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.