong was a Chinese-American man in his sixties who rocked John Lennon glasses, his office featuring pretentious South American and African furniture.

“I got that particular piece in the early ’80s, during my travels to Brazil.” He swelled in pride while talking about his precious items.

Meanwhile, I was in a full-blown mental health crisis. “Can we talk about my situation, Dr. Wong?” I finally whispered, unable to continue our conversation about from which boutique art dealer he got his finely carved Brazilian table. At a steal.

He scratched his beard, looking at me as if I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. “How is the Lexapro doing?”

“Like I said, it hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“You still have the anxiety and depression symptoms?”

“Yeah. Dread in the morning. Anxiety and depression throughout the day. Sometimes I wonder if even worse when my parents try to help me — ”

“You can talk to your therapist about that.” Dr. Wong quickly cut me off. I guess that wasn’t his responsibility.

“Noted.” I tapped my foot, anxious.

“You should start feeling the medication soon. The anxiety and depression should level off shortly.” A pause, then Dr. Wong continued, “What are your plans after that?”

“What do you mean, what are my plans? Once I get through this, I’m going to stop taking the Lexapro and get back to my life.”

He looked at me again, a gaze that made me feel like I was a butterfly on a pin. “I’d advise staying on it.”

“Um. For how long?”

“You have depression in your family, your father in particular. I’d classify you as a depressive. It’s in your best interests to continue on the medication.”

“Forever?”

“If that’s the way you see it.”

“I’m not sure I want to do that.” I shifted in my seat.

“Like I said, you are a depressive. I’ll see you next time.”  He stared at his furniture, the signal for me to get the hell out. I was furious.

“You know, your furniture sucks. It’s pretentious and looks like a middle school kid could’ve carved it.”

I didn’t say that, of course, but I wish I had.

On the drive back to my apartment, I heard a voicemail from Cash. “Hey, Kuannnggmmm. I hope you come back for another class, buddy.” I suppressed the urge to click Delete and finished listening. I could hear the sound of cats, meowing in the background. He continued, “You should at least clear. It’ll be good for you.”

* * * 

The first few days I was back at home from college, I tried my best to help my mother. I’d go grocery shopping for her, and tried to help Baba with what he needed. He was prone to sleeping past noon in those days, the anti-depression drugs making him hazy, tired. One afternoon, while my mom was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready, I approached her.

“What happened to Baba that made him like this?”

She looked at me, blinked a couple of times. “When your Baba was teaching in Taiwan last semester, some burglars snuck into his University apartment and stole money.”

“Oh. Wow. How much?”

“About two thousand dollars.”

That was a lot of money, I thought, but it wasn’t that much money. How did he become a shadow of himself because of just two thousand dollars? He wasn’t physically hurt; he still had his family.

“That doesn’t seem to be enough to cause this to happen,” I said.

“It’s not just that. It’s something that’s physical. A disease of the mind.”

“Disease?”

“It’s part of our family. His mother. Your Nai Nai, she had this too. Depression.” There. She had finally said it. The word that she hid away from for so long. Depression. The word itself made me feel very uncomfortable. A sense of shame bubbled inside me. We didn’t talk about this subject in the family. Why was my mother talking so openly about it now?

“If you feel yourself going through this, Lexapro is the drug that worked for your Baba and your Nai Nai. He’s taking it now.”

“I’m not going to need it.”

“You should just have the information. It’s good for you to know.”

* * * 

My mother came over to my apartment after my visit to Dr. Wong. It started to rain, hard drops onto the Los Angeles cement. She brought over some food from Sam Woo restaurant, setting plates of hot noodles and duck on my kitchen table.

“Did you see your psychiatrist?”

“Yes, I did. His furniture sucks.”

“What?” My mother narrowed her eyebrows.

“Just a joke,” I said. “I’m taking the medicine he prescribed. The same one Baba took.”

My mother smiled slightly, then closed the lids of the takeout, placed them in my refrigerator and gently closed the door.

“How is Baba?” I asked.

“He’s fine. He’s worried about you.”

I pushed my plate away. “I think I’m going through what Baba did when I was in college.”

“I know.” My mother responded, her eyes kind.

Later that night, I got an email from my father, telling me he was thinking of me, just like my mother mentioned. He wrote that he hoped I felt better soon. He told me about the medication that was making his new depression go into remission. Then he quickly got back to telling me about his newest Physics textbook. “It’s my best yet.”

I turned off the computer and went over to my balcony, overlooking the starry Echo Park night. The rain had stopped, and the streets had a lovely glistening texture. Neighborhood folks strolled outside, ready for a night out at the local bars.

I thought of my father. I took solace in the fact that my father had this problem as well. I wasn’t alone. Perhaps I was wrong to keep it all bottled up.

“Thank you for the message,” I replied. “I appreciate it.”

* * * 

I went back to the Clown Palace. It was just Cash inside the studio that day. He was sitting on the stage, on a weathered stool.

“Hey Kuannggmm.”

“It’s Kuang.”

“Sorry about that.” His face became less exaggerated, more open. “What would you like to do today, buddy?”

“I want to work on some material.”

“That’s great. Do you want to do some clearing first? It looks like you have a lot on your mind.” Cash looked at me with empathy. It was a huge change from the cartoon comedian from last week. “You get on this stage, and it doesn’t have to be funny. You just get some shit off your chest.”

A pause from him. “I think you might need it.”

“You’re probably right.” I stepped on the stage and Cash took a seat. The stage was just a platform a few feet off the floor, but I felt high up on a ledge, as if I could fall down thousands of feet.

“I’ve been having some really bad thoughts lately.” The microphone made my voice expand, the volume filling the room.

“Talk to me, brother!” Adam hooted and hollered, as if I was Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden.

I spoke a little louder. “I had some suicidal thoughts, but I didn’t do anything about it. I guess I was never that good at follow-through.”

More barking laughter from Cash. He looked at me. But this wasn’t like Dr. Wong’s clinical look — this was supportive, generous.

“Which is weird,” I continued, “Because I’m Asian. We’re overachievers. I would’ve thought I would have gotten that right.”

“Better than us white hicks from Texas for sure!” More peanut gallery antics from Cash followed, but I was loving it. I was feeling heard.

“I’ve never really been that amazing at anything, if I’m being honest. I’ve always been an average Asian.”

More laughter from Cash. “The ‘Average Asian!’ I love it!”

That afternoon, we worked on some jokes. But really, we worked on my sanity.

* * * 

The journey back to feeling myself again wasn’t straightforward. It was full of twists and turns, from doing therapy to pushing my body to its limits with a marathon. But my self-healing began that day with Cash at the Clown Palace, with a commitment to being honest with myself.

This irony isn’t lost on me. Our Chinese culture is full of stoicism and saving face. Letting it all hang out on a grimy comedy stage was the furthest thing from that. When sadness and despair take hold, we often turn to shame and hide our emotions. This silence only worsens our mental state and deteriorates our self-worth. Although clearing was awkward, weird and sometimes not even very funny, it forced me to be truthful.

Just like my mother took a brave step and opened up about our family’s depression to me, I took her baton, and let it rip on the Clown Palace stage. And that made all the difference.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

The post Adventures at the Clown Palace: Stand-up comedy helped me confront my depression and cultural taboos appeared first on Salon.com.

“Fookin’ Mikey screwed us, Johnny. Said he had a .38, but it was bulls**t. Fookin’ single shot .22 anybody’d laugh at soon as stick up their hands.”

They were meeting up to plan another robbery that very night, Christmas Eve, less than a block away. Neither the robbery nor the timing made much sense, but making sense wasn’t on the menu for either Johnny Machine or Beansie, his friend since they were kids on Avenue C on the Lower East Side. It seemed like a long time ago they were sprinting down Eighth Street in the West Village, snatching purses, coming up behind tourist couples as they came out of bars at night, sticking a wooden dowel in the back of the guy like it was a gun, warning them not to turn around or they’d shoot ‘em, croaking gimme your fookin’ wallet in as deep a voice as they could muster, then taking off in their stolen sneakers down McDougal into the dark corners of Washington Square.

They had each been in Sing-Sing up the river the year before, Johnny at the end of a three-year stretch for, what else, robbery, Beansie finishing up five years for pistol-whipping a bartender near to death on Avenue B in ’62. Cops caught him a few blocks away on St. Marks Place in a joint where his girlfriend, Roberta, worked tables flashing her boobs and getting her butt pinched for tips. 

Beansie was short, round as a barrel, with a crew cut that looked like he barbered it himself, which he did standing at the sink in the kitchen of Roberta’s sixth-floor walk-up on Avenue C, a block from where he grew up on 11^th Street. It was a railroad tenement, three rooms, you walked into the kitchen and you could see into the living room in one direction, a bedroom the size of a horizontal phone booth in the other, toilet down the hall, window in the kitchen stuck open six inches, you got slammed with blast furnace heat from the airshaft in the summer, snow swirling down off the roof in the winter, misery in every breath, every corner of the dump tenement, but with forty dollar rent, who was complaining.

Johnny slept on a daybed in the front room the nights he didn’t score a hippie chick hanging out in Thompkins Square Park or a waitress in one of the coffee shops on 14^th Street where you could get coffee and an egg and two slices of toast for fifty cents. Women’s knees folded like a lawn chair for Johnny, somebody once said, watching him do his act in a corner booth one-night, dark, hooded eyes he got from his father who beat him Saturday nights after losing at the track and a mother he had to scrape out of junkie crash pads when he was still in grade school. Chicks love the wounded ones, he told guys he played poker with when they marveled at his prowess with the women.

Beansie said poker had Johnny by the balls. Johnny was always short of money. He was into loan sharks in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side, the Village, all over town when it came right down to it. Johnny and Beansie were what they called take-off artists. They had knocked over a bar in Chelsea two nights ago, but the owner had taken most of the cash out of the register when he went home an hour before closing and all they got was a couple hundred which didn’t cover the vig on even one of Johnny’s loans. So, a day later, they were in the 55 Bar gaming out how they were going to hit the Buffalo Roadhouse, half a block away down Seventh Avenue at the corner of Barrow.  The Roadhouse was a hip bar with a younger crowd. Johnny had had a thing with one of the waitresses who told him that the take on Christmas Eve would be enough to retire on, crowded with dudes flashing cash to impress their dates and look big. Champagne assholes, she called them. 

Gay bars had more money, but the mob owned the gay bars, so they were off limits. The Stonewall, next door to the 55 on Christopher, was owned by the Demartinos and raked in gazillions from Wall Street closet cases cruising the boys after work, but you didn’t take off joints owned by the mob.

“What are we gonna do, Johnny?  I tole’ you we shouldn’t have dumped those pieces.”

“I told you the rule, man. You don’t use the same piece twice.”

“We didn’t even shoot the fookin’ things, Johnny. Cops can’t trace them without a bullet.”

“Bad luck, Beansie. You know that better’n anybody. The place you put a gun after a job is the East River. That’s that.”

Beansie pointed to Johnny’s cup and raised two fingers. The bartender grabbed the pot, refilled Johnny, poured another cup, and topped off both with Jameson’s.

Johnny said, “You still got that shotgun we stole off that guy up at Bear Mountain?”

“What good’s a fookin’ shotgun gonna do us. You can’t walk around carrying a fookin’ shotgun on the street, man.”

“I got an idea,” Johnny said.

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An hour later, Johnny and Beansie were at the Salvation Army storefront south of Canal off Broadway, volunteering to be street Santas, ringing bells, quarters clanking into their tin buckets. 

As they walked out in their beards and red suits and Santa hats, Johnny ran down the scam. 

“It’s perfect,” he told Beansie.  “Nobody will recognize us in these beards, and we can carry the shotgun in a sack, you know, like it’s full of presents.  We walk in, pull out the shotgun, blow out the back bar, wave it around, tell the assholes to hand over their wallets.  The bartender will shit bricks, give us the whole take.”

“We’re gonna rob the Roadhouse wearing Santa suits.  You’re outta your fookin’ mind.”

“You got a better idea?”

Beansie pointed at Johnny’s nose. “What we gonna do ‘bout that beak of yours?  Anybody at that bar will be able to pick you out of a mugshot book.”

“We’ll glue a couple of clown balls on our noses. C’mon. I know where we can get ‘em. Magic shop on 27^th Street.”

“Fookin’ magic store?”

“Magicians, man. Losers workin’ kids birthday parties as clowns. They rent’em the whole outfit.”

*    *        *     

The storm hit in the late afternoon. When they headed south from Roberta’s apartment on Avenue C around 10,  there were two-foot drifts against the side of stoops. The snow was blowing sideways so hard, when they reached 9^th Street, they couldn’t see Thompkins Square Park at the end of the block. On the corner of East 4^th Street, the all-night fried chicken joint was empty, and the counter man was sitting at one of the tables reading a copy of the News. 

Johnny pulled his Santa hat down over his ears as they turned west on East 3rd, leaning into the wind. Beansie was walking behind him trying to stay out of the wind, complaining with every step. The gates were down and the lights were off in Slugs Saloon when they walked past. By the time they reached the Bowery, the snow was a foot deep on the sidewalk. They hadn’t passed a single person the whole way.

At LaGuardia Place, a cop car pulled alongside. The driver’s window rolled down. “What are you two doing out so late?” the cop asked. 

“Headed home, officer,” said Johnny. His feet were freezing, and his Santa beard was caked with snow. 

“You want a ride?  It’s fuckin’ freezing out there.”

“Thank you, sir, but we just got a couple more blocks.”

Beansie was clapping his hands together, trying to keep the blood flowing.

“What you got in the sack?” the cop asked.

“Presents, sir,” answered Beansie. 

The cop shot him a look, shook his head as he rolled up the window and drove on.

As they reached the corner of Sullivan Street and turned uptown, a door opened. A thick figure in a bathrobe grabbed Johnny by the arm. Beansie skidded to a stop. Everyone knew who the man in the bathrobe was:  Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the biggest bookie and loan shark in the West Village. 

Gigante took the cigar out of his mouth and dragged Johnny inside, signaling Beansie to follow. He did. The room was dimly lit, with an espresso machine and several small tables where men in suits sat with tiny cups and saucers before them.

“Fuckin’ mook.” Gigante pulled the red ball from Johnny’s nose. “You owe me two fuckin’ grand, Machine, you loser.  I’m guessing you don’t have it on you.”

“You’re right, Chin,” said Johnny. His face broke into a smile. “But I know where I can get it.”

The post Jingle bells, shotgun shells: The stick up on Christmas Eve appeared first on Salon.com.

The restaurant calls it a “hand-cut rock” (oh brother) and customers will only be charged when they order a drink that doesn’t usually come with ice.

Washington City Paper reports:

The Pennsylvania-themed spot, which is set to open in the former Mighty Pint space at 1831 M St. NW on Oct. 21, will be the first place in D.C. with an ice surcharge listed on its cocktail menu. (Most bars eat the cost or build it into the price of the drink.) Granted, these are no freezer-burned, generic tray cubes. This is the fancy, unclouded artisanal stuff from D.C.’s boutique ice company Favourite Ice, founded by local bartenders Owen Thomson and Joseph Ambrose. Second State bartenders will chip off the eight corners for a more spherical shape that sits in the glass like an iceberg.

“It’s worth it,” said bar manager Phil Clark in an interview with Washington City Paper. “When it goes into a cocktail, it’s crystal clear. It’s purified water, so there’s no minerally taste.”

Allow me to quote a commenter from the original WCP post: “F*ck this times infinity.”

The post Restaurant to charge for “artisanal” ice cubes appeared first on Salon.com.

Jeff and I generally live together in the kind of harmony the Beach Boys would envy, but when it comes to travel the dissonance is ear-splitting. I like to be at the airport hours early, he minutes before the flight attendant slams the cabin door shut. I pack minimally and methodically while Jeff’s philosophy is “If I think I might need it, I’m bringing it.” As I watched Jeff count out two weeks’ worth of underwear, I willed myself not to say anything. Divorce is a terrible way to start our first long trip together.

Long before I started packing, I knew this trip would be very different from the last time I’d visited Southeast Asia almost two decades before. Back then, I traveled a lot. After college, I backpacked around the world for months — occasionally years — at a time. My identity seemed forged by the stamps I collected in my well-worn passport. The boy who’d eventually become my first husband and I would buy cheap tickets, strap on rucksacks containing two changes of clothes, a few extra sets of underwear and a toothbrush, and see the world while staying in hostels or huts without electricity. We hitchhiked through New Zealand, bounced along Indonesian roads in crowded buses jammed next to chickens and rice sacks, glided by outrigger through the Sulu Sea in the Philippines and by freighter through the rough South Pacific in the Cook Islands. We were determined to not only see the world, but to sense it fully, too — to smell, hear, taste and touch it. If there was a border, we needed to cross it.

When that relationship ended after 18 years, so did my travel. Like household goods divvied up in the divorce, I got the stainless steel cutlery and he got the plane tickets. But at the time, I didn’t mind that it wasn’t a part of my life anymore. I told myself it was time I tucked away travel and grew up. I had a daughter to take care of as a single mom with sole custody, so at the time I moved on by not moving and was happy staying where I was, content on our own in Brooklyn. But when a year later I began to feel slightly less content on my own, I decided to try to meet someone.

I met Jeff on my first date in almost 20 years. From the beginning, it felt natural and mature in ways that my marriage never approached. We talked things out; we made decisions together, and much later, when I told Jeff I wanted to try my hand at writing, instead of laughing as my husband had, Jeff offered to take on extra work so I could make a go of it without worrying about where the next meal might come from.

Everything about the relationship was thrilling, not only for me but also for my daughter whom he doted on as if she were his own. All I’d read about relationships led me to be wary, though. If ours was this easy, it couldn’t possibly be real. Instead, I was sure it was like the Nigerian email that occasionally made it past my spam folder, messages with a polite greeting that promised a long lost fortune: highly suspect and too good to be true. But after a couple of years, we married and bought a house out in the country in upstate New York.

Although Jeff had traveled some in the past — he’d lived on a kibbutz for a year after high school and backpacked through Europe after college — it didn’t define him in the way it had for me. We took short trips on vacations and enjoyed them, despite some small philosophical travel differences. Jeff worked hard and saw vacations as a way to relax, while I was generally in explorer mode.

Over the years, I convinced myself that I didn’t miss traveling, yet I found myself frequently reading books set in faraway countries. When friends and family posted vacation photos on Facebook, I’d tell myself living vicariously through them was all I needed. I’d say place names out loud — Vientiane or Botswana — to taste them in my mouth. But, like a dieter who tells herself a picture of chocolate cake is just as satisfying as the real thing, they were tasteless and empty. I’d persuaded myself this was enough. Sometimes it’s easier to talk yourself into believing something rather than wading through psychic muck to find out what really makes you happy because the truth can be frightening. Did I need more out of life than I was getting? Namely to be back on the road again, so to speak. “Don’t go there,” I told myself. I didn’t and so I allowed that part of me to get lost. I didn’t even realize it was missing. I stashed away what I thought of as my old life in a box in the far corner of my subconscious.

Travel became something from my youth, like wearing a bikini confidently or meeting friends for drinks at 10 p.m. — an activity I used to enjoy, but had grown out of.

But I couldn’t keep that restlessness locked away forever. After a couple of years in upstate New York, we traded our house on a dirt road for an urban bungalow in Portland, Oregon. One day I was in the city’s great landmark, Powell’s bookstore, and found myself in the travel section. I pulled a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia off the shelf and flipped through the pages, entranced by the photos of Angkor Watt and saffron-robed monks. With that, I realize now, I wasn’t just opening a guidebook — I was reopening that part of myself that had been as closed and musty as a guide to Mandalay. I could feel myself transforming from content middle-aged woman back to Traveler Sue — every cell vibrating, needing, to pack a bag and go. The prospect was as electrifying as it was frightening. Jeff had work deadlines. Would he be as excited as I was? What if he wasn’t? Would this expose some kind of hairline fracture in our relationship? Now that I’d suddenly rediscovered my long-lost love, what would happen if my present love didn’t want the same thing?

As I flipped through another guidebook, I could feel my cautious outer layer peel away. Maybe we could make it happen. It was one of those fork-in-the road moments. I could have put the book back on the shelf and headed off to the fiction section, but instead I bought the guidebook and a couple more.

When I got home, I checked to see how many credit card points I had. Twenty years’ worth, it turned out. I’d been saving them for something, but I hadn’t known what. I checked to see if they’d cover airplane tickets for Jeff and me. They would. The next thing was to check with Jeff. I burst into Jeff’s office, guidebooks behind my back.

“What do you think about going to Cambodia?” I asked.

Jeff blinked in surprise, thought about it for second and instead of balking, quietly suggested, “Why not Vietnam, too?” He had marched in antiwar protests while in his teens and said that he’d always wanted to visit the country — just not in 1972.

Why didn’t I suggest traveling sooner?

But an issue quickly loomed nearly as large as the mountain of underwear Jeff was cramming into his luggage. I was determined to travel the same way I had years before. Although I wasn’t married to my ex, I was wedded to our way of budget travel. Jeff had his own ideas and, when I’d told him about 12-hour bus trips and thatched huts with cold water, he looked at me with horror.

“We’re not going to travel like you did in your 20s, with a toothbrush and change of clothes,” he said, stuffing his Kindle and iPad next to the stack of underwear.

“I had two changes of clothes,” I said, keeping facts straight and my mouth shut about his ever-expanding backpack.

“But why would you even want to travel like that now?” Jeff asked, reasonably. “We could afford a bit more comfort. What are you trying to prove anyway?”

It was a good question. Was I grasping at a bit of my youth? Suffering from middle-aged rigidity? Or was I merely cheap?

I mulled on this while we packed and as a few weeks later we argued about how to get to Siem Reap.

“Let’s take the bus — it’s inexpensive,” I said, sipping passionfruit juice at a Phnom Penh cafe.

“But they take 12 hours because of all the roadwork. A taxi’s only a little bit more and a lot more comfortable,” Jeff countered.

It was actually three times as much as the bus. But, I pondered, it was still less than we spent on date night at our neighborhood Thai place. Feeling my rigidity flex, I agreed to take a taxi. On the trip, our driver stopped at a roadside market, one with vendors selling local fried delicacies: crickets, grubs and, my favorite, barbecued tarantulas, which, to Jeff’s alarm, I bought a bag of to snack on during the ride. It turned out that paying a bit extra was the perfect compromise: something for my earlier, adventurous self to sample, and comfort to stretch out our creaky middle-aged legs for Jeff.

So I traveled light and Jeff traveled heavy. But I discovered those chargers he’d packed came in handy and that I enjoyed having 10 books on my new Kindle. Although I couldn’t convince him to take a bite of an arachnid, there was a point early in the trip when he casually said that maybe he didn’t need the four pairs of pants and two dozen pairs of underwear. We both had our little victories.

But the trip was more than little triumphs. On the first day of our trip in Ho Chi Minh City, Jeff and I clung to each other and stepped into the river of nonstop traffic that is a Saigon intersection. While completely and utterly terrified at the prospect of crossing the street against traffic coming from six different directions at one time with what appeared to be a total disregard for the rights of pedestrians, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t for years, even if my death was imminent. We kept going until we made it safely to the other side. As I turned and looked to see where we came from, I couldn’t wait to cross back again.

When planning a family getaway to Southeast Asia, a great tip is to pre-book accommodation at properties known for welcoming travelers. For a 5 star hotel Bangkok experience, you have several options, including another popular hotel in Bangkok or a convenient Don Muang airport hotel. For a beach holiday, consider coastal favorites like a Pattaya beach hotel or a North Pattaya hotel, and this Hua Hin resort.

The southern islands are especially popular, with properties like the Phuket resort hotel, a modern Phuket hotel, a Chaweng beach resort, a Koh Samui hotel, and a boutique Krabi beach resort. For a unique trip, you could even explore inland destinations with a stay at a hotel in Buriram. This ease of travel extends to neighboring countries as well. In Malaysia, you can find an excellent Kuala Lumpur hotel, a Johor Bahru hotel, a hotel in Penang, or a George Town Penang hotel. For those seeking an adventure in Laos, a Vientiane hotel or a hotel in Vang Vieng offers a comfortable starting point for exploration.

The post I thought travel was a thing of my past appeared first on Salon.com.

The bill, which will allow state employees to refuse issuing same-sex-marriage licenses, comes a week after lawmakers approved a draft, stating that the law protects those who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and genders are unchangeable.

Privately held businesses would be able to selectively service people who align with their religious beliefs and although the government will still be required to provide services, individuals will not be sanctioned for opting out, avoiding cases like Kim Davis.

House Bill 1523 has received strong criticism from gay-rights groups, who say it enables discrimination.

“This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” wrote the Republican governor in a statement on Twitter.

Supporters of the bill claim that it protects the rights of people who oppose homosexuality yet live in a country where same-sex marriage is legal.

“This bill does not limit any constitutionally protected rights or actions of any citizen of this state under federal or state laws,” Bryant said. “It does not attempt to challenge federal laws, even those which are in conflict with the Mississippi Constitution, as the Legislature recognizes the prominence of federal law in such limited circumstances.”

North Carolina has also enacted a similar law, while Georgia and South Dakota are in talks of proposals.

“This bill flies in the face of the basic American principles of fairness, justice and equality and will not protect anyone’s religious liberty,” Jennifer Riley-Collins, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, said in a statement. “Far from protecting anyone from ‘government discrimination’ as the bill claims, it is an attack on the citizens of our state, and it will serve as the Magnolia State’s badge of shame.”

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On Tuesday, the “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” reality star, stripper, sex tape performer and New York Times bestselling author sent out a photo of herself on social media with the message “Gotta love my new look.” In it, she’s ponytailed and in profile – and shown next to a picture of “Futurama’s” Leela. The resemblance, thanks to a horribly botched exercise in lip plumping, is uncanny. Other photos show the extent of damage from the procedure, which she reportedly believes was an allergic reaction to the anesthetic – an upper lip grotesquely swollen, a face now utterly out of proportion. She writes, “Girlfriends don’t say I didn’t warn ya! #BOTCHED California #ER #fixit.”

It surely takes a fair degree of self-absorption to go ahead and post a bunch of selfies when one is looking so completely out of whack – a little like the gross trend of “Look at my disgusting wound!” selfies – and Abraham’s entire career is certainly dotted with ill-advised attention-getting moves. She’s been more than open in the past about her other procedures, including a nose job, chin implant and two breast augmentations. But there’s also something weirdly likeable about a woman who’s willing to share the ridiculous, humblingly awful results of an attempt to look better.

Cosmetic enhancement is a simple fact of the lives of plenty of people in the public eye – not just TV stars but athletes and politicians as well — but their transformations usually come with implausible denials and insistences that they’re just very well rested. When a star appears looking suddenly and dramatically different, the expectation is generally that it is not to be commented on. (For this and many other reasons, we miss you and your candor, Joan Rivers.) But the blatantly extreme measures that some people will go to has created its own little side industry – the lurid, “OMG what did she do to herself?” industrial gossip complex. Our culture constantly chastises people for growing older, for gaining weight – yet the public fascination with normal then and now progression is nothing to the outright horror of a once familiar face rendered waxen and unrecognizable.

By putting herself out there with her mangled face first, before some tabloid site could snark on her unfortunate new kisser, Abraham hasn’t just taken control of the inevitable spin – she’s made it okay to laugh about it. She’s said, yes, I literally look like a cartoon mutant creature. Good for her. Though not many of us might venture to get our lips augmented, we all are vulnerable to the lure of presenting our most appealing versions of ourselves. We all want the world to see us at our best – even if one person’s version of “best” is another’s “yikes.” And we all fall short, with remarkable consistency and frequency. We miss the note, we have the bad hair day. And when it happens, we can hide, or we can try to respond with a little self-deprecation and humor. We can deal with it with — if our faces are still capable — a smile. We can try to not take ourselves and our vanities too seriously. We can try, believe it not, to learn a little something from Farrah Abraham. 

The post Farrah Abraham’s lips don’t lie appeared first on Salon.com.

A reckless juvenile on 440 N. Robinson Street

My earliest memories of Thanksgiving date back to the late 1980s and early ’90s: Adolescent me, chalk-ashy with a box fade, in my cramped bedroom at 440 or in a cramped bedroom at my Aunt Trudy’s across the street, or at my Grandma Famma’s house surrounded by too many cousins playing Double Dribble and Arch Rivals and Jordan versus Bird before NBA Live 95 dropped. We’d compare our Jordans and Ewings and AF1’s that matched our Starter Jackets or Triple Fat Gooses that eventually landed on the floor because fighting over the joystick was much — much — more important.

Nobody on our block ever heard of a ventilation system because the smells packed the house and buried themselves inside the fabric of our jeans and shirts. We’d smell like grease all the way up until we washed our clothes.

The spread was turkey, baked and fried; sweet potatoes dripping in King Syrup, which I hate; cheap biscuits that pop out of the can; stuffing with sausage I couldn’t eat because my mom kept me away from pork; a big shiny ham I couldn’t eat because, again, pork; five-cheese macaroni and cheese, which had to be slightly burned on the top; collard greens; canned cranberry sauce that falls onto your plate in the perfect, scientifically-modified cylinder, which everybody loves more than homemade cranberry sauce; seafood salad and about 12 sweet potato pies, because no respectable Black person has ever heard of pumpkin pie.

While playing Nintendo, before TurboGrafx-16 dropped — I was the only brat with a Neo Geo, and then later, a Sony PlayStation — I’d be summoned for a plate. My aunts had to make sure I got my fair share because it wasn’t strange for my older cousins to eat everything, leaving 60-cent rice from the Korean store as my only option for dinner.

“Lil Dwight, put that game down!” they would yell. “Come eat!”

This is where one of my glorious aunts would grab my hand and guide me past the spread, pointing at each dish. I would have the luxury of selecting everything, excluding the pork, or at least everything my inexperienced palate deemed edible. Maybe the food was delicious and maybe it wasn’t. Honestly, I didn’t care about flavors, plate presentation or the quality of what I ate. I was a growing street kid. I would have inhaled whatever you put in front of me as long as it didn’t have mayonnaise in it.

My older cousins always talked about who cooked what: How my dad made the best seafood salad, and how Aunt Trudy made the best macaroni and cheese, the best pies, the best cakes, basically the best everything. My mom mastered sweet potatoes — that was her dish. Famma made everything, even though her kids brought dishes. She loved to present her options. My uncles were worthless; they only brought things to dinner we didn’t need, like chips and ice. Don’t get me wrong, everyone loves a cold drink, but once you’re in your mid-20s and on your way to your early 30s, you have to do better than paper plates, chips and ice. No one has ever said on Thanksgiving, “Where is Uncle Vincent? We need him here! He brings the best ice!”

The plate: In this phase of uninterested culinary discovery, I’d normally end up with some thinly shaved slices of fried turkey breast, a chunk of macaroni with the burned top picked off, collard greens and a slice of sweet potato pie. Under no circumstances should any of my food overlap or touch. All servings must be at least a quarter of an inch apart on my doubled-up paper plate.

* * *

To be 20-something and radical

“Why would I ever celebrate a holiday that brought death and destruction to our native brothers and sisters? Get the f**k up out my face!” That was how I approached Thanksgiving throughout most of my 20s and early 30s.

I read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” That powerful text, along with a mix of conscious rap, had me ready to whip a Pilgrim’s ass each and every November. Which seems wildly selective as I reflect now — I mean, if I was such an advocate for my Native brothers and sisters, why didn’t I want to kick Pilgrim ass all year long? Why did I save all of my anger for the month of November — and not even the entire month, just Thanksgiving Day, forgetting about my anger as soon as those Black Friday sales kicked off?

“I’ll save my burning anger for you Pilgrims for next year,” my brain would tell itself as it switched over to Black Friday. “Eighty-five-inch flat-screen televisions are 95% off. And even though I could be trampled by other irresponsible shoppers in the process, and even though I don’t need another 85-inch flat-screen television, I just have to buy it, because it is Black Friday and it’s 95% off!” Wait — shouldn’t we all hate capitalism?

My grandma died in 1997, and that was the last year my family held a big dinner with my mom, all of her sisters and brothers, and the endless collection of cousins. We tried to bring the big dinner back a few years after she passed; however, we failed terribly. My grandma was too strong; she was the one who kept us together, leaving no one to carry the torch.

In these years I rarely attended formal Thanksgiving dinners, if I even hooked up with people who knew how to cook at all. My Thanksgivings were spent hanging out on the block, passing around tightly sealed blunts in one direction and a bottle of liquor in the other. Or else I was keeping cozy indoors in the middle of dice games that housed 30 to 40 shooters, all thirsty to grind up some of that Black Friday money. Or I’d try my best to link up with whichever woman I was dating at the time after she left her big family dinner, because I had no interest in being the “holiday date.” The “holiday date” normally ends up being the most questioned, judged and talked-about person in the room.

Once I was a holiday date for a woman I wasn’t even dating. We attended the same middle school, lost touch during our high school years, and then reunited when she moved two doors down from me with her cousin, my homeboy.

Wherever she went between high school and then left her with a serious weed habit that mirrored mine. The two of us puffed constantly, like chimneys on a cold day. She used to always try to chip in, or buy little pieces of bud off me, but I didn’t sell weed; it takes too long to get rid of, and the people who buy it talk too damn much, usually about nothing. So I would gift her a little piece of bud here and there, and tell her she could break me off a piece when she purchased her own, which was never. This woman was really into bartering, though, like, if you give me weed, I’ll braid your hair, and I was not. The only thing I ever wanted trade goods or services for was cash.

“You gotta let me pay you back, bro,” she said during an early-morning Thanksgiving smoke session. “Come with us to Thanksgiving. My grandma makes the best everything!”

I wasn’t into the devilish holiday, but I was also free and hungry, so I rolled right into the Thanksgiving date trap. As her family passed tin containers of sweet potatoes and macaroni around, her mom and grandma and uncles and aunts pressed me like, “he’s such a nice young man” (I wasn’t) and, “How long y’all two cuties been going out?” (we weren’t) and, “lock him down, he’s a child of God.” (If they only knew.)

I made it up out of that family dinner with some sausage-less stuffing, turkey, a hot-ass homemade biscuit and two healthy cups of Hennessey. The three of us laughed uncontrollably at how they all thought I was her boyfriend, and we went back to my place to smoke again.

The plate: These were by far the worst Thanksgiving dining years for me. One year I fasted as a middle finger to the Pilgrims, though I doubt they received my message. Chinese food fed me well for a few of those years. Maybe a turkey sandwich after someone’s family dinner, or a woman I actually was dating would bring me a plate, which often scared me because of my well-documented trust issues. I ate Lunchables, cold pizza, four wings and fries, and Golden Grahams. Sometimes I’d eat these meals without a plate, pouring the cereal into a red plastic cup, or eating off a ripped piece of the greasy pizza box big enough to balance my extra slice.

* * *

Growing into the person you thought you’d never be

Everything leveled up in my 30s. I wore an overcoat. I drank dairy-free lattes with extra foam. I read books about politics, studied at an elite university, purchased glasses, attended spoken word poetry events even though I hate spoken word poetry events. I smoked less weed and then no weed. I discovered craft cocktails that pair beautifully with farm-to-table food. I started identifying as a writer and began my journey into being an amateur snob, saying things like, “I don’t eat McDonald’s — I guffaw at the idea of a person indulging in McDonald’s!” OK, I never used the word guffaw or indulging in a sentence. I did act just like a guy who would use the words guffaw and indulging in sentences. And I wore sweaters.

And with this new attitude and new diet came new ideas. One of the biggest ideas was that I had to redefine Thanksgiving, separating it from the holiday commemorating the colonizers who practiced genocide on our Native American brothers and sisters and reclaiming it as a time for family, friends and love. With that in mind, I started hitting up dinners with my new taste and understanding of aesthetics. If the food you served me was delicious and plated well, I would tell you. And if it wasn’t, I would also tell you, but not in front of everyone — after all, I was sophisticated, so I would pull you to the side and say, “thanks for the invite, but you have some things you need to work on.” These conversations, not surprisingly, never went well.

I began sharing Thanksgiving dinners with all kinds of people: successful artists, executives, and other creators with way more experience than I had. During this time I met a lovely interracial couple, Keisha and Sam, who invited me over for Thanksgiving after I had already had dinner. I loved talking to them about art, music, our government, and sports, all of which we talked about over dessert. Keisha (who I should mention is Black) served me a healthy slice of warm orange pie, placing it perfectly next to a scope of almond ice cream. To the naked eye, it looked like sweet potato pie. I put a little ice cream and a little pie on my fork as I ran my mouth about the things we all loved to run our mouths about, then took a bite. Delicious. It was like sweet potato pie, but not as sweet — a perfect companion for the ice cream.

“What do you think?” Sam (who I should mention is white) asked, watching me enjoy the pie. “What’s the verdict?”

“I love sweet potato pie! What are you talking about?” I laughed. “This may be new to you.”

Sam’s eyes lit up. “That’s pumpkin pie, bro!”

My eyes stretched across my face as my hosts burst out in laughter. I wish I had a story that revolved around me spitting out the bite, finding the nearest stack of sweet potato pies and cleansing myself of pumpkin madness because of my commitment to Blackness, or taking the young couple hostage, taping them up, and then throwing sweet potatoes at them full speed until and they swore on their lives that this moment never happened. But I do not.

As embarrassing as enjoying pumpkin pie was, I was also going through a whole lot of other changes. Don’t get me wrong, I know I should never get on a public platform, especially in front of a bunch of Black people, and talk about how great pumpkin pie is, mainly because part of my commitment to my race is showing my people — actually, all people — that sweet potato is better. But between us, I could go for some pumpkin pie right now.

The plate: In some ways, the plate now feels far from the one from Famma’s table. Yes, I still eat some of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes; however, it’s not strange for me to also serve lobster, prawns and crab cakes; two or three different kinds of fried turkey; mac and cheese made with Manchego; fresh collards and other vegetables from somebody’s organic garden; and aged Cabernet and champagne. But there’s also Stove Top stuffing and that fake cranberry sauce, because I’m still from the block. And F those Pilgrims, because I’m still that radical in his early 20s learning about solidarity with indigenous people. And yes, there may even be pumpkin pie now — intentional pumpkin pie, even. Please don’t tell my cousins.

The post The evolution of my Thanksgiving plate appeared first on Salon.com.

The two-way nature of bearing witness — venturing out to explore but returning enriched — has most pointedly come home in four decades of work as a formal witness, an expert in court for more than a dozen Native communities across North America.  That work has given me a faith in humanity and in our collective future, a faith I otherwise would never have known.

As an expert witness, my role has been to bring the experiences of this continent’s first peoples into legal proceedings where their rights as tribal citizens and as Americans were being challenged. Here’s a confession: I never adjusted to courtroom maneuvering and combat. Still, even in the rancor of litigious lawyering, I have had the privilege of compiling and conveying the special history of indigenous communities, of uncovering human stories that shaped a narrative marked by suffering, resistance and undaunted courage. The totality of that narrative has flowed back into my own life, demonstrating the insistent humanity of a people who were so often ignored or cast aside. These experiences that began in the role of an expert, reshaped me as a participant.

I unknowingly entered those dual roles in 1977 when I was asked to be part of a case arising from a challenge to the boundaries of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in central South Dakota. A group of white political leaders incensed by the rise of assertive Native leaders in the “Red Power” era had embarked on a campaign to limit the reach of tribal governments. At Cheyenne River, they claimed that a 1905 act of Congress, which made a portion of the reservation eligible for public homestead entry, had implicitly “diminished” the reservation. By chance, lawyers in the Department of Justice learned that a part of my recently completed doctoral dissertation in Indian history included a discussion of such “homestead laws.” A white academic with no experience in Indian country, I was suddenly an expert.

I spent the next several months in libraries, the National Archives, local courthouses and on the reservation. I set out to interview every octogenarian who might know and recall something about the law’s passage and implementation. It turned out that the woefully deficient “agreement” with the tribe that Congress had deceptively used to justify its action was signed in the middle of winter, a time when few snowbound tribal members would leave their homes to attend the negotiations. Most had no idea that any changes were about to occur. But my research drew me beyond surface facts.

In my interviews on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, elder Raymond Clown told me that his family came out of their cabin one morning to discover Norwegian-speaking homesteaders unloading a wagon in their front yard. His family’s experience was typical: government officials barely mentioned the new law to the tribe. Future decision-makers with authority over education, health care and other services never acknowledged the homestead areas or recognized a change in reservation boundaries. Clown’s testimony invited me to imagine events from his family’s point of view.

It was joyful and humbling when my interviews and research ultimately became part of the record in a unanimous Supreme Court decision that vindicated the tribe’s position, defended ably by both their attorneys and lawyers from Justice. When the ruling issued, I understood that to the extent I had contributed to the tribe’s remarkable victory, it was likely because they had shared with me a quiet truth, one that I had learned from personal interviews that encouraged me to look deeply into the records I located in the archives: The people of Cheyenne River viewed their reservation as the central instrument that oriented them to the world.

Here’s what was most inspiring: The barely comprehensible legal language and daily government bullying the people at Cheyenne River had endured — both in the past and in the present — did not even come close to intimidating them. They swatted away the attempts to divert them from their way of life like so many pesky mosquitoes.

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In Iron Lighting, a remote farming district the tribe’s opponents argued lay outside the reservation’s boundaries, Thomas Elk Eagle sat across from me at his kitchen table and recounted his life as a rancher, farmer and tribal citizen, a life that stretched back to the beginning of the century. Like Ray Clown, who had had no understanding of why Norwegian immigrants suddenly appeared in his front yard, Elk Eagle never turned for a second from his commitment to living out his life in his Native homeland. His courage and generosity enabled me to understand how the past appeared to him and his family.

John Hump kept me on the edge of my seat—and long beyond the life of my battery-powered tape recorder—as he described the government’s indifference to his family’s complaints of trespass and invasion. Telling his story in his cabin near Cherry Creek, he gradually drew family members into the living room. By the time he ended, dozens of relatives and neighbors had shared in his testimony. And the inadequacy of the opposition’s simple, legalistic case came clear.

I had gone to each of these people — and many more — to assemble my expert report, but the very force of their stories compelled me to grasp, and witness, their indomitable dedication to their land.  By sharing their stories, the elders at Cheyenne River gave me more than historical insight; they helped me understand and admire how Native people view the universe and their lives. They conveyed to me their allegiance to their families and their homeland.

The learnings they shared nourished and sustained me through a long and satisfying career in pursuit of proper memory and some measure of justice: as I explored the history of voting rights on a reservation in Montana; investigated the chicanery surrounding 19th-century treaty making in Michigan; studied the persistence of tribal life in a supposedly-abolished reservation in Minnesota; or compiled the story of how a small group of Oneida Indians near Green Bay, Wisconsin, worked to uphold a treaty that local people wrongly argued had no force.

Native Americans face enormous obstacles when they enter U.S. courtrooms. Despite an impressive record of recent victories, they can count on few legal principles to sustain them. To cite but one example, no legislation affecting American Indians has ever been found unconstitutional.

And yet, in the right circumstances, the courts have heard Native testimony, and experts communicating their perspectives, that cannot be ignored. That hardly means that Native people always, or even consistently, prevail. But as one minor actor in the drama to protect their lives and ways of living, I have been honored with the opportunity of helping to bring their voices into the courthouse. Again and again Native people have been ready and willing to reverse the typical direction of research — from scholar to subject — by teaching me the central truths of their past.

In human relations, and particularly in a democracy committed to the rule of law, listening to and appreciating the experiences of others leads inevitably to connections in our common humanity.  Once we recognize and embrace that connection, it is impossible to retreat into caricatures or to dismiss people others have viewed as history’s victims.

The privilege of listening to American Indians’ stories and struggles, and of conveying them in courtrooms and classrooms over many years, has filled my journey with purpose. More than that, it has created a deep faith in the enduring presence of Native people in America and their immeasurable contribution to it.

The post My Thanksgiving: How testifying for Native Americans made me a witness to history appeared first on Salon.com.

Outside, the ground crackles with frost — but I’m still cultivating, tending my attitude of gratitude like my life depends on the fruits of my labors. And it does. Farming is not gentle work; the body and spirit require as much regard as the land.

On this farm, there’s no Thanksgiving. Here, it’s harvest season. Firewood season. Wrap-your-salad-garden-in-blankets season. This is the week when the browns and grays come, and stay. It’s almost time for Mother Winter to blow down the door and wipe the fields clean.

Over the years, this slice of soil has nourished wild alliums, huckleberry, sassafras — even ancient apple trees planted by those who came to claim these West Virginia acres as their own. But this land did not see itself as acreage, or as part of any country — and knew humans only as itinerant intimates. When I arrived, the meadow burned purple with ironweed. Soon, fields turned to pasture, feeding poultry and sheep alongside the hairy, feral pigs who churned earth into muck into grass without cease. Until they, too, moved on.

Our first hard frost dropped weeks ago, but the radish, nettle, and corn salad are still holding on, tucked against the frigid ground like ears on a mad cat. I may yet find one last flush of shiitakes stair-stepping up the side of an old stump, feeding themselves on the rich red oak.

On Thursday, I’ll dig horseradish. I’ll drag my grandfather’s spade along behind me as I pick through overgrown ferns of asparagus, dodging burdock as I search for the perfect clump of spicy white roots to cleave out of the chilly clay. Just one fat tuber will do, or two.

Out of the freezer, I’ll pull a roast — the last of a Red Devon steer raised on the wild grass of a friend’s farm, nearby in the Allegheny Mountains. As I grip the hunk of frozen meat, frost shears off, crystals prickling my skin as they melt against my hand. I plan to roast the beef low and slow after a long, two-day thaw.

Only after the beef is in the oven, bracketed by the last of those steadfast Summer onions and maybe some sturdy sprigs of rosemary, pinched from the bush up the hill, will I turn to the potatoes.

Onward to the root cellar, basket in hand, to forage for ingredients. I’ll let my eyes trail along the shelves as I catalog the colorful canned goods: red and yellow salsas studded with chunks of sweet onion, whole fuchsia plums shedding their skins as they float in the jars, pickled green beans so thick and straight I feel my tastebuds jump at the piquant thought of dill and garlic. I never tire of admiring the bounty gathered in this small, dark room dug into the hillside. I’ll load a basket with waxy yellow potatoes still matte with soil, dark cherry preserves, that last jar of golden pickled beets.

Once back inside, the canning jars will frost with fog in my warm kitchen as I mound potatoes in the sink before scrubbing their skins to a shine. Each potato opens with a juicy whack of the old arc-blade knife my father gave me, the carbon steel pitted with as many dents as its wooden handle. Soon, rounds of potato nestle against the beef like stones encircling a grave. I will chop the cabbage next, though I always cook it last — a wild nest of shreds dropped onto the hot flat of my cast-iron skillet — the cherry-lacquered beef nearby, at rest.

One hour before dark, as the wind hurls itself against the mossy north side of my house, breaknecking up the long, crooked trail from the river, I’ll be hauling more firewood inside, simmering a pot of chaga and spices into mushroom chai on the small wood stove. The roast will glow, burnished and blazing, as I open the oven door to baste it with preserves and turn the glowing globes of potato in their spitting fat.

Over the Greenbrier River, past Cold Knob and the blinking windmills, I know my mother is doing much the same. So, too, are conscious farmers and cooks from Maine to Arizona. People who celebrate food do this simple work every day: we harvest, we cook, we eat. Daily nourishment can be uncomplicated; reverent eating doesn’t need to mean overabundance.

On this Thursday, I won’t be harvesting and cooking and sitting down for dinner to glorify the barbarity of my pinched-faced European ancestors, but because I believe that the effort to tend soil, cook slow food and savor each plate is worthwhile, that sharing real food with other humans is an act of radical gratitude.

Or because — in the absence of a more perfect solution — the best way to honor land that has never been mine is to steward it with the greatest care I can muster. So that, in the wake of cold and weary fingers, long hours peeling garlic and simmering broth, early mornings and late nights nurturing seedlings and tending trees and carrying water, the land — the Grandmother of us all — may thrive.

The post On this farm, there’s no Thanksgiving appeared first on Salon.com.

Even though our funeral home is consistently busy, I’ve learned that one of the best things I can do for George is to push aside my to-do list, take a deep breath and just listen. So I did. He told me that losing his wife was so much harder than he thought it would be. He recounted how his pastor wisely told him that there was no timetable for his grief and that he should be patient with his feelings.

“I’m throwing nothing of hers out,” he told me. “I’m keeping all her stuff right where she put it.” He went on to say that every morning he makes her breakfast like he always did when she was alive and that he even bought her a Christmas gift.

“It helps,” he finished. “It helps to go through the motions; even though she’s not here I still love her just as much as I did when she was.”

A couple of years ago I might have felt uneasy with George’s insistence to make his wife breakfast, his keeping her stuff, and his gift-giving, because it smacks against the acceptance stage of grief work. Like many others, I had mistakenly believed that “The Five Stages of Grief” in the Kubler-Ross Model were meant for people grieving the loss of a loved one. I was wrong. The model was a reflection of what Kubler-Ross saw in people who were dying.

As new grief models have come out, it seems that this whole idea of reaching the last stage, or of closure, is a myth altogether, because our grief lives as long as our love. What George was experiencing and doing wasn’t morbid, or weird, or pathological, it was . . . good. He was, in a sense, living in the liminal space of Halloween. He was still connected, in love and life and memory, with his dead — but still alive to him — wife.

Dare I say he was living with her ghost?

Every year Halloween comes around, and with it those classic horror flicks, with their dated special effects and well-timed scare scenes that make us jump even though we know they’re coming. Who doesn’t love seeing children dressed in costumes? The weather. The fall leaves. The Pumpkin Spice everything. It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But beneath the cute and fun is this flirtation with the spiritual — albeit the dark side of the spiritual — that abides talk of ghosts, spirits and hauntings.

In the traditional Irish calendar, there are four “quarter days” that mark the beginning of a new season. The first of November marked the beginning of winter, considered the “darker half” of the Irish year. But the day before the first of November (October 31st) was seen as a liminal, in-between period where the Otherworld seeped into this world, allowing spirits — some good and others bad — to visit the living. Instead of shutting their doors and pouring some pre-Christian version of holy water around their houses to keep the spirits away, people would often do the exact opposite. They’d open up their homes, set extra places at the dinner table, and even prepare a meal with the hope that maybe the dead would bless them with health and wholeness through the winter months.

I want to believe in the spiritual kinds of ghosts. I love how the imagination can dance around these ideas, but the rational part of my brain usually wins over the mystical. You’d think a funeral director would’ve seen something, right? Maybe a ghost in the funeral home late at night? Or something misty and creepy at the cemetery? I’m often awake at the witching hours, going on late-night death calls, strolling through the silent corridors of nursing homes. There is a silence to the witching hours, a calm that can be disarming, but it’s never been an eerie silence for me, even when I’ve been handling the dead. I can say that the tragic deaths — the murders, some suicides, and some grisly accidents — have a presence to them, but I’m not sure if the presence is spiritual, or just the weight of the horror.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are spirits. Or maybe spirits do exist and they’ve always been kind to me because I care for the dead. I’m willing to entertain the maybe.

I do, though, believe in another kind of ghost. One that can be much scarier. Much more damaging. And much more haunting.

There is this liminality between the living and the dead, an in-between where the bonds of love can still dwell. Liminality is something that makes us uncomfortable. We like binaries, like yes or no. On or off. But some things exist in the in-between. They are yes and no. Dead and alive. Present and absent. The liminality of our dead is like a ghost, like Halloween. Because our loved ones are gone and they’re still here with us. Their actions, character, and — yes, I think I can use this word — spirit have literally helped form your neural pathways, so that the way they thought, their little idiosyncrasies, are dwelling in you. I write in my book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director,” that behavioral epigenetics have found that our experiences can be passed down on a molecular level. I write, “There are literal pieces of your loved ones in you from generations ago. And there will be pieces of your love for generations to come that play out in joy, confidence and bravery. Love may not be the same as power, and it may not always lead to survival, but love, unlike anything, finds a way to live on.”

Like my friend George, and the traditions that shaped Halloween, instead of closing out these liminal spaces — these ghosts of our loved ones — we’d do well to let them in. Ghosts get mad if we shut them out, if we don’t acknowledge that love lives on, if we force them into binaries. Repressed emotions, repressed bonds, repressed loved ones can haunt us for the rest of our lives if we decide to shut them out. This doesn’t mean we have to keep all their stuff and make them scrambled eggs and bacon every morning, but it does mean that closure is a myth. Not only is it a myth, it’s also harmful, for the living and the dead.

The dead can be scary if we don’t give them space. But, if we make peace with our grief, peace with our liminal spaces, and peace with our dead, it might provide us with favor during the cold, dark winter that lies ahead.

The post Finding peace with your ghosts: Advice from a funeral director appeared first on Salon.com.

It is not a place most people go to fall in love.

Yet in its own unexpected way, it’s quite beautiful. The feelings of awe and trepidation I felt walking into the neo-gothic institution, enclosed by its 30-foot walls, were overwhelming. Standing in the central rotunda in 2014, beneath the cathedral-esque vaulted ceilings, it was hard to take in: I gazed down cellblock after cellblock, stretching out like spokes on a wheel. All around me were crumbling walls that revealed their history in layers, like rings on a tree: from grey stone, to copper colored brick, to cement, to the green and white flaking paint. Heavy and jagged portions of the floors and walls sat in piles where tree roots and vines had pushed through and wound around the remains of scavenged equipment, a kind of mechanical carnage.

I was there doing research for a book on fear and why and how we engage with scary material. I’ve spent the past 10 years working in the “haunted attraction industry,” a surprisingly booming economy built for people who love nothing more than to have their socks scared off. In this little world, there are few places as grand and influential as ESP.  I knew I had to come, because, in addition to the ghosts and whatever animals have made ESP their home, it houses a massive haunted attraction, Terror Behind the Walls. It is the site’s most successful fundraiser, welcoming more than 100,000 guests each season. It’s also one of the most impressive in the industry, thanks in part to the work of the creative director Amy, who makes a living thinking of ways to scare people. In this case, me.

I’d met Amy two years before and was immediately crazy about her. She was into scary stuff, confident, magnetic, oozing charisma. I flushed when she said my name, and I startled easily and often when she tried to spook me. I, on the other hand, hadn’t registered on her radar as anything more than a professional colleague.

But a lot had happened in the two years since I’d met her. ESP was my last trip in a series of adventures I’d undertaken for my book: I had been lost in a dangerous section of Bogotá, pondered mortality in the mysterious Aokigahara Forest in Japan, hung by a cable from the side of the 117-story CN Tower, and survived more anti-gravity roller coasters and Hollywood-caliber haunted houses than I could count. The experiences had made me stronger, braver. I did not scare easily.

That night, standing with Amy in a dark, abandoned prison, I felt my heart race and I wiped my sweaty palms again and again on my shirt to keep the grip on my flashlight. These were classic symptoms of fear — or in my case, a searing crush on an amazing woman.

It was around 10 p.m. and we were the only ones left on site. Amy would take me first through one of their attractions, and then move on to tour the entire site. “Hopefully you won’t get too scared, Margee.” Her smile was equally devious and adorable. I’d never heard a voice like hers — singsong, expressive, yet controlled. She could go from whisper to shout in less than a breath.

Matching her playful tone, I told her I wanted to get scared, that’s what I was there for, that she should do her best. (Amy would later tell me this is when she knew that she had to be at her most terrifying. “It was on,” she said.)

We ventured from one cellblock to the next, encountering rodents of every kind, along with large black beetles that scurried with every labored opening of the heavy wrought iron gates that block each corridor, each cell. We walked through tree branches, tangled vines and sharp hanging stalactites, over roots as thick as a human leg, and carcasses of birds, mice and God knows what else in varying states of decay. Small signs of life and death were everywhere.

All the while, we shared stories of the creepy places we’d been and vendors with the most realistic body parts for the best price. We brainstormed costumes, characters and sets for the perfect scares. Amy even shared her secret recipe for fake blood: between two fear industry professionals, this is a true gesture of intimacy. We eagerly and anxiously made choices about what to say, what to share and what to keep secret, exploring each other’s boundaries like the darkening walls of the old stone prison, boundaries built from histories of loss and pain and a desire to bring light into the dark places.

The time was approaching 2 a.m. and there was only one place left to see: the punishment cells underground, where I would finish out the night.

The punishment cells, or the “Klondike,” are described in a 1924 warden’s report as a row of unsanitary, windowless cells with black painted ceilings and walls, and only an iron toilet and faucet.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Amy asked as we stood at the top of the steep stairs.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” I replied. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to descend into a dark, damp, claustrophobic space. I didn’t want to leave Amy.

“OK, step where I step and take your time,” she said. “Be extremely careful. I’ve seen your squirrel moves.”

“I will,” I said with a hint of defiance — and honestly, a touch of ego. I’d survived a lot in my travels.

But Amy stopped me, held my hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I’m serious, Margee. I really don’t want you to get hurt.”

There it was again, the feeling of being lifted gently off the floor and set back down as she said my name. But this time her voice was nothing but sincere, her face nothing but concerned. I believed her.

“Thank you. I’ll be careful.”

I went into the hole and crouched down in the first cell off to the right. The ceilings were only about five feet high, which became unbearably uncomfortable almost immediately. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

There are few places in our well-illuminated world that are pitch black. Even the pin light of a cell phone charger gives us something to orient ourselves against, a way to make sense of where we are. But not here. Reading about these places is not the same as being in them. There is a physical reality that is impossible to replicate.

I was hot and cold at the same time, and the thick damp air made me feel like I was suffocating. I felt frantic; a profound sense of powerlessness and loss of balance in the total darkness came over me. My eyes were open, yet saw nothing. I tried to strain and refocus a thousand times. I waited for my eyes to readjust, but when they didn’t, there was no place left to go except into my own mind. I felt a deep and genuine terror.

I lasted only a little over two hours, and when I left, I took the stairs two at a time. My relief upon reaching the top was quickly replaced with panic as I looked around. It was still dark, and I was disoriented. I desperately scanned up and down the never-ending stone walls, and finally saw a dim light in the distance.

“Amy?!” I shouted and started running towards her. As she stood I wrapped my arms around her and held her tightly.

“You waited here for me?” I said, as tears welled in my eyes.

“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to be close, in case you needed me.”

I did need her, and Amy has stayed true to her word. That night was now over three years ago, and on July 8, this time inside the walls of a historic military fort that is rumored to be haunted, we promised each other that we’ll always be close, that we’ll be each other’s light when darkness inevitably falls. After we exchanged our vows, with friends and family gathered, we stood together, each with one hand on a flaming torch, and fired a 200-year-old cannon into the night sky.

The post I found love in a haunted prison appeared first on Salon.com.

Until very recently, I took a firm “no thanks” stance on the things. Now my tiny household refers to me as “Miss Bird,” after I developed what feels like an out-of-nowhere obsession with them. Not because anything particularly magical happened, but because I’m old.

I’m, apparently, in my bird era now, and I’ve got the feeders to prove it. It happens fast.

In 1995, the year I graduated high school, Peter Murphy released an album called “Cascade,” which features the song “Wild Birds Flock To Me.” During this time, I worked at a small amusement park in Riverside, California, as an illustriously titled “ball floater,” which means that for five days a week I would spend my after-school and/or weekend hours walking around the park’s mini-golf course picking up trash with one of those grabby sticks and waiting for people to alert me to the fact that their golf ball had gotten stuck in something, dispatching me to go fish it out. That was my job description in theory, but mostly — after a few laps just to make myself seen by my boss — I would sit on the back fence of the course, up against the flashing lights of the Tilt-O-Whirl, sneaking cigarettes and listening to music, with this album, and this particular song, in heavy rotation on the Discman concealed in the waistband of my pants.

“The Crow,” starring tragically deceased Brandon Lee as Eric Draven — a musician who, along with his fiancée, is brutally killed and then brought back to life one year later via a crow pecking on his grave, aiding in the avenging of both of their deaths — had just been released the year prior. As much as I would love to sit here and stretch listening to Peter Murphy while thinking about “The Crow” into the basis of my “Miss Bird” origin story, it’s just not the case. Birds were as lost on me at that time as the majestic California mountainscapes that my mom would yell for me to pay attention to while I was engrossed in a book in the backseat of our family Jeep. “Look how, beautiful!” she’d exclaim, in frustration, while all I saw was dirt. And heat.

There’s an Oscar Wilde quote to put to use here: “With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.” It doesn’t come alone though. It comes with birds. Just like the house sparrows that use their beaks to break open seeds in the three (THREE!) feeders I’ve newly installed in my backyard to get to the soft bits inside, the years have softened me, cracked me open. Now, seeing a rare raven perched on my fig tree, sizing me up and then resuming its work on the summer fruit hanging from it, a song from “The Crow” soundtrack doesn’t immediately come to mind. I think something deep. Something about the fragility of life, and of the creatures that live it with us. I think of peaceful moments, and how they sometimes just happen, taking us by the shoulders as if demanding, “Stop. Just stop a minute and breathe.” And I think about how, every minute, I’m getting older. And will, hopefully, one day be as old as my gramma, who died at 91 as a “Miss Bird” herself.

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For as long as I knew my gramma, she was into birds. She had bird figurines in her kitchen, some of which made their individual bird songs when you pressed a button. She had ceramic cardinals and bluejays on tables in the living room of her farmhouse in Illinois, where I’d spend every summer. And she often wore T-shirts and sweatshirts with birds on them, one of which I took home with me after helping to clean out her house after she’d died. I’d never stopped to think about what her whole deal was with birds. It was just part of what made her my gramma. But now it’s all so clear. Born in 1927 and growing up to catch the eye of a local farmer named Dale, my papa, it’s doubtful she was going around in her bobby socks or whatever they wore back then talking to him about birds. That came much later, when she was old. At 46, I’m still far from my “gramma” years, but I’m closer to them than I ever was before, and getting closer each day. Birds, man. They just happen to you. It’s happening. Right. Now.

I’m aware that there are young people who are into birds, and that having a fondness for them isn’t an exclusively “old person” thing, but this feels like a turning point for me, and I’m embracing it as such. Like in “The Crow,” when Eric pulls on his tight-fitting, long-sleeve black shirt, paints his face white, and goes out onto the perpetually rain-slicked streets, crow on shoulder, to hunt down bad guys. I sit here now, facing the feeder I hung outside my office window, watching the sparrows, bluejays, cardinals and grackles eating the seeds I put out for them and I feel . . . something. I feel so much. Watching my birds, I’m fighting for something too. I’m fighting for my own peace. For the ability to pause for a minute and take deep breaths, while I can still take them.

After my gramma died in 2018, I got a tattoo in her honor, same as I did when my mom and dad died. For hers, since she loved birds so much, I got a bright red cardinal. And it means so much more now. Most things do.

The post With age comes birds: Notes on time, awareness and watching for wings appeared first on Salon.com.

And to the overly literal, I don’t mean tithing or some religious-themed amusement park or you popping out that shiny quarter to cover your entry fee into the pearly gates. I’m pretty sure that’s way more expensive. I am talking about a sweet, syrupy frozen cup on a 95-degree day. That is the heaven I know, and yes, it used only to cost 25 cents.

My childhood babysitter Boo Boo was always pulling my coat to something. Pulling a person’s coat means putting them on, enlightening them with the knowledge they need to better their living experience. Boo Boo introduced me to bitter Maxwell House coffee when I was two years old, showed me how to tuck my shoelaces under my insole when I was too young to tie my shoes, and even though we loved Different Strokes — the show where an old rich white man came to the projects in a limo, and invited two poor Black kids to live in his mansion — she taught me never to trust old rich white men in limos.

“If you see an old rich white man in a limo around here, baby, you better run and don’t stop, don’t even look back!”

All of these life lessons are extremely important and relevant to this day as I still drink my coffee black, and I don’t trust old white men and limos. As a matter of fact, I don’t trust anybody in a limo (why are there still elongated cars riding around in 2023?). But the most important lesson I ever got from my dear babysitter was the instructions for making and enjoying a frozen cup.

Not a snowball — a frozen cup.

Snowballs are everywhere and we don’t want to mix the two summer treats. For one, snowballs are more elite because they require both an ice maker and flavored syrups that aren’t used for anything else for the most part except making snowballs–– like, are you seriously going to make a cup of egg custard-flavored water? I think not. They are also overpriced. Even back in the day when I was a kid, snowballs always cost between 75 cents and $1.50. Add 25 more cents if you wanted melted marshmallows. That’s too expensive, and now they are even higher! I went to a snowball stand last summer, and they were pushing the idea of them being gourmet to justify the ridiculous $5 price tag.

“Five bucks!” I screamed on the inside, “Like a whole five bucks?”

Frozen cups are for the people. Boo Boo, always the eager investor, made a killing off of selling $0.25 frozen cups every summer. She had a corner house with a side window, perfect for serving customers. And you knew she had the best because she always sold out.

Early on, Boo Boo’s frozen cups consisted of Kool-Aid poured into a Styrofoam cup and placed in a freezer. Once they were frozen entirely, she’d crank open that window, and the kids would line up. The early flavors were grape, strawberry, fruit punch and orange—the basic Kool-Aid flavors. These were not heaven. But as her business grew, so did her ingredients, technique and storage. Everything was enhanced except the price.

Before I introduce you to what heaven tastes like, it’s essential to understand the correct way to eat a frozen cup. I practically lived at my babysitter’s house then, so I used to go into her kitchen and grab a teaspoon, and angle it enough to scrape off this sugary top. A scientist could explain this better, but when you freeze a sugary drink, somehow the sweetest part rises to the top creating a sticky entry point. You don’t have to eat the sugary top, but you do have to use that teaspoon to dig a hole into the center of the frozen cup so that you can scrape, scrape, and scrape, filling your spoon with sweet ice from all angles. Once it looks like a hollow cave, you have probably been in the sun long enough for the sugary top to weaken, and you can use the back of the spoon to turn the remainder into slush. Boo Boo’s transformation changed all of this.

Boo Boo was selling out too much, so she purchased the deep freezer to store more frozen cups. She also got tired of people asking to borrow spoons because children who borrow spoons typically never bring them back. Hence, she found a way to revolutionize her product by eliminating the need for a spoon. This is what made it heaven.

Boo Boo did this by purchasing those syrups used for snowballs, yes the elite ones. The new frozen cups recipe was with half Kool-Aid and half snowball syrup –– and she even added one marshmallow that always floated to the top as a chef’s kiss. The new method allowed her frozen cups to freeze perfectly. They were easy enough to devour with a plastic spoon if you wanted to be fancy, but also soft enough for us kids to flip the contents upside down, and stuff the larger side back in the cup. From there, we could eat it top-down without teeth and without making a mess. It was perfect.

I made frozen cups for years and still eat them in my 40s. Except I don’t use Kool-Aid, and I don’t know if they even still sell the Kool-Aid they gave us back in the day. Instead, I make a smoothie with almond milk, agave, fresh blueberries, spinach, fresh strawberries, a banana, water and raw almonds. After I take it out of the blender, I pour some into a cup to drink now, some into my daughter’s little cup, and I put the rest in the plastic cup that I place in the freezer–– because it makes for the perfect adult frozen cup.

I do miss Boo Boo, and her original invention, but at least I still have my teeth along with those sweet memories.

The post Frozen cup: When the best part of summer cost just a quarter appeared first on Salon.com.

It was, therefore, a weird choice for me to book myself on a weeklong Caribbean cruise. Particularly, one targeted at the elderly. Particularly, alone.

Let me back up. I’m a married woman in my 30s with a horror of vacationing in hot places, breaking bread with strangers and visiting ports of call where the local culture consists of Margaritavilles and novelty T-shirt shops. My ideal vacation is renting a villa in the Mediterranean during shoulder season when it’s cool and breezy, eating elaborate meals and driving to offbeat museums and hidden beaches.

But I’m also a romance novelist, devoted to my craft. And cruise ships are, for all their arguable faults, an excellent setting for forcing two strangers to spend a week together. Which is why I decided to maroon two characters on such a ship, against their respective wills, and make them fall in love. Because I am a comic genius, I also decided that my 30-year-old characters should make this journey on a boat for senior citizens.

Problematically, the only cruises I had been on in real life were those forced upon me in my youth — the Disney and Carnival variety. For verisimilitude, I needed to do research. And how do you research a luxury cruise for the 60-plus demographic?

Very sadly … you take one.

For plot reasons, I needed this cruise to be very fancy, which was at least a point in this venture’s favor. I researched boutique cruise lines and landed on one with a reputation for gourmet meals and pampering.

“Darling,” I said to my dear husband, “would you like to take a cruise with me for author research?”

“No,” he said flatly.

“It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s a fancy boat filled with old people.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Unlimited alcohol?”

“Still no.”

“Our own butler!”

“Please stop.”

Which is how I found myself setting sail one fine November morning alone, save for 600-odd silver-haired strangers.

Because this trip was for work rather than (dubious) pleasure, I could not merely observe the cruise. I needed to participate in the same way my characters would be forced to. Attend shipboard activities. Book shore excursions. Make friends.

Unfortunately, participating in group activities and interacting with strangers are two of the activities I’m worst at.

The very enthusiastic cruise line representative with whom I arranged my trip had assured me this wouldn’t be a problem. Our ship, he swore, would be full of repeat cruisers who love to mingle and who would naturally take an interest in a relative spring-chicken. I’d be the social darling of the sea.

This is not what happened.

The rep was correct that the boat’s denizens were veteran cruisers devoted to the ship’s luxe service and intimate nature. What he miscalculated is that they are so devoted that many of them already know each other. They already have their cliques and social darlings. My relative youth did not provoke intrigue.

I felt like I had in middle school: awkward. Socially inept. A fish, pardon the metaphor, out of water.

But I did have one thing I lacked as a preteen: access to alcohol. The ship had many bars, and I am very good at drinking. I decided to station myself in front of a martini and strike up friendly chats with fellow guests sitting nearby.

But here was another fatal flaw. The ship was not fully booked, meaning the bars weren’t full. In order to sit next to a stranger, I’d have to eschew vast stretches of empty stools and plop down right beside them like a creep, hitting on unsuspecting old people.

But OK, I thought, as I drank alone. There’s the nuclear option: the singles table in the restaurant. The ship happened to have recently rolled out a new “solo traveler” package, so surely there would be other lonely stragglers eager to make new friends. I showed up at the restaurant in a party dress, heels and a big smile, trying not to let memories of finding a table in the school cafeteria paralyze me.

At first, it didn’t go well. The eight-top table for solo travelers was half-empty, and it quickly became apparent that none of us had anything in common. The pauses in chat were glacial as we all tried to think up stimulating questions that might lead us somewhere other than strained silence.

But then two men appeared and sat down like they owned the place. They were medium-handsome, in their 70s, and dressed dapperly in khaki slacks and navy sport coats bearing name tags that identified them as Bill and Frank. They had captain of the football team energy.

“Hi,” Frank said, waving the sommelier over to pour him a glass of wine. “How are you enjoying your first night?”

I’m not, I thought, but I gave him a big smile. “I love it,” I said. “I’m having so much fun.”

Casual chitchat flowed as Bill and Frank revealed they were “cruise ambassadors” — single men in their golden years who sail for free on the ship in exchange for spending their evenings dancing and dining with solitary female guests.

Frank, I learned, was a retired firefighter from Toronto who got into ballroom dancing when his wife passed away and learned of the ambassador circuit from his fellow students. Bill was a divorced grandfather from Michigan who spends “the season” at sea. “You get all the benefits of the other guests, plus a $30-a-day per diem,” he told me rapturously. “You just have to be in the ballroom from nine to midnight. And you can drink all you want.”

Given that the boat serves excellent food, top-shelf liquor, free Wi-Fi and twice-daily housekeeping, even my modest math skills calculated that this was a very good deal indeed.

Our hosts excused themselves before dessert to get up to the lounge in time for dancing. I leaned into the experienced cruiser to my left and probed her for more information.

“Are those guys gigolos?” I asked.

Though we’d struggled to say two sentences to each other before their arrival, now she looked at me with the conspiratorial twinkle of a longtime girlfriend.

“Technically,” she whispered, “they’re not allowed to ‘fraternize’ with guests. But it happens.”

She proceeded to tell me a soapy story about a friend who’d struck up a steamy interaction with an ambassador the year before on a different ship. It was hot and heavy until another woman boarded the following week and also struck up a steamy interaction with him — while his original lover was still on board. A torrid love triangle ensued, and one of the women left the cruise early, brokenhearted.

Cruise ships, I realized, are not just a little like middle school. They are very similar indeed.

I wanted to watch this drama in action, so immediately after dinner I went up to the lounge to observe the ballroom dancing. In my haste, I tripped on the carpet in my heels and rolled my ankle. I limped on, ordered a drink and stationed myself on a sofa near where the ambassadors were congregated to view the action. It did not escape me that I was behaving exactly the way I had at every school dance I’d ever attended: sitting in the shadows, unwilling to participate.

What I learned is that while you have to know how to dance to be a cruise ambassador, you in no way have to know how to do it well. The courtly gentleman guided women around the floor to big band standards with all the aplomb of teenage boys waltzing at a cotillion dance they’ve been forced to attend by their parents. But the women on their arms — better dancers all — didn’t seem to mind. The ladies were into it. And I was into the show.

One woman in particular danced with verve. A gorgeous middle-aged brunette spun and dipped with grace, putting more hip into it than you might expect with such a partner. She had moves and she had charisma. No one could take their eyes off her. I had found her: the most popular girl in school.

I was grinning despite the pain in my ankle, typing furious notes into my phone, when my dinner companion Frank noticed me in the shadows and, to my horror, asked me to dance. My blood ran cold.

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I explained that I am a terrible dancer in the best of circumstances, and could barely walk owing to my ankle. (It was not lost on me that I, the 38-year-old, was the one with mobility issues in a room full of people 40 years my senior.)

Despite my excuses, Frank didn’t take it well.

“Come on,” he coaxed, obviously offended but not willing to give up. “Just a spin.”

“I’m sorry,” I demurred. “I really don’t want to.”

Frank walked off with a sour expression, clearly feeling rejected. It seems cruise ambassadors can be as vulnerable as the rest of us.

Since I’d offended one, however, I knew I could not depend on their pack for social salvation. What I needed was an anchor friend. An extrovert better than I was at mingling.

I eyed the popular girl.

In school, I’d finally found acceptance by seeking out a few girlfriends who had many other friends. Their ease made me comfortable and allowed me to be more charming.

So when the belle of the ball took a break from the revelry and sat down to order a drink, I subtly repositioned myself on the couch across from her.

“You looked amazing out there. You’re such a good dancer,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said in a western twang, beaming at me. “I used to be a professional belly dancer.”

A rich opening line if ever I’d heard one. I peppered her with questions and learned she was a travel journalist from Oklahoma. She was bubbly and as committed to gathering cruise stories and new acquaintances as I was. And unlike me, she had an obvious gift for it.

I willed her to be my friend — and because she was everyone’s friend, it worked. By the end of the week, I was not only comfortable on the boat, but I’d made a cadre of vacation friends whom I genuinely liked, and whose life stories were useful local color for my novel.

I had graduated from weird dork to cool kid.

And this is a valuable skill. Because, as chance would have it, my mother-in-law requested a cruise through Alaska for her seventieth birthday this summer. It’s on a fancy boat, geared toward an older crowd.

I can’t wait to dance the night away with an ambassador.

The post I went on a senior citizens cruise. It felt like middle school appeared first on Salon.com.

Come on, I think, you can do better than that.

“I fell in love with _____!” (Fill in the location of your choice — everyone does.) It’s the most over-used sentence in travel writing. I’ve been to Wales 30 times in 40 years, yet I’d rather have my tongue pierced than say I fell in love with it. Editors and publicists often try to push me into the love corner, but I snap and growl, as cornered creatures do.

I know I sound grouchy. But only because I want to get this right.

I love a woman — my partner of 36 years. I love a dog — my Welsh Corgi of three years. My parents are dead, but I still love them. I also love ice cream and seasons 1 and 3 of “Ted Lasso.” And I’m OK with all that. Love is an elastic verb.

When I was 23 and an American graduate student in Wales, the rolling pastures of Ceredigion at dusk, sweet-smelling of dung and the day’s photosynthesis, quiet with sheep and centuries of secrets, teetering on the edge of darkness, silence, and poverty, brought me to my knees with an aching need to do more than testify to their existence. More than take a photo or write a description. I needed to know the Welsh countryside in time as well as space. I strained against the edges of mortality to grasp the whole of it in a way off limits to humans. I felt compelled to imagine, to resurrect all those who’d stood alongside the darkening fields before me, tending animals, dreaming of home, praying to gods whose names were unknown to me.

Is this love? Is love wanting to scream in frustration because even though all you did was watch the sun set over a line of receding hills, it felt like the planet was offering you a gift you didn’t have the age or wisdom to be able to accept?

I don’t know, but it’s where I draw the line. To say I fell in love with Wales collapses the relationship of person and place into something sentimental and two-dimensional, in a way that saying I fell in love with my partner, Marguerite, does not. Maybe that’s because when we apply love to people we understand that the verb “love” turns and twists like a multidimensional kaleidoscope — we’ve all seen the colors and patterns change, been dazzled, furious, confused, contented. And we know what “I love mint chocolate chip” means, too. We understand that “love” contracts in that sentence to convey something like flavor lust + icy mouth feel = ten minutes of happiness. And nothing more.

Love of place is just as complex as love of people, but we’re not used to excavating all that the word can mean when we say, “I fell in love with Wales.” There’s a whole lot more going on than a hearty appreciation of sheep, interlaced, rolling hills and Iron Age forts.

Up until I was 20, when I studied in Paris, I thought I’d find my place in France. It turns out I found Marguerite instead. France — a place I deeply admire — embraces centrality. Paris is the center of France and France is (arguably) the center of the universe. I didn’t articulate any of this at the time, but a previously unknown, murky appendage in my brainstem lifted its head and howled disagreement.

When I arrived in Wales three years later, it changed its tune. Wales is central to … well, nothing. As I wrote in my 2023 book, “The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir,” the very name “Wales” is a Saxon word meaning “Home of the Foreigners.” The name Wales calls itself, in Welsh, is Cymru (KUM-ree), which means “Home of Fellow Countrymen.” The difference between the two is the difference between “Us” and “Them.’ To the world at large, after Wales became the first colony of the future English empire in 1282, it was defined as a negative: This is the place where we are not. It became the home of “Them.”

Ever since, the view from its minority rung on the UK geopolitical hierarchy has been alternative. A strong social­ist bent in politics, nonconformist in religion, working class. The Welsh language has been a marker of difference, too. Far more so than other Celtic strongholds in the British Isles — Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall — Wales has hung on to its tongue, about which shifting opin­ions have formed over the years. It’s preserved our identity; no, it’s held us back. Whichever you believe, Welsh remains stubbornly spoken in shops, on TV and radio, in kitchens and government conference rooms throughout the country.

As a young woman lurking on the edges of Welsh sheep pastures, I sensed Wales’ marginality before I understood it. While there was a grandeur to the geography, the towns’ and farmhouses’ lack of studied prettiness—a hallmark in England—testified to Wales’ exclusion from generic British prosperity. It was far from London; it was hard to get to; it was different. And you know what? That felt familiar. I was a middle-class kid from New Jersey, but like a poultice, this ancient, colonized country drew out an answering difference from my bones.

I grew up as part of an American anti-establishment generation against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the feminist movement. All of that led me to shy away from the center and naturally embrace the edge. Not to mention my hunch, shoved into the depths of my psyche, that I might be gay.

Marguerite and I had already met in Paris, but it was Wales’ nearly two-millennia-old embrace of its alternative path in the UK — the place where people speak “that funny language with no vowels” (not true: “w” and “y” are vowels in Welsh, so it actually has more vowels than English), where there are more sheep than people, where Americans don’t visit—that suggested to me that an alternative path might not be so bad. More than that: it helped me realize I’d already been on one, all my life.

When I went home to New Jersey after grad school friends demanded a sentence about my experience. “School was OK, but I loved Wales,” would’ve sufficed. Yet every time I gave in and said something along those lines, I felt like I was betraying the extraordinary experience the Welsh call cynefin. (I was relieved that my family never used the “L” word; they just called my connection to Wales, “Pam’s Welsh thing,” as in, “Is Pam over her Welsh thing yet?”)

When I was researching “The Long Field,” Gillian Clarke, the former National Poet of Wales, introduced me to the word cynefin. (Pronounce it Kun-EV-in. In Welsh a single f is pronounced as a v — it takes two fs to make the noise in “fight” — and the emphasis is always on the penultimate syllable. Even speaking English the Welsh stress the second-to-last sound. I love the soft way they skid into “seven,” pronouncing it SEV-un, dragging out the “ev” and swallowing the “un.” When they say that I hear the tide receding.)

Gillian wrote in an email, “Cynefin is the word used for the way a sheep passes on to her lamb, generation after generation, the knowledge of the mountain, the exact part of the mountain that is hers.” I understood why that would matter to the lamb, but not to me. Then Gillian continued: “Or it can mean that sudden sense you have that you belong to this particular place though you may never have set foot in it before.”

Ah ha! I understood. Cynefin is a way of describing the threshold where the interior imagination meets the outside world — the place where love resides.

It wasn’t just marginality that coaxed cynefin from me in West Wales. It was the landscape, too. I’d grown up in suburban New Jersey, where the geography of the planet is hidden beneath a barnacled crust of 20th-century houses, highways, and shopping malls. As a child I felt there was nothing to hold me in place — no anchor in space or time to keep me from floating away. And then I went to rural Wales and found a world with few trees and a distant horizon. A place where you could climb a hill and understand instantly how the earth had been made, where the glacier had passed and how rivers sculpted out valleys. The landscape’s clarity sliced through my memories of over-built New Jersey, slicing down to the mental bedrock beneath — a primary place of understanding where memory and concept conjoin. And that place looked like Wales. I’d always seen it in my mind’s eye, and now here it was beneath my feet. I remember writing in my book, “I felt I’d found the key to a map I’d carried in my head since I was a little girl but had never before been able to read. And until I could read that map, I’d had no perspective on my species’ place on the planet,” and shivering with the understanding I’d never written truer words.

Surely this is love—but I didn’t fall into it. Falling is just too easy. Although cynefin may be sudden, it requires preparation. There has to be longing first, and a fiercely imagined “geography of the soul,” as novelist Josephine Hart calls it, before there can be cynefin. And only once you’ve felt it comes the real effort. I had to work for decades to earn the right to love Wales. I had to learn its language—well…let’s say I had to try to learn it — and its myths and history, to read its poets and novelists, to listen to its hymns and folk songs and bands, descend into its mines and walk its paths. Let its rain soak my hair and creep inside my bones. If anything, my love for Wales has been more of a climb than a fall. I suspect it’ll take a lifetime to reach the summit.

The post Don’t “fall in love” with your travel destination appeared first on Salon.com.

She saw a man once a month for expensive dinners. He was kind, but he didn’t want to do any hugging. My mom wanted to hug. And more.

Now that I was ready to get back out there, I imagined us swapping stories and talking about what we planned to wear on each date, like the best friends we were.

That wasn’t what happened.

“The good news is that your mother’s panic and anxiety are lifting,” the social worker said when she called with an update. “The bad news is she thinks she’s in Italy.”

My 79-year-old mother was actually on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, where she’d been for four weeks. I had to commit her on Christmas — not because she refused go to, but because she was unmoored in time and space. She couldn’t sign herself in because she didn’t know where she was. While volunteering at an elementary school in October, my mother had fallen and fractured her pelvis. Her body was healing; her mind was not. The fall and resulting hospitalizations triggered delirium which stubbornly refused to lift.

My mother had a history of stubbornness. When I was young, she’d talked often of divorce. Yet her complicated 51-year marriage to my father only ended when he died. I guess that’s love, but it also looked like pain. My mother was the weakling; my father was the smartest person in the room. They once did go to Venice together for the wedding of their friends’ daughter. I wondered if, in her delirium, she’d returned there to be with him, or if she was traveling alone now.

During her hospitalization, I did some casual dating. A few hours away from the relentless demands of elder care a few times a week was a welcome respite. I wasn’t looking for anything more than that.

Then I met Andre.

Invited to a New Year’s Eve-Eve party, I decided to wear a black leather dress I’d last put on for my 25th high school reunion. It made me feel bold. I talked to friends and then sat down to listen to music. Someone was playing the piano.

“How do you know Doreen and Ayo?” asked the man sitting next to me, with the smooth voice I later found out he’d used to narrate one of Barack Obama’s audiobooks.

I told Andre I’d met the hosts when our kids were younger. We talked about my son and his two children, his work and mine.

“Like any good West Indian,” he said. “I have four jobs.”

“Like any good Jew,” I said. “So do I.”

I said I regretted not learning to play the piano despite the three years of lessons I took in elementary school.

“My mom plays beautifully, though,” I told him. “I mean, she did. She’s in the hospital now.”

He spoke with reverence about his own mother, alive and well in her mid-80s. Venezuelan-born, she’d emigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad with nothing to become a successful movie producer while raising three children and helping her 11 siblings.

A man this good-looking who was also caring and family-oriented? He had on nice leather shoes, tan with red stitching. I was impressed.

We’ll tell people we met at this party, I thought. We’d go back next year, for our anniversary. It was an annual event.

Then Andre stood up and said he was going to get a drink.

“So that’s it?” I asked.

“I’ll find you later,” he said.

Unconvinced, I remembered the first rule of parties: Like a shark in water, keep moving.

Meanwhile, my mother was drowning. She didn’t know it was almost New Year’s Eve, or that she’d fallen two weeks before Halloween, or that Thanksgiving had passed, then Hanukkah. The doctors said her delirium might lift, or it might evolve into dementia. The psychiatrist kept referring to “the tincture of time,” promising we’d know more in three months, or six, or nine.

In my family, it had always been like this: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. My mother’s bipolar disorder had overshadowed my childhood. Her moods had a centrifugal force, pulling in everyone in her orbit. When she was sick, we were all sick.

Years of therapy helped me see that my mother and I could be two separate people having two separate emotional experiences at the same time. A month before I turned 50, I realized that her being in a psychiatric hospital while I was at a holiday party didn’t make me a bad daughter.

On the dance floor later, I saw Andre come downstairs. He made his way over to me. We moved near each other, and then up against each other. At one point the DJ told everyone to grab a partner, and I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Uh oh,” he breathed into my ear. “We’re in trouble.”

Later, taking a break from dancing, he asked for a kiss, and then for my number. I gave him both.

In the month she’d been in the hospital, my mother mostly thought she was at a school — an institution where she’d felt most at home. She’d held jobs and volunteer positions in elementary education for her entire adult life. In a recent call, she’d cheerfully told me about a celebration for her in the teachers’ room.

“Will you help me write thank-you notes after the party?” she asked. I assured her I would.

“You sound so good. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying. I knew what she couldn’t believe was that I was living a life apart from her. It didn’t mean I didn’t love her. It meant I loved myself, too.

As the party wound down, Andre walked me out and leaned me against my Honda Civic. We kissed again, then we each went into our own cars and drove away. I didn’t know if I’d hear from him, but I did. A first date led to a second and then a third.

One night in January, Andre’s children were at their mother’s, so I went to his place. He’d ordered what I’d told him was my favorite food, sushi. Suggested we watch the beloved movie I’d mentioned, “Terms of Endearment.” Bought the whiskey I drank: Jameson.

Our hours together slipped by. Now I was unmoored in time and space, too.

I wished my mom could find this kind of happiness with her own dream man. The dam between us had always been porous. Now it had burst, and what she wanted most was rushing into my own life.

I wondered if what I felt for Andre was novelty, the newness of initial attraction. I’d never found romantic love to be enduring. I was worried I might look silly to friends I told about him, or get hurt in the end.

But who gets to say what was real? One person’s love could be another person’s lust could be another person’s pain. Maybe someone’s Italy was always going to be someone else’s psychiatric hospital.

What if early love was just another form of delirium? It might lift, or evolve into something deeper. We’d only know given the tincture of time. I told myself it didn’t matter if I felt this way in three months, or six, or nine. I felt this way now. I wasn’t going to back away from it. Instead, I’d going to lean in.

When my mother’s pragmatic sister asked for an update on my mom’s recovery in late January, I told her about the improved mood but continued confusion. My aunt liked rules and order. She was having a hard time with my mom’s delusions. When my mother asked her recently why my father hadn’t come to visit, my aunt answered, “Because he died four years ago.”

I told my aunt I was planning to go along with whatever my mother said, because if we wanted to be with her, we had to step into her reality. My mom’s psychiatrist suggested we pretend we were doing improv with my mother. Take her lead and run with it.

“But how will she feel when she finds out she’s in a hospital?” my aunt asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Right now, she’s in Italy.”

On February 14, my mother was officially diagnosed with dementia. It hurt, letting go of the hope she would fully recover. Holding onto a different sort of hope, I asked Andre to be my Valentine. He said yes.

The post Love in the time of delirium: As my mother fell into a strange new reality, I found romance again appeared first on Salon.com.

“You know, Glenny, I had sex with your mother once.”

I roared a happy laugh into the phone. “Oh, Howie, that’s great!” I said. “How was it?”

He met my happy laugh with a sly one and said just enough for me to imagine the scene: Atlanta apartment, twin bed, 1971. Newly single, 28-year-old Nancy Horn Nailen had left the kids with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama, driven to Atlanta for the weekend, and needed a place to crash. Her good friend Howard Cruse invited her to stay with him, and even offered to sleep on the couch so she could have the bed and be more comfortable. 

Don’t be silly, she said. We’ll share. 

There’s the short con. 

I can see and hear it.

If you’re a straight, single mother of three sons under the age of 10, your romantic prospects are dubious at best. But if you just want to get it on with a guy, who could be a better mark than your gay best friend, if he’s game?

Any onus for long-term love was absent — Howie preferred men and so did Nancy. Neither wanted a relationship or the barnacles of feeling that come with commitments. They had each lived with the consequences of unexpected pregnancy, so both insisted on preventative measures. After nestling and nuzzling through a long, sweaty night, they got it on just before dawn, he told me. 

“Nancy sent me to the store to get condoms,” Howie said. “Neither one of us wanted another child. We just wanted to enjoy each other.”

I could have been a stuck-rubber baby, I tell myself. I could have been the sequel. 

Of course, this is nonsense. But it’s the kind of nonsense I always engage in when I learn anything about my mother’s love life. I thought, Oh, Howard Cruse could have been my father. But that’s not the way it works. My father is my father and I wouldn’t want to trade him, even for Howie. But I love knowing about the liaison. And since my mother is made up anyway, I can imagine her with whomever I please. 

Here’s what I mean: 

I was 8 years old when my mother died in a car wreck; she was 41. Most of what I know about her has come to me secondhand — a mix of myth and nonfiction delivered by several survivors, including my father (her second ex-husband), my three older brothers (all sons of the first ex-), as well as family, friends and former lovers, one of whom was cartoonist Howard Cruse. Maybe you’ve heard of him: the founding editor of Gay Comix and a mentor to Alison Bechdel. From 1983 to 1989 his seminal comic strip “Wendel” ran in The Advocate, recording in real-time ordinary gay American life of the 1980s, including the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. His graphic novel, “Stuck Rubber Baby,” was published in 1995; playwright Tony Kushner wrote the introduction. But 13 years later when I picked up the phone to call Cruse — always Howie to me — the most important thing I knew was that he had known my mother. He was low-key famous in pop culture and a legend in my head. 

I bestowed legendary status on anyone who knew my mother because I was starved for information. And if you knew her before she was a mother, there was no higher rank. Howie had. Their friendship dated back to the mid-1960s, when both were students at Birmingham-Southern College. He knew her as a teenage co-ed and a young dropout wife, then a divorcée and a mother to boys. Their romp came before her second marriage (to my future father) and her first attempt at mothering a girl (me). 

In 2008, I was the editor of an alternative newsweekly in Birmingham, Howie’s hometown and my own. When a press release informed me Howie had scheduled a brief homecoming, I feigned a news hook: If I could interview him by phone, I would write a feature about "Stuck Rubber Baby." (First Second published a 25th-anniversary edition in 2020.) I had never read it but knew it was set in a fictionalized Civil Rights-era Birmingham. I knew every review described it as “semi-autobiographical,” chronicling the radical, racial and sexual awakening of a closeted, queer Southern white boy, who played it straight just long enough to get his college girlfriend pregnant. I knew all this, but on the day of our interview, I didn’t even own a copy of the book. That turned out not to matter. I was about to get an earful on the book’s background and a postage-paid primer on my own writing life. 

The call was almost over when Howie said, “You know, I have all these letters that Nancy and I wrote each other in the 1970s. I have all the letters she sent me, of course, but I have mine too. I kept the second-sheet carbons.” 

I gasped. Somehow this shook me more than knowing they’d hooked up.

“Maybe you’d like to read them?” Howie asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Please.”

“I’ll send them and you keep the originals. But please promise that you’ll make copies and send the copies back to me.”

It was important, he explained, to keep the correspondence complete.

Because I was so young when my mother died, only a few memories of her are my own. But I can recall the ecstatic joy of going to the mailbox with my mother — or on her orders — because there was almost always a letter from someone. Howie’s were special because they often included drawings, but he was not her only correspondent. She wrote to her mother, her brother, her classmates, cousins and friends. She exchanged postcards with former sisters-in-law and her first husband’s second wife. (“My wife-in-law” was how she described that person.)

My mother was an adult convert to Catholicism and frequently wrote to priests. Those letters began “Dear Father,” whereas missives to her own father started with “Dear Daddy.” She wrote to three Popes that I know of — Paul VI and both John Pauls. No Pontiff ever wrote back, but the Archbishop of Galilee did — and often. Those envelopes were onion-skin thin and usually blue. “Par avion” was the first foreign phrase I ever learned. My mother told me the words were French for “a bird brought this.”

Many times she’d read aloud to us the letters she received. She’d read them at the breakfast table, in the living room in front of the fireplace, or instead of standard-issue bedtime stories.

She never wrote to me.

But she did write about me. In 1979. To Howie:

Letter shared between author's mom and Howard Cruse. (Photo courtesy of author)

Glennie Lou is now three. It seems to me that she talks more and better than the boys did, but I don't know if that's true, or if I just read somewhere that girls develop verbal skills sooner than boys, so I'm looking for it. She really isn't mechanical at all though. She has done things like stand on a book and try to pick it up. She has done that a lot. This shakes me up. She did it once while Don Gregg was visiting. I observed her and rather mournfully said, "She'll never be a scientist.’"Don mulled this over for a second then cheerily countered, "Ah, but she will be a philosopher."

In the next paragraph, she pleads with him to keep showing up in the mailbox. 

I love you, Howie. You ought to write me even if I’m tacky and I don’t write. At least let me know how disgusted you are at my behavior. Every two weeks. 

* * *

I asked myself what my mother’s correspondence represented to me. She was an English teacher and an aspiring novelist, but above all else a correspondent: She wrote hundreds of letters to dozens of people and, like Howie, kept copies of them all. (Turns out second-sheet carbon paper was the sent folder of the 1970s.) Thanks to my father, I had always had access to my mother’s papers, which included all of her letters. But neither my father, nor any of my three older brothers, nor I had ever read them — or at least had never read them all. The anguish of her absence was too great. Before I got that fat, flat package from Howie, I could only ever manage one or two at a time. And they weren’t even in order. While Howie’s correspondence was labeled and filed, what we had was hoarding as a grief strategy: letters stuffed in boxes and boxes stuffed in dresser drawers. For me to even open an envelope meant a trip to my stepmother’s house, where the precious cache was moldering in a mildewed basement.

Then here came Howie with an un-disordered archive. I didn’t have to go get it — it arrived in my mailbox. The thick packet contained an exchange of more than 20 letters, but for me it had a wonderful weightlessness. I imagined the mail carrier had been forced to hold onto it like a balloon, that “PRIORITY MAIL” in this case probably meant “so magical and important that before I delivered it, the Postmaster General had to personally devise a method to keep it from floating away.”

Envelope of correspondence from 1979-1982 between author's mother and Howard Cruse. (Photo courtesy of author)

After I read a few Howie letters, I decided I was ready for the rest of her letters — to everybody. I thought of the phrase READY TO READ! and I couldn’t help laughing. When my mother taught me to read, this was surely not what she had in mind. But once I got started I couldn’t stop. I grew obsessed with completion. I felt I couldn’t figure out anything unless I read everything. The letters were all I had to go on. Those pages were my only bequest.

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So I retrieved reams and reams of paper from the basement and I ordered a fireproof, waterproof safe. I bought and donned white cotton gloves like the pros wore in the library archives department. I opened envelopes she had closed with wax seals. I turned piles into stacks and labeled new file folders and made a few spreadsheets. I put the letters in chronological order and arranged them by recipient. All the new information galvanized me. The more I read, the more confused I felt — and the more thrilled, too. I thought I would find answers with a capital-A, although I hadn’t even come up with questions.

Dated files of the author's mother's correspondence. (Photo courtesy of author)

* * *

I got drunk at a party and cornered a historian to ask for his guidance on research.

He said, “Well, you know that not everything in those letters is true.”

I said, “What?”

He said it again, and again I said, “What?”

We looked at each other for a long time. And I laughed and groaned and said, “Of course it’s all true.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe none of it is.” 

* * *

I spent the next several years writing to Howie about my mother and about writing. I called our correspondence “the doubling.” I was writing to Howie about her. And Howie was writing to me about her. And as we parsed how she wrote to him and about me, we were writing to each other about writing. 

June 17, 2014
1:46 PM

Glenny Brock
to Howard

What always astonishes me about your letters is their length My God, their length! I try not to worry overly about What Kind of Writer I Am, but I do seem to have trouble with length. Is this concision or compression? I'm not sure. In any case, it troubles me, but only a little bit.

glb

June 17, 2014
1:48 PM

Howard Cruse
to Glenny

Yeah. Well, past versions of me had the spare time necessary for writing long letters. Those days, sadly, seem to be gone. Sigh.

Howard

But included in my mother’s files I found an eight-page single-spaced letter that Howie had written to someone else — a document he had not included in the original packet he sent me. It was clearly a copy of a copy, meaning he must have sent my mother a copy of his copy. I wrote to ask him why, and he explained: “I made two carbon copies while writing it because I wanted to communicate the same things to Nancy without having to compose all the same notions a second time from scratch.”

This made absolute sense — it was the 1974 version of copy and paste. I’ve done the same a hundred times, cribbing from emails to compose essays, from text messages to finish poems.

* * *

“Pen pals” is such a corny term for a pair of people exchanging letters. These two were having intercourse, in the old-fashioned sense of the word — the give-and-get idea swap described by the medieval Latin intercursus: “communication to and fro.” The word implied exchange and intervention. Intercourse was a merchant’s word — used exclusively in trade until the 16th century. Then, for 200 years, it meant “mental or spiritual exchange.” Before the bawd overlay, the definition was “social communication between individuals; frequent and habitual contact in conversation and action.” Intercourse also meant “communion between man and that which is spiritual or unseen.”

Discourse was different: That word eventually meant conversation, but its Latin ancestor was discursus, “the action of running off in different directions.” Ultimately it meant “application of the mind to something,” which sounds like a solo act.

Their intercourse was discourse with a sly eye toward posterity. I was that posterity, on the page and off. 

* * *

At some point, Howie and I were discussing a novel written by a mutual acquaintance. Howie made an offhand remark in which he described the book as a failure. I didn’t bring it up again for four or five years, and then when I did, he didn’t even remember the conversation.

“If I said the novel ‘ultimately failed,’ I was probably being overly harsh,” Howie wrote in an email. “What I probably meant was that, while [the writer] was able to step back emotionally from the real life events to an admirable degree, he didn't achieve quite enough distance to put himself in the reader's place when he wrote it. This prevented him from recognizing when certain of the protagonist's behaviors needed further exploration…

“But I don't think that means the novel necessarily ‘failed.’ Just that, in my view, it could still be improved a bit with further exercises of craft and additional emotional distance.”

* * *

I had been thinking a lot about “emotional distance,” although I wasn’t calling it that yet. But Howie used the phrase and I read it like a map key. My mother was an absence rather than a presence; she was not a parent but rather a writer whose work I could study. Reading became a way to conjure her and draw her close —she was a character in her own story, but also in mine. Her future was history. Mine and hers too. Howie called the whole endeavor my “Getting-To-Know-Nancy Project.” And so it was. In those pages, I could read her like a book. 

What was the goal, though? Resurrection? Burial? 

When it came to letters she exchanged with anybody else, I didn’t know what I was missing. But I thought Howie’s cache could provide all the answers because I perceived it as complete. He was like a well that would never run dry. He was a slot machine set to win every time. Every time I hit refresh, the picture would get clearer, revealing some new detail. I started to think of Howie as a bizarro executor of her will. 

I had inherited his friendship. I had inherited his letters. And through him, I had inherited her letters, which actually felt like inheriting her. Her living voice — her wit and insecurities, her vanities and fibs, the whole of her mind as she herself came to know it. To read these letters was as good as reading her mind. 

The Howie correspondence unlocked something else that I had been previously unwilling to face — that getting to know her would mean having to grieve her, even if we only met on the page.  

* * *

Here’s an excerpt from a letter. I don’t know who the recipient was, or where the first two pages are. It’s only clear that it was written after Dec. 1976, because she is pondering how best to mother me.

My parents raised me to think a girl could do anything a boy could. When I learned the hard way that society as a whole did not share this opinion, it was a nasty awakening. Should I let Glennie dream her dreams? Or should I warn her early on as I was not warned? I keep thinking that if I had been prepared to meet prejudice, it wouldn’t have been such a big shock. On the other hand, if I warn her what it is like to be a woman in a man’s world, she might not dream at all. What to do?

What to do indeed? 

* * *

Obituaries almost always mention survivors, but they never mention the paper trail that the dead leave behind. My mother did not have a decent obituary — not one that did her justice — because her death was sudden. Instead, there was a death notice, just two column inches, with a list of our names behind the baffling phrase “survived by.” As if we survived her, but she didn’t survive us. The word choice is weird, right? It almost implies the dead can’t survive the living. But it’s not like we best the dead just by continuing to breathe.

Then again, the notion that any piece of writing, obituary or otherwise, can do someone justice is probably absurd. But I think about the phrase “body copy” — a printer’s term for the heart of the text, the main part of the text, everything that isn’t a headline or subhead or caption. When you learn to write letters, you’re told that the body is everything between the salutation and the closing. 

Her letters survive. I discovered her body in all those paragraphs on second-sheet carbon paper.

* * *

Howie died in 2019. In addition to his husband, brother, daughter, grandchildren and friends, he was survived by his letters, comics and drawings. In a letter to my mother written in 1974, this was his take on mortality: 

As to the Afterlife, I don’t particularly believe in the reincarnation of a soul/entities from human body to human body… or from human body to tomato or cockroach. I wouldn’t be that surprised (or disturbed), however, to find out that I’m wrong. 

* * *

Strange, but I’ve never considered writing a letter to my mother. Not once. To do so would seem like a silly put-on — like a weird grief pantomime. But I still write to Howie sometimes, even though he’s dead. This morning, for instance.

Dear Howie, 

I dreamt of you last night. We were sitting in some kind of storage facility and were supposed to be sorting packages, but instead were arguing about narrative clarity. 

I kept saying, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

You said, “But you’re not. Not really.”

I said, “What? What do you mean?”

You said, “What about a willingness to discard directly autobiographical moments in favor of invented ones?”

I had a clever comeback, but it vanished as soon as I woke up. Can you remember it? 

Either way, if this letter reaches you, please let Nancy know that some of her messages got through.

The post Correspondence school with cartoonist Howard Cruse: How I met my late mother through their letters appeared first on Salon.com.

Williams and his wife clearly do things their own way. The adventure began Monday when he posted a photo on Twitter of her Louboutin-clad feet in hospital stirrups, saying, "When Ayda goes into labor she comes correct." And in one of the clips, she performs a sexy dance for him to "Fancy." So you can see why she might have fallen for a man who during labor would perform a vigorous version of his song "Candy," imploring her to sing along while she's obviously having contractions, a man who would crack jokes about the comfort of his pants and would sing "Let It Go" – and have someone there to record and post him doing it — while she's actively pushing his child into the world. (Note to Mr. Williams' friend with the camera: They're called "landscape" and "portrait." Learn the difference before shooting and uploading videos.)

Williams' performance has thus far drawn mixed reviews. The Australian noted that he "has obviously never been in labor," while the Irish Independent declared, "'Cheeky chappy' or not, at that point I would have felt like punching him." And as one blogger put it, "He should have been cherishing the moment, supporting his wife and generally not MAKING IT ABOUT HIM." And it's true that in the clips, the tone change from his wife's early playfulness to her exhausted irritation at his Disney warblings does seem to indicate that he's not the world's greatest reader of other people's cues.

Yet in the Guardian, Ally Fogg defended the singer's unique approach to delivery, recalling how interminable the time between the start of labor and the arrival of a baby can be, and saying, "The presence of a clowning male partner and a discreet camera phone would appear to me far less problematic than the current vogue for recruiting a professional photographer to come into the delivery suite with a telephoto lens and a tripod but hey, each to their own." I imagine that Field's 24-hour labor provided plenty of moments of supreme need for a little levity, even if Williams perhaps did not pick the best of them.

A man who called one of his albums "The Ego Has Landed" is a man who is totally going to make videos of his wife in labor, casting himself as a father obsessed with his own comfort and amusement. How much of that is an act, and how much of it is pure Robbie Williams? He himself may not know the answer. And while I admit that I, like many, many women on Twitter this week, would coldcock a partner who was busy joking around on YouTube while I was giving birth, I am not married to Robbie Williams. And if it works for them, mazel tov.

In the final video, Williams holds his wife's hand and says, "I've never been more in love and never been more proud of my wife." He added, "It's made the whole experience really magical and whimsical and lovely. Thank you for being with us." And meanwhile, he's given mothers-to-be around the world the comforting knowledge that as difficult as their labors may get, at least Robbie Williams isn't standing there singing songs from "Frozen" to them.

The post Robbie Williams makes childbirth even worse appeared first on Salon.com.

Reliving childhood holiday memories through the gifts you buy your kid is a guilty parenting pleasure. Yes, you buy the latest, most popular toys; yes, you stay up all night putting those toys together; and yes, you play with them as much as your child does, or maybe more. A guiltier pleasure is attempting to go above and beyond anything your parents may have done for you. In my case, that's an even more ridiculous project — I always felt fortunate enough to get everything I needed in my childhood Christmases — but here we are.

I had an excellent plan. I would teach my child to expect only three gifts for Christmas: something she wants, something she needs, and something educational. In theory, it makes perfect sense. In reality, two things happened I did not game-plan for. The first obstacle was that I didn't know she would be so stinking cute, with a perfect little smile that made me want to spoil her rotten. The second is that putting only three gifts under a family Christmas tree pushes against the gift culture in which I was raised. It's kind of like asking a fish not to swim. I am a product of the Big Show.

Where I'm from, we only live for the Big Show. 

The Big Show is a grand gesture by parents eager to prove how much they love their children. It looks like a gift explosion. Imagine a beautiful Christmas tree, then pile around it so many gifts it's almost impossible to get close to the tree — maybe impossible to even see the tree. Gifts all over the floor, gifts stacked up against the wall, gifts on top of other gifts, gifts on the couch, gifts under the couch, gifts in the kitchen, gifts by the toilet, gifts spilling out of the front door — gifts, gifts, gifts.

This was normal in my childhood household and throughout my neighborhood. We were taught to go all out for Christmas. If it was Christmas and the $600 rent is due, and there was exactly $600 in the bank, then you did not pay the rent. You attempt to create the Big Show. This was Dad Logic 101 when I was growing up: You can talk to the rental office, negotiate with the mortgage company, come up with the extra money in January. You will be able to figure it out. But you cannot recreate Christmas. You cannot attach yourself to the magic of December 25 on December 26. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I saw this throughout my childhood. Automobiles were repossessed in the middle of the night. The power was cut off. Creditors made my house sound like a call center with the way they would ring us all day looking for money owed. That money was spent on those gift explosions. When Christmas came around, my dad had no time to chase a good credit score. He was more into chasing that magical moment — the moment when his spouse or child would tear open their dream gift, take a hard pause, and then say something corny like, “This is all I ever needed in life.”

Lucky for Dad, I was always a grateful kid. When he sprang for that Triple F.A.T Goose coat, I made sure I wore it until the feathers burst out. And when the rent money was spent on those Air Jordans, I wore them until my feet grew and busted at the seams. I played with all of my toys: Mr. Potato Head, Connect 4, the Michael Jackson doll. And every time I received a gift that my dad scraped and saved and borrowed to purchase, I always gave him that look and the little speech about how I could not live without the item he fought so hard for me to have.

My father mastered The Big Show and Dad Logic. We never missed a meal and always had a place to stay, while my siblings and I gifted him the smiles he was searching for while spending his last dollars on our gifts, even as he gave Santa, the imaginary king of giving, all the credit. 

Before I had my own child, I wondered why my dad worked so hard just to give credit to Santa. Once I earned the role, I understood that the Big Show was never about getting credit — it was about the smiles on our faces. Our smiles were like a drug to Dad — an unimaginable high that forced him to take risks and allowed him to float through most of the year feeling like the best parent ever. I imagine my father believed that if he messed up a thousand other things, but got Christmas right, then everything else would be OK.

I find myself chasing that same kind of smile when my wife Caron and I began dating. I would do things like charge trips I could not afford or buy the designer items she would randomly mention during our conversations about the things we dreamed of having. Delivering these items made me extremely happy. Receiving those items made her extremely happy. Like me, she is also a very grateful person. But this also pushed us into very dangerous territory. We loved each other dearly, but began letting expensive gifts define that love. She would go over budget to chase the Big Show, just like I would. Just like my dad before us. 

I brought this up in a conversation and we both agreed to scale back. We failed. I also brought up the idea of not spoiling our daughter by buying a mountain of toys, promising to stick to the three-gift rule. We failed at that as well. We didn't even beat ourselves up over it, but we vowed to stick to the rules in years to come. That future came quicker than I could have imagined. It was our 4-year-old daughter who stepped up and ended the Big Show for us.

One night over dinner, we asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Cross tilted her little head and raised an eyebrow. “A Moana baby doll and a Moana dress,” she said. 

She did not ask for a house full of gifts, a new Power Wheels truck, a bicycle, 60 Barbie dolls, a Barbie mansion, a Barbie automobile tire rotation, a toddler kitchen, a toddler hair studio, or any of the other gifts I probably would have purchased to make the Big Show happen. She was simple and to the point, and we listened to her.

A week after Cross gave us her two-item obtainable list, she added an American Girl doll. I whipped out my phone and went to the website ready to order because I'm such a sucker. My wife stepped in and told her, “You have a list. You can get that for your birthday next month.”

Cross did not fight or complain — she simply said OK. She is way smarter than me and understands that she doesn't need any and every thing to feel loved. Just her family.

In these scary times, when it's easy for a parent to feel like you're not doing enough or you're doing too much for the children, I'm happy that my child understands going overboard isn't a sign of love. She has indirectly taught Caron and I to focus on what really matters, like our health, well-being and commitment to our family, and to strive for an abundance of love over an abundance of gifts.

I know now I don't have to hold myself accountable for every magic moment like my dad did. When my daughter wakes up on Christmas Day without an American Girl doll, I can let someone else take the blame. This Christmas, let’s drag Santa through the dirt instead, and maintain our good names.  

The post Moving on from a “Big Show” Christmas: What my preschooler taught me about holidays and abundance appeared first on Salon.com.

There for the past 45 years Geoffrey “Bart” Bartholomew has worked at this East Village venue, considered one of the the city’s oldest continuously operating bars (since 1854). In May his son Rafe published “Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me,” a book about how the dusty old bar, filled with artifacts and junk, fostered their tight-knit relationship. Rafe shared some of the life lessons he absorbed from his father, while hanging out at the bar on Saturday mornings before the doors opened.

In an interview from his familiar post behind the bar, Bart reflected on their experiences — as did Rafe from inside Salon’s studio:

Rafe on "growing up" at McSorley’s

When I was a kid, going to the bar with my dad on Saturday mornings was the absolute highlight of my week — or my life.

My dad reminds me of the original name of the bar, which was the Old House at Home. He likes that because the bar, McSorley’s, certainly has become a home and a family for us.

Bart on bartending at McSorley’s

It’s one of those things: Emotionally you get attached to a place. It’s sort of like going on a long cruise, but in this case it never ended.

There’s an oral tradition that is passed down here as well, the history and the characters in the bar, and all the memorabilia on the walls. It all sort of comes to life and gets [to be] part of you, sort of in your DNA, if you will.

How a humble bar furthers a father's relationship with his son

He got to know a lot of the regulars and he’d listen to the stories we’d tell. So he became attached to the place as well and it was sort of like it became a second home for him. I didn’t really realize what I was sowing the seeds of.

Watch as the Bartholomews reveal quirky McSorley's traditions, including the turkey wishbones hanging above the bar since World War I.

The post New York’s oldest bar inspires a father-son relationship appeared first on Salon.com.

Back then, the only people getting veneers were celebrities like Tom Cruise and Hillary Duff, who could afford the 5-figure price tag for a quality set. My family, like most Americans, didn’t have that kind of money to spare. In Orlando, my mom worked as a barista at Starbucks, making a little over $20,000 a year. We both had the same teeth: jagged and growing inward, with dark cavernous gaps between them. I brushed mine obsessively as if to wash off the word DIRTY I felt was written on my forehead. Unlike me, however, my mom owned a cheap pair of flippers: those perfect, creepy-looking fake teeth toddlers wear in beauty pageants. When she put them on every morning, her face lit up, and she was free to go out into the world with her head held high.

I’d begged my mom for braces for years, but there was no way she could afford both the initial installing fee, plus the return to the dentist every couple months to tighten them. It was a miracle if we went once a year at all. Veneers, on the other hand, were a one-stop solution, though at three times the price. In the end, she paid for them with credit cards, and even then, she didn’t have enough credit for a whole set and could only purchase me enough to cover the top row of my teeth, which the orthodontist assured were “the only ones people see anyway.” They were $8,000—almost half her annual salary. A few months later, she would declare bankruptcy. 

As shortsighted as my veneers might seem to some, to my mom they must have been an investment in my future. Before I got my teeth fixed, I was an ambitious kid with a near-perfect grade point average. I dreamt of clawing my family out of poverty and giving my mom the life she deserved. Then one day, I was expelled from high school on drug charges after a student lied to the campus police about me being a dealer. By the time I started at my new school, the future and all my lofty goals had begun to feel childish and naïve. There was something that seemed preordained about the expulsion, like it was the first step in what was bound to be a lifetime of failures. Deep down, I worried that if I didn’t have straight, white teeth, I would never be successful, the same way I worried my being gay and non-white would inevitably hold me back. 

The veneers helped restore my faith in the future. Staring at my new $8,000 smile in a handheld mirror at the orthodontist’s office, a flicker of hope stirred inside me for the first time in forever. If this could happen, then maybe I was wrong about being destined for failure; maybe there were good things ahead. When the orthodontist informed me I would have to replace my veneers in 15 to 20 years, I shrugged his words off, figuring that adult me would have no problems with money. After all, I had a smile like Hillary Duff. Who wouldn’t hire me?  

Now the 15 years is up, and I don’t have anything close to the $10,000 I need to replace them—and that’s if I’m lucky, since a decent porcelain pair can run up to five times that. It turns out getting my teeth fixed wasn’t the secret recipe to getting rich that I’d hoped. 

Don’t get me wrong, my veneers have come with some sweet benefits. Whereas my old gap-toothed smile gave away that I was poor, my shiny new teeth imply wealth, a healthy lifestyle, a lifetime of regular trips to the dentist. Like wearing eyeglasses, they even make me look smarter. “You can tell a lot by someone’s hygiene,” a man once told me on a first date. “Bad teeth are a deal breaker for me. I want someone who takes care of themselves.” I nodded politely, while privately remembering how awful it felt as a child when others assumed my natural teeth were a result of not “taking care of myself,” as opposed to a combination of biology and difficulty accessing healthcare. It was one of the worst and best compliments I’ve ever gotten.

To tell you the truth, I’m not above playing into stranger’s assumptions. My veneers are the first thing people see at job interviews, and I take full advantage of that. I didn’t go to an Ivy League university. I don’t have family connections in any industry. But I can smile like my life depends on it. These days I’m a writer, which you’d think is the one career where appearance doesn’t matter, yet with the rise of social media, writers are increasingly expected to be full-fledged brands. With the pressures of keeping up a platform and invitations to speak on panels and read my work in public, I find myself having to smile more than ever before. 

This would be fine, except for the problem of my veneers falling out. Every time it happens, I’m thrown back into a past that I tried so desperately to forget, and once again I’m that insecure teenager who doesn’t see the point in trying. Making a living as a writer is difficult enough (for reference: for my last book, my publisher paid me $15,000, before taxes, spread out over three years), and with my mom aging out of the workforce and increasingly depending on me for financial support, it's unlikely that I’ll be able to save $10,000 to replace my teeth anytime soon. 

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I don’t feel sorry for myself. I won’t lie; I did get a good run out of these bad boys. But I do wish that 16-year-old me had been better prepared for the responsibility of maintaining veneers. Even so, I don’t regret getting them. If I hadn’t had the procedure done at such a crucial point in my life, I wouldn’t be where I am today, both because of the confidence they’ve given me and the doors they’ve opened in my profession. At the same time, I’m nervous about where I’ll end up if I can’t keep them. It helps that I’m not alone in my fear. Losing your teeth is consistently ranked as one of America’s top nightmares. It just so happens their nightmare is my daily reality. 

I’ve been lucky so far. I found a dentist once who glued one of my teeth back on for $50. Others have done some clever maneuvering with my dental insurance, which I only have because of my partner. Each time, they send me off with the warning to be more careful, because next time the damage might be too drastic to repair. I try to stall however I can: brushing and flossing after every meal, avoiding eating hard foods like apples. 

I feel oddly comforted by the fact that other people are just as desperate as me to have beautiful smiles. Nowadays, I can’t turn on a TV set without seeing a celebrity with a pair of blinding white veneers, whether on reggaetón stars like Bad Bunny or drag queens like Sasha Colby. But veneers aren’t just for the rich and famous anymore. It isn’t strange for average Americans to opt to have the procedure done. Some of them fly to Colombia or find “dentists” on TikTok who promise veneers at a fraction of the cost. I would do the same, but I’ve read too many horror stories about people cutting corners to get quick fixes only to end up with botched smiles. 

Seeing this latest rise in veneers, especially among influencers, reminds me that they weren’t simply a vanity procedure for me, but directly linked to my ambition. When I was younger, I believed I needed the perfect smile just like I believed I needed a fancy suit and tie to complete the illusion that I was someone worth giving a chance to. Whether my plan worked? It’s hard to tell. What I do know is that the profession I’ve chosen often places me in the public eye, something I would have never done as a teenager when all I wanted was to hide. 

The irony is that now that I’m in my 30s and fake teeth are everywhere, the people I envy most are the ones with natural, imperfect smiles. I love a gap, Zendaya’s slight snaggle, all those little personal details that separate a face from the rest of the crowd. I feel envious when I see strangers biting into apples, not worried about the consequences. Meanwhile, I can barely look at a corn on the cob without flinching. It’s been said before: You never know what you have until it’s gone. As the expiration date on my veneers rapidly approaches, I can only hope that in the next few years, I’ll figure out a way to keep smiling.

The post 15 years ago I got veneers — now my teeth keep falling out appeared first on Salon.com.

But when I happened to catch Ellen weeping into her hands on Tuesday, I knew exactly how she felt. My personal adventures with the dog rescue organizations of greater Los Angeles have led me to believe that such shelters are often run by the kinds of people who don't know how to play nicely with others. Fueled by truly awful firsthand accounts of animal abuse and abandonment and horrified countless times by owners who move or change their minds and drop their doggies off to die alone at the pound, these charitable souls gradually develop into self-righteous mouth breathers and priggish control freaks.

It makes perfect sense, really. You start with people who love animals more than other people. (And look, I've teetered close to this line myself, usually in the wake of a very bad boyfriend and in the company of a very good doggy.) You take these people and charge them with rescuing animals from mean or callous owners. Then you ask them to find good, loving people to take in each animal, ensuring that they're loved dearly henceforth. Suspicions will be stoked, hurt feelings will ensue, and every failed adoption will prove, once again, just how deeply disappointing most human beings can be.

It's not like the shelter owners and volunteers are wrong about that. But given that so many dogs are killed in L.A. alone every day, you'd think that volume of lives saved would be the main goal. For many volunteers, though, the work is much, much more personal than that. They don't want to save every dog in L.A., they just want to find Fifi her perfect forever home.

Which explains why, when I approached several rescue shelters in search of a young, playful companion for my dog, Potus, two years ago, I was instead led, time after time, to the dog they wanted me to adopt. Even though I made it clear I was looking for a dog under 1 year of age, I was repeatedly introduced to the likes of Oscar, an 11-year-old, three-legged basset hound with diabetes and cataracts. As I gazed guiltily at poor old Oscar, the volunteer would explain helpfully that he needed only several shots of insulin and eyedrops daily, plus special food and dialysis three times a week. If I dared to protest that I was really interested in a younger dog I saw on the shelter's Web site, the volunteer would invariably give me a withering look, as if I'd just told him I was looking for a good guard dog who wouldn't make a fuss about being chained to a post in my front yard in the dead of winter.

Now granted, we all want Oscar to find a home, and we applaud the good, generous soul who is bighearted enough to take him in and shell out thousands for his dialysis and his special food. But a tiny voice in my head still wonders why shelters should spend big piles of cash to get Oscar his dialysis when hundreds of healthy young dogs are dying in the pound every day. Yes, it's true, you wouldn't apply such cruel logic to human beings, but then, hundreds of healthy children and teenagers aren't sent to the gallows each day.

Increasingly thwarted in my search for the right healthy, young dog, I eventually encountered a volunteer who encouraged me to e-mail her so she could contact other shelter coordinators she knew to see if they had an appropriate dog for me. Soon, the saddest cases were flooding into my in box: Willy, the charming 8-year-old, half-deaf basset mix who was very depressed at the loss of his owner, but who was sure to cheer up with the right mix of love and elaborate hand signals; Baxter, the 10-year-old lab with hip dysplasia who was very possessive with toys, but who would otherwise make an awesome companion for my 2-year-old dog. I wrote a very apologetic note to one shelter owner, explaining that I was being a little picky because I was looking for the perfect companion for my dog. She responded with a diatribe, insisting that there was no "perfect" dog for me out there, and that it was absolutely impossible to predict how two dogs will get along over time, even if they hit it off at first.

Discouraged but determined to find the right dog, I visited a local shelter to meet a Hurricane Katrina survivor — let's call her "Heidi." Heidi was in a small cage with a larger dog who was clearly tormenting her constantly — she kept moving away with her tail between her legs, but the other dog wouldn't leave her alone. She even had some scratches on her face and body. When I mentioned this to the volunteer, she said, "Oh, they're just playing." (The other dog might have been playing, but Heidi definitely wasn't having any fun at all.)

Then the volunteer noticed the metal choke collar on my dog, with its blunt prongs that turn in to keep her from pulling on the leash constantly. "If you give us that collar, we can give you another, more humane collar to replace it."

"That's OK, this collar works well for me," I answered politely. My dog was leash-aggressive after being attacked by off-leash dogs as a puppy. The prong collar doesn't hurt her, but reminds her that I'm in charge when I'm walking her by a little yapper and keeps her from bounding out of my hands and into traffic to chase a fat squirrel.

The volunteer got a somber look and left. Another volunteer appeared. "There's no reason that dog needs an inhumane collar like that."

"It's not inhumane at all, actually. Plenty of trainers recommend them," I replied lightly. "The Dog Whisperer himself told me it was a good choice for her!" It was true. I had shown Cesar Milan the collar, and he gave it his stamp of approval.

"I'm not sure we're going to be able to let you adopt one of our dogs if you use a collar like that."

I could've lied and said I wouldn't use the same collar on Heidi, but it didn't feel right to brush off the concern. More volunteers appeared and gathered in a group a few feet away, whispering and pointing at me, the heartless dog abuser, and my poor, suffering dog (who was bounding around the courtyard, happily playing with Heidi). Finally, one of the volunteers came over. "I'm sorry, we can't let you adopt one of our dogs in good conscience, knowing that you'd use that collar."

Driving home, I wasn't sure if Heidi was the one for us, but I felt bad for her, spending another day in that cage being harassed, while some other lucky dog would enjoy a life of daily 3-mile runs, a nice grassy yard, an affectionate big sister and an owner who spent most of her time at home. The shelter workers were so sure that they were right and so consumed by the rules they'd set that they'd missed the big picture.

The next day, I woke up angry. Why deal with these people at all? I could go get a dog straight from the source. After all, most dog shelters picked up their dogs at the municipal animal control centers in the area. The private dog shelter where I found Potus had rescued her from a county-run facility just a week before I paid it $500 for her. When the shelter gave me her papers, it included her pound-issued mug shot, which I had seen online the week before. I had considered making the drive to the pound, but worried that she'd already have been executed by the time I got there, and I didn't think I could stomach it. Plus, I was told repeatedly that these were terrible, sad places that no one with a heart could stand to visit.

Nevertheless, this time I steeled myself for the horrors I might see and drove down to the north central L.A. pound and met a pointer mix puppy who licked my hands through the bars of her cage, scampered around happily in the hallway when I visited with her, and then jumped about 3 feet in the air when she saw the worker who passed out meals at dinnertime. She looked like the one, so I took a chance and told the shelter that I wanted her. No one asked me about the approximate square footage of my home or yard. No one grilled me about my training methods. No one urged me to consider working with a sweet little shepherd mix with a history of biting when cornered. Granted, this was also where my neighbor who keeps his dog in a tiny, filthy area of his yard probably picked him up. But here I was, in the San Quentin of the dog world, and everyone was incredibly happy for my puppy, which one of the employees told me had to be given up because the landlord wouldn't let the previous owners keep her. "Isn't that sad?" he asked.

It was sad, but her story was about to change. Bean proved to be the perfect dog for us: happy, energetic, playful, loving and submissive enough to accept Potus as her big sister.

So when Ellen DeGeneres cried on national TV because her dog had been kidnapped, I didn't think she was overreacting to the fate of her dog, I thought she was expressing anger and frustration at people who preferred to enforce their rigid policies in a situation that clearly called for flexibility and compassion. Once a dog has found a happy home, is it really appropriate to march in and decree that small dogs should never, ever live with children under the age of 14? (Mutts and Moms, the rescue group that gave Ellen the dog, had arbitrarily deemed this the appropriate age of child to pair with a small dog, and the two children at Ellen's hairdresser's home were 11 and 12.) And then shelter reps show up at the family's house with animal control officers and cops, claiming that they're there to do a home check, only to grab the dog and leave? Why create such a traumatic scene just to enforce policies that have nothing to do with the best-case scenario for the dog or the people in question?

Of course no sane human would think that the shelter owner, Marina Baktis, deserves the death threats and harassment she has endured since Ellen hit the airwaves. And the slightly menacing phone call from Ellen's publicist that Baktis allegedly received Thursday didn't help Ellen's case much. Even so, Baktis' statements so far have been pretty telling. Her lawyer, Keith A. Fink, says his client "is not going to be bullied around by the Ellen DeGenereses of the world." And in People magazine, Baktis herself is quoted as saying, "Celebrities, you know, they get preferential treatment. They have lots of money. They go into a restaurant they get a table. And so you know, this contract was breached. It was breached. So people need to understand when you enter a binding legal agreement that you can't just go, 'And here you go, I don't want you.'"

Is that really what this is about? Because that has nothing to do with the dog. Countless unwanted dogs die in shelters every day in Los Angeles, and this woman is wasting her time and energy swooping into someone's home and grabbing a dog out of a crying child's arms, just to prove a point? Remind me what that point was, again?

Ellen's tears didn't look hysterical to me. That situation would've left me shaking and sobbing, too. Would I have merely been concerned for the poor child, missing her doggy, as Ellen claimed? Maybe. But I also might've been depressed by the way doing something kind and generous can turn people into scoldy, long-suffering nitpickers and self-righteous tyrants. I'm not saying that it's not understandable. If I rescued abused animals all day, I'd probably become a self-righteous tyrant, too. But it's something to consider before you go looking for a new pet. Next time, maybe Ellen should go to the pound, and skip the interlopers.

While this doggy scandal is sure to disappear as quickly as it appeared, one hopes some of the more rigid shelter owners and volunteers will reconsider their strict adherence to their policies when bending the rules slightly serves the greater good and avoids tears and bad feelings all around. When you see a family that clearly loves a pet, let sleeping dogs lie on their 300-thread-count sheets and move on. There's another sweet little mutt on death row who'll thank you dearly for it.

The post Ellen, the dog bullies and me appeared first on Salon.com.

New York Comic Con is the East Coast’s biggest ode to pop culture. It's a four-day convention that is less about comic books themselves and more about accumulating pins and posters and hoodies and mystery boxes exploding with stuff you will never use. There are vendors selling replicas of Thor’s hammer. Life-sized glow-in-the-dark Slimers. Lightsabers that can power your house. It's geek fashion week, and everyone competes for who has the best cosplay, spending months and thousands to dress as their favorite characters. Those who don’t cosplay are decked out in geek swag, acting as billboards for their chosen properties.

I came with $100 cash in my pocket — much less than most folks there — and I was ready to blow it on Marvel shirts, hats and action figures. But I was just so bored with it all.

It was a terrifying realization for someone whose life revolved around geek culture and toys, especially as we climbed towards the apex of the shopping year: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday, plus regular Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — all spectacular times to find deals on action figures during the holiday season.

Every year, November and December would fly by as I scrolled the Target and Walmart and Amazon and eBay sites hunting for the newest Spider-Man figures, yearning for that same jolt of excitement I had when I first began collecting as a pre-teen.

I’m not alone. For the first time, according to a 2024 Circana study, in the first quarter of this year, American adults spent more on toys for themselves than for preschoolers, shelling out over $1.5 billion in sales in the first three months. In the past year, a whopping 43% of adults purchased themselves a toy. Similar trends are happening in the UK. As the toy industry struggles, sales to adults are skyrocketing, and toy companies are marketing nostalgia, releasing figures that remind folks of their youth.

Shopping for toys gave my droll winter workdays meaning. It made parenting less wearying when I could flick through my kids’ toy catalogs, searching for the toys I wanted. When your days are monotonous — working and changing diapers and driving kids to school — scoring a rare collectible makes you feel accomplished.

And the season of giving — to myself — begins in October, with Comic Con. Other than a couple of years during the pandemic, I’ve attended every New York Comic Con for more than a decade.

Even preparing for the con was exciting for the shopper in me. I needed to plan my outfits, the bag I'd carry all my goodies in without breaking my back, the shoes that would help me not destroy my ankles while I stood in lines for panels. For months, I would refresh comic news websites hourly for the latest drops for the con and holiday season that I wouldn’t be able to afford.

Over the years, I’ve filled many roles at the con, many of which let me in before the normies, so I could be first in line for swag. I’ve attended on a professional pass as a school social worker learning how to incorporate comic curriculum into my programming. I’ve written for random comic websites that pay me nothing but offer free press passes. I’ve elbowed my way through twisting lines to secure exclusives that I sell within minutes on eBay so I could afford more exclusives for myself.

I had a comics-themed bar mitzvah, and Comic Con was that times a million. I grew into adulthood, getting married and starting my own family, secure with my action figures and comics by my side. Life changed, but Spider-Man didn’t. Family and friends aged and died, but Aunt May never did.

Now that I own a house, I have more physical space than ever, but less space to collect anything. This is because I have a ton of little people living with me: a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 1-and-a-half-year-old. And they all have their own toys, spilling out of every crevice. Now, my collection of action figures has been pushed into the scorching attic. All my unopened Pop! bobbleheads have been discovered by my kids, their packaging torn to pieces and heads ripped off. To marvel at my 30th anniversary X-Men Hologram Set — which is still miraculously sealed! — I need to schlep upstairs and battle through the walls of spider webs.

But I can delve into memories without moving an inch. One of the first years I attended Comic Con, I volunteered to write for a now-defunct geek website to secure that coveted press pass. I scored an interview with Darryl McDaniels, the iconic black-hatted co-founder of pioneering hip-hop group Run-D.M.C., who was promoting his new comic. He was a comic book geek himself who overcame addiction and had the gentlest voice. Before we chatted, he had to use the restroom, so he spirited me backstage along with his crew.

Outside the bathroom, he stopped to talk with his friend Stan Lee, the co-creator of the Marvel Universe, who was then in his 90s. I attempted to play it cool. I didn’t want to burst with excitement, so I held my breath and didn’t move, and for that moment, I was just part of DMC’s entourage, chatting with the man who created my childhood. It’s a memory no one can take from me, one that will never be stuffed into the attic. I’m still buds with one of the members of DMC’s crew.

This year, I went into the city for three days to attend the con. It was my first time not cuddling my son to bed since the pandemic started. Instead of forcing myself to trek to Javits every day, I only attended for two days, spending less than six hours total at the con. When I was there, I hung out with my cousin — the dude who introduced me to comics with a Fantastic Four annual all those decades ago. When I shopped, I shopped for my kids, searching for the perfect pins based on their favorite properties: Spider Gwen for my daughter and Pikachu for my son. The 1-year-old didn’t need anything. Neither did I.

The truth was, I still had a great weekend. During my years writing about comics — often for free — I built relationships with people I adored. I spent an hour debating the Jewish influence on the Skrull’s invasion of the Marvel Universe with the author of one of my favorite books on Jewish comic history, and I was invited to eat Shabbat dinner with the former comics editor at Heeb Magazine, one of the greatest magazines ever. Over delicious homemade challah, we discussed classic graphic novels, many of which he edited.

The more I find myself distanced from the clutter of action figures and collectibles, the more I find myself loving comics. I re-read comics and am blasted back to moments of my life that I cherish. Issues of X-Men from the '90s zip me into the backseat of my parent’s car, safe with them at the wheel. I read issues of Avengers and feel the same way I did on my wedding day when I read them to distract me from my anxiety. Today, I still purchase physical comics to support my local comic shop, but I read most issues digitally, with my babies cradled close after bedtimes.

I’ll even try and enjoy myself this Chanukah season. Sure, I’ll still flip through my kids’ catalogs, but I feel a sense of relief knowing I won’t spend entire days scouring the web for a few bucks off a figure I will never open. Next year, I’ll still trek to Comic Con with a hefty bag and good shoes, but it won’t be the same. What matters these days isn’t the stuff I accumulate. My kids just destroy it anyhow. But I’ve got great relationships and memories that aren’t going anywhere, and I’m creating new ones every day.

The post I’m a dad in my 40s. This Black Friday, I’m finally giving up buying action figures for myself appeared first on Salon.com.

Maybe those men were just better trained to fear their wives’ fury than my own man, or maybe they were biased. After all, every woman that I knew in that room did the conventional thing and married an older guy — some by just a handful of years, a small enough of a gap to warrant having seen the same movies in high school, and some by a lot, enough to raise uncharitable questions about whether “old sperm” was a thing that they should be concerned about, seeing as children were the future and all. So by this logic, if the younger wives were middle-aged, that could only mean their more advanced husbands (in years, at least) were in danger of being at old age’s doorstep. Even so, I chose to believe them. I thought I was safe.

But then my novel — which features my fictional doppelgänger as the narrator, who finds herself in a situationship with a Kpop boy bander multiple years her junior — came out, I discovered that in fact, some people automatically assumed that the mother in the book was also middle-aged.

The first time it happened, it was in print. A journalist had interviewed me over Zoom about the backstory behind "The Band," and our conversation was the kind that felt like it was between old friends, rather than total strangers who got introduced via a publicist. She was an author herself; also, a woman, and assuming that she didn’t have any fancy Zoom filters or high-tech ring lighting going on, looked approximately in the same age group as me. We chatted effusively about everything from situationships (love them/hate them) to our favorite bands (N’Sync, BTS) and day jobs (professoring, psychologizing, writing) to using prophecy as a plot device (to emulate both the Bible and Shakespeare). Her article, when it came out a few weeks later, reflected the depth and breadth of our conversation along with all the highlights — everything I had hoped for — but one thing that caught my eye was the mention of the middle-aged psychology professor at the center of the book. This was news to me. I had no idea I had written a book about a woman who was halfway to the grave.

Despite spending the last four years writing, editing, and promoting this baby, the fact that one of its main characters (whose voice, profession, and other demographic labels were largely my own) was already in middle age felt like a revelation — albeit not necessarily a good one. The closest thing I can liken it to is the adult equivalent of finding out that Santa isn’t real or that the tooth fairy just threw your baby teeth in the bathroom trash can after paying you market price for them. It threw me into an existential crisis that started with me going back to my bone-broth regimen (for the collagen, all the well-preserved women of TikTok tell me) and ended with me hungry and asking ChatGPT “What is the definition of middle age?”

Keep in mind that I make no references or clues to my protagonist’s actual age in the novel and only mention, in passing, her school-aged children, who just so happened to be the same ages as my real children. (As they say, all writing is autobiography.)

So I thought that maybe this was a one-off. I moved on with my life and my book promotion, wandered away from my commitment to slow-cooking chicken feet in my Instant Pot for its collagenic properties, and figured that I wasn’t really middle-aged. I comforted myself with reminders: I still got carded for buying alcohol at the grocery store! (At least when I didn’t have my children with me). I still got randos DMing me across my socials! (At least whenever I posted material that didn’t involve books or husbands or kids). I could still fit into the short-shorts I had since college with my alma mater scrawled across the butt! (Although now I have just enough shame to only wear them to bed and not in public, where other women — my age or not — could judge me).

But then, during another interview, it happened again. The second time I heard the reference to the "middle-aged woman" at the center of the book — much to my shock and awe — was in person. During an author panel at a yacht club, the bookseller interviewing me and another novelist expressed her surprise that the "middle-aged" mom in my book was so driven by sex. I, in turn, expressed my surprise that this was a surprise to anybody.

I looked around the room at the audience. Based on my cursory and non-scientific snap judgment, it looked like most people there were my age; a good number of them were older, as at least one had explicitly pointed out to me during our taco bar lunch earlier that day. I asked them if they stopped caring about or talking about sex after college, or their 20s, or whenever it is when a person transitions from being a young person or generic adult into “middle age,” whatever that is. I stopped just short of asking them about their own sex lives because I still wanted them to like me enough to buy my book.

Afterward, when I returned to my separate life as a social psychologist and mother myself, I wondered: Is motherhood itself synonymous with middle age?

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Here's why it matters: As I teach my undergrads every semester in the Psych of Prejudice class they're required to take, ageism is real. By that logic, it's no stretch to unpack the many negative connotations of "middle-age," and to be automatically labeled that because one is a mother is a social liability of motherhood that nobody is talking about, but maybe we should. Because here's what else comes with that: the association between motherhood and all the other things we — myself included — historically associated with aging, like an absent sex drive, a declining openness to experience, irritability and moodiness.

I grew up across various neighborhoods in China, Puerto Rico, and American cities across the Midwest, the South and the West Coast, and I don't remember knowing any sexy moms. Maybe women just aged faster back then, before Instagrammer mothers who could pass for the same age as their teenage daughters invaded our feeds and told us that anything was possible, especially with the right gym equipment/plastic surgeons/plant-based diets/Korean skincare products. The only time I came close was once in the fifth grade, when my own mother elicited shock and awe from my classmates when she showed up to pick me up from school early in a green velvet dress and face full of makeup.

“That’s your mom?!” a boy I was madly in love with asked me, clearly impressed. He was probably thinking of his mother, who wore her grays prematurely and her clothes breathable and loose-fitting.

“Yep,” I replied, smug for the first time that year as the new girl in school already in the comedogenic throes of puberty. But then in the months and years that followed, that green velvet dress disappeared, never to make an appearance again, and instead got replaced with muumuus, as comfortable as they were shapeless. I didn’t think much about it until several years into my own marriage, when my husband would make the oft-repeated joke that if I ever started wearing muumuus myself, we would never see another wedding anniversary. I’d laugh and remind him that I like my outfits uncomfortable and spandex-ridden, partly to keep him on his toes and partly because my self-esteem is unstable so I could use all the help I could get, particularly in the form of attention from strangers. But also because I believe in the mom who still relishes being seen for herself and not just as an extension of what she can do for other people.

As I approach my 40th birthday — which might soon usher me officially into middle-age-dom myself — I’m comforted by the oft-cited finding that a 40-year-old woman (and mother) usually has the sex drive of a single (and childless) 18-year-boy. In this climate, few stats give me more hope for the future. 

The post I didn’t know I was middle-aged until I wrote a book about sexy moms appeared first on Salon.com.

This is the holiday mind game: the too-sweet memory of that one shining moment coupled with the painful certainty that the rest of the world must be sitting at a Norman Rockwell table feeling loved. It only gets worse when you begin deconstructing the purpose of such holidays. Pondering the true origins of Thanksgiving, for example, always leaves me feeling more than a bit ashamed and not the least bit festive. Don't even get me started on Christmas.

Every year, I think more and more of divorcing myself from these blockbuster holidays. I want to be free from both the material glut and the Pandora's box of emotions that opens every November and doesn't safely close until Jan. 2. Chief among these is the longing for that perfect day that my friend described, the wishful balance of tradition, meaning and belonging. But as an only child in a family that has never been long on tradition, I've usually felt my nose pressed against the glass, never part of the long, lively table and yet not quite able to scrap it all to spend a month in Zanzibar.

When I was a kid, of course, there was none of this philosophizing. I was too thrilled by the way the day so perfectly matched the song we'd sung in school. You know the one: "Over the river and through the woods " Across the gray Midwestern landscape, driving up and down rolling hills, my parents and I would go to my grandmother's house. From the back seat, I'd peer out at the endless fields of corn, any stray stalks now standing brittle and bleached against the frostbitten black soil. Billboards and gas stations occasionally punctuated the landscape. Everything seemed unusually still, sucked dry of life by winter and the odd quiet of a holiday weekend.

In less than an hour, we'd turn off the interstate, entering more familiar territory. My child's mind had created mythic markers for the approach to my grandparents'. First came the sign for a summer campground with its wooden cartoon characters, now caught alone and cold in their faded swimsuits. Farther up the road, a sentry-like boulder stood atop a hill, the final signpost before we pulled into my grandparents' lane. Suddenly, the sky was obscured by the long, reaching branches of old-growth oak and elm trees. A thick underbrush, a collage of grays and browns, extended from the road and beyond to the 13 acres of Iowa woodland on which their house was situated. A frozen creek bisected the property at the bottom of a large hill. The whole kingdom was enchanted by deer, a lone orange fox, battalions of squirrels and birds of every hue.

Waiting at the end of the lane was not the house from the song, that home to which the sleigh knew the way. A few years earlier my grandparents had built a new house, all rough-hewn, untreated wood and exposed beams, in lieu of the white clapboard farmhouse where they had raised their children. I vaguely understood that this piece of contemporary architecture, circa 1974, was a twist on that traditional tune, but to me it was better: a magical, soaring place full of open spaces, surprises and light.

Upon entering the house, I'd stand and look up. Floating above were windows that seemed impossibly high, their curtains controlled by an electric switch. On another wall was an Oriental rug so vast it seemed to have come from a palace. Hidden doors, a glass fireplace that warmed rooms on both sides and faucets spouting water in high arcs fascinated me during each visit. In the basement, I'd roam through a virtual labyrinth of rooms filled with the possessions of relatives now gone. Butter urns, antique dolls and photo albums of stern-faced people competed fantastically with the intercoms and other gadgetry of the house.

I see now that it would have been a great setting for gaggles of cousins: having pillow fights, trudging through the snowy woods, dressing up in my grandmother's old gowns and coonskin hat. Instead, I recall holidays as having a museum-like hush. Alone with the friends I'd created in my mind and the belongings of deceased generations, I was content. Upstairs, a football game hummed from the TV, a mixer whirred in the kitchen and the stereo piped one of my grandmother's classical music 8-tracks from room to room. But the house, with its carpeting and wallpaper, absorbed it all. As I'd seen in an illustration from one of my books, I could picture the house as a cross-section, looking into each room where, alone, my family members read, cooked, watched TV and napped. Pulling the camera farther away, the great house glowed in the violet of early nightfall, as smoke from the chimney wafted through the woodland and then over the endless dark fields, a scattering of tiny, precise stars overhead.

The moment that brought us there together — my grandparents, mom and dad, my uncle and his partner, and my great-grandmother — was perhaps the most quiet moment of all. Thanksgiving supper, held in the dim light of late afternoon, was a restrained meal, as though it were a play and we had all lost our scripts. Only the clank of silverware, the passing of dishes and the sharing of small talk seemed to carry us around and through it.

If I could go back in time and enter the minds of everyone at that table, I would not be surprised if only my great-grandmother and I were really happy to be there. My grandfather: walking in his fields, calculating numbers from stocks and commodities, fixing a piece of machinery. My parents: with friends in a warmer climate, "The White Album" on the stereo and some unexpected cash in their wallets. My uncle and his partner, Bob: willing themselves back home and beyond this annual homage. (Bob himself was a mystery to me, a barrel-chested man who laughed a lot and wore — at least in the one mental snapshot I have of him — a wild patterned smock top and a gold medallion. No one had explained Bob's relationship to our family, so I assigned him a role in my own universe, much like the cartoon characters at the campground or the sentinel rock. I made sense of him and marveled at his ebullience.) And then my grandmother: thinking she should enjoy this, but tired from the cooking and management of the meal, more looking forward to a game later in the evening.

That left my great-grandmother and me. Both of us were happy to have this time with family, this mythic meal in which we both believed. And, really, everyone else was there for us: to instill tradition in me, to uphold it for her. Isn't that what most holidays are about? Everyone in the middle gets left holding the bag, squirming in their seats, while the young and old enjoy it.

Within a few years, though, by the time I hit adolescence, I'd had my fill of tradition. Not the boulder, the huge house with its secret niches nor even the golden turkey served on an antique platter that my grandmother unearthed every year from the depths of a buffet held any appeal. Gone was my ability to see the world through the almost psychedelic rose-colored glasses of childhood. I also hadn't gained any of the empathy that comes with age. Instead, I was stuck with one foot in cynicism and the other in hypersensitivity. The beloved, magical house now looked to me like a looming example of misspent money and greed. My great-grandmother, so tiny and helpless at this point, now struck me as macabre and frightening, her papery white skin on the verge of tearing.

Perhaps my parents took my behavior, moody and unkind as it was, as a sign that traditions are sometimes meant to be broken. I'm not sure whether they were using me to save themselves from the repetition of the annual holiday, or if they were saving the rest of the family from me. Either way, we stopped pulling into the wooded lane that fourth Thursday in November. For the next few years, we'd drive instead to Chicago. My mind managed to create similar mythic land markers: the rounded pyramids near Dekalb, Ill., which I've since realized are storage buildings; the office parks of the western suburbs where I imagined myself working as a young, single woman, ` la Mary Tyler Moore; the large neon sign of a pair of lips that seemed to be a greeting especially for us, rather than the advertising for a dry cleaner that they actually were. About this point, at the neon lips, the buildings around us grew older and darker, and on the horizon the skyscrapers blinked to life in the cold twilight air. The slow enveloping by these mammoth structures was as heady as the approach down my grandparents' lane had been years earlier.

We would stay at a friend's apartment or, better yet, in a downtown hotel. I was mesmerized by the clip of urban life. On the wide boulevard of Michigan Avenue, I'd follow women in their fat fur coats, amazed and appalled. The wisps of hairs from the coat closed tight around their necks, hugging brightly made-up faces. Leather boots tapped along city streets, entering the dance of a revolving door or stepping smartly into the back of a yellow cab. The mezzanines of department stores — Lord & Taylor, Marshall Fields — dazzled me; the glint of light reflected on makeup-counter mirrors, the intoxicating waft of perfume on a cacophony of voices. And my parents, freed of their familial roles, seemed young and bright. They negotiated mantre d's and complex museum maps; they ordered wine from long lists and knew what to tip.

Of course, like that adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, I was that thing we hated most: a hypocrite. I couldn't see the irony in my fascination with the urban splendor vs. my disdain for my grandparents' hard-earned home. Or that my parents possessed the same
qualities and talents no matter where we were. I definitely couldn't pan out far enough to see that I was just a teenager yearning for a bigger world, a change of pace.

During these city trips, my sense of Thanksgiving shifted. No longer was it a wishbone drying on the kitchen windowsill, or foil-wrapped leftovers in the refrigerator. Instead, late November connoted the moneyed swirl of holiday lights flickering on the Magnificent Mile as an "El" train clamored over the Loop. It was the bellows of drivers and the urbane banter of pedestrians, weighed down with packages. The soft glow of restaurants — the darker the better — cut me so far adrift from my day-to-day world that I might as well have traveled to another continent. Far away from the immense quietude of the house in the woods, the bellhops now served as my uncles, shop clerks and waiters my cousins, and the patrons in theater lobbies and museums became my extended family. Late at night, I'd creep out of my bed to the window and watch with amazement as the city below continued to move to the beat of an all-night rumba. Without having to be invited or born into it, I was suddenly, automatically, part of something bigger and noisier than my small family.

In years since, I've cobbled together whatever Thanksgiving is available to me. After college, friends and I, waylaid on the West Coast without family, would whip up green bean casserole and cranberries, reinventing the tastes of childhood with varying success. There were always broken hearts and pining for home at these occasions, but they were full of warmth and camaraderie. Then, for several years, my husband and I battled a sea of crowds in various airports, piecing together flights from one coast to the other in order to share the day with his family.

On my first visit, I was startled by the table set for more than 20 people. This was a family in which relatives existed in heaps, all appearing in boldface and underlined with their various eccentricities. Neuroses and guarded secrets, petty jealousies and unpaid debts were all placed on the back burner for this one day while people reacquainted themselves, hugging away any uneasiness. This family — suburban, Jewish, bursting with noise and stories — so unlike my own, made me teeter between a thrilling sense of finally having a place at a long table, and a claustrophobic yearning for a quiet spot in a dark cafe. Or, better yet, in a dark and quiet woodland.

This year for Thanksgiving, I will rent movies, walk with the dog down still streets and have a meal with my parents and husband. Throughout the day, I'll imagine myself moving through the big house in the woods that my grandparents sold years ago. Padding down carpeted hallways, I'll rediscover hidden doorways and unpack that platter from the buffet. A bag of antique marbles will open its contents to me as the grandfather clock chimes. Counting "12," I'll look outside onto the lawn and watch a family of deer make their nightly crossing through the now barren vegetable garden, jumping over the fence that my husband and I put in their path, and into the neighbor's yard. I'll press my nose against the cold glass and wish myself outside and beyond the still of the house.

The post Thanksgiving: A personal history appeared first on Salon.com.

"I'm here to find an SS Officer,” I told the muscled man in uniform peering at me through the sentry window at the Berlin Archives. A plaque at the entrance read:

“During the 'Third Reich,' here was the barracks of Adolf Hitler’s SS Leibstandarte,” Hitler’s personal-bodyguard unit.

“The man saved my mother,” I added in German, smiling at the guard almost apologetically.

He handed me a pass and a white plastic bag with a German coat of arms printed on one side — a black eagle with red talons that looked capable of tearing out my eyes — and directed me to a building a few hundred yards to the rear of the sprawling campus.

Stepping inside a set of glass doors, I registered myself at a reception desk. A librarian, a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, told me to put my bag and coat in the locker room and bring back only what was ‘absolutely necessary’ in the white plastic bag. Five minutes later, I was back at the desk, plastic bag in hand. The librarian asked what I was looking for.

“I want to find an SS officer who saved my mother’s life in Poland in 1944,” I answered. “I know some things about him, but not his name.”

Why did I feel the need to impress on people that the Nazi I was looking for might be a ‘good’ Nazi? Was I trying to protect them from their fathers or grandfathers, or was it me I was trying to protect?

“No. We can’t help you,” she said flatly with a scowl. “You can’t find the names of these men without the permission of the families,” she explained in a these-are-the-rules tone.

Patience was my goal here, although that virtue only personally comes out on special occasions. This was one of them, I decided, and smiled as sweetly as a child. “Perhaps you can help me find a list of men who served in Radom Prison in 1944, and we can start there?” I asked calmly, hopeful there was a publicly available archived list. The truth was, I didn’t have much to go on. I knew he was of Ukrainian background, an officer, and had a reputation for torturing women, but I figured that last tidbit wasn’t going to get me very far. If I could find a list of officers, I could narrow things down by filtering for Ukrainian names, those ending with ‘-chko,’ ‘-enko,’ ‘-ovich,’ or ‘-iuk.’

“It will take us at least six weeks to find that kind of information,” she said bluntly. “You can’t just show up. You should have emailed us.”

I had emailed and was told that the archive’s researchers could not help with this kind of search, and that if I wanted to visit, I could look through reference books on my own. So, I said, that’s what I’m here to do. I showed her a printed copy of my email. She eyed me sharply, then left her desk and walked out of the room.

It was unnerving to wait near the ghosts of Hitler’s bodyguards. Why was I even here? A few months before my father had said to me on the phone, “I think you want to find the Nazi more than your mother does — you’re obsessed!”

* * *

The obsession began on a chilly New England evening in November 2011. I was pounding out the last of my work emails while snuggled on the sofa with a laptop balanced on my knee. On T.V., a young couple on “House Hunters” was deciding between a three-bedroom condo on a golf course and another with ocean views. With one eye on the TV, I googled my mother’s maiden name, Dortheimer. Clicking on a link, I opened a film that had been shot days after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, of Hollywood directors John Ford and George Stevens interviewing a Mr. Dortheimer, my grandfather Mietek.

“We are more than sure that no one is alive from our families,” he said in perfect English, staring at me through the camera, 34 years old in a striped prisoner’s uniform that hung from his skeletal 84-pound frame.

“We don’t know what will be with us. We have no place to go back.”

No one in my family had ever seen the video, but my Jewish roots had preoccupied me for years. My mother is a born-again Christian and as a child in Australia, I’d clapped my hands and swayed to upbeat pop songs at a Baptist church, then spoke in tongues and raised my arms in praise to Jesus at a Pentecostal one. I knew that my agnostic grandparents, Mietek and Alicja, and my mother were born Jewish, but never suspected that our family had secrets dating back to The War.

Mum was in her thirties when a letter arrived from a man in Canada claiming to be her real father. She didn’t tell me about the letter at the time. I was ten when we flew from Australia to Toronto to meet ‘Uncle Dick,’ a stout man with deep brown eyes, olive skin and strands of gray hair that were slicked against his bald head. I knew he was a long-lost relative, but was too young to guess the truth. A black-and-white photograph sat on the top of a bookshelf in his orange-curtained living room, of a young Uncle Dick in a Polish army uniform sporting a huge grin beneath his hard-topped cap. Sitting on his knee, I told him how handsome and young he looked. “Did you ever shoot anyone when you were in the army?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

His sternness and serious glare scared me. I didn’t know what to make of him. During the six weeks we visited, he rarely ventured outside to play with me, preferring instead to bury himself in his newspapers and books.

While I sat on his knee, he pulled a heavy white-covered book from the shelf; it was filled with large photographs of Polish castles, palaces, and stupendously grand buildings. The words were in Polish, so he read the names of places in a rumbling baritone: Gdansk, Ujazdow, Warszawa, Piotrkowice.

“Before the war, Poland was important center of European culture,” he said, his eyes wet with tears. “Now, most is gone.”

* * *

In my teens I learned that Mietek and my grandmother Alicja weren’t really my grandparents. My head reeled as their faces rolled around my brain like chess pieces mid-maneuver, undecided where to land. Alicja’s younger sister Irena was really my grandmother. She’d been shot at age 25 by the Nazis, while hiding outside of Warsaw with her husband — the man I now knew as Uncle Dick — and their eleven-month old child Joasia, my mother.

Irena had given birth to Joasia in June 1942, at her parents’ once palatial home on Orla Street, inside the Warsaw ghetto, cut off from the rest of the city by brick walls more than ten feet high. The occupying Germans crammed around 400,000 Jews — more than 30 percent of Warsaw’s population — into 1.3 square miles, around eleven times the density of New York City. Starving children in threadbare clothes crouched on street corners crying, their stick-thin brothers and sisters lying frozen beside them, dead.

A month after Joasia was born, Nazi SS men with guns rushed into the fetid buildings, one block at a time, shoving women and children down stairwells and into the streets. Aiming their weapons at the sick and old, they shot them in their beds, in hallways. Women ran from courtyards screaming. Old men hobbled. Some carried bundles and suitcases holding a precious pair of shoes, a shawl, or a last piece of silver. A confused toddler stood alone, crying for his mother. The streets seethed with SS whipping the crowds toward the Umschlagplatz, a large square on Stawki Street.

A week of rain and wind did not delay the loading of the trains. “Where’s the roundup today?” people asked anxiously.

Thousands waited on the Umschlagplatz, often overnight, surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns, in the stinking shit of those who had waited the day before. Two hundred policemen lined both sides of a path to the trains that would cart Mietek’s father, Alicja’s parents, brother, friends, aunts and uncles, to their deaths at Treblinka and Majdanek.

Dick crushed two sedatives he’d acquired from a doctor and forced Joasia to swallow them. The doctor warned that the pills might kill her. But when she was asleep and limp in his arms, Dick tucked her gently into a backpack and headed for the checkpoint gate at Leszno Street, where Jewish workers deemed sufficiently strong left the ghetto each day for hard labor on the Aryan side of the city, their names on the ‘deportation’ lists having been deferred. Sliding into the column of haggard, sunken-eyed men, Dick handed over a pre-arranged bribe and marched out of the ghetto with Joasia on his back, asleep and buttoned up in his rucksack.

On the other side of Leszno Street, hawkish blackmailers — Szmalcowniki — scanned the street for darting, nervous eyes, for dark hair pushed under hats; frightened Jews who could be extorted and robbed under threat of being turned over to the Germans. Dick passed along another bribe and glanced over to where his friend Roman Talikowski stood on a curb. Exchanging glances, Roman began walking away. Dick fell in, not far behind, rounded a corner and followed him to an apartment, where he crouched behind a bookshelf in the dark.

* * *

After secondary school, I traveled for a year and lived with Dick in Toronto. In the evenings after he’d downed a Scotch or two, I listened to his stories as we sat around a laminate table in his tiny kitchen. I visited him again in my late twenties and then moved to New England for a job opportunity with my husband. Suddenly I was surrounded by Jews. Neighbors and work colleagues celebrated holidays I’d never heard of: Yom Kippur, Hanukah and Rosh Hashanah. Alicja and Mietek had assimilated with my mother into a middle-class Melbourne neighborhood — far from the Jewish suburbs of pickled herring and yarmulkes — where straw-haired, freckled Aussie children slathered black, bitter Vegemite onto thin white sandwich bread and people were welcoming, but not overly curious at the green numbers tattooed on Alicja’s wrist. So when my neighbors in Boston invited me to eat matzo to remember how Jews overcame the impossible, the itch to find out what happened to my family became a fixation.

Returning to Australia for vacation, I somehow convinced Alicja to let me interview her. When I was growing up, she had barely mentioned the war. That all changed with “Schindler’s List.” We’d planned to watch the movie together, but instead she’d gone with a friend and phoned me a few days later.

“You must still go,” she pleaded. “The scene in the shower room where they push in all the women, and they look up at the showerheads wondering what is going to happen to them, thinking they will be gassed?”

I had paused on the other end of the phone, not sure what to say.

“That was exactly what [it] was like for me.”

In the movie, guards shouted orders in Polish and German at dozens of razor clipped, shoeless, naked women scuttling into a concrete-floored room. Biting their trembling fists, they huddled in groups sobbing, clinging to a mother, a daughter, legs tangled, breast jammed against breast, grabbing at the ribs of a stranger while staring up at the pipes. Suddenly the light shut off. Dark curdled screams turned to a wretched moaning.

I heard the Holocaust. For the first time, it took on shape and form. It had been forced onto someone I loved. I was unable to speak about it for days.

A week later, Alicja asked to meet me in a restaurant. We ordered red wine and a rich risotto. Dessert arrived and my grandmother was unleashed. She described Dr. Mengele on the assembly Platz at Auschwitz, his white-gloved hands, and how he flicked his whip at women who shivered in the cold next to her, pushing them from the line, off for killing, or experimental, mutilating surgeries on his operating table.

It was strange that she told me — not my mother — about this and the vermin-ridden barracks of Birkenau. She must have known that years later I would be like a dog digging for a buried bone, looking for evidence to round out memories that had been shaped by the unimaginable wickedness inflicted on her.

My tape recorder spun as we sat in her lounge room on her blue velvet sofa set, a porcupine Sputnik light pointing at us from the ceiling. Her shelves were filled with books, with titles such as Survival in Auschwitz that had terrified me as a child, when I’d been too busy building sandcastles on beaches and leaping bareback onto horses to process her horrors.

While perched on the edge of her sofa, I learned about the Nazi who saved my mother. He’d interrogated Alicja in Radom Prison in central Poland — after her arrest in January 1944 at a sawmill in a small town 25 miles away. She and her husband Mietek had been masquerading as Catholic Poles with false papers. To blend in, she’d attended mass, touching her forehead and tapping her chest in the sign of the cross. She combed back her wavy auburn hair and tucked tight braids into the nape of her neck. Instead of city-girl heels and hip-hugging dresses, she wore shapeless shirts and aproned skirts, offsetting her slender cheekbones and beguiling smile.

Seven months earlier, Dick paid a Catholic woman to bring Joasia to Alicja. “Everyone was afraid to keep her,” Alicja explained. “So I took her.” Walking to town with nineteen-month old Joasia in a stroller, Alicja covered the child’s face with a blanket, her hair a dangerous jet black, her eyes as dark as bittersweet chocolate.

The day the Polish police arrived, Alicja ran from the house screaming onto the street, begging the police to shoot her instead of handing her over to the Nazis. In town squares across Poland, bloodied, dismembered bodies were hung up as a warning of how Germans extracted information. Joasia was left howling in her cot, clinging to a white teddy bear.

Radom Prison was surrounded by a brick wall topped with barbed wire more than thirteen feet high, an abyss of torture largely under the control of theSicherheitsdienst, or SiPo, part of the security police and Gestapo that belonged to the intelligence agency of the SS and Third Reich. Most prisoners did not survive. Some who did described sadism as typical as that inflicted by SSObersturmführer Ferdinand Koch. His initiation rite was to whip prisoners with a large bunch of metal keys, then a fire brand, then a broom, and if the prisoner was Jewish, to kick them with his metal tipped shoes. Koch’s favorite was to push Jews to the ground and kick their heads, not stopping until the body was still and blue.

In Alicja’s cell on the first floor, stone walls exuded dread and the air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies. During the night when guards switched on the light, a dense black carpet of lice, fleas and cockroaches slithered on the ceiling, dropping onto women who were curled up shivering on corners of straw mattresses. A single window screened with thick steel mesh restricted light and air. Men screamed from the courtyard behind it, where Koch and others beat prisoners with bats, slashed them with whips and ordered them to crawl and jump barefoot on razorsharp shards of iron ore slag.

Alicja was handcuffed and driven a mile to Gestapo headquarters for interrogations — an imposing building where, in a labyrinth of airless stone-walled basement cells, women and men were chained to pipes and lined up for torture.

The Ukrainian officer was her interrogator, “a terrible fellow who was beating everyone,” she said. “He was always saying ‘pray to God that the war is finished and we all be safe’, so maybe he was against [the war] a bit, but he was still beating people — ach, he beat women!”

But, she claimed, the Nazi never beat her. Once, during an interrogation to uncover the source of her false papers, he left the dank cell where she had been handcuffed to a chair. He returned cradling a bowl. The sweet smell rising from it would have tormented anyone thin and gaunt from the prison rations of watery soup. The officer lowered the bowl onto the table. Alicja stared at it in disbelief. It was thick with carrots, grains, potato and cabbage.

“I’m sorry, but there is no meat today because it’s Friday,” he said to her.

Back in her cell, she scribbled messages on tiny pieces of paper — gryps, as the prisoners called them — and rolled and stuffed them into pieces of bread. A Polish guard delivered her gryps to Mietek in his crowded cell. Later, Mietek sent word to the Nazi. He had valuable information, he said, but he and Alicja needed to see him together. The inmates learned of the meeting and rumors spiraled. "You are spying for the Germans!" they said.

One morning at Gestapo headquarters, an officer led Alicja and Mietek into a room. Unlike the sparse interrogation rooms — where whips were lined up on a table in order of size, ranging from small sticks to large rubber and leather whips as well as electric cables of varying thickness — this room was more office-like. A few empty chairs were arranged in front of a wooden desk and behind it a larger, more comfortable chair.

The Nazi told the guard to leave. Motioning to the chairs in front of the desk, he directed Alicja and Mietek to sit. Alicja pulled at her dress awkwardly. Hampered by her handcuffs, she slid her fingers up her leg to the top of her stocking. She unraveled the corset that was wrapped around her upper leg, yanked hard and pulled it off like whip. She passed it to Mietek.

“I want to give you something,” Mietek said to the Nazi while fumbling at the cloth. Enormous diamonds emerged from slits in the fabric, earrings embellished with delicate filigree. Mietek held the sparkling stones in his palm, then lowered them onto the desk. Next to the earrings he placed diamond rings, carats large.

The jewels had belonged to Alicja’s mother. Irena was wearing them the day the Gestapo came banging on the door to kill her. She’d hurriedly removed her bust halter, along with the diamonds sewn into its seams. Hours later, Joasia crawled on the floor among the dead, dragging the diamonds behind her. That’s what Dick saw when he entered the house. He fled with Joasia, who was later sent to Alicja, along with the jewels. Now Alicja hoped that the only thing left of her family would help Joasia.

“When he saw those earrings he nearly fainted,” Alicja said of the Nazi. “He said he would promise anything.”

“What do you want?” the officer asked.

“We want you to promise to save our child.”

The Nazi drove to the town where Alicja was arrested, found Joasia and took her to a convent. “Don’t harm a hair on her head,” he commanded — or so the legend goes, as some of the sisters of the Order told me recently. It’s a mystery as to who cared for the Jewish toddler until then, and how the Nazi knew where to find her.

Later, during an interrogation the Nazi informed Alicja of where he’d taken Joasia.

“He kept his promise,” she said. “He didn’t have to, but he did.”

* * *

In Berlin, I waited among the neatly stacked shelves, hoping to find a list of Radom officers hiding on a page somewhere. If I could match the Ukrainians on the list with officer’s interrogation cases, I’d find Alicja’s name and prisoner number. I’d brought her prison file with me that I’d had sent from Poland.

Eventually the librarian marched through a door up the back with a manila folder in her hand that included my printed email. She added a few more notes to the file and asked me again what I was looking for. I took the black book she handed me from a rack that contained reference numbers and descriptions of archived content, and sat at a table. She logged me onto a computer and then left me to it. Opening the book, I let the ends settle flat on the table to land on an arbitrary page, somewhere in the middle. My eyes bulged when I saw Kommandeur den Sipo und des SD Radom. But my stomach lurched. What was his name?

I noted a few reference numbers with my pencil. Hunched close to the computer screen, I keyed in the numbers and scoured dozens of documents with titles like ‘Criminal proceedings against polish citizens.’

I told the librarian that I had been unable to find anything meaningful besides what I handed to her on a piece of paper, reference numbers for documents not viewable on the computer, with descriptions such as ‘relatives of Ukrainian criminal police under command of the Sipo and SD, 1944.’

“Maybe my colleague can help you,” she said. She wandered over to a man with a shock of neat jet black hair and a thickly-bristled moustache. After she mumbled something to him, he glanced back and looked me over. They both returned to the reception desk. The man told me in a polite tone to come back the next day at two p.m. He’d have documents for me to look at. I nodded and thanked both of them.

At two p.m. the next day I stepped up to the reception desk at the archives. The anticipation of a discovery was killing me. I looked around for the librarian with the moustache. Dipping his head in my direction, he scuttled back and forth across the room as if in an awful rush to go somewhere. But he didn’t seem to be fetching my books.

Finally, he directed me to sit at a table. But by three p.m. there was still no sign of any documents, so I began to rifle through books on shelves close by…Aktion… Konzentrationslager… Juden…Großrosen… I typed a message to my husband on my phone:

“I’m in Berlin archives looking for a murderer… weird looking at Nazi files describing arrests and killings. Not sure why I’m doing this?”

His message back was tonic: “…because it is important. Because in some way it will make a difference, even if you don't know what that is yet. All of this is taking you somewhere you need to go. Be patient. Stay passionate.”

It’s true the Nazi saved my mother, but I am the beneficiary. My life was handed to me on a platter. There was little chance this man was still alive, but I felt some irrational responsibility to thank his children. It had nothing to do with forgiveness — not after what the Reich did to my family — I wondered how a man who whipped and disfigured women would treat his own children. Knowing about his kind act might help them bear a past that was not their choosing.

The librarian placed two reference books on the table in front of me, like a waiter with a platter of roast chicken. He returned with a piece of paper and pencil and pulled up a chair. Removing the prison files from my plastic archive bag, I repeated the ‘good Nazi’ spiel and pointed to Alicja’s prisoner number at the top of a page, hopeful he could match it to an officer. The librarian asked questions and scribbled notes in immaculately straight lines. Then his face turned hard — grim even. “This is very complicated. It will be very difficult,” he said.

“But the man I am looking for is of Ukrainian descent,” I told him. “There can’t have been too many Ukrainian SS and Gestapo serving in Radom Prison?”

“Yes that’s a good clue. Let me ask my colleague,” he said.

In hushed tones, he talked with another man at the back of the room. Sliding into the chair next to me, he whispered, “but there were many Ukrainians. I will try, but I don’t hold much hope. You see, it’s impossible to search by prisoner number. The records are kept under the name of the officers, and their case numbers [of interrogations] are recorded against their names. What you are looking for is the other way around.”

But, I thought, I have the prison files — let’s do a reverse search — I can see when they entered the prison and when they left. I can see their false names on the first few pages and their correct names on the last. There must be records of interrogations somewhere. Out the back maybe? What did they do with all that information?

Of course, I realized with a thud, in 1944 and 1945, in order to eliminate evidence of atrocities, the Gestapo and SS tossed hundreds of thousands of files into fires as the Allies and Russians approached. For a second, I wanted to give up. But I couldn’t. Lurking in online forums, I had thrown names of Radom SS men at war buffs and collectors of Nazi memorabilia. I had pestered historians across the United States, Israel, Poland and Germany. I had traveled through Poland and now Berlin. Besides, just before I pressed STOP on the tape recorder at the end of my interview with Alicja, she had asked, “You think someone will want to know all of this? We should never forget what happened.”

I’d promised her that I would tell her story, but I didn’t think I could truly understand it unless I knew more about the Nazi. She may have left out details that were too harrowing to tell, but he could have taken the jewels and killed her. His training should have sent him to kill Joasia too. Whatever his motivation, he risked his life and saved a Jewish child.

“It will be difficult, if not impossible,” the librarian said gently, with me too sour to notice that he was trying to help.

“We don’t know what we would do if we were alive at that time in those circumstances,” I said. “This man deserves to be remembered for one good deed, despite his bad ones.”

“Ja,” the librarian nodded, his lips turning upward ever so slightly. I thanked him for his help.

When I pushed open the glass doors to the outside, the cool autumn air blasted through my hair. I pulled my coat tighter, pressing my arms around my waist to seal in the warmth. The entrance gate of the former Leibstandarte loomed up ahead, like the eye of a needle. Nodding at the guard, I felt deflated at leaving empty-handed, but vowed to myself that I would not give up until I’d thanked the Nazi's family.

But as I walked back to the train station I thought about Alicja. “You remember everything,” she’d said years ago from her blue sofa chair as she stared past me, somewhere beyond my shoulder. “You might forget the names, but you don’t forget what happened.”

Although I was in Berlin to find a Nazi, it was Alicja’s courage that overwhelmed me. The Nazi had been in a position of absolute power, wheras Alicja stared death in the eye, and instead of using the jewels to save herself, she gifted life to another woman's child.

The post My search for the Nazi who saved my mother’s life appeared first on Salon.com.

This fall, on my second day at Abercrombie & Fitch's 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods, Jeffries – sporting torn Abercrombie jeans, a blue Abercrombie muscle polo, and Abercrombie flip-flops – stood behind me in the cafeteria line and said, "You're looking really A&F today, dude." (An enormous steel-clad barn with laminated wood accents, the cafeteria feels like an Olympic Village dining hall in the Swiss Alps.) I didn't have the heart to tell Jeffries that I was actually wearing American Eagle jeans. To Jeffries, the "A&F guy" is the best of what America has to offer: He's cool, he's beautiful, he's funny, he's masculine, he's optimistic, and he's certainly not "cynical" or "moody," two traits he finds wholly unattractive.

Jeffries' endorsement of my look was a step up from the previous day, when I made the mistake of dressing my age (30). I arrived in a dress shirt, khakis and dress shoes, prompting A&F spokesman Tom Lennox – at 39, he's a virtual senior citizen among Jeffries' youthful workforce – to look concerned and offer me a pair of flip-flops. Just about everyone at A&F headquarters wears flip-flops, torn Abercrombie jeans, and either a polo shirt or a sweater from Abercrombie or Hollister, Jeffries' brand aimed at high school students.

When I first arrived on "campus," as many A&F employees refer to it, I felt as if I had stepped into a pleasantly parallel universe. The idyllic compound took two years and $131 million to complete, and it was designed so nothing of the outside world can be seen or heard. Jeffries has banished the "cynicism" of the real world in favor of a cultlike immersion in his brand identity. The complex does feel like a kind of college campus, albeit one with a soundtrack you can't turn off. Dance music plays constantly in each of the airy, tin-roofed buildings, and when I entered the spacious front lobby, where a wooden canoe hangs from the ceiling, two attractive young men in Abercrombie polo shirts and torn Abercrombie jeans sat at the welcome desk, one checking his Friendster.com messages while the other swayed subtly to the Pet Shop Boys song "If Looks Could Kill."

If looks could kill, everyone here would be dead. Jeffries' employees are young, painfully attractive, and exceedingly eager, and they travel around the campus on playground scooters, stopping occasionally to chill out by the bonfire that burns most days in a pit at the center of campus. The outdoorsy, summer-camp feel of the place is accentuated by a treehouse conference room, barnlike building and sheds with gridded windows, and a plethora of wooden decks and porches. But the campus also feels oddly urban – and, at times, stark and unwelcoming. The pallid, neo-industrial two-story buildings are built around a winding cement road, reminding employees that this is a workplace, after all.

Inside, the airy and modern workspaces are designed to encourage communication and teamwork, and everywhere you look, smiley employees are brainstorming or eagerly recounting their weekends. "I'm not drinking again for a year," one young employee said to another as they passed me in the hall. There are few "offices" and even fewer doors at A&F central. Jeffries, for example, uses an airy conference room as his office, and he spends much of his days huddling with designers who come armed with their newest ideas and designs.

The press-shy Jeffries rarely grants interviews, but he invited me to A&F's Ohio headquarters to promote the opening of his first flagship store, a four-story, 23,000-square-foot behemoth across the street from Trump Tower in Manhattan. To celebrate the opening, in November Jeffries threw a packed, ritzy, invitation-only party at the store, at which slightly soused women paid $10 apiece to have Polaroids of themselves taken with shirtless A&F model Matt Ratliff. And why not throw a party? Life is good for Jeffries, who in 14 years has transformed Abercrombie & Fitch from a struggling retailer of "fuddy-duddy clothes" into the most dominant and imitated lifestyle-based brand for young men in America.

Valued at $5 billion, the company now has revenues approaching $2 billion a year rolling in from more than 800 stores and four successful brands. For the kids there's Abercrombie, aimed at middle schoolers who want to look like their cool older siblings. For high schoolers there's Hollister, a wildly popular surf-inspired look for "energetic and outgoing guys and girls" that has quickly become the brand of choice for Midwestern teens who wish they lived in Laguna Beach, Calif.

When the Hollister kids head off to college, Jeffries has a brand – the preppy and collegiate Abercrombie & Fitch – waiting for them there. And for the post-college professional who is still young at heart, Jeffries recently launched Ruehl, a casual sportswear line that targets 22- to 35-year-olds.

While Wall Street analysts and the companies' many critics gleefully predict A&F's impending demise every year or so, they have yet to be right. The company struggled some in the post-9/11 period, when, unlike other slumping retailers, it refused to offer discounts or promotions. But A&F's earnings have nonetheless increased for 52 straight quarters, excluding a one-time charge in 2004. "To me it's the most amazing record that exists in U.S. retailing, period," says A.G. Edwards analyst Robert Buchanan.

As his A&F brand has reached iconic status, Jeffries has raised prices, only to find that the brand's loyal fans will gladly pay whatever he asks. Total sales for November 2005 increased 34 percent over the year before, more than five times the gain made by A&F's main competitor, American Eagle. And while many retailers struggled during the Christmas season, Abercrombie thrived — it scored year-over-year gains of 29 percent in December, compared to 1.5 percent for other specialty retail stores.

Next, Jeffries plans to open his first store overseas, in London, and continue the transformation of A&F from American frat-bro wear to luxury lifestyle brand. I wouldn't bet against him. If history is any indication, Jeffries won't let anyone – "girlcotting" high school feminists, humorless Asians, angry shareholders, thong-hating parents, lawsuit-happy minorities, nosy journalists, copycat competitors or uptight moralists — get in his way.

Mike Jeffries is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry. A quirky perfectionist and control freak, he guards his aspirational brands and his utopian chocolate factory with a highly effective zeal. Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. "He's weird and probably insane, but he's also unbelievably driven and brilliant," says a former employee at Paul Harris, a Midwestern women's chain for which Jeffries worked before becoming CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992.

Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports.

His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips. But while he can't turn back the clock, he can – and has – done the next best thing, creating a parallel universe of beauty and exclusivity where his attractions and obsessions have made him millions, shaped modern culture's concepts of gender, masculinity and physical beauty, and made over himself and the world in his image, leaving them both just a little more bizarre than he found them.

Much more than just a brand, Abercrombie & Fitch successfully resuscitated a 1990s version of a 1950s ideal – the white, masculine "beefcake" – during a time of political correctness and rejection of '50s orthodoxy. But it did so with profound and significant differences. A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair. While feigning casualness (many of its clothes look like they've spent years in washing machine, then a hamper), Abercrombie actually celebrates the vain, highly constructed male. After all, there is nothing casual about an A&F sweatshirt worn over two A&F polos worn over an A&F T-shirt. (A&F has had less of a cultural impact on women's fashion. Its girls' line is preppy, sexy and popular, but the company has mostly remained focused on pleasing the all-American college boy.)

For many young men, to wear Abercrombie is to broadcast masculinity, athleticism and inclusion in the "cool boys club" without even having to open their mouths (that may be why the brand is so popular among some gay men who want desperately to announce their non-effeminacy). But because A&F's vision is so constructed and commodified (and because what A&F sells is not so much manhood but perennial boyhood), there is also something oddly emasculating about it. Compared to the 1950s ideal, A&F's version of maleness feels restrictive and claustrophobic. If becoming a man is about independence and growing up, then Abercrombie doesn't feel very masculine at all.

In that way, the brand is a lot like its creator. While Jeffries wears A&F clothes, the uniform doesn't succeed at making him seem boyish or particularly masculine. And for a man obsessed with creating a "sexy and emotional experience" for his customers, Jeffries comes off as oddly asexual. He is touchy-feely with some of his employees, both male and female, but the touch is decidedly paternal.

Remarkably little is known about Jeffries' personal life. There are few people who claim to know Jeffries well, and those who do wouldn't comment for this story. What is known is that Jeffries has a grown son, lives separately from his wife, and, according to Business Week, has a Herb Ritts photo of a toned male torso hanging over the fireplace in his bedroom.

Jeffries wouldn't discuss any of that with me, and he fidgeted nervously and grew visibly agitated when I asked about several of the many controversies and lawsuits he has weathered in his 14 years at the helm of A&F. Our first bump came when I mentioned the 2002 uproar over the company's thongs for middle-school girls, which had "Eye Candy" and "Wink Wink" printed on their fronts. "That was a bunch of bullshit," he said, sweating profusely. "People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls. But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls. And I think anybody who gets on a bandwagon about thongs for little girls is crazy. Just crazy! There's so much craziness about sex in this country. It's nuts! I can see getting upset about letting your girl hang out with a bunch of old pervs, but why would you let your girl hang out with a bunch of old pervs?"

Later I brought up the brouhaha surrounding the A&F Quarterly, which, until it was discontinued in 2003, boasted articles about the history of orgies and pictures of chiseled, mostly white, all-American boys and girls (but mostly boys) cavorting naked on horses, beaches, pianos, surfboards, statues and phallically suggestive tree trunks. The magalog so outraged the American Decency Association that it called for a boycott and started selling anti-Abercrombie T-shirts: "Ditch Fitch: Abercrombie Peddles Porn and Exploits Children." Meanwhile, gay men across America were eagerly collecting the magazines, lured by photographer Bruce Weber's taste for beautiful, masculine boys playfully pulling off each other's boxers.

Jeffries nearly fell over in exasperation when I mentioned the magalog, although I'm not sure which charge – that he sells sex to kids or that his advertising is homoerotic – bothered him more. "That's just so wrong!" he said. "I think that what we represent sexually is healthy. It's playful. It's not dark. It's not degrading! And it's not gay, and it's not straight, and it's not black, and it's not white. It's not about any labels. That would be cynical, and we're not cynical! It's all depicting this wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness that exist in this generation and, candidly, does not exist in the older generation."

Jeffries alternates his grumpy defensiveness with moments of surprising candor, making him at times oddly endearing. He admitted things out loud that some youth-focused retailers wouldn't (which may be why he panicked and pulled his cooperation from this story two days after I left A&F headquarters, offering no explanation). For example, when I ask him how important sex and sexual attraction are in what he calls the "emotional experience" he creates for his customers, he says, "It's almost everything. That's why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that."

As far as Jeffries is concerned, America's unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," he says. "Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don't alienate anybody, but you don't excite anybody, either."

Jeffries' obsession with building brands began when he was 5. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father owned a chain of party supply stores for which a young Jeffries liked to organize and design the windows and counters. "I would always say to my parents, 'We need another store. We need another!'" Jeffries recalls. "I always wanted to expand and get bigger, and I would get off on saying, 'Why do we do the fixtures like this? Why don't we do it another way?' That totally turned me on."

Jeffries says he had a "very classic American youth," although he was not good at sports. "I broke my dad's heart because I wasn't good at basketball," he says. In high school in the late 1950s, Jeffries always wore Levi's jeans. "Actually, don't write that," he tells me, laughing. "But Levi's was definitely the uniform back then, kind of like what A&F has become. If you didn't wear 501s you were considered weird."

No one cool wore Abercrombie & Fitch when Jeffries went off to Claremont McKenna College and then to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in business administration. In fact, the company's best years were long behind it. Founded in 1892, in its heyday it served Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower (they bought their fishing equipment there), Ernest Hemingway (guns), and Cole Porter (evening clothes). During prohibition A&F was where the in crowd went for its hip flasks. But by the 1970s it had become a fashion backwater, holding on for dear life.

Leslee O'Neill, A&F's executive vice president of planning and allocation, remembers what the company was like before Jeffries got there. "We had old clothes that no one liked," she says. "It was a mess, a total disaster. We had this old library at our headquarters with all these really old books. There were croquet sets lying around. It was very English."

The company, which since 1988 had been owned by the Limited, was losing $25 million a year when Jeffries arrived and announced that A&F could survive and prosper as a "young, hip, spirited company." "We're all there thinking, Oh yeah, right. Abercrombie & Fitch?" recalls O'Neill. "But in the end we were like, Well, why not? It can't get any worse." Jeffries, then in his late 40s, dressed in oxford shirts and corduroy pants. "He was a lot more normal back then," O'Neill says. "Today he's much more eccentric, obviously."

Maybe, although former co-workers at Paul Harris recall that Jeffries had an odd personal style even back then. "He wore the same outfit to work every day," recalls Thomas Yeo, a Paul Harris colleague. "Nearly worn-out suede loafers, a pair of gray flannel pants, and a double-breasted navy blazer. I don't think he ever changed his clothes. All that seemed to matter to him was the success of the brand."

Jan Woodruff, who also worked with Jeffries at Paul Harris, remembers him as a workaholic. "If he had a life outside work, it wasn't something people knew about," says Woodruff. But Woodruff and others say he has a superlative fashion mind. "It's so rare to find someone who is brilliant at both the creative and the business sides. But Jeffries is both. He's good at thinking in broad terms, but he's also obsessed with details. And I've never seen anyone as driven as Mike. I had no doubt he would be incredibly successful if he found the right venue. And he found it."

Soon after taking over A&F, Jeffries went looking early on for the right man to help him make A&F a sexy, aspirational brand. He settled on Bruce Weber, already a renowned photographer known for his male nudes. "But back then we couldn't afford him for an actual shoot," Jeffries told me, "so we bought one picture from him and hung it in a store window."

Fourteen years later, Jeffries' success is the envy of the fashion world. In a recent feature called "The Abercrombie Effect" in DNR, a newsmagazine about men's fashion and retail, the magazine noted that "not since Ralph Lauren's ascent in the 1980s has a single brand perfected a lifestyle-based look so often alluded to and imitated." Now Ralph Lauren's doing the imitating, opening a chain of collegiate, WASPy Polo knockoff stores called Rugby for young customers, featuring in-store grunge bands and beautiful salespeople.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," says Margaret Doerrer, national sales manager for young men at Union Bay, another youth-oriented label. "In the young men's market, for the longest time no one was creating a 'lifestyle.' Particularly in the department stores, everyone was focused on hip-hop and urban brands, and no one was creating that average, American Joe look. Jeffries never lost sight of who his customer is, and he created a quality brand that caters to the cool clique and has a sense of exclusivity, yet it still has a mass appeal, because people want to be a part of it. It's genius."

Maybe it's just the price of success, but it's not a normal day in America if someone isn't suing (or boycotting, or "girlcotting") Abercrombie & Fitch, which has become a lightning rod for both the left and the right. In 2004 A&F paid $40 million to settle a class-action suit brought by minority employees who said they were either denied employment or forced to work in back rooms, where they wouldn't be seen by customers. While A&F denied any wrongdoing, Jeffries said the suit taught him a lesson: "I don't think we were in any sense guilty of racism, but I think we just didn't work hard enough as a company to create more balance and diversity. And we have, and I think that's made us a better company. We have minority recruiters. And if you go into our stores you see great-looking kids of all races."

In the latest episode, last fall a group of high school girls from Allegheny County, Penn., made the rounds of television talk shows to protest the company's "offensive" T-shirts. Of particular concern were shirts that read "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" and "Do I Make You Look Fat?"

"Abercrombie has a history of insensitivity," the group's well-spoken Emma Blackman-Mathis, 16, told me, "and there is no company with as big an impact on the standards of beauty. There are kids starving themselves so they can be the 'Abercrombie girl,' and there are guys who think they aren't worthy if they don't look exactly like the guys on the wall."

The protest (which resulted in A&F pulling "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" and "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" but retaining "Do I Make You Look Fat?" and others) began after my visit, so I couldn't ask Jeffries about it. But I did ask him about other T-shirt dust-ups, including "It's All Relative in West Virginia" (which West Virginia's governor didn't find funny), Bad Girls Chug. Good Girls Drink Quickly (which angered anti-addiction groups), and Wong Brothers Laundry Service — Two Wongs Can Make It White (which triggered protests from Asian groups).

Remarkably, Jeffries says he has a "morals committee for T-shirts" whose job it is to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. "Sometimes they're on vacation," he admits with a smile. "Listen, do we go too far sometimes? Absolutely. But we push the envelope, and we try to be funny, and we try to stay authentic and relevant to our target customer. I really don't care what anyone other than our target customer thinks."

What about shareholders? Last year aggrieved Abercrombie shareholders filed a suit against the company alleging that Jeffries' compensation was excessive. (The suit was settled; his $12 million "stay bonus" was reduced to $6 million, and he gave up some stock options. In 2004 he made approximately $25 million.) Other suits, still pending, accuse Jeffries of misleading stockholders about the company's profits. "You settle because it's a distraction," Jeffries told me. "I can't let anybody be distracted here. Me included. We are passionate about what we do here on a daily basis, and if any of us is tied up with this nonsense, it's counterproductive. We're a very popular company. We have a lot of money. And we're targets."

Jeffries dismisses the idea that he courts controversy deliberately to sell clothes, although the endless complaints about Abercrombie perverting the minds of America's youth undoubtedly makes the brand even more appealing to them. Meanwhile, the slogan-free items, which are for the most part as unthreatening as those of any other, less controversial label, fly under the parental radar. "Abercrombie remains a very acceptable look for Mom," says Union Bay's Doerrer. "I don't think many mothers of 16-year-old boys dressed in Abercrombie will make them go upstairs and change."

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Jeffries says that A&F is a collaborative environment ("a diva-free zone," is how he put it to me), but in the end he makes every decision — from the hiring of the models to the placement of every item of clothing in every store. There are model stores for each of the four brands at A&F headquarters, and he spends much of his time making sure they're perfect. When they are, everything is photographed and sent to individual outlets to be replicated to the last detail. If there's an A&F diva, it's Jeffries.

I got a firsthand look at his perfectionism in action when he invited me along for the final walk-through for the Christmas setup of his stores.

"How does a store look? How does it feel? How does it smell? That's what I'm obsessed with," Jeffries said as we walked quickly toward the Hollister model store surrounded by a handful of his top deputies, including Tom Mendenhall, a senior vice president whom Jeffries recently lured away from Gucci.

Inside the dimly lit Hollister store, which is designed to look like a cozy California beach house (there are surfboards, canoes, comfy chairs to lounge in, magazines to read, and two screens with live shots of Huntington Beach, courtesy of cameras permanently affixed to a pier), Jeffries paused in front of two mannequins and shook his head. "No, no, we're still not there, guys," he shouted over the No Doubt song "Spiderwebs," which blasted throughout the store. He stared at the jeans on the female mannequin. "The jeans are too high. I think she has to be lower."

A guy named Josh got down on his knees and started fidgeting with the jeans, trying to pull them down so they hung to the ground. "And we need to make the leg as skinny as we can," Jeffries said. "Should we clip the back of the leg in the knee?" Two employees scurried off to get clips. "We want it bigger at the top and skinnier at the legs. Yes, that's sexier. Much better. That's less butch." (Jeffries isn't a fan of the "butch" look, though when they were all the rage he grudgingly incorporated camouflage army pants into his Hollister line for girls.)

Jeffries then turned his attention to the male mannequin. "OK, how rugged and masculine can we make this guy?" he asked, prompting a couple of his assistants to fidget with the jeans, making them bigger in the leg. "Good, he looks cooler now. He's got more attitude. We love attitude."

There was more mannequin fixing at the A&F store, where a male one decked out in jeans wasn't looking very manly. "We have to fix this guy's package," Jeffries said. "We could stuff him," a girl suggested while a guy fiddled with the crotch, trying to make it poofier. With that fixed, Jeffries turned to a male mannequin in cargo pants. To make sure it looked realistic, he had a very attractive male employee put on a pair of the pants and stand next to the mannequin. "That looks great," he said as the young man did a 360, the pants sagging off his ass. Jeffries looked at the mannequin again. "Are the pants low enough? This guy's got it lower."

"They're right at the edge of falling off," said an assistant.

"OK, that's good," Jeffries said. "Let's get them as low as we can without them falling off. We don't want him looking like an old guy."

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

The post The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch appeared first on Salon.com.

As reported by USA Today, for almost half of the nearly 13,000 women researchers interviewed, their "first union" was living with an unmarried partner — not marriage. The survey also found that marriage was the "first union" for less than 25 percent of women, down from 39 percent in 1995.

Other findings include:

— As a first union, 48% of women cohabited with their male partner, up from 43% in 2002 and 34% in 1995.
— 23% of first unions were marriages, down from 30% in 2002 and 39% in 1995. The percentage of women who cohabited as a first union increased for all races and ethnic groups, except Asian women. Among Hispanics, the percentage increased 57%; for whites, 43%; for blacks, 39%.
— 22 months is the median duration of first cohabitation, up from 20 months in 2002 and 13 months in 1995.
— 19% of women became pregnant and gave birth in the first year of a first premarital cohabitation.
— Within three years of cohabiting, 40% of women had transitioned to marriage; 32% remained living together; 27% had broken up.

Researchers are attributing the shift to, among other factors, class, education and an evolving view of marriage:

The new data show 70% of women without a high school diploma cohabited as a first union, compared with 47% of those with a bachelor's degree or higher. Among women ages 22-44 with higher education, their cohabitations were more likely to transition to marriage by within years (53%), compared with 30% for those who didn't graduate high school.

"What we're seeing here is the emergence of children within cohabiting unions among the working class and the poor," [sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore] says. "They have high standards for marriage and they don't think they can meet them for now, but increasingly, it's not stopping them from having a child. Having children within cohabiting unions is much more common among everybody but the college educated."

The study also found that cohabitation is often a first step toward marriage for many couples, so don't publish your think piece on the "death" of the institution just yet. (But the report also found that a growing number of adults are entering long-term cohabiting relationships as an alternative to marriage, so maybe save a copy on your external hard drive.)

Arizona State University sociologist Sarah Hayford sums up the federal study's findings nicely: They're complicated.

"It seems like cohabiting unions are playing different roles for different people," she says.

The post Not getting married is the new getting married appeared first on Salon.com.