The party's over

A month ago we sat at table with the student we support at the conservatory--it was his graduation ceremony--,together with his parents, and his brother, and I was again struck with the obvious love that was bestowed upon these two young men by their parents, mostly the mother, whose glance and demeanor showed her strong feelings.  I said to her as I had last year when first we met that I cannot imagine such love from a parent, having never experienced it myself.  With that remark I went into a kind of blue funk, reviewing the last maybe five decades of my life.  I started back with my high school days, a whirl, as I remember it, of parties and dancing, and sitting in a booth of a drug store after school and going duck pin bowling.  Then there was college, and of course I got married and we hung out at the student intellectual bar, also a kind of gay bar although gays were too repressed back then to make obvious distinctions.  And then we went to Cambridge and Mary continued her social progress and I came along at the tail end with various and sundry of my fellow students.  And then she died, and I remarried, and I became a father, you'd think it rather cut into our for socializing but in fact my colleagues at the university were lots of fun and we laughed a lot with them.  So there was New Haven and Palo Alto and Brookline with Rome and Athens thrown in and there were lots and lots of academic parties, and maybe the women were all bitter for being cut off from their careers but before they had so much to drink that their bitterness overcame them, there was a lot of great conversation; thwarted ambition is actually a great goad to wit, repartee, good conversation, and everybody at the table had put their time in reading up on something or another. The thing was I kept changing the case of characters in our social life  the Iowa City crowd, the friends Mary had made, the other Cambridge people, ditto in New Haven and Palo Alto, then Brookline, different universities and faculty lunches, When the kids were in their teens,  my wife had gone back to work as an architect, I was the housekeeper and I sometimes used to invite twenty for sit down dinners twice a week; there was a friend who often came and sat at the baby grand and pounded out show tunes to which we all brayed in our various outrageous registers. Somehow the children joined in or yelled down from upstairs to shut up so they could do their homework.  And then we divorced and I went to live in Cambridge as a gay male so the social scene changed rather sharply and many of the old friends didn't know what to do--husband and wife, now boyfriends?-- so they avoided me. I was offered a job in New York City, the chance to re invent myself, new friends, new lodgings, goodbye to all that.  Then I met my husband to be and he took a job in Massachusetts and I retired a few years later.  Back we went to the house in Cambridge and at sixty five I started a new social life with a man who was  genial enough but basically anti social, so not much help at all in the social scene.  Then he retired, we went to the sea shore, then on to Florida with a pied a terre in New York.  Last week I flew to Manhattan for a week of museum and theater going and various and sundry to see, then on to Providence for a memorial service of someone I started out knowing in graduate school in 1953.  There were lots of ghosts in my life there, the luminaries of a profession. faces and voice I could finally make out after minutes of conversation.  It left me with the terrible sense that I really don't belong anywhere anymore, and I know that at eighty six I am too tired or jaded to try for a social life in Sarasota. As the song says:  Now you must wake up, all dreams must end/Take off your makeup, the party's over/It's all over, my friend

hunky guys

For the past forty years off and on I have lived part of the time in Hull, Massachusetts which apart from the fact it abuts an incredibly  beautiful shore line of the Atlantic Ocean is your typical small town working class America.  Very Irish, Jewish, and Italian, not first generation but not too long ago off the boat.  I still read The Hull Times, although I no longer live there.  Why?  Trying to connect with my small town Iowa roots, I would guess.  I always delight in reading the Letters To The Editors column, and take particular pleasure in the congratulatory letters of thanks to the Hull Fire Department which is out and about every day 24/7 taking the citizenry to the hospital.  I have had my own experience of them when they rushed my husband suddenly overcome with pneumonia off to the hospital in Weymouth hours after a car and driver had brought us back from an overnight stay and his surgery in Beth Israel.  At the time I wrote a letter to the paper remarking on their wonderful humane take-charge behavior with two elderly confused and effeminate men.  I meant every word of it.  Some time before that I was in New York City in the large freight elevator that doubles as transportation for the audience of the theater in the cellar of the Citicorp Building on 53rd Street when it stopped between floors with fifteen people aboard twenty minutes before curtain.  The theater when apprised of the problem said they would hold the curtain; the fire department was called and said they would soon respond.  We all waited and with maximum high WASP reserve remained utterly glacial and impassive.  Soon the Fire Department crackling speaker phone announced their arrival and alerted us to the escape mechanism.  They would manually move the elevator down between floors and manually force open the large horizontal door and then one by one we would drop into the arms of a  waiting fireman.  I have to say it was delicious when my turn came.  No, not because I am an aging queen who cannot get enough of youthful males.  It was because I had never in my entire life up to that point been caught and held for security in the arms of a strong male.  Never having had a father, I had never felt a man's caring protective hold of me.  I am not asking my reader to burst into tears at this desolation, just to acknowledge the fact.  Recently on my trip to New York City with my balance more precarious than ever I leaned slightly out into 57th street to signal for a cab to go to Penn Station, and lost my balance and fell.  It was eight am on a Saturday and blissfully free of crowds.  Suddenly two men were at my side.  "You hurt?"  "No." "Wanna go to the hospital?"  "No, I'm okay. Just need a taxi to Penn Station."  "Put your arms around my neck, and don't try to raise yourself."  He stooped down, and my God, this hunky young man lifted me to a standing position.  Daddy!

In The Galleries

Picasso is represented in the new Met Breuer inaugural show of so called unfinished works with more than one piece.  One of my very favorites is his Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), 1918, which has its home in Musée Picasso, Paris, France.  The show id dedicated to artists' works that are declared to be for whatever reason unfinished, yet they have gone out into the worold as exhibited pieces of art.  Olga, in this piece, is painted with smooth unobtrusive strokes, her demeanor indicated by her hair smoothly drawn back, by the simple fabric  of her dress, loosely falling over her body sitting in complete repose.  A little to her right there seems to be a wall, then the brush strokes cease and the untreated canvas forms the back drop to her seated in the lower foreground.  The small patch of blue wall paint is enough for me to suggest that the figure is completely psychologically and realistically in the painting, and the part of the wall painted blue is organically true to the unpainted canvas, although intellectually unpainted canvas. Thus to be the unfinished is the finished, a paradox I can live with as I understand the art process, not  to mention the life process.  It is what makes the painting so strong and memorable.  Unfinished is not meaningful here; I had the same objection to other pieces in the exhibit where process was foregrounded.  Over at the Fifth Avenue Met I saw another interesting ambiguity in a piece from the Pergamon show, one of the most thrilling shows on view this season. The art of the Alexandrian site of Pergamon in present day Turkey is in contrast to classical art and suggests the turbulence of politics, violence, emotions in the third century BCE and thereafter, so fundamentally different from the serenity of proportion, suggested for instance in the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.  This raw emotion opened all kinds of visual possibilities, it seems to me.  There was one panel in particular that fascinated me and again like Picasso's Olga it was hard to know what was going on.  It was a panel customary on stone altars and walls of temples.  Generally they depict a recognized constellation of people and events from a known myth; narrative is the key.  This panel, however, had a warrior's ornamented body shield tossed half way upside down, with the wheels of a chariot behind it, a stylized head of a horse which might have been pulling that chariot in a pose that defied gravity and logic and was posed more for decoration than anything else, next to it lay a man's head decapitated, then amputated legs.  All of this was thrilling to myself who am habituated to classical art.  The turmoil and hysteria projected by this melange is such a dramatic and pronounced feature of the period.  Yet, again, I thought looking at it another way,it could be seen as a kind of exciting very unusual abstraction in which pieces of the normal of that culture are laid out as articulations of that normal, disassociated so as to be abstract in no way a realistic take on the time.  Loved it.  And what really sold them both for me is I made up my own interpretations, didn't have to read the catalogue to find out how utterly wrong I was.  There's nothing like being a retired professor with nothing to do but pontificate to one's self whilst going through the galleries

why?

Why does an airline reply to your on line booking with not simply the confirmation code or record locator, but at least one if not two pages of self congratulatory detail which is a waste of paper, not to mention the trees of our nation's forest?  Why does an airline ask you to comment upon a recent flight with a form giving one to ten on a scale of appreciation or approbation which does not allow you to indicate anything about the particulars of the flight, like the steward who told you he would be coming through just before take off to put your cane into the overhead, while in fact a brusque and thoroughly disagreeable colleague swept through slamming overhead doors shut and almost broke off my hand as i tried politely to hand him my cane?  Why do airlines think you care about the quality of service when the planes have seats that are too small, boarding procedures that are sadistic, grotesquely meager snacks, and in every way evidence the complete surrender of this nation to the most vicious capitalistic aggrandizement imaginable?  What a joke to ask why I chose airline A over airline B?  As though there were a splendid display of choice on my monitor!  Why is it that the nation's journalists and politicians cannot acknowledge how grotesque airline service is in this country?  Along with most other services?  The ground transportation system is in complete disarray, not just at airports going to cities; one thinks of Heathrow's Paddington Express, or the train into the city at Charles DeGaulle, or even bella Roma now has a quick direct train to the central train station, not to mention Frankfurt and on and on and, this is becoming the norm everywhere, but not here.  That pathetic SkyTrain at JFK with the interminable walk which no one my age could ever manage to traverse is their pride and joy.  Pathetic.  I live in a city with supposedly a population that is over fifty percent made up of people over eighty.  I probably have the numbers all wrong, I usually do.  But there is the meanest limited public transportation system.  Here in the south according to old time southern friends of mine, the public transportation system has been systematically starved so that poor blacks will have no way out of their ghettos. Public transportation ceases to function when the sun goes down here in this city.   And so old folks of any race have no way in the evening to go the theater, film, symphony unless the jump in their cars and drive out blindly into the night.  Why, O Lord, why?

Tap

We went to see a new musical tonight and since it was about Josephine Baker we were expecting tap dancing in a series of great routines whereas what we got for the most part was a series of tableaux in which shapely ladies in see through body suits with appropriate pasties at the proper places moved about langorously.  I suppose that if you wanted to call it dancing you could.  At one point two young men broke out into tap dancing, and our hearts leapt up.  But that moment was short lived.  What has happened to tap dancing?  I hope to see "Shuffle Along" in New York.  They have to do tap dancing in that if there is any attempt at historical accuracy.  Several years ago there was a magnificent musical pretty much devoted to tap dancing "Black and Blue" which opened at the end of 1989 and ran for six or seven hundred performances and garnered a host of awards.  It suggests that tap is a form of dancing for which there is an audience, and it is artistry which the gyrations we were treated to tonight could hardly really pass muster as choreography.  Two or three years ago we had one of the treats of a lifetime in London watching a staged musical version of the film "Top Hat," a concoction from decades ago starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.  As one would imagine there was a chorus doing the kind of precision tap that one so rarely sees anymore, and the principals tapped their way through number after number just like Fred and Ginger.  What made this musical especially intriguing was for those members of the audience, like myself, who had seen the film enough times to have memorized more or less the routines, the choreography, the angles of the shots, every bit of paraphernalia trivial or serious that made the film.  There was a frisson to see this in three dimensions.  The film of course presented a flat two dimensional view of the action, and here the exact same maneuvers were extended into the third dimension, an aesthetic epiphany that was absolutely thrilling.  I have never understood why the show never came to the United States, but then it is true that the revivals of great musicals seem in the last decades all to come from England.  One thinks of "Oklahoma" or"Carousel", or "Guys and Dolls" to name some of the more outstanding.  I guess it is not the tap dancing per se, although that is awfully compelling, but in the case of these last three it was the incredible precision of performance together with the rethinking of the plots, bringing them along from their origins to what their potential for meaning is nowadays.  Ah, shuffle, ball, change, shuffle, ball, change.  I cannot ever get enough of that.  When I was in my forties a friend suggested we all learn to tap.  He had spend a like more entwined with the American musical, so it is fair to say he had lots of rhythm. I was totally enthusiastic and we build a wooden tap floor in our recreation room, recruited students--two of my children took it up--, mostly various gay friends.  I guess that was predictable. Once or twice a week our delightful tap teacher put us through our paces.  Forty years on it is another delicate bond between parent and child: we can stand in a row and do shuffle off to buffalo

Gazing From The Peaks Of Darien

So for ten days I was wandering around Manhattan, Cambridge and parts of New England.  Wandering misrepresents my  experience; I was confronting advancing balance problems that kept me on a cane, and even then in serious danger of falling.  The last day as I hailed a cab on the corner of Fifty Seventh and Ninth to go to Penn Station for an early train, I did indeed situate my body out at angle to attract a passing cab's attention and fell off the curb and to the ground.  Luckily it was early Saturday morning and the traffic was light, luckier still on the deserted sidewalk two construction workers saw my plight and rushed over to assist.  Lucky for me the one knew how to pull a man to his feet by having the man who had fallen put his arms around his neck and hold on as the burly fellow had the strength in his body and moreover in his neck muscles to raise the body up to a standing position.  In seconds I was face to face with this hunky gentleman, brushed off and assisted into a cab.  Not much damage, and his heroic demeanor and great good looks and obvious physical strength and extreme kindness were my last impression of the city.  On Sunday last my younger daughter drove me to New Hampshire to participate in Trinity Sunday services at my other daughter's church.  Being with them and an participating in the church service were memorable, but what more forcibly struck me was the sensation of spring in New England, an exotic and deeply sensual visual color experience for one just returned from parched and barren tropical lands: palm trees, which I adore to look at as they shake their fronds in the wind, have none of the soft, luxuriance of a the manifold greens of New England trees budding out in spring.  The church was in a small urban cluster of mostly eighteenth century houses, a moment in the history of American urban architecture that can't be beat.  Then brunch at the Exeter Inn where we were surrounded by the creme de la creme of early teenage prowess and success and as those things often go, physical beauty and great good manners.  All happy making.  Yesterday my Cambridge based daughter accompanied me on the subway out to the airport since she was concerned that I would fall if I were alone, a very sweet gesture, since indeed, i had grown increasingly wobbly on this trip.  I shall never forget my last impression which was the row of riders sitting in this early morning stillness, still waking up and hence, monumental, still, somewhere else just as statues, a row of them on either side of the long bench of the subway car.  The cream of the intelligent youth of the Cambridge area,  seeming to be so in control of their thoughts and destinies  looking, so serious, so gracefully pensive, physically beautiful, silent, gazing in repose on their inner thoughts.

Bella Abzug

Today I am flying to New York City, spending a week there, and traveling on by train to Boston, stopping on the way for a few hours to attend a memorial service of a very old, dear friend who was a professor at one of the universities in the Northeast Corridor.  Because I am so unsteady and have an apartment full of clothes in the city I tend to travel only with a capacious canvas briefcase into which I can add a couple shirts, underwear and socks for the few days trip north of Manhattan.  Because of the memorial service and its university setting I feel compelled to wear a suit, and since I am in Florida it will be very lightweight.  The weather prediction is for something in the high sixties low seventies; that is polar to my new sensibilities.  Should I take my outdoor jacket and make do with it as the alternative to the suit jacket?  My daughter who sent me weather tips from up north sternly rebuked me for even caring about the outerwear/suit jacket issue.  No one cares, no one, she insisted.  All those years at Ivy League faculty gatherings particularly among humanists who as we know tend to be well born and slightly pretentious from birth have left me denatured; I cannot resist worrying about what I am wearing for an hour visit at a memorial service.  86 years old.  Pathetic.  Today I have been reading an oral history of Bella Abzug, published perhaps a decade ago by Farrar, Straus.  I remember her as being so ugly, pushy--no, I don't mean that as a code for Jewish; she was that as well and insistent about it--and opinionated.  This book is an inspiration.  She was everything that makes me love New York. She was ambitious, hard working, she cared about social justice, the poor and oppressed needing help were her special concern along with the displaced Jews of Europe.  She was so vehement, always on task, energetic, and probably somewhat humorless in the sense that irony was not her frame of reference.  After reading one hundred pages of this I feel energized, liberated, a friend to humankind, ready to go forth, do battle, wear whatever to the memorial; my old friend's family will not care, old acquaintances will have other things on their mind.  I am not going to this service to ingratiate myself so as to get tenure.  At my age I am anonymous.  The world must belong to the likes of Bella Abzug.  I salute her memory.


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For the next ten or so days I will probably not work with the blog since I am always at a loss when it comes to transmitting from my IPad and from our New York apartment which has no Wifi although I have something else called LTE, I believe.  That seems to allow email.  Oh, well, a break is always good.

Grow Old Along With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be

The odd part of working out with my trainer is the understanding, like it or not, that I am actually deteriorating.  The trainer would not for a minute buy that statement, he is outrageously cheerful and optimistic at all times, not just about me and my physical well being but life in general.  He has confessed obliquely to a youth spent in the worst war-like gangs of the Bronx, so I suppose everything is on an upward course as far as he is concerned. He is in perfect shape, handsome, happy, the same age as my older son, a divorced man with a rolodex of babes to call on, not unlike my son, come to think of it.  He is forever complimenting me on my performance in our training sessions. But I can tell perfectly well that I am in fact going down hill.  Yes, I am recovering from open heart surgery, look years younger everyone says, know myself that the blood flowing so newly vigorously through my arteries is giving me pep and intellectual thrust.  But there it is: I am growing increasingly old and feeble.  Old and feeble, what dreadful words!  Old, yes, I know the new idea is that we are only as old as we think, or is it feel?  Well, let's see.  For one, I am so terribly unstable.  I am going to New York on Friday and the recent photos in the Times of the crowded subway platforms makes me realize that I cannot go down into that with my cane, nor can I easily go through Times Square by myself to a performance of a play.  The crowds and their back packs or the baby carriages produce an obstacle to safe walking that is a calamity.  I think of Beckett's play Happy Days I simply cannot muster up Winnie's cheer, much more prefer thinking of Yaweh telling Moses that for the mistake of striking the stone instead of talking to it he would be denied ever to cross over into the Promised Land.  Isn't that sort of the truth about life and better to know it than sit in sand yammering away as one slowly sinks deeper and deeper?  I have never been fond of Beckett: too many gloomy home truths that we all know only too well.  Waiting For Godot, I've seen all the great productions,for instance, the original one with Bert Lahr, and then John Wood, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and so on and so forth.  Beckett resists interpretation, and he is right.  The play is an exercise in waiting, and as such, a moment of existence made special, that never ending pointless being on hold for nothing.  I find the play obvious.  I guess I'll go with Bette Davis in "Now Voyager" when she asks "Let's not ask for the moon. We already have the stars"

"Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.” W.C.Fields

My mother lost her newly married husband at the front in the summer of 1918.  Her second husband, my father, died in an automobile accident a few days after his fiftieth birthday, leaving her with six children ages 14 to 4, and a considerably diminished trust income.  Her relatives considered her life tragic, and she an unfortunate victim of terrible circumstances.  The population of my home town considered her life a happy and comfortable one.  (I remember not really understanding a parent of a fellow student in first grade saying nastily to the teacher within my earshot no less:  "It's about time she had something to suffer over," referring, I have to imagine, to the death of my father only a few months earlier.)  We lived in a very large house, with a staff of five plus a full time gardener to deal with extensive grounds.  Mother did not work.  Well, what did she do?  Puttered in the garden, read several newspapers, went to luncheons, did all the grocery shopping--these were the days before supermarkets when it was possible to establish a relationship with the provender of every sort of food, and mother took that relationship seriously, appealing as it did, I imagine, to the feudal in her.  She distanced herself from her children when they were young, the servants being a buffer, but any time I was in her company she was never failingly pleasant.  That was her default mode.  She always had a slight smile on her face, even when no one was with her, you could see it on her walking along for instance from the garage to the house when she came home.  She encouraged it in us much to the rage of my teenaged sister who insisted it was utterly false.  My mother accepted the dichotomy between what life had brought her and the way she presented herself to the world.  In some sense she insisted everything was coming up roses.  As I grew older and spent more time with her I saw that what held the day together was the cocktail hour, the time when she drank slowly and with considerable relish two Scotch Old Fashioneds prepared in an exquisite cut crystal glass.  All her relatives and friends did the same.  Your mother's cocktail hour was what High Mass is to others, a friend once observed, and I think, yes, it was a sacrament that gave in loosening the tensions some kind of benediction as well.  A.R. Gurney's play"The Cocktail Hour" catches this.  I can still see the actress Nancy Marchand, feigning a posture of slightly bent age, in her knit cardigan and white hair, holding out her cocktail glas, and saying from time to time in the play "Just another splash, please."  That was my mother-in-law to a tee at ninety eight as I remember her, same attitude toward life as my mother.  W.C.Fields, although it describes comically the point of view of a lush, and is very different, in a perverse way always makes me think of mother.

Butterflies

My trainer at the gym is also a photographer, mostly making money from shooting fashion shots of gorgeous and exotic if not to say erotic women.  But he has a kind of other passion which is photographing butterflies which have landed upon the petals of various budding flowers.  The exquisite moment of rest for an insect so much in flight together with the harmonious blend of shape and color which it is his genius to capture far outshine the curves and shining skin of the young ladies who pose for him.  Butterflies when their wings are spread and they are in flight have a way of bouncing on the air that is delicious; they make so many tentative and delicious passes at the flowers beneath their path.  And then they land, and assume a texture with the shapes and color of the plant on which they are feeding.  And evolution dreamt this up I have been told so that the birds overhead would not be able to make them out.  Camouflage.  How different it is from the other subject of his photography, these beautiful models, whose goal is always to put their breasts, their thighs, their everything on full display.  Women are vulnerable because they are subject to or rather more to the point the object of the male gaze.  It is an erotic gaze, needy, demanding, rapacious.  It is in a way like the birds overhead yet they miss out on seeing the butterflies alighting on the multi colored flowers below in the garden because of the camouflage.  Some women think they have much to lose if they were to employ camouflage; others hope that they just are not that much noticed.  It is strange but my photographer friend's outrageously beautiful semi naked women are in their own way so aggressively beautiful that they provide their own defense against the gaze.  Their beauty and artificiality are their camouflage.  "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" asked Yeats.

Gay, gay, all the way

My husband and I just watched an HBO documentary called "The Out List," which appeared quite by chance after something with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda which  he has a penchant for and I am trying to learn to love.  This other piece was riveting, a series of interviews with gay and lesbian persons and their life experience.  Riveting is one word for it, painful was another, at least for me.  The world has changed so completely since my youth.  I never knew another person who was a homosexual, never knew the term, did not even know what the sexual experience was.  As I grew into some dim awareness I also learned that same sex experience was punishable by prison terms.  What a shocking awakening that was!  As I have written in my memoir I was exceedingly blessed in the youngsters with whom I went to school who for the most part casually shrugged it off as my eccentricity rather than the work of Satan or some other more disease.  The same was not true of my mother, nor I suppose for her cohort; she made me feel truly awful and unloved, and that never changed.  I could never redeem myself.  Ah, well.  What this documentary made me realize was that the generation who were interviewed are all comfortable with themselves in a way that I shall never be.  Ever.  I am not comfortable with other gay persons either, unless they are presenting themselves as rather plain under the radar guys.  Drag queens, wildly effeminate guys, guys who wear lots of bracelets, guys who put their sexual orientation out there pure and simple, no, I run away.  I cannot claim them as my own.  Suddenly in the film there appeared Larry Kramer, eighty years old and almost my exact age, who was one of the founders of Act Up, and he is describing a group demonstrating at the high altar at St Patricks in NYC.  It was 1989. He was putting himself on line.   Where was I?  Well, as a matter of fact, in Athens on a sabbatical, but I know that if I had been here I would not be demonstrating with Act Up.  There was the fact of my parenthood and four children.  I was divorced as of 1975, yes, and my children were still too young, in my judgement, to tell them. But that HBO documentary made me realize that my life has been entirely disfigured because I have never come to terms with being gay, or really bisexual, a better term for me.  I really never went to gay bars, I never acted out gay, I am always an alien on the alert, never relaxed despite my famous wit and charm.  Well, I am not sure that it absolutely true.  I think so when I am alone in my room.  I just don't know how to act.  The odd fact is that whenever I meet young straight males I am completely at ease.  Whenever I meet straight males older than sixty I am instantly wary, close mouthed, withdrawn--unless they are with a female companion and then I can chat her up and it's all okay. Older straight American males, I just don't get them.   The film is a heart warming account of men and women who have found their place in society and in their family and are happy and comfortable.  That is what the film is all about, but I watched if from some place where I was shut off from the ease and comfort and joy I was watching.  Sad.

Questions

Nothing alarms me more than to hear a moderator at the close of a rousing, well articulated, thoughtful lecture "Now we will open the floor to questions."  He or she never adds "and please understand that if you intend to speak, do so with the volume that is customary in a large auditorium."  The average lecture goer seems to have no notion of throwing the voice across the room; the lecturer and the moderator rarely complain.  So that portion of the question and answer period degenerates into a private conversation between speaker and the questioner who indeed has often moved forward to make it still more private.  And the moderator might add: "And keep your questions focused and brief."  There are the numbers of people who do not have a question at all, but rather a variant on the innocuous "I just wanted you to know how much I liked your talk."  I am mouthing silently "who cares?"  It has all the deflating quality and stems from the same stupidity as those people who start texting at a red light and don't move on when it changes.  And there are numbers of people who simply did not understand the talk and ask questions completely off the mark or address the absolutely obvious.  When I used to lecture I grew bad tempered when the question was stupid, and was not above replying: "I can't really answer that," and looking further into the audience calling on someone else to ask a question.  Then there are those in the audience whose question is actually a mini lecture on the same subject from the questioner's point of view, a chance for this selfish bore (who would never ever be asked anywhere to give a lecture!) to offer an opinion in detail and at length, ending of course in a question so as to legitimate the dreadful imposition.  There was once a professor famous for doing this at the end of every lecture or seminar he attended.  Good Lord, he was pompous!  I wonder if he is still alive.  In any case, he was subject to one of the greatest putdowns of all time.  It was out in the West Coast and an elderly, very renowned, professor, an immigrant into the States from Germany at the time of the Third Reich, was slated to give what he announced would be his last  lecture.  Everyone who could make it from everywhere was in the audience, and the old guy talked the allotted span, and there was deafening applause and the idiot moderator opened the room up for questions.  Well, this grotesque was visiting at some place on the West Coast that year so he was of course in the audience that night, and just as sure as--whatever the idiom is (I guess it is shooting, but don't want to use that anymore)--he got up, was recognized, and began a lengthy mini lecture ending finally in a question.  To this the old man responded in his heavy but beautiful German accent.  "I am an old man, I did not quite get your question, so would you please repeat what you said."  The room went wild with laughter, and the professor sat down, and the audience burst into applause and the evening was over.

The bathroom laws

All this coverage of who goes where into what public bathroom makes me think about them as I rarely have before. My experience of women and men in public bathrooms is from the common enough male experience of helping women to enter the mens room when it was essentially empty in the stall area when there was a dramatic overflow of women waiting.  Men as a rule don't have to wait.  Once at a performance of "Ragtime" when the audience were largely ticket holders sponsoring a major gay charitable institution, a woman in our party heard another say unwittingly in the ladies room "How queer it is, there is no line to the ladies room."  I remember once at a matinee at Lincoln Center the line for the mens room stretching into the corridor and I joined it perplexed and the old gent ahead of me said: "Welcome to the prostate nation!"  Yes, I certainly know noww.  I am an old man and I prefer not to stand to urinate since the urine coming out of the penis tends to spray; it's because the pressure is so low in the urethra, the tube bringing the liquid down from the bladder.  Spraying just means I have to worry about wetting my pants or dripping on the floor, so sitting down in a stall is in theory better.  The stalls in men's public toilets, however, are often awash with liquid around the porcelain receptical which is meant to be the target.  That's because men use the sit down toilets as urinals.  Several have made a clumsy attempt cover the mess by pulling toilet seat tissues and laying them on the wet ground which of course quickly soak up and become soggy.  Women who have thought to use a men's stall in desperation cannot believe the mess in them.  For a man my age standing at the urinal can mean a long wait as the liquid not under pressure makes its way down by gravity's laws and into its final destination in the porcelain urinal.  Nothing is more strikingly demonstrative of age than to have a very young man come in hurriedly unzipping his flies pulling himself out and directing a powerful stream into the bowl.  It sounds like a fire hose has been unleashed.  Seconds later he is zipping himself up and on his way, while the elderly gents around him are patiently waiting the drip, drip, drip, or indeed waiting for the flow to commence.  I don't quite get all this hysteria surrounding toilets.  I well remember on hiking outings with my children, their going al fresco, boys and girls, not to mention my wife who had a small bladder, as she claimed, or as was otherwise the case, pregnant again.  I cannot think how many times I have stood at a urinal in southern Europe while the bathroom attendant, always a woman, was busy with her mop, no distance at all from where I was doing my business.  I remember once on a ferry crossing the Adriatic, I believe, standing at a urinal and not quite believing my eyes as I glanced at a normal looking young fellow standing next to me who was, I am sure of this, taking the occasion to masturbate privately between the two panels demarcating his space.  Men at least keep their heads down, do their business, get out as quickly as possible. That's why when there is desperation as at a convention or some other outsize gathering and women have commandeered stalls in mens rooms,  nobody seems to mind.  I guess women have mirrors in their area, and they have to use the mirror for a touch up, and that's when all the transgendered people are going to be revealed, exposed, flaunt themselves.  Actually I don't quite get it.

En Paris Avec Charles

Marcel Proust would undoubtedly have turned his nose up at the madeleines my husband brings home from his forays into Costco, industrial pastries, for sure, but quite tasty in a large plastic container.  As I was popping one into my mouth last evening I was reminded of an experience in a French patisserie several years ago when in a fit of sudden hunger I entered one, totally elegant, the customers therein, all elegant middle aged French ladies with the scarf at the neck, and the gloves and the handbag, as they all are,  and staffed with ladies that were determined to maintain some kind of standard. It was a commonplace in Paris, a setting that demanded of the customer a certain dignity, poise; all I could think of was my mother out shopping having donned grey kid gloves to establish a certain tone to the expedition.  In this shop  I pointed to some pastry in the case and one of the salesladies brought it out with a set of tongs and was on the verge of wrapping, as the French always do, in tissue paper and a box, when I stopped her and said "Non, non, merci," there was quiet as the salesladies studied me and I reviewed my knowledge of the language, after which I said: "C'est pour manger dans la rue."  I heard muffled exclamations on all sides.  The other customers try as they might could not quite control their merriment and contempt for the uncouth, grotesque American, whose French was just this side of a jungle ape, and who was demanding behavior beyond a Parisian's belief.  ("Dans la rue!"  Mon dieu!  Quelle imbecile!).  I wonder if those ladies look back upon that moment.  I won't say that I was the game changer, but nowadays in France, les citoyens are all eating on the street, just like the Americans, as they must have seen in the films before they embarked upon this behavior.  I have offended in one other major way (we will ignore my ignorance of wine and eagerness to down as much as possible in the bistros), and that is my habitual failure to greet a store owner with "Bonjour" when I enter.  My experience in America is that if you greet the owner of a small shop upon entering he or she will immediately come over to engage you in some project of selling you something.  I cannot abide that; I want to be left alone to examine without prejudice of affection or guilt at rejection the items on display.  Not to greet the store owner in France is very very bad manners, indeed.  The greeting is not a laisez passer for an effort to sell anything.  It is just good manners.

My Social Scene

I grew up in an academic town.  I became a professor.  Most people I knew in childhood, friends of my mother and my late father, since they were academics, had "fields."  Dr. Thompson who always came to Sunday dinner was a professor of English, Kate Daum, Professor of Nutrition, and so on and forth.  People held forth at our table on subjects that often included citation.  After a free and easy social life in high school I began to study classical antiquity seriously at university, and therefore I, too, acquired "a field."  In graduate school, the focus narrowed considerably, but I was saved from total pedantry by my wife, as intelligent and well read as could be, but a free spirit who had dropped out of college and whose best friend in Cambridge was a woman whose interest was theater.  But when I embarked upon my teaching career, that wife had died, and my second wife, immersed in child bearing and rearing, simply followed my lead in social events.  All our friends were young faculty, the husbands would-be professors, the wives reluctant homemakers with unused PhDs.  Everyone had a "field."  Conversation, therefore, had an authority to it.  Being in the humanities business, for the most part, our friends has an attitude on every new film, novel, art exhibition, etc. mentioned in The New York Times or similar publications.  This was true in New Haven, Palo Alto, Boston, and finally Manhattan.  When I moved to Cambridge after a divorce my neighbors were to a one working class middle aged persons of Irish descent; we nodded, sometimes made feeble conversation about the weather and its attendant problems (shoveling snow); we had nothing else in common.  Then I had a second house at the beach in Hull.  My neighbors were all working class Catholics, either Irish, or Italian, and proud of it, suspicious of my presumed "queerness," and affronted by my educated accent.  We existed side by side, sometimes we mentioned an item flourishing in a garden if we chanced to meet on the street where everyone walked.  Fast forward and now I am in Sarasota, have lived her for five years , the last two as a full time resident.  Yesterday we were at a celebration luncheon for the graduating students at the Asolo Conservatory, along with all the proud parents and the sponsors and donors.  As I surveyed the room I felt at a loss.  We have never made friends with anyone amongst this crowd.  Yes, we say hello, but that's about it.  What is wrong.  Well, for one, they don't have "fields," they are all retired people from the world of making money; they are business men, developers, retired hedge fund people.  They don't follow trends in theater, surprisingly enough, nor art, music, nor literature.  There is no conversation about the latest of anything or where crazy new developments are heading in the more bohemian parts of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.  Experimental theater, experimental anything, it is far far under their radar.  Call me an intellectual snob, (you might as well: my husband does, my children do) or, okay, better yet call me socially inadequate, clutching nervously for those markers that will allow me to navigate the shoals of social intercourse.

Commitment

We watched the film about the travails of Dalton Trumbo tonight.  Newsreels of the time which were introduced to give period flavor took me back to a time I lived through.  The communist menace was something my mother was always talking about, the House Un-American Activities Committee was a subject of furious dispute between her and my oldest sister, a a recent graduate of Swarthmore where she had become a Quaker, and certainly in part to thwart my mother taken a Jewish boyfriend (who ironically enough soon dropped her at the behest of his Upper East Side parents because she was a hick from Iowa!).  She had come to Manhattan and started working for PM a left leaning newspaper funded by Marshall Field where she claimed there were a number of Communists whom she despised because her political tendency was anarchist and she could not abide organization or commitment which of course true blue Stalinists demanded.  I was a teenager living in New York at the time and she brought me around to anarchist meetings but it was all too serious and theoretical for me. Years later I was in Cambridge when Harvard's President Pusey told Senator McCarthy he would not consider firing Wendell Fury who whatever his political leanings had tenure.  McCarthyism was a serious threat that was furiously debated back and forth, and again I did nothing except fret, but then what was one to do?  Time marched on and I became a father of four and totally missed the early Vietnam protests except to sign a petition in support of the war and a week later another opposed to it.  We did I remember march against the bombing of Cambodia, brought all the children to that march, all of us dressed up, because the anti Vietnam war people in Cambridge were trying to get clean cut middle class people to march for the news cameras.  And then I was gay and trying out a persona that just did not work, also marching to Washington for Gay and Lesbian rights, and those marches as you can imagine were a lot more fun. Nut I was so immersed in the workings of parenthood and housekeeping the events of Stonewall never even caught my attention until a year or so later.  When I was being my gay self fun was the operative word, and almost nobody I knew was dying of AIDS so I didn't quite get it, not even after some guys who had been my lovers sickened and died; ACT UP meant little to me.  White people were always talking of protesting, making the revolution, but in fact the great moment in the early sixties was when the black students sat at the counter in the segregated South.   Far more courageous than any of us whites were doing anywhere.  My sister, who had been the anarchist who had never found a protest march she did not want to join was marching in Kingston NY against racism, and met a black man standing next to her in the crowd who was an IBM executive from Poughkeepsie who finally decided he should stand up and be counted.  My sister was more than he had bargained for and went home and became her lover and then her serious partner for the rest of his life.  But it more or less all passed me by.  I was always there at the scene, but didn't quite get it.  Every time.  No moral fiber, I can hear my mother saying that a lot, and she could have been talking about me.

The Road Not Taken

I  recently read somewhere of a woman who deferred marriage at age 34 because she felt she had not found her "inner self,"  I thought back to age 34 half a century ago when I was the father of four children, and working on getting tenure.  I had the same feeling of bewilderment that overcame me reading of Karl Ove Knausgaard's twenty and twenty first years while living in Bergen and attending school aimlessly missing all his classes, getting blind drunk night after night with chums (to say that they drink a lot in Norway way understates the case!). When I was twenty one I graduated college, got married, and planned on going to Harvard for graduate school.  My undergraduate years had been spent studying the morning and working a job in the afternoon.  Fun was drinks with friends on weekends and finding some guy to go to bed with.  Then I got married, sort of a bizarre move, and I moved into middle class family mode.  The point of all this is I never stopped to take a step back and think about it all, even when my first wife died, and at twenty five I started dating again and then marrying almost immediately the woman who was the mother of the four kids.  Do I have an inner self?  I must be pretty conflicted, gay guy two wives, family man, went with the flow, although it ran in a funny canal, into marriage and domesticity, and then suddenly out the other end, married to a guy, with whom I have been together twenty  five plus years.  A couple of days ago while reading about Karl Ove's drunken years I felt myself to be so different and thought back to taking on heterosexuality, almost as a caprice, and then parenthood.  I got out two wonderful albums of photographs, and there were those wonderful children, as babies and little tots in New Haven,  Palo Alto and Rome, as junior high schoolers in Brookline  and Rome again, as high school kids, looking damn bad ass and assured sitting in my garden down in Hull, then  marriage for some,, one holding a baby up, ohers getting a college degree, one proudly standing in a restaurant kitchen, all going in different directions and the other book was a remembrance of a weekend visit on my eightieth birthday, there they were slightly plump, grey in their hair, middle aged, the grandchildren playing frisbee on the beach, and me the old codger.  I had a lump in my throat all the way through these viewing sessions.  But I don't think I have yet to discover my inner self, and I am convinced my generation were too busy just following the rules.  I had to get a college degree, I had to get a part time job, I wanted to hook up with this woman,, if i were goint to do that, I had to get married, I had to become a professional, I had to go to graduate school, I had to start teaching, get married another time, be a father because my wife became pregnant, and so on and forth.  I can remember friends over the years when I described the details of my life calling out "Charlie, what were you thinking?"  I guess that's the point.  I really wasn't, just following the path, the rules, the road, whatever.

A Classic

A friend proposes that we go to see the new production of "Streetcar Named Desire" that is soon to open or just did in New York City right now.  I hesitate.  There is imprinted in my brain the images of Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois so strong and indelible that I hesitate to break the spell.  Tried it once in london with Glenn Close in a blonde wig, shuddered through the first act and left.  Vivien Leigh brings all the damaged goods of Scarlett O'Hara to the part, an asset not available to any other actress.  Surely her temperament, not unique among high strung ladies of the stage, is revealed in her every frail and nervous gesture.  I was was lucky to see Ethel Merman in "Gypsy" and when she sang "Rose's Turn"  And Tyne Daily and Angel Lansbury and Patti Lupone.  There is something in the mystique of Vivien Leigh coming from those two roles that makes for a mystique that transcends the filmed moment, so much history, social, political, and personal, in that character.  I think I will not want to see another version.  Which is not to say that I would not like to see what is inherent in all of Tennessee William's great women figures, and that is the wounded gay guy underneath.  I can see Blanche now renamed Beau kicked out of his teaching job in that small southern town and then out of town for picking up tricks night after night at the bus stop, traveling down to his sister's in desperation, befriending her husband's somewhat soft and iffy poker player friend "a bachelor" and that going nowhere, his sister's husband who has clearly once upon a time in his youth turned tricks as rough trade himself--the antagonism and desire between the two is palpable--until there is a revenge rape when Beau tries to go too far with Stanley at the end.  Great play, and it would instantly be a classic, too.