Kat Tales

I'll Follow the Sun

2012-02-06T23:49:00.000-08:00

Let’s be honest. I will do almost anything but sit still and plunk out words on the keyboard. Just now, I spent almost two hours watching YouTube videos of George Harrison on the Dick Cavett show and then subsequently following the stupid links to other YouTube Beatles related videos… anywhere but facing this screen. You wonder, my friends, why I am not on FaceBook. Can you imagine the amount of wasted time I could rack up?

This is how I found myself at Fete Coffee on 3^rd and 20^th Street not finishing the several half-written posts about my great experience in Peru last October. Normally, I would send you, dear readers, updates about the build site, the work we would be doing, the families, but I just couldn’t wrap my brain around anything I had previously started, and frankly, I didn’t know how to put into words that I was moving again. It feels like I just mailed those beautiful “change of address” cards.

It all started in June while I was lying in bed throwing a pretty big pity party for myself, trying to evoke sympathy from Vanessa, who impatiently interrupted my nonsensical stream of consciousness with “Lemonade, Kat, lemonade!”

The benefit about being in your 40s is that you can actually see everything as a win-win situation, which is what Vanessa told me when she told me to sweeten up and write down what was going on. This introspection is not for everyone. Lemons, after all can be sour. You end up seeing things about yourself that you may not like. Which is exactly what happened.

I began working on a long essay about my volunteer work, community and the simple concept of home. In my efforts to pen descriptive prose, the authenticity of this subject forced a lot of complexities to the front. I found that I couldn’t stop dreaming about my former house on Oak Grove Drive. In my sleep state, I would walk the hallways and peer in the closets; I would sit on my green vinyl step stool in the kitchen corner and chat on the old rotary dial wall phone and wave to the neighbors. I would pluck the dead heads off the climbing yellow roses.

I was compelled to revisit a blog about Oak Grove. Yes, I was listening to Suzy Orman talk about dream houses. Yes, it was the perfect time to sell in Southern California. Yes, my CPA was right, I was never going to see this margin of profit again.

But I found hidden anxieties woven into that reasoning. I didn’t want to clean the gutters by myself. I didn’t want to haul the gy-normous trash bins to the curb. I didn’t want to be the single woman on the block that caused all the young brides to suddenly start walking their golden retrievers alongside their husbands. Didn’t they know that I, too, wanted someone to share the load?

Indeed, Oak Grove Drive was a grief inspired lovesick real estate therapy purchase, but I had unexpectedly disrobed the naked truth that I loved that house. By selling, I had uprooted myself and had not yet found fertile ground. That, despite wanting someone to share the yard work, I regretted letting go of my home and didn’t want to admit it.

It was these unsettling thoughts that permeated my mind when I left the country with a team of volunteers for La Florida, Peru, ironically to build houses for single women. And it was while I was hiking the Inca Trail, all 32 miles (or 26 depending on who the guide is or what literature you’ve read) I became fully conscious of how unhappy I had been in the past year and that the only way out of it would mean changing the course of my life … again.

Before I flew back to New York, I spent some time in Temecula with my childhood friend, Robin. Her house is some sort of Franco Tuscan style complete with fountain and circular drive. Hot water comes out of the faucet. Heck, water comes out of the faucet. This was literally the polar opposite of where I had just come from.

Hot air balloons swell on two sides of the house each morning at dawn, waiting to take people on tours of California’s south coast wine district and spectacular sunsets spread bright blood orange azure violet blue streaked skies across the Great Room’s 20 windows. “Every night” Robin says. I am envious of these views.

Numerous rose bushes remain in bloom, even for late October. I miss gardening. I long to plant geraniums to trail down the second floor balcony. The house practically weeps for it. I found myself pouring through one of my favorite cookbooks, The New Basics, planning dinner parties and imagining the deserts I hadn’t made yet.

I had to force myself to leave, not wanting to face my 250 square foot one-window apartment where the snow had left thousands of North Easterners without power. I wanted to stay there, in the spacious kitchen with the Thermador stove and pot of hot coffee.

And so I returned ten days later than originally planned, having been gone a total of six weeks, at the beginning of what I dreaded might be another long winter.

I woke up thinking about a conversation I had with Robin. I was trying to reason the necessity to have a permanent address, unsuccessfully betraying my reluctance to leave California. “Well, let’s see - you move for love or a job.” she reasoned back.

Full time wasn’t part of my bi-coastal-summers-on-the-Cape plan. In fact, I had moved for love. Well, that and the apartment my then-partner and I were sharing was not dog friendly, a fact omitted when he asked me to move in. So, there I was driving across the country with Lily on March 8^th, the day after my 41^st birthday, to his other apartment in NYC with the pretense that we would fix it up, sublet and perhaps buy something back on the West Coast.

Three years later, I didn't know why I was here except for the same hopeful, if not misguided, motivation that had prompted the purchase of that house, the long drive across country and currently, the leasing of this apartment - all results of relationships that didn’t make it to the Oscars, let alone the altar.

The fact of the matter was that for the past 10 months, I had been trying to make lemonade out of a hurried survivalist decision made against my instincts, but the mix was still tart.

I started thinking about the money that flew out of my pockets, how the rent I paid was more than my mortgage had been, the fact that I have to turn on the lights to make coffee, and that every morning when I walk Sgt. Pepper, I’m witness to more and more of the New York I used to know from the ‘80s, (meaning – openly transacted drug deals in front of the Bellevue Emergency room entrance at 9:AM).

I love this city. I’ve traveled far and wide, and it truly is the greatest place in the world, just like the Red Sox are the greatest ball club in the world, but the standard of life I want includes a view, a little bit of sunshine and sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes… a free parking lot. Friends, I'm not talking Brooklyn. I gave notice a few days later, and scheduled movers for mid-December.

While I packed up the apartment, fall was in full procession. Leaves sparkled in parakeet yellows and wine-like crimson. The temperature dropped absurdly without reason and rose the next day to 60 degrees. November’s full moon gleamed over the East River, the Empire State building was illuminated in five colors: purple, orange, blue, green and white. This was a nightly event I looked forward to, a surprise the whole city is in on because you never know what the colors will be unless it’s a holiday.

One night, I passed three people loitering outside my building, casually sharing a cigarette. A girl wearing bubble shorts, accentuating her ass and not caring that her cellulite peaks out right below, (she’s probably 25 though, so F you for noticing), takes a long drag and says: “You have to be careful about the Nurses. They either ignore you or they don’t know what they are doing. Hey you know what, you look just like Rashida Jones from Parks and Recreations… she’s gorgeous! But tell me for reals, is Jack a shitbag or what?”

I ask you, where else in the world can you eavesdrop so blatantly?

I didn’t know if I preferred the bitchy customers waiting in line at the Santa Monica post office or just the plain crazy clerks on 23^rd Street who lose your packages. Honestly, I didn’t know where to forward my mail, but I did know that I wasn’t going to live in an apartment that made me unhappy any longer.

I am uprooted, or “a seed in the wind” as David LeBarron calls me. Maybe that is O.K. Maybe I should seriously think about getting a PO Box.

Someone asked me how I was doing, thinking my move might be for more ominous reasons. “I’m molting” I responded. “It’s not comfortable, but necessary for growth.”

Before the movers arrived, I flicked on the lights, lit the kettle for my leaky French press, and clicked open TinyBuddha.com’s Daily Wisdom:

We make hundreds of decisions every day, and most are no-brainers with low stakes results. Whether we choose A or B is a matter of evaluating risks and weighing benefits. It’s more about preferences, and less about impact.

Not so with powerful decisions. These are the ones that change the course of your life. These are the ones that require us to go way beyond reason and logic, straight into our hearts, and find answers that are truthful, though not necessarily popular or easy.

I’m always reassured when I get a missive through the Internet that speaks directly to what is going on in my life. Like I do have a guardian angel out in cyberspace.

As if I needed reinforcement, I received an email the same day with this quote under the sender’s signature:

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once again, I am buoyed a by a trip to a faraway place. It is December the 27^th; I am high above the Pacific Ocean on my way to Moloka’i in the state of Hawaii.

To borrow from Paul, I’ve decided to follow the sun. I know the universe has conspired with me on this one.

Summer's End

2011-08-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

There are few things as sad as empty rooms in a summerhouse on a gorgeous August day. For the past week our rental has been full of people, but this morning, we are but two, bumping around each other for the last few days. There should be sand to sweep out of the house and the smell of the grill, nightly excursions to the ice cream parlor in town, and my quintessential summer treat, fried clams.

What makes me hesitate to write my annual Ode to Summer is that I’ve been tres reflective this vacation, even though we’ve managed to stave off the predicted thunderstorms that were supposed to hit last week, and no one got into a teary brawl as can sometimes happens with Forced Family Fun, a term my friend Robin coined when we were teenagers.

We are at the end of our two weeks in Wellfleet, Mass; one town over from Truro, oddly called “the Lower Cape” even though it’s due north of its elbow. Truro was where we spent our family vacations in a true seasonal two story on Highland Avenue, the second floor bedrooms separated by tongue and groove paneling that never made it to the ceiling, allowing for children and parents alike to hear everything and tease each other, call out "Goodnights" and laugh at dad’s snoring before dropping off to sleep. Those days in Truro were some of the best parts of my childhood, influencing me in ways I am still discovering. Respect for the ocean and its treasures - a piece of sea glass to join a colorful collection on a kitchen window shelf back home, a perfect angel wing shell, driftwood aged by salt water, a game of gin rummy ending in rousing hysterics, the acknowledgement of summer and the change of seasons. Learning these simple pleasures.

We’ve traveled to P-Town no less than three times, boiled eight lobsters and a dozen ears of corn, supped on pints of chowder, went for long walks on the cove. My sister, younger brother and I try to recreate the best parts of those Cape summers from our youth, but we just couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to see “Smurfs” at the Wellfleet Drive-In, a patch of tar worthy of some of my favorite memories.

We’ve spent our days together at any one of the five beaches. I’ve been studying for my GREs, trying to remember my high school math and cursing periodically when an algebraic equation eludes me. I ask about Quantitative Reasoning and am answered by blank stares. Indeed. I would have the same reaction. I admire the New Yorkers who brave coming to the Cape, Land of the Red Sox. When we were kids, and cars were the size of small watercraft, we’d mimic our parents when the orange and blue license plates would crawl up and down Route 6a… “There go the New Yorkers…”. Even though I live and am registered to vote there, I still consider myself a New England gal. While we are at Marconi, tide high, a couple of my city companions complain about the water quality – “It’s like swimming in a bunch of diarrhea” and “ It’s cheaper than a seaweed wrap at the Canyon Ranch Spa. I haven’t showered in three days, I’m going to have to check out that outdoor thing”. My sister and I look at each other but don’t say anything. We don’t go into the water though. The moment for jumping the waves has been lost.

I’ve been plucking away as best I can on my guitar with Phil, finishing old crossword puzzles or catching up on “Mad Men” with my sister until I’m truly tired and ready the hit the bed, around 10:30 PM. When you’re older and the kids that your siblings had are now in their early 20s, raring to go explore the local bars with the friends they’ve invited, it makes you reminisce about the energy you no longer possess. Time speeds by so quickly, you’re trying to reel it back in like an 8-pound striped bass on the end of your line.

On the late afternoon of the 14th, Siobhan and I head to Duck Beach to witness the extreme low tide. Once a month the ocean stretches its arms back towards England; a phenomenon brought on the by the full moon. We laugh in wonder at how incredibility gorgeous the sky can be. Pepper cannot find any birds to chase as he did in Davis Park, and the plovers are just too miniscule and busy to attract his attention but he is happy to race up and down the beach and we are happy to chase him. Clammers and families and lovers have toted their chairs and umbrellas way out away from the pebbly beaches to enjoy the quiet lap of waves rolling on the sand bars, a sound quite different from the roar of the ocean side.

Mom and I have walked through the house making sure that the beds have been stripped and tossing everything into the wash. We are leaving the day after tomorrow. The house is empty save for the remains of distractions we brought with us, my guitar, board games, and back issues of New Yorkers. We are in the midst of a Scrabble-off. This morning Pepper & I braved it alone at Calhoon Hallow beach, but the sand finally drove us away. The wind is starting to pick up, advance warning of Hurricane Irene, but most of the vacationers welcome the balmy temperatures after the past two nights.

With dramatic weather comes dramatic sunsets, and I have been trying to keep the tradition my mother started all of those years ago in Truro when she and Pat Hall would call out “SUNSET” and drive off to Head of the Meadow beach. It was important to say goodbye to the day. I don my yellow mustard colored Cape Cod hooded sweatshirt, reminiscent of high school and head out into the 70-degree chill. It smells like fall and this reminds me why I love the East Coast so much. The shores of Wellfleet are truly magnificent; they are shores you can dream on for miles.

The Longest Move

2011-04-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

It seems like yesterday I was hailing a cab on 2nd Avenue, headed off to the tropical part of the United States, a/k/a: Hawaii. It was December 20th, 4:30 AM. It was cold and dark. Street vendors piled the sidewalk with Christmas trees, and it was still so on January 17th, 2011. The fragrant evergreen piney smell of trees that had been felled recently, and I imagine, bought on December 24th only to be tossed to the street as the 12th day of Christmas rang through.

This was the day I had finally ordered the movers to deliver my worldly possessions to the apartment I had reluctantly signed a lease for in mid-December, immediately regretting the decision and spending the following weeks tossing and turning, dreams of unruly neighbors and angry landlords, who I had recently learned, were my next-door neighbors.

As if I had been born under a sign that demanded it so, it rained as it had for the past three major moves I’d been through, and for over $1000, three men busted my furniture and boxes through the door in just two hours. Not bad. After they left the apartment, I followed them and traipsed back up to the safety of Tudor City and a minimalist apartment that wasn’t wall-to-wall boxes and plastic wrapped furniture.

My friend and former roommate Victoria offered some comfort, ‘moving always sucks’. “Remember how many books I had when we were living together on East 19^th Street?” I ask her. “Multiply that by 17 years.” I ended up staying in Tudor City for the next two weeks until I was curtly told via text message "Cut the cord!”. I was being ridiculous, I know, but I just did not want to face the task ahead of me.

How can I put the feelings I had into words while I shuffled through cartons I had boxed up in August 2007 and left in a Pasadena storage facility? "Simultaneously detached and eerily present" is what comes to mind. In fact, it was rather overwhelming. Life has happened. Things have changed. I’m different. And that I’ve been an unapologetic transient… it feels like I’ve been moving for years.

I keep trying to believe what people tell me, that this will be fresh start, that all of my efforts and energy will come back to me, but I can’t seem to drink the Kool-Aid just yet. It seems like such a monumental effort, this moving, and I can't help but wistfully think of Gandhi and his shoebox.

What I’m finding are things particularly California-centric; a Stickley bed set, Catalina forged decorative tiles, Plein Art oils of the Cambria coast, a rare pattern of Franciscan ware called “Forget Me Not “ as if lulling me back to the west coast.

All of this fit pretty nicely into that life over there - wide-open space and suburban cityscape, that way out west across the Painted Desert, the blur of colored lights in the middle of nowhere, the cragged ragged crags of the Sierras changing color with every hour of every day. This is what my boxes contain. The light. I miss the light, which is especially poignant given we’ve barely had two days of sun during all of February, March and the first two weeks of April.

Don't get me wrong, I love living in New York. Every day I’m on the move, walking to and from and sometimes nowhere and I am always glad to be here. But I although the reason why I ended up here is a happy accident, I can’t say that moving is happy making.

It just brings up too many questions that wake me out of a restless sleep, overwhelming me at unseemly hours like 3:AM. Questions that range from morbid, (“Do I really need these photos albums? Someone is just going to throw them out when I die”) to angry (“Why is the square footage constantly wrong on the apartment listings? This apartment is definitely NOT 350 SF. Note to self – in NYC, always deduct at least 100 sf from what the listing states!), to despair masking as existential (“What am I doing here?”) This can be interpreted on both levels of spiritual to practical to a sack full of self-doubt. I mean, really, what am I doing here in this dark, studio apartment? “Where do I belong?” Hawaii? Could I live there? I’ve always wanted to live in Spain. Why did I sign this lease?”)

Over the next six weeks, I slowly find a place for everything, come up with creative shelving, hunt down Crate & Barrel bargains on Craig’s List and make several trips to IKEA in Paramus, Elizabeth and Red Hook.

After four years, I finally I have all my things in one place, with the exception of my Peter Beard signed print that is stowed in someone’s garage in Los Angeles. For the first time in many years, I don't feel like my life is one big diaspora.

I'm further downsized and compact, and this apartment, which I refer to as The Garden, is really super cute. My landlord is actually a very nice man, (although his wife tends to light into him every other day). The Yankees fan across the hall is a complete stoner, so much so that there are times when I arrive home and MY apartment smells like pot. The light in my bathroom is yet to be fixed, but as Victoria reminds me, "Kat, this is New York - we've been waiting for our landlord to fix a lamp in our apartment for eight years!".

And truly, I was tremendously happy to see those books, covered in plastic acid-free wrappers, a weekend project I’m grateful for as I see how badly the movers have handled everything despite my careful labeling. I remembered all of my friends, gleefully recalling where and when I had found certain prizes while I examine the spines and page through to my favorite passages.

As I was lying awake one night, with those eternal questions zipping through my brain, this one popped in “Am I to be toting around these heavy boxes of books and curios all my days, items consolidated over time constituting my life? They are so heavy!” I considered selling them. It was Gandhi and that little box, whom I admired so much more as I shuffled these boxes from one end of the room to the other, but a friend advised that one day I would find that house and I’d want my books around me then.

And so … even though the trips to yet a new storage unit, this one in Brooklyn, are bewildering, I know there is another move in my future.

For now, I'm waiting for the sun to come out and enjoying the lovely little space I've created.

Block and Roll

2010-11-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

The villages Habitat builds are typically where the poorest of the poor live, the “humble class”. They are homes to construction, agricultural and other day laborers.

This rural part of El Minya has been described to me as the “Real Egypt”, and in reflection from the noise and haste of the all encompassing “Tourist Egypt”, it cuts quite a different swathe. In El Gazaer, vendors peddle through town on bikes piled high with fabrics, fruits and grass for the livestock.

Homes are decorated with red, blue and green geometrical designs as well as Muslim and Coptic symbols painted or fired into the intricate wrought iron doors and windows and for crafting these artful portals, there is a metal worker in both villages we visit.

Habitat Egypt has developed a loan program distributed in $1000 increments (5000 Egyptian pounds) determined by the Habitat board and a local committee of nine, formed from both local and religious leaders of the Muslim & Coptic Christian faiths and former loan recipients who are embedded in the community. Each committee must have at least two women on their board as well. The loans provide funding for families to build the upward addition, allowing for extra sleeping space to rebuild the house originally constructed from mud bricks.

Livestock is part of the unit here, and up to 10 people will share sleeping/living spaces, while animals are corralled on the roofs and in the kitchens. It is not uncommon to find amount the unfinished tops piles of corn set out to dry next to the chicken coop and satellite dish.

The concept of volunteerism is very new. People greet the bus and crowd around the job site to happily watch us work. Women of the household prepare hot tea in hourly intervals. There is a lot of stopping and starting, yet everything is pressing - Vella! Vella! (Go! Go!) or Kataya! (Enough!), much like the movie business mantra: “Hurry up and wait”.

When a decision needs to be made in these limited spaces, like moving sand from one teeny room to another, the loud, heated Arabic attracts other men from the site until a group is formed. Results of these conclaves can take a long time and before you know it, tea is being served again.

Part of our work has been hauling 40 + pound limestone blocks, forged from the desert quarries nearby. I imagine the same rock beds that the pyramid stones were cut from thousands of years past. The blocks arrive early in the morning and are dumped right in the middle of the street. We have to move quickly in order to clear them from the road, standing side by side and passing them down narrow alleys.

Sand is also piled out in the open, and before re-location and sifting duties begin, we encourage the children to plunge in. We lug it into the houses with super cool buckets made from reused tires hooked onto a crudely rigged pulley system. Later, it will be used for various types of mortar, from flooring to masonry and wall spackle.

Although it doesn’t seem like much, we save the families a significant amount of money in labor by just helping them to move building materials. (We calculated that we moved about 10 tons total) Maybe about $300 dollars for the entire time we are there. For each home we provide help to at the four different locations, this is quite a savings.

One of Habitat’s initiatives in Egypt is to offset the costly electricity hook up to the grid as well as proper plumbing. Utility bills are extremely affordable due to the hydro-power provided by the Aswan Damn. Since its inception in 2007, this simple aid program has helped 432 families, with 100% repayment. Habitat Egypt hopes to help 200 families in the upcoming year.

It is only a taste of a typical ten day build, and the team wishes they could keep working if only there were more time. This makes it very difficult to leave. It’s tough to be a team leader, but especially so in this situation. You want everyone to feel like they've contributed and made memories with the homeowners they've met.

On our last day, the word “Nartura” lingers from the streets to the committee room to the security laden bus...

“You bring light to our village”.

In Just a Few Key Strokes by Jamie Lowe

2010-11-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

In life there are times when we feel the need to go beyond our own limitations and comfort zones. This very brave venture and thirst can lead to a life-changing experience. My thirst was quenched with my travel with Habitat for Humanity to Egypt. Born and raised in the United States of America I can proudly say that I have been afforded certain luxuries. However, it is when those luxuries are stripped from you that you examine what caliber of a person you are. What will you do for another that does not directly benefit you? What will you sacrifice, both physically and mentally, to uplift another? These are questions that I asked of myself. Undoubtedly these may have been the same questions that meandered through the minds of the people in El Gazaar and Kolonas. Why would a group of Americans venture to carry tons of limestone and sand? Why would they work in the hot sun for no reward?

The truth being that is was never a purely selfless act. While sifting sand I experienced the dynamics of a true giving relationship. Observing friends from different races, age groups and sexes working tirelessly to lift a family. Individuals bending their minds, bodies and spirits to melt into a perpetual ladder to bridge a family from where they once were to where they dream to be.

My experience in Egypt wasn’t merely a testament to the fact that I plaster a wall, sift sand nor move limestone. It was a testament that I can move beyond my own limitations. It was a testament that despite a language and cultural difference the still underlying tone in a relationship is humility. It is the setting aside one’s own ideologies to melt with an unknown group to form a more harmonious entity.

A Room With A View

2010-10-31T09:15:00.000-07:00

The team has arrived safely, without any lost luggage or mishaps. Along with the GV Egypt personnel, we pile into a mini-bus for a five-hour drive south to El Minya, following the Nile the entire way.

Hundreds of empty buildings crowd the outskirts of Cairo; windowless red brick developments with dangerous looking prongs of rebar pointing northward on each corner.

The unfinishedness of the houses, Egypt Style as it’s known, is preparation for the upper floors that will be built once sons and daughters are married. Land is often tenured, staying in the families for generations. Because of this, Egypt builds up.

This explains a lot of things, especially the fact that ancient Egypt was uncovered from years of windswept sands and towns built entirely of mud bricks that consistently collapsing onto itself, forcing the inhabitants and subsequent relatives to move on top.

Our local coordinator explains that most of the vast construction is being built by developers hedging against the market, using the economy’s decline to hire cheap labor and then hoping that it will surge again so that they can sell these spaces at a premium.

Structures closer to the city are part of a failed government initiative to provide affordable housing, but city officials didn’t count on the expense incurred by construction and thus, the pricing to purchase proved to be beyond the means of the people who actually need the housing.

With 17, 000,000 in Cairo (that’s 200,000 per square kilometer), you can imagine the need for affordable housing. Children are literally being kicked out of their homes since parents cannot afford to pay for both rent and mouths to feed, leading to a new statistic of 1,000,000 homeless children in the city itself.

*Just to give you a comparison, there are 10,000 people per square kilometer in New York City, population 11,000,000.

Pictures cannot accurately describe the sprawl that continues on and on throughout our drive, I try to think of ways to describe this vast acreage of empty windows that stare out like jack-o-lanterns and metal fingers stretching up towards the sky.

At the Hotel Cleopatra, the front desk manager assures us that we have a beautiful view, but when we open the shutters and throw up the sash, I discover that our room faces two unfinished apartment buildings with a narrow alleyway leading down the bank. “I want to see the Arno” I sigh, remembering Lucy Honeychurch’s words upon hearing that her room promises a view as well in E.M. Forester’s classic.

We will be sequestered here for the three and ½ days, not a typical time frame for any Habitat build, but Egypt is unique in that the villages where we are working are combinations of Coptic Christian and Muslim, both religions having non-working holy days beginning Friday and ending on Sunday.

More so, however, Egypt remains a police “state”, and because of the terrorist bombing in 1995, requires all tourists to be accompanied by armed guards. Tourism fuels a major portion of the economy, with 14,000,000 visitors expected this year alone.

With us at all times is the swankily dressed Omar, packing a Colt .45. With a beam in his smile, he proudly tells us that he was on Obama’s detail when he spoke in Egypt last year. I can tell that he’s picked up a thing or two from the Secret Service by the way he leaps off the bus while it’s in motion and clears the street before we exit.

A Toyota truck with at least six armed soldiers on benches follows our bus to and from the hotel, although we never see these men until our last day when a gaggle of kids, home from school, crowd around the team wanting pictures and touching everyone; a bustle of noise rising to a hundred gleeful shrieks and giggles and causing much agitation to the soldiers and the village security men, clad in matching galabayas, who start waving long, thick canes in front of the children, causing them to scream and back off, only to return to their excited state a few seconds later. Soon after, Omar orders the street cleared and we are on our way back to safety of the mini-bus and the long ride to Cairo.

It's Two AM, Do You Know Where You Are?

2010-10-24T03:50:00.000-07:00

On these international journeys, I’m always seem to arrive in the middle of the night stumbling after other bleary eyed fellow travelers through brightly lit and impossibly white customs counters, exiting out into the gassy glow of orange municipal lighting and the combined smell of smoldering embers from city incinerators and roadside trash disposal, diesel and leaded fuel, dusty streets. I love it.

You bump along to some hotel where the staff is surprisingly wide awake, crash into a bed that you hope is comfortable, knowing that you will wake up in a city you've never visited before and a whole new experience that will forever mark your life and give you memories to later dream on.

If you expect The Four Seasons on these Global Village treks, you are on the wrong voluntourism trip. I've stayed in bunk beds four across in a crowded cabin, cement block hotels with armed guards and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling to shabby chic hotels, remnants of some grander era of the ‘60s… which is where I find myself on the morning of October 9^th in Heliopolis district of Cairo.

Prevalent in this Mother of all Cities are sand particles that breeze in from both sides of the Nile where the desert stretches on for miles. It adheres to cars, buildings, your feet and turning white limestone buildings brownish yellow of silt and dust.

My first mission after getting rousted out of bed at 1:30 pm is to locate the “Cilantro” coffee shop our coordinator has suggested directly across the street from the Hotel Baron. Not in her detailed account of arrival procedures and neighborhood conveniences was the life threatening street crossing. One has to cross two wide streets separated by double trains tracks in a shallow ditch.

I’m determined. I get my New York on, hold up my left hand first and dance between cars and motorbikes and tour buses, gingerly hopping down to the train tracks that separate the two boulevards, then climb up the other side and do the same thing all the while clutching my laptop and looking directly into the driver’s eyes as I do my same little dance to coffee.

Although there don’t seem to be any streetlights in this part of town, in downtown sections of the city, crossing lights display a green man running in a quick animation as if this has always been the way to get to the other side.

Before leaving, Cairo: The City Victorious was recommended to me via 43Places.com. The history is astounding and everywhere I look, I try to match the words to actual locations. There so much to write about Cairo, but I am anxious to talk to you about the build and so I will save that for later.

The Summer Sessions

2010-09-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

At 5 Second Walk, a clam shell announces, “A Day at the Beach is the Best Day Ever” in blue magic marker. I couldn’t agree more. I remember the sentiment as I tumble to the Atlantic, where I rejoice in the waves…. the waves the waves the waves as they crash and retreat. I like my towels to be orange and red, a reflection of the heat and joy of beaches and summer. The ocean is a perfect Sea Green from the Crayola color wheel. Swimmers jockey for position between a dozen men casting fishing poles and ogling girls clad in bikinis, but it’s an older woman in a colorful kurta who reels in dinner, a blue fish she smartly totes off for cleaning.

Next to where we have laid our spread, a group of former Delta Sig sisters reminisce about their college day - their kids run amok attempting to force a kite to take flight. “The smell of the ocean”, our neighbors comment “... so my favorite thing.” I write this down this bit of eavesdropping.

It’s a great excuse to be lazy and while away an afternoon on soft sand, two months worth of New Yorkers and Oprah's latest issue as inspiration for September, quickly approaching. And the theme of this issue is appropriate. It is time for a makeover; although I’m unclear on my start date for this makeover, this New Me. It’s something I contemplate over the next two days, lounging on my triple wide spread of towels, umbrellas, books, lotions and coolers of frozen fruit and ice cubes.

One of our houseguests left on the 5:20 ferry Saturday. The rain hadn’t settled in yet, but the wooden walkway was slick and our flip-flops squeaked and squawked as we made our way to the ferry landing marked by a single lamppost, oddly reminiscent of the wardrobe leading to Narnia. We wanted to see her off, across the short bay to the LIRR & Penn Station where she would train it to 2nd & 4th readying herself for a morning flight across the country to LA.

A new beginning. A whole new chapter. I took that journey myself once – and at her age - from the same side of town East Side to the same side of town West Side. I’m excited for her, but sad for me. Goodbye this time wasn’t a “see you next week”; it was goodbye good luck to an uncertain path and a sparkling future. I’m half jealous.

Remnants of the hurricane season hit us early Sunday morning, raining all day and leaving Monday a windy mildly warm and tempestuous day. An olive skinned beauty, say 15 or 16, stands with her left hand on her cell and her right cupping her cheek vacantly looking out from the Grill Counter, normally full on sunny days, yet eerily empty, devoid of people and their pleasure crafts. Whether boaters left last night in the rain or early this morning, choppy waters in the closed quarters of the marina is probably not an ideal spot. The beach near the casino and ferry landing is full of bathers and two lifeguards watch over the low tide and rolling waves. Grey skies or not, people continue in their doggedness about enjoying their vacation time.

I can’t believe I waited until mid afternoon to come out to the beach. Being in the darkness makes one lazy, sloth like. We need some form of light to awaken our souls. Outside, even in this bright yet cloudy day I feel better, less stuck in the mud. The ocean has turned from a sea glass green to soup – a steely pea green mixture with five-foot waves that tempt the surfers. Five tweens hold hands and face the white caps. Kids rush the foamy parts of the waves, determined on their first day of a family vacation not to let the grey skies ruin their fun of the week before school starts. Parents are keeping close watch, bundled up and hunkered down against the wind. The sun brightly and bravely tries to break the barrier of clouds, but from its position now, I can see it has resigned to settling in until tomorrow.

Idleness certainly does not slow down time’s passages. For me it acts as lubricant, speeding up the last year. Davis Park, 2nd Walk, 2009 feels like two months ago. How did we get to here so quickly? A week is just not enough time to have a proper summer vacation. By the fourth day, you’re counting backwards, retracing steps trying to slow down the next few days that are anything but lingering. I think of O, and the September issue and my list… the list that never ends with questions like: What I am doing? Where am I going to live? What is my ideal life? What makes me tick? Why do I love sugar? I need to more yoga, start up guitar lessons again, Call that Dan Smith, memorize those uke songs, finish sweaters I’ve started, write postcards, discard old things and unused possessions, go to the post office by the lamppost, find a new apartment, tap into my brain, organize my thoughts, finish planning my trips, go the library, call my mother, call my sister, call my brothers, birthday cards and baby gifts, return calls, so much to remember, so much to do and in the midst of this all, the storm the storm and this dark cabin.

The sky is a milk glass with a light bulb shining through and I don’t want to leave just yet. It doesn’t seem right that it should be storming and 70 degrees in the dog days of summer.

I am on the beach with the kids… the kids and dogs who don’t mind the weather. They are just as happy to jump right in the surf no matter what the skies portend. Sgt. Pepper loves the beach, loves the sand, loves above all chasing the sand pipers. They mock him, flying wide circumferences over the beach dunes and back across the beach to the sea trying to get him into the water. I swear we walked five miles and Pep has run about ten retracing his steps again and again in his pursuit. And the next day, he’s ready to do it again.

I want more. I want an entire summer. I will settle for just one more sunny day at the beach - that is all I want.

We’ve decided we will pack up and catch the ferry about twelve hours earlier than our planned departure. All of the equipment I carried for my lazy days at the beach - magazines, journals, lotion and SPF 15 Chap Stick, seems wasted. No matter how many hot days there are to come, summer is over for me. It ended the day the rain came, leaving it soggy. It has been melancholy for other reasons as well. I think I crave the endless summer – the coast that I recently left. There is nothing sadder than finding oneself under twisted oaks in the dark, dark shade while outside it pours relentlessly and the mosquitoes find refuge inside your dim cabin.

We get back to our little cabin; the rain turning swiftly on us, a reminder of the mercurial seasons here and this realization hurts me personally. I used to rejoice in the advent of autumn. New cords, new desks, brown paper bag book covers, crisp air, but now it only makes me feel sad and helpless. I can’t stop the wheel from turning and soon it will be autumn for sure and for me, that means a new home as of yet to be determined, and an adventure of my own to not one but two foreign lands and hopefully a new path and purpose. I suppose this is a make over of sorts.

Cabin cleaned and bags by the screened porch, we take that last beach walk before heading back to the city. As if on cue, the sky has revealed a Tiffany blue gift, a hot orange sun– a new day. It is so gorgeous, so perfect that the mosquitoes have even taken a break.

To the north, yes, you can see exactly where the wind has pushed the clouds away from Fire Island, big cumulous clouds gather, bunching up like mounds of whipped cream. The ocean sparkles with the sun. Though not returned to its glassy green, gentle waves roll in, lolling swimmers to arise and get wet. A few more days of summer, it beckons, just a few days, whispering with the gentle wind, provoking us to take in this day and the next to come.

On the east coast, this is something to savor, a warm memory to return when the real cold comes on and the days turn bitter, short and the sky closes up once again but with snow. It is the tokens we take with us, shells and bits of broken worn down glass that fill empty bottles and jars later made into lamps, the bits of sand not shaken out of tote bags and socks that find us, that will remind us to seek out these days.

The sounds of the surf are loud and vibrant, and there is no need for talk or thinking. Just nothingness and the sense that everything is as it should be.

The Summer Wind

2009-09-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Someone recently asked me what the difference was between August and September. Being from California, he couldn’t possible know the subtleties that distinguish the months on the east coast, seasons in California being broken up by the Santa Ana winds, a spotty rainy season, and if you’re lucky enough to travel freely, snowy Sierras.

When you live in Summerland, you cannot experience a true sense of the season and all of the delectable trappings that go with it. It’s like Fried Clams without Tarter Sauce.

Fifteen years in Los Angeles has not eradicated the imprint sandy Cape Cod summers have left on my soul or the 5 AM departures from our Sudbury home, five kids piled into the Volvo wagon with my Mother at the wheel, crisscrossing the country to her mother's in Fort Dodge, Iowa where loads of adventures awaited us at house Grandma Sue called "The Diggings".

These were my family traditions that finely tuned themselves to the inner mechanics of my body clock. September always marked a beginning, perhaps due to the anticipation of a new classroom, new clothes, new notebooks and binders, the definition of “crisp”. Lining outside the door on the first day of school were the dreams that filled the last nights of August leading up to that magical day when the ice cream man, Mike, would trade in his musical truck for the yellow school bus.

This summer, I rented a cabin out in the sleepy township of Davis Park on Fire Island with some friends. It has the secret allure of being steps away from this meglo-metropolis, only fifty minute on the LIE to the Ferry Terminal.

Our cabin was sheltered by canopy of shrub oaks covering seemingly ancient wooden walkways to a shoreline so pristine and speckled with families who have taken ownership of the sun, the sea and the sky. Everyone is happy and at ease. The beach is my unifier. I connect with the horizon, the movement of the waves rolling in, and the groups that populate the shore with the usual blankets, coolers, toys, and the requisite novel. My father toted “The White Lotus” by John Hersey to every vacation of my childhood, restarting the book each sojourn, having forgotten the plot as soon as he put it down the previous August.

After a week at the beach, we are hit with two back-to-back Hurricanes. The wind shifts direction, the ocean is turbulent.

The skies clear within two days and for a brief moment, stragglers will get glimpses of summer's end, keeping the glow of the sun and sandy mementos like shells and starfish stored safely away. As I head back from the beach August 31^st, the leaves on the wooden walkway give away the reality of change.

We easterners hang onto the warmth in preparation for the winter months ahead, dreams to keep the home fires deep in side smoldering.

Starbucks has announced that Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back. The UN is in General Assembly. Disneyworld’s attendance drops for the first weeks of September. Apples orchards are ripe for the picking. A mass exodus floods the ferries, bridges & small craft airports that pepper the vacation areas of Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and Long Island and other waterfront utopias.

And just like that, summer is over.

Message from Mozambique

2009-03-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Friends - a great video has been produced about the Mozambique Habitat/OVC program. This gives great insight into the work we did there. Team leaders Bob & Leslie Bell are planning on returning this summer... think about joining them! It will change your life!

From Denver (via New York) With Love

2008-11-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

Directly following my return from Africa, I found myself on a plane headed across the country to Denver to work at the Democratic National Convention.
I had signed up to volunteer back in April, when it looked like there would be fireworks on the podium and a delegate melee on the floor. That visceral part of me loves a good fight, and the primaries were shaping up to stage a genuine competition of historic proportions. Not seen since Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican Party in half or Lincoln debated Douglas for 11 hours on the principals of abolition have we seen a convention with such possibilities.

As I flew off to the Mile High City, it was probably no coincidence that the muses pointed me towards a poignant article by Peter Godwin in September’s VANITY FAIR, a stirring and straightforward portrait of Mugabe's Reign in Zimbabwe.

Take a moment to read these last two paragraphs:

“Zimbabwe’s runoff election was scheduled for June 27. Morgan Tsvangirai [the opposing candidate] and the M.D.C. withdrew from the contest a few days beforehand, unable to compete in safety or with any guarantee of fairness. The party had effectively been prohibited from campaigning. Rallies were banned. Tsvangirai himself was arrested and detained five times. Mugabe’s slogan in the runoff election was “The Final Battle for Total Control.” With no competition he won handily.

By then the body count from Mugabe’s pre-electoral spasm of violence stood at a hundred, with another 5,000 people missing, many of whom must be presumed dead. Bodies have been found collecting at the spillway of a Harare reservoir. Others have been found in the bush, sometimes mutilated, hands or feet cut off, eyes gouged out. In the months leading up to the runoff some 10,000 people had been tortured. Some 20,000 had had their homes burned down. Up to 200,000 people had been displaced.”

That night, I reached a chapter in my book, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which echoed the same chords as current day Zimbabwe.

Part of the action takes place 20 years after Gandhi’s success at gaining Independence, part of which included an idealistic vision of a caste-free society in which all people would be able to vote in general elections for their choice governmental and rural leaders.

Despite his valiant efforts, Gandhi’s dream was thwarted for decades by Brahmin upper caste landowners who bullied their lowers to blot a fingerprint and thereby allowing the decisions of power sharing to fall permanently into their hands. These landowners kept the lower castes in check by hanging dissenters upside down, putting hot coals in their mouths and dragging them naked through the streets until their death, ultimately refusing their corpses a proper burial so that their souls would never be at rest.

My first night in Denver, I was hired to work an event celebrating the 68th anniversary of the Women’s Right to Vote.
Embedded in key note speaker Senator Clinton's speech was a reminder that the achievement of the 14th Amendment carried its own traces of blood. Alice Paul was tortured by electric shock until President Woodrow Wilson was shamed into enacting the promise President Grover Cleveland made to Susan B. Anthony sixty years before.

Indeed, many countries continue to engage in violent struggle, violence people continue to endure in order to exercise their inalienable rights, rights we are granted by merely being citizens of the United States.

Both Zimbabwe and India’s tortuous and bloody images remind me that despite our differences as Americans living in a two party system, we live in a relatively thug free society. And let me define “thug” because I know that some of you will equate thuggery to robo-calls and smear campaigns.

No one in a government issued uniform, state or federal, is going to beat you to death, burn down your house, cut out your tongue, or carve a backwards “B” into your cheek, on your way to the local polling center. At least not anymore.

With the growing consternation and constant criticism surrounding us, one can become blasé in the blink of an eye about the political process. Or, as a friend’s husband believes, that your quotient of the 12th, 15th & 19th Amendments, the right for all Americans to vote, doesn’t matter.

Anti-War Protesters in Denver.

We may despise the political landscape we have become; we may be mired by a press that loves to stir up trouble, conjecture and fear, including a quest for who is “pro-American” and who is not. And this blog may very well be one of those propaganda messages that are prevalent during election periods, but reading Godwin and Mistry in the wake of that historic convention compelled me to remind myself and my peers of the great privilege we have. A privilege we can choose to act upon without the threat of violent repercussions. And that matters to me.

We cannot be afraid to engage in intelligent discourse with each other about the state of the country or increasing tax rates for the upper income sector or re-implementing regulation or Roe Vs. Wade. Like crosswords, an exchange of ideas keeps the mind sharp.

Frankly, I’m with Chris Rock on this one, “We are all a little conservative and little liberal”.

Walking from the Pepsi Center after an inspiring evening, I was greeted by staggered 6-foot posters of the "Anti-Choice" variety with angry, shouting individuals, telling me that I was a murderer, and how I would surely be going to hell.

While they didn't know my position about choice, they exercised the 1st Amendment, their right of free speech and protest. Although I can't agree that it was peaceable, I was glad for it.

** As Ghandi said – “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” **

Vote November 4th…

...no matter how long you have to wait!

Find your polling center by clicking here

Kanimambo!

2008-08-09T20:07:00.001-07:00

This musical word means “thank you” in Shangani. Whenever one of us would say “Kanimambo!” lingering long on ‘ooooo’, builders and villagers alike joyfully chant the word as a refrain. The people speak both a local dialect of Shangani and Portuguese and we search our rudimentary Spanish to find similar words to communicate with. Sometimes we are successful, but “Kanimambo” is the only Shangani word I’ve retained. It makes me smile. It sums up the gratitude I feel.

With natural rooster alarm clocks, waking up for a 6:30 breakfast is not a problem. There are two bathrooms to share between 16 people and without going into too much detail; we know each other intimately. It’s easier to brush our teeth on the boundaries of the garlic fields that the small mission has planted as part of their garden. The silken red earth gets into our nails under our skin and in our ears and the cracks in our feet. There are no mirrors and for the next two weeks I’m sure that we are never quite clean.

The women set out deep fried eggs, individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and hot rolls supplied by the nearby baker. We have our own way of passing the condiments: condensed milk (sugar milk), jam (pink stuff), butter product, (yellow stuff), tea and instant coffee (Ricoffy).

As different from Massaca is from Maputo, so is Mahanyani. It's hard to gauge how large the village is. Straddling the boundary is a bus stop where women sell vegetables and a large South African plantation advertising its wares as “Bananalandia”. It is a beautiful stretch of hundreds and thousands of banana trees and the contrast between the bounty of the dripping trees and the meager stalls is staggering.

The rickety bus we huddle into drops us at a central meeting point where the school and Habitat office are and we head out on foot to each new location we will be working at with one of our master builders. Over the course of 10 days, we will complete 16 homes. Here there is no grid system. People arrive out of nowhere and disappear from our sites with the same ghostly vapor. In this rural place, you are reminded to be present.

Wells and water taps are spread throughout the acreage. Dirt roads ramble and randomly lead to these meeting points. These outlets are the community newsstands, where inhabitants learn of clinic programs, school hours, and gossip.

I’ve counted three shops that sell cold drinks, bubble gum and other small items. One day, we buy our gang cokes after lunch and this simple transaction empties the cooler.

I am assigned to carry water one day, and when you have to stop every few steps while lugging a 5-gallon petrol container while women haul twice as much on their heads, the task is quite humbling. I can’t imagine doing it every day. But indoor plumbing is not an option, so trips to the well are frequent.

One of the women in our group carried water to her Alaskan cabin many years ago. When I ask her about the experience, her frank response was, “At first you think what an adventure! Then it’s work and then you are just plain angry about it”.
I wonder if these women feel the same.

At 11 AM, someone appears on a bike with a basket containing two thermoses of hot water, a tin of Recoffy, a Nestle product of chicory and coffee soluble mix, which I became quite cavalier with, tea bags, and cookies. I look forward to this break time and appreciate the effort made by the Habitat staff member to provide such a luxury for us.

We are building as part of the OVC program, which I will write about later. There is an abundance of orphaned children in Mahanyani. One of the volunteers has brought inflatable beach balls and during recess, the ball sends 50 plus kids running, kicking up clouds of dust and screams of laughter as the multicolored orb flies through the air. The children make toys with whatever they find. Mostly, it’s with old tires and the wheels of old bicycles. They run alongside the trucks and through the fields. Or they pound cassava root into a top and whip into circles with twigs. These simple pleasures give them such happiness. Anything that can be kicked attracts a huge crowd, however, a Nerf football left them totally confounded.

If the nights are loud, the days are filled with the peep peep peep of chicks and ducks a-scurry. Here, electricity is even more rare than Massaca, although everyone has cell phones and the beeping of dying batteries is prevalent.

Cabbage, cassava, tomatoes, potatoes, mango trees and apples, corn grow haphazardly, without order and women pick their way through their lots to feed the household that day. It is not only the way we connect with each other during this build. It’s the community and the getting a glimpse, if only for two weeks, of the women waking up early to gather water, find food, grind the shima, gather more water, do the washing. These everyday acts that complete a life.

I’ve fallen in love as well. A 10 year old with a bright smile and quick to learn, Francisco has captured my heart. On the last day, his mother sings her appreciation to the group and pleads with the builders to let Francisco work with them so he can learn a trade. I tell her how much I love him and in her blue dress and soulful face she is the most beautiful woman. When she embraces me, I feel a part of her soul enter me.

I’ve been writing back and forth with other team members this past week, all of us heartbroken over leaving “The Dark Continent”, but Africa is anything but that. We wonder why we feel so attached to Africa – is it because it’s the cradle of man, the continent we all broke off from so many years ago – it’s where our roots are, regardless of color, where nature still is on equal footing with the humans?

How do I describe my Africa? Can I wrap you up in words and bring you back with me if I palpably illustrate a rusty red earth that saturates the soul, an abundant turquoise sky backlit by an impossibly bright sun star radiating its glow on the green leaves of mango and banana trees and casting a line of gold on the river that runs through Mahanyani? Or will it be the soft whistling wind and musical sing song of women’s voices returning from the washing with kids dancing around them? With these images, will you yearn as I do to explore more of this incredible world?

Maputo, Massaca, Mahanyani MOZAMBIQUE

2008-07-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

From City to Town to Rural Village

There has been so much movement in my life since January, that I feel as if I awoke and found myself in Maputo, Mozambique on the east coast of Africa.

Africa. The word itself inspires majestic imagery. And even though Maputo is a city in disrepair, there is an essence of sturdiness in the briny air that breezes in from the Indian Ocean.

Once considered a rival to the luscious Cape Town, trash billows down the wide boulevards broken apart by the unceremonious Portuguese departure almost 50 years ago and an ensuing civil war. The remnants of this port jewel are certainly sad to behold, but Mozambique has retained the pride of its countrymen, and the government is progressive, moving to eradicate AIDS, empower women and educate every child through the eighth grade. It's an impressive agenda that seems to have caught the enthusiasm of the people.

The first night my roommate tells me she watched "Out of Africa" before she left her home in Florida. It's hard not to smile at this innocent confession because after all, Kenya is not Mozambique and Robert Redford is definitely not here. We are housed near the bus station, a makeshift stop at a rotary where small minivans cram passengers traveling to destinations written on cardboard displays in the windshield. It is a similar bus that takes us to Massaca, the township in which we will be staying.

Massaca 1 (there are six) is a former refugee camp with a population of 1000. The township lies in a simple grid system with the camp's military gate in tact at the entrance. Driving in, we pass a dusty field where kids play with makeshift soccer balls and a market of tin sprawls into dark passageways. Houses of brick, stone, thatched bamboo and tin spread out on four sides from the main road until a flourishing cabbage patch greets you at the end and directs your attention to a view of the countryside.

The village is supported by a Spanish Mission which also runs the clinic, school, miller, bakery and lumber yard where the first day we see children's coffins bing roughly hewn from odd ends of wood. These are early mornings, at 7:AM, the miller has already begun grinding his corn for the baker's bread and for villagers who can afford his service. The meal will be made into a dish called "Shima", a south African staple.

It is quite cold South of the Equator, and the evenings darken quickly but we are blanketed by the Milky Way and a host of constellations I have never seen before. The moon in its sliver visits us three nights in a row. The main road is very dark, electricity being uncommon, but I hear people laughing and walking up and down the streets when I step outside the Mission House wall to have my evening cigarette.

Somewhere in the market of tin roofs and displays of chips & hair extensions, a shopkeeper with a television sets out plastic chairs and plays movies for paying customers. WWF and karate films are favorites and kids love to strike action poses for us.

One would think in the darkness, evenings would bring a thoughtful repose, but the nights are noisier than New York City beginning with loud party music blasting from somewhere in the town until about 2:30. At 3:30, the baker's apprentice arrives to chop wood for his ovens. At 5:00 AM, what sounds like thousands of roosters screetching and howling jolt you out of bed. I imgine they are passing on a secret warning, something like "Today it could be you! Take heed!" It is a most disturbing sound. When we depart for Mahanyani at 7:30 AM, the roosters are still squawking out their credo.

A New Beginning...

2008-06-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

Oy!

I’ve spent too long mulling over my latest adventure ... letting the writing utensils that are my ten fingers get rusty and out of shape. The muscles I’ve built up have atrophied and instead of physical therapy, I like to pretend the last seven months didn’t happen… if only I could press the restart button. However, lying in bed the other night, I caught an old episode of South Park: “Fourth Grade”. After spending the entire episode trying to get back to the 3rd Grade, their teacher advises them that "Life isn't about going back, it's about going forward... The adventure of life is that there's always something new. New challenges, new experiences. A fun game is a game that gets harder as it goes. So it is with life". Crazy that Trey Parker’s sage wisdom would inspire me to reconnect with all of you.

It only now occurs to me that I hadn’t even sent out change of address cards, so I’ve effectively fallen off the face of the earth.

Here I am, high above the country on my way back to Santa Monica to move out of the apartment I unpacked my gear in last November. At the top of my list, my life list of who I want to be and the life I want to lead, it states “Trust Your Instincts”.

I did not heed the call, but plunged into the deep end without my goggles. I have learned the hard way that you can’t rationalize your way into a relationship. It has to mature authentically. In my own way, I conjured up a fantasy, born of a lifetime spent working in the arts, living my own movie style or classic Broadway musical life. But the apple I picked, although well versed in the cinema slang and catchy tunes of a Rogers & Hammerstein hit, wasn’t quite ripe.

And now I find my own orchard is strewn between Santa Monica, a storage facility in Pasadena, and the odd hilltop community of Tudor City, Manhattan. I’ve sold half of my possessions, and now, with the remainder halved and quartered, I would willingly give the rest up for a safe haven. The onslaught of Sister Carrie’s return to the big screen hasn't made it any easier. I want that E ticket to Fantasyland where I can have that gorgeously appealing “Sex And the City” type of lifestyle instead of my own.

In a way, I have been dating my own Big on and off for four years. And like Big and Carrie, we have our own set of “issues”. On the premise of getting it together and working it out, he sweetly asked me to move in. However, when you spend the first month of cohabitation lying awake on your side of the bed wondering if you made the right decision, you probably didn’t.

Instead of following my own credo, I turned into a consumer. In the absence of having my own home, I started shopping … a lot. When the boxes started to arrive, Big II shook his head and said, “I’m getting worried”. In this respect, Carrie & I are alike. There seems to be nothing a new pair of shoes and a fresh lipstick can’t cure, even if the feeling is fleeting.

We decided that our living together was a win-win situation. It was our last attempt of the greatest leap. Either it gels or it doesn’t. “Clean break up – no hangovers” we said. But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t hung. I believed in my ability to get out the wrinkles with extreme ironing. I thought this extraordinary skill would create a life of laughter and successes and challenges and all of the threads that knit up nicely into a history. But this isn't that love story and I’ve been falling apart a little, the threads having come loose, unraveling slowly and painfully. And like Carrie, I found myself lying in bed unable to think about anything of substance.

The past six months have been a reverse bell curve. Starting with doubts, rising with hope and now flat lining. You chart a course and go, but sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you thought it would. The ship goes off course and you hit a Nor’ Easter, each person leaping overboard, clutching a life preserver and trying to make their way back to shore, shivering, shaken up and caught in an emotionally charged decision of fearing another wreck or resiliently anticipating the next time you raise the jib with an ability to steer the ship with the proper navigation tools, a sextant or even the stars.

The thing about having a partner is that it gives you a tether. You acquire that look, that “Thank God I Don’t Have To Be Out There Anymore” gaze. It’s easier not talk about the demise than admit defeat, because I’m a fixer, a solution oriented multi-tasker, an ideal resume for a job, but not a relationship.

My story is not going to end with a reconciliation and 200 square feet of closet space, although I can’t promise that finale won’t include a gorgeous gal puffing on an American Spirit with a shiny pair of heels swinging off her tootsies. There are lessons to be learned. For example, like the 4th Graders of South Park, I am right where I need to be even if that means I am ironically, give or take a month, exactly where I was a year ago; moving out, traveling to a foreign country, visiting a Beatles landmark and living fancy free.

When you last heard from me, I’d arrived home from India, a little disheveled, a little enlightened and seeking the simple life. In one week, I’ll be on my way to Mozambique, packing up Goethe's wisdom with me: “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid” and taking another leap of faith.

This time, my faith springs from within me.

...and until further notice, you can find me at 2 Tudor City Place Apt. 10 E North New York, NY 10017.

Steak, Medium Rare

2007-10-08T20:47:00.000-07:00

Having been completely overwhelmed by India, mind space was required between September and the present with the hope that my thoughts and scribbles would come together and make sense. That said, be forewarned. If you were expecting Eat, Pray, Love or even a melodic song a la Alanis Morissette’s “Thank You India”, it’s not going to happen.

“You go to India and everyone expects you’ll come back the fucking Maharishi”, I mutter half asleep to my roommate after her husband chides her via blackberry that she’s not acting “all Zen”.

But that is just the way India is; everything all at once like the everyday street smells of curry, excrement and jasmine that hit you in a left-right-left combination within five paces. It is where the big bang happens everyday, its own billion-population universe.

Most people I have talked to, travelers from the ‘70s, to the ‘90s, recount memories and experiences that mirror mine, even down to the minutest details. I was grateful to learn that I wasn’t alone in this opinion and even happy to forgo the hoped for epiphany or spiritual enlightenment, although arriving in the chaos of LAX’s International terminal was wholly reminiscent of the country I had just left behind.

Luggage from five different flights was strewn throughout the four carousels and travelers from Germany, India, Singapore, Tokyo and Ireland ran back and forth with large metal carts while airport employees tried to make sense of what was going on. It was as if the universal energy of India had followed me home and sequestered itself at Terminal 6.

And I now that I am home, I want to drive and drive and drive.

I’ve been dreaming of smooth five lane highways that are well lit and hug a pristine coastline. Driving on roads that aren’t crowded with bikes, livestock, enormous flatbed carts pulled by water buffalo, slowed by makeshift mechanics who have removed the front ends of buses and then scratch their heads at broken axels and busted radiators. Roads that weren’t dirty, rocky, smoggy or riddled with bloody car accidents where fatality was certain.

Driving myself instead of being dragged by taxi drivers hoping for a small commission to dozens of factories and bazaars from Pondicherry to Jaipur to Agra to Delhi to Rishikesh, where marble inlay tables, sandalwood boxes, statues of Ganesha, Buddha, and Gandhi, gems and pashminas, silk saris and incense, cotton shirts and kurtas, block print tablecloths are purveyed and displayed in the hundreds. “Looking doesn’t mean buying” the salesmen tell you, but they are hoping you’ll buy. Traveling as a single, white woman seems to signal that you are rich and on a serious consumer jag.

As I board the plane in Delhi, I can’t stop thinking of black boots, which I am convinced are an essential and crucially missing part of my wardrobe. I’m not sure why I am thinking about the black boots. Black shiny high pointy-toed boots, but suddenly I can’t live without them. I spend my layover at the Singapore Airport envisioning my boots and where I will look for them first. I almost settle on a pair of oversize red sunglasses.

On Washington Boulevard, we pass In and Out Burger and my craving suddenly takes a u-turn from black patent leather to meat. Remembering the chickens, pigs and sheep feeding from piles of roadside garbage, becoming strictly vegan was a piece of cake.

I’ve left clothes behind, fled an ashram, cleaned conspicuous wounds from children, hefted bricks in 80% humidity, and led a team of strangers in what I hope was a life changing experience for them. I’m spiritually, physically and emotionally spent. Or perhaps I am in reverse culture shock and filet mignon and retail therapy are my ideal solution.

I call Andy from the car to let him know I had landed who asks me thoughtfully if I want anything. “Ice cubes, hot water, and a steak, medium rare” roll off my tongue without a second thought.

And with that response, I ask the driver to stop at Starbucks for a Venti ice coffee.

One Photo Please

2007-08-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Despite a comprehensive plumbing system, technology prevails in India. "One photo! One photo please!" or "Camera phone? Camera phone?". Once one or the other appears out of pocket, children swarm, all wanting portraits. "One photo" translates to a single shot, one person in the photo, just them. Mothers run back to their homes to bring out newborns peering over your shoulder to see their likeness in digital screens. The team has amassed millions of photos, but we've quickly been schooled in the art of stealth photography.

When I left, people told me that I'd return to the United States with a peaceful look on my face and about ten pounds lighter. I can't say that I've found that recipe just yet. The build has been going well, despite a lot of sick team members. One young lady developed culture shock disguised as a sinus infection on our second day and wouldn't leave the hotel four consecutive days. Others developed typical colds and sun stroke, but quickly recovered. The work is very hard and it is hotter than you can imagine here. Although the humidity has not quite hit Florida in July numbers, it is a close second. Lifting bricks and pans of mortar all day leaves everyone exhausted, and daily we are put to shame by both older women and their daughters who gamely toss bricks to the masons and tote large bowls of wet cement on their heads.

We are hungry all of the time, despite the spicy indian food plentiful at meals and I sense the alchemy of this work added to the combination of India's insanity and the indigent conditions of the village we've become a part of has left everyone speechless and spent. Getting to Mamallapurum will be a great way to end the trip.

Two of our hosts, Stephen and Dyan, have treated the team to a movie titled "Sivaji", hooting and hollaring with the rest of the crowd for the three hour extravaganza. "Sivaji" stars Rajinikanth, who calls himself BOSS and has his own theme song. Wow! The final number included a spice girls type dance routine with guitars as props, flying machine guns, shot entirely at the new Gehry museum in Barcelona. "Not logic, just magic" Stephen gleefully whispers to me. I am crazy in love with Indian cinema!

After telling us that this would be the third time they had seen "Sivaji" (which is like our "Pirates" in financial success), Stephen and Dyan reveal that they are die hard members of the Kamal Husan "clan", a rival Tamil star. Last week, they presented Katy Leigh and myself with their official fan club t-shirts. India's movie fans go to great length to show their devotion. For example, a "clan" will create large banners resembling billboards with a collage of their favorite stars' photos and films, the lower half displaying smiling faces of the purchasers. These "fanners" are then strung over streets and plastered to sides of buildings, making it clear who the real heroes are.

The film clued me in to the happy disposition prevalent in the people we bustle through the streets with and sweat beside all day. Color and music and magic and faith is embedded in everything they create, whether it be legends or blockbuster movies.

More to come...

Pondicherry at Last

2007-08-20T06:45:00.000-07:00

Six of us have brought our Lonely Planet's Guide to India with us, thus increasing the weight of our baggage by about thirty pounds. Pondicherry is recorded as a welcome relief from the hustle and bustle of other Indian cities and indeed, it is. Our three hour bus ride from Chennai was an experience, with the same non-traffic rules applying for the two lane dirt highway. It was best to avert our eyes at the on-coming cars, trucks, bicycles and mopeds. As I mentioned previously, three members of the team have arrived on their own due to missed connections etc, and during this trek, I thought of what they would be experiencing, first arriving at a crazy airport in the middle of the night only to get accompany a stranger and head off into the darkness, headlights shooting to the left and right of the taxi.

Pondicherry was once a French colony and a small quarter of the city labeled "White Town" remains home to about 500 French families. White Town abuts the beach with the promenade bustling with "black" Pondicherry every evening, but that is about as close as the two populations get. Even at Auroville beach, people are separated which is odd to experience. A beautiful statue of Ghandi crowns the horizon. August 15 marked the 60th India Independence Day or "Friendship Day", and he has been fully lit up and adorned with floral wreaths of jasmine and coxcomb.

I am moved to tears by the sight of his smile, walking staff, familiar spectacles and pocket watch dangling from his dhoti.

Driving to the build site on the red clay roads and crumbling housing, we are faced with extreme poverty. Despite this, the people are happy and the children run along the side of the bus shouting "Hello! Hello! Hello!". I learn that "Hello" means "Hey You" as well. I will miss this very much when we leave. There is nothing lovelier than a chorus of children's voices greeting you in the morning.

We are working in Chinna Kotakuppam, a small village of 600 which means "small fishing village". The residents were not directly affected by the tsunami, and in fact, they aren't fisherman, but as daily labourers, once the storm hit, work was scarce for quite some time. As this particular village is the poorest of the poor in Pondicherry, the Indian government has extended its tsunami relief efforts to townships such as Kotakuppam where updated housing will certainly provide much needed shelter against the elements.

Seventy brick houses are to be completed in this particular village, each 320 square feet with terra cotta tile roofs supported by palm wood beams. To expediate construction, Habitat has integrated a women's self help group to mobilize labour and produce interlocking bricks used on half of the construction. Both styles of bricks are heavy and are dug right out of the earth surrounding the structures. Clearly we are not used to this type of work. Women with babies slung about their waists were tossing bricks to one another like it was a loaf of bread.

Although we have been laying brick, mixing the morter is off limits. There is a very stern looking man clad in boots fashioned out of plastic cement bags tied at the knees, who stands proudly at the foot of his creation, his stare warning to stay back. I have labeled him Morter Man, Chief of the Cement. When you see his picture, you will laugh. Today he actually waved to me.

In this place, there resides 200 children of all ages, the babies clad in only a red string tied about the waist run to us with big smiles and joyous waves. Other children wear various pieces of old clothing or school uniforms that look like they are in their third generation of use. About 90% go barefoot and have various cuts and sores in different stages of healing or infection. The team was so disturbed by this, we took up a collection and purchased a caches first aid supplies. Everyday for an hour, we've set up triage, and the volunteers who apply an assortment of bandaging welcome an onslaught of complaints, cuts and bruises with the more serious injuries. On a lighter note, one of the children wrote on his hand in english "please can I have one banana?".

More to come...

P.S. In case you are wondering, I have found the best coffee shop and internet cafe in Pondicherry and they know me by name!

India: An Assault on the Senses

2007-08-18T04:42:00.000-07:00

I have been here a full week and the words to describe India elude me. Overwhelming is too small. Incredible is inaccurate. Insane is inappropriate. But "an assualt on the senses" seems to fit.

Spending two days in Chennai pretty much primed the group for what was to come. With a population of eight million, the city is as big as Los Angeles, but the sprawl and infrustructure is unlike anything I have ever witnessed. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for anything. Spencer Plaza, the westernized shopping bazaar marks the center of town, and enormous billboards advertising gold, diamonds and silk saris rise above crumbling buildings housing merchants selling autoparts, truck tires, bike accessories. I try to find something to relate to, something that will keep me tied down.

Our hotel sits to the side of a main road into the city and the street noise is non-stop. And when I say that, I mean it.

Twenty four hours a day.

Horns of various timbre and volume, a quack, a blare, toot toots are all part of the cacaphony of noise. The barely paved street carries and bikes and people and motorcyles and trucks and cars and tuk tuks to destinations unknown. With the sheer mass of traffic, we find it difficult to orient ourselves. Side streets spill over with poor families, goats, dogs, chickens, cows and crude altars. Garbage is everywhere. People stare at us, some are brave enough to say hello.

Despite these bleak images, bright, color abounds from every direction, women in saris float by like snowflakes, scents of sumptuous spices from the street vendors hit our noses and assails the stench rising with the heat. Crammed buses blink multi-colored disco lights on the outside and play Bollywood movies for the passengers. All of the vehicles are brightly painted in yellows, reds, greens and turquoise. The average dump truck is its own work of art. With this juxtoposition, every image is an indelible photograph.

The group has been straggling in. One of the young women received a voice mail on her stopover in Doha that her sister had been hospitalized after a serious car accident and I've driven her back the airport in hopes that she can make it to Cincinatti. She had only just arrived ten hours before. The mother & son team have been delayed in Paris and are due to arrive in two days and after arranging transportation for them to Pondicherry, we pack up our disco bus and head south.

You're Not in Singapore Anymore

2007-08-12T02:00:00.000-07:00

What a different a five hour flight makes.

We arrived at midnight in Chennai after the longest flight pattern I've ever traveled. LAX to Taipei, where I was lucky enough in our hour stop to find a Starbucks open at 6:30 AM, hopped back on the plane for a nine hour layover in
Singapore. If Foxwoods is the largest casino out there, Singapore Airport is its sister in size.

From full size gym and swimming pool to XBox center and live Soduko to massage & sleeping lounge to shopping galore, one can keep themselves entertained and fed for hours. Being adventurous types, we cabbed it to town where my traveling companion, Katy Leigh described memories of dancing with the snake charmer at the world famous RAFFLES hotel & long bar twenty years ago at age 8. So, off we headed into a pristine, lush city, where chewing gum is illegal, where garbage is not to be found, and an architectual mish mash of British and Asian culture. Although it was a weekday, the city resembled a ghost town. We found the inhabitants later at the mall where people rushed around shopping for Levis and Nikes. I thought Singapore would be quaint, but maybe I was mixing up my imaginary pre-WWII Asian port cities from movies like "Empire of the Sun" and "Indochine".

Chennai couldn't have been more different.

Bleary eyed and stunned by the hour wait through customs, we were barrelled out to
hundreds of family members and other greeters lining the barriers at the arrival doors to the international terminal. Our driver led us to his "MaxiTaxi" and joined the throngs of vehicles in what seemed to be a late night drag race on the narrow strip towards the outskirts of downtown Chennai. Five cars and/or motorcycles competed to fit into a two lane road, horns at a constant sounding, more for safety issues than for aggravation. "Just letting you know I'm next to you" or "Just letting you know I'm passing you" that sort of warning. The brightly colored trucks and tuk tuks display a painted "Sound Horn" sign on the back as invitation. Even with darkness surrounding us, I kept the window open and took in the energy. Cows lined the sides and medians of the road, trash was swept into piles or tossed to the side of the road, cars and bikes passed each other, people on foot wove in and out of the constantly moving traffic, Bollywood movie signs were tied to palm trees every few yards.

We arrived at the Astok Hotel, a drab little place with lots of men standing around shaking their heads at us. We were not in Los Angeles, nor Singapore any longer.

House Sold/Where To?

2007-07-18T16:58:00.001-07:00

Working Sisyphus-like on the weeds one weekend, I heard Suzy Orman’s voice on NPR advising, “If it’s not your dream house, sell it!” Despite the amount of TLC I had put into Oak Grove over the past four years, it took me two seconds to answer that question. I added my resolution to downsize to the equation and determined that listing my house would certainly jumpstart this lifestyle change.

However, despite the attempt to overhaul my feng shui, I was unreasonably shaky after Robin drove off with the sofa bed and mosaic patio furniture from Further. Books have been carefully catalogued and packed in boxes. Closets have been emptied. The move has started. And even though it isn’t the ocean side cottage I’ve dreamt about, Oak Grove has been a safe harbor for me.

Of course, what this musing means is that I’ve finally sold my house, listed for almost nine months - a gestation worthy of celebration. It’s been a bumpy road in what we’re being sold as a buyers “market”, but a road that ultimately led the perfect owners to this haven.

Wanting to find the right people became a mission, forcing me to acknowledge the fierce protectiveness towards the sanctuary I created; Jeanette & Hal Whitstone’s address for fifty years and personally designed in 1941 by Lillian Anderson before them. I spent hours philosophizing with my realtor, and after two failed attempts at purchase, the universe answered.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

That I recognize Oak Grove as home is odd to me, because I when I bought it, I was in the throws of grief and blind love simultaneous attacking my system.

The thing about grief is that it is personal and it can attach itself to you in many forms. Mine was retail therapy, including the purchase of this house, bought at the behest of my boyfriend who insisted that when he moved to Los Angeles, we would need a bigger place and a garage in which to park his aging sports car.

But when I found myself alone while he was off trying his hand at motorcycle racing, I discovered just how much disrepair the property was in, one night coming home to rain running down the walls of the dining room. After calling my angel, Antonio, who hurriedly and rather blindly arranged tarps on the roof, I sat down on the floor and cried.

Eventually, we broke up, but I was buoyed to fully restore and make Oak Grove my own by the prevalent creative energy of my predecessors. And in the next months spent roofing, flooring, painting, and planting, part of me became ingrained in the foundation.

In the past four years, I’ve developed a morning routine; a daily check up on the state of things, coffee in tow, chatting through the fence with Carlos, a source of infinite wisdom, peer in on the gold fish I’ve fed to Koi size, measure the progress of the Madagascar, Arabian, Pink Star, Angel Wing and Night Blooming jasmine I’ve planted, planning for their sweet aroma to fill the yard all twelve months of the year. I note how the lilac vine Hope, Debbie & Nancy presented on my 37th birthday has taken over the lower deck and am awed by the beauty of the sparkling red passiflora Dick & James, my other next door neighbors, presented for a house warming gift.

I gauge the progress of cuttings I’ve brought from Poppy Peak and before that, Silver Lake, of the aloe and other native succulents inherited from another neighbor, and the clivia lillies Hal planted for Jeannette that I’ve separated for James, and the irises he & Dick have separated for me. My Alpine Ginger has finally decided to explode with dozens of white, pink and yellow clusters of bell shaped flowers. I’ve been surprised by the full scented freesia blooming in early spring and cursed the birds for keeping me awake at night with their singing and chatter.

My kitchen sits high above the street at the corner of Wiota & Oak Grove and I often call out from my windows to neighbors, yell at drivers ignoring the Stop sign or quietly sit while an spectacular sunset commands my attention.

Many things happen between the walls of a house. Hearts break, vows are made, new recipes tested, ginger snaps explode in the oven. And there are triumphs, excitement of new love, the thrill of discovering a white owl softly hooting in the night atop one of the large and very old California oak trees.

I think about these things as I take pictures down off the wall and fill in the holes. The house has begun to feel empty and I’m constantly finding objects I don’t use. A veritable plethora of vases, a coral shirt recklessly purchased, things I don’t want to take with me to wherever it is I’m going. And that is a big question mark. As Jeff says, I’m in the great unknown.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for over fourteen years; the longest I’ve lived anywhere since leaving Sudbury on the edge of 17. Our little Cape was the last place I called home, and when my parents sold it, the moving out was painful. I cried everyday until the moving van pulled out of the driveway. It was in this place that I felt wholly myself, where my family was, where both kids and adults shot hoops on the basketball court into the evening, where the hostas my mother planted besides the birch trees on the side yard bloomed and where the stump, a sad empty reminder of the weeping willow cleaved out after it threatened the water pipes, lay among the crocuses in the front yard.

As I contemplate my predicament in the final weeks of escrow, the two new creative spirits that will add their own experiences to the mixture hearten me. During the inspection, while we sat on the upper deck among the treetops, I pointing out the different varieties of plants and narrating a brief history of the property, my heart knew that Tom & Sharon were sent to take over the story.

I’m both scared and exhilarated to think that I’ll be homeless soon, the closing date two days before departing for India as a Team Leader for Habitat. I consciously look forward to getting out of the country, recalling David LeBarron once describing me as a seed in the wind. Perhaps that’s true. I always seem to be moving, on the go, infected with the traveling bug.

I not only desire, but dream of a clean, well lighted place to hang my hat. And when I return without an address or a utility bill, I’m confident the universe will point me in the right direction.

Yes, I Am 40

2007-06-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

For my father’s 40th, my mother topped a beautiful three-layer cake with trick candles. Everyone was in on the joke and we held our breath as Bob, always a smoker, challenged himself to blow out all of the candles in one take. With room aglow, he made his wish and extinguished every one, flashing a smug grin to the room until a few seconds later the candles flickered and relit themselves. The look on his face was priceless. He couldn’t quite understand what had happened and blew them out again, as if the first attempt was imagined. It’s strange to have such a brilliant memory of the oldest person I knew turning 40 and then to do it myself.

My own birthday did not have trick candles or even 40 candles at that. My friends were cautious to create a youthful atmosphere, especially given my penchant for lying about my age, a habit started fresh out of college. As the Company Manager aboard the S/S Norway, and essentially the Boss of the theater department, (mostly ex-Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders hastily schooled in tap and put into a 90-minute version of “42nd Street”), I found it worked to my advantage to be a teeny bit older; and really, there was something glamorous about fibbing the years.

What’s funny about this white lie is that I’m finally ready to accept the four decades in my history. I preface sentences with “… well, now that I’m 40” peaking sideways at people’s reactions knowing full well that I don’t look my age. It must be because at 25, rationalizing it was never to late to start early, I made my way to the Lancôme counter at Macy’s 34th Street and armed myself with over $250 worth of products guaranteed to shield me against the aging process. Of course, that didn’t deter me from smoking and drinking throughout my 20s and 30s, but I thought eye cream would give me an advantage. I wasn’t ready for wrinkles, already feeling too old as the date approached.

With the belief that one must fete momentous occasions with a plenty of champagne and a party dress, people crowded into my East 19th Street apartment that March of ‘92. If you were there, you’ll remember David LeBarron singing a medley of highlights from “Evita”, the neighbors across the air shaft hurling cans of Comet at the windows, cops arriving to break up the Saturday night soiree and charming our way out of a “Disturbing the Peace” ticket and around the corner to the Irish bar on 2nd Avenue until the wee small hours. I had everything to live for and somehow it wasn’t enough. The sweetness I felt pretending to be a quarter century while ship bound was replaced by a compulsory pressure to measure up to the achievements of other 25 year olds like Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, Orson Welles, Hal Prince, Dorothy Parker, and even Cameron Crowe.

In retrospect, it’s laughable. Maybe that is the folly of youth, because even though I made enormous demands on myself, it was the same year I left for Paris to work at the Theatre du Chatelet, fulfilling a lifelong dream and memorializing it by getting a tattoo on my right thigh lest I forget the importance of this occasion, which clearly I had.

By this point in my short life, I had graduated with honors from a college I had helped to pay for, spent a semester abroad in Austria, signed the lease for my Manhattan apartment, knew what a carnet was and could fill one out, toured a group of Africans from five different countries, produced a 16mm black and white short, and had fallen head over heels in love three times and accepted my first marriage proposal.

Cut to fifteen years later. With the rings around my trunk becoming a little more visible, this is the moment I’ve finally come of age, as if my past wish for being older and my older wish of being young have finally met. “By 50 I hope I’ll be on an Ashram somewhere inhaling the spirit of life and wisdom.” I say to the party guests during a little impromptu speech. Christine comments as she lights the candles; “Sister, I hope not!” And then the Elvis impersonator jokes that I don’t look 40. “I know!” I exclaim.

And the good news is that thanks to either good living or Lancôme, I don’t feel 40. I find myself liberally tossing around my license as if I might be carded, accepting dates from 31 year olds while trying to negotiate exactly what age-appropriate dress is because by this time, I thought I’d surely be donning Chanel suits like Jackie O instead of my Lucky’s and a tank top.

As I was driving home from Vegas, thinking about the party LeeAnn had thrown me, the friends and family that had flown in from around the country, a vision that wafted in with the soft desert air. If 30 is passing the torch of wild nights and career maneuverings to a 19 year-old, 40 is reflecting on your accomplishments, both in work and spirit.

I thought about the dream jobs and world travels I’ve had, the cache of catchy stories most of you have heard more than a dozen times, the string of ex-boyfriends who make for good fodder when I need something to write about. Every major decision, I’ve made by my own consul, whether it was the college I attended, buying a car from the dealership, or the purchase of the house I live in. I’ve learned to navigate Manhattan, Minneapolis and the Paris Metro. I’ve bought and sold hundreds of items in yard sales, (for example the seven sofas I amassed until I found the perfect one), hosted a slew of fabulous Silver Lake parties that reached epic status in the '90s, and I make a ceviche that garners Lupe’s praise.

But most importantly, to spend a milestone event with people that have been there for you, believe in you, and love you no matter what. Well. The fabulous gown and the Vegas icon in his light blue jumpsuit are just gravy.

Looking around room, in the presence of so many with whom I have a strong history, a feeling of invincibility overtook me and new dreams sprouted out of nowhere - I want to sell my house, move to Spain, have an affair with a bull fighter like Lady Brett, start an artist retreat, build my own house, plant a winter garden, perfect my French, master the Salsa Dance, learn to fly. With nothing to tether me, the sky is my limit.

Thoreau said, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life, to put to rout all that is not life and not, when I came to die, realize that I had not lived."

Somehow, thanks to your belief in me, I had lived into this devotion.

During the long ride home, I let everything fall away and thought about my new life goals. If at this point, the most important is my quest for purposeful work and a meaningful relationship, well, that’s pretty lucky.

And until further notice, I’m 40.

Hypochondria Happens

2007-03-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

Leave it to the Divine Miss M to quip, “After thirty, a body has a mind of its own”. Personally, my mind started losing it as well, and thus year 39 launched with what experienced experts might call “growing pains”.

I had difficulty recalling events of the day before. I couldn’t fall asleep. My knees had checked into the school of hard knocks making it impossible to wear the fabulous assortment of heels I had amassed over the years.

During a Passover Seder, I cornered a doctor, and in bad social form, blurted out “I’m sure you hate it when people do this…” … and described my multiple aches, pains and memory problems. She seemed to listen sympathetically, until bluntly cutting in, “You know… we are getting older”. My eyes clouded and I quickly dismissed her prognosis, pressing her to recommend a colleague.

But I was concerned that a “heads up” from my new friend would color a savvy New York doctor. I concluded that adjusting to a new time zone and unnatural cold weather were the cause and immediately forgot about my problems.

That June, I scheduled my annual check up with Los Angeles’ most eligible widower and my general practitioner, Dr. Mitch. Among my other symptoms, something was definitely wrong with my right hip. Applied pressure was agonizing. I looked up into his eyes, asking in earnest, “Do I need a replacement?”

Dr. Mitch has this way of looking at you like you might be crazy, but that he’s going to refrain from judgment and treat you accordingly. I love him.

“Well…” he turned to give me the news eye to eye; “…you’re not a spring chicken anymore”.

Now really. Was this little piece of information necessary?

Nevertheless, I made my “bursa” as in “bursitis”, an event, even affecting a bit of a limp. While most furrowed their brows, those over 40 knew exactly what I was talking about.

My condition required a rheumatologist to administer a cortisone shot. So, following my return from NoLa, I double dosed on doctors, stopping first at Dr. Rinale then onto Dr. Mitch, where my seriously poisonous spider bite turned out to be a mild rash. “Probably sweaty gloves”. These are not the words you want to hear from your soon-to be-fiancé.

During my build in South Dakota, Dr. R’s office called me with the news that my blood work revealed low platelets. “Do I have cancer? I’d rather know now and get the hard part over with” I stoically demanded. “We don’t need go there right now” she replied. “Just come in for another draw when you get back into town”.

Her ambivalent response ramped up the paranoia, and I pestered the group’s retired nurse about her cryptogram. Apparently, it could mean my blood wasn’t clotting properly. I arrived home and immediately fell ill. Dizzy, exhausted, lightheaded, I awaited any kind of scratch to check clotting quickness. I consulted the Angry Man, king of all illnesses. He asked me when I got so Jewish, stating that he hoped I really was sick so I would quit smoking. As he lectured me, I put the phone down and googled “low platelets”.

Clotting wasn’t the only issue. It seemed I could have Bone Marrow Cancer. The symptoms almost certainly matched mine. I made an emergency appointment with Dr. Mitch for the following day, apologizing profusely. Despite the “spring chicken” comment, I still had a huge crush on the Doctor. There is no way I want him to think I’m nuts.

After taking the requisite pulse, temperature, & blood pressure, he banged my head with his reflex hammer and asked me if I heard tones. I knew it. Something was drastically wrong. I looked up at the ceiling, trying to get the tears to roll back into my eyes.

“At first I thought you were crazy”, Dr. Mitch began, “But the ringing and the lightheadedness got me thinking” he said. I asked him, desperately trying to control the quiver in my voice, “What’s your plan?” “Well”, said my future husband, “We’re going to try a couple of things and then I’ll see you next week”. He left the room.

I had Bone Marrow Cancer. Who would be my match? Was he giving me experimental medication? Would Dr. Mitch even consider marriage now or was I destined to die alone, eaten by my cat like the corpse in “6 Feet Under”/Episode 18?"

He walked back into the room, turned to shut the door, and coolly handed over a weeks worth of Allegra D and Nasonex. Sinus medications.

Although my blood work came back normal, I wasn’t convinced that mere dust and pollen was the cause of my memory loss and severe sleeping disorder. I left it to my girlfriends to fill in the blanks. With three almost-professional opinions, it seemed everything pointed to my thyroid. My stomach looked distended. I’d been unsuccessfully trying to lose the 10 pounds I gained on my cross-country trip. Sudden weight gain, incidentally, is a symptom of hypothyroidism.

After visiting a website specializing in home diagnosis of thyroid abnormalities, I forced Dr. Mitch to recommend an endocrinologist; securing a back up plan just in case. According to thyroidpower.com, it’s common knowledge that doctors misread the C125 and Free 3 levels all the time. They could send me home when in fact I could still be dying.

My sonogram revealed cysts living on my glands. As I prepared myself for surgery and the phone call I would have to make to my mother, the lab doctor, escorting me out the building, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Nothing to worry about, they’ll probably go away on their own. You’re not going to die yet!”

But it wasn’t my thyroid, it seems that eating nuts and sitting for longs periods of time in a car can be rough on the intestinal track and after a three-day cleanse and the addition of seaweed salads into my diet, I began to feel much better.

That is, until October when the palpitations started in. Just as I was about to fall asleep, my heart would begin booming, reverberating through the springs in my mattress. I hated to do it, but I picked up the phone and called Dr. Mitch.

He dutifully took more blood, studied the pictures of my tiny thyroid cysts, administered a panic attack test and scheduled a heart echo. I warned my family. This could be serious. My ticker was torquing and who knew what that meant. Perhaps this perplexed the doctors as well since I never received a phone call from either.

In the meantime, after a year of listening to my failing health, David LeBarron has given me a Hypochondria Wheel, which shouts “Yes, You're Probably Dying!”

As a matter of fact, my hair was falling out in clumps.

Hair loss. Sharp pains in the ear. I lined up the wheel. My illness seemed to be something called “Folliculitis“, however, next to the diagnosis, it read “But you’re probably just aging”.

I didn’t need to hear that a third time.

Celebrating the Dead

2007-01-24T18:20:00.000-08:00

Death clouded my periphery towards the end of 2006. People close to me were losing loved ones quite unexpectedly, without warning.

I particularly feel their loss since my father died the same way. It is both shocking and painful when death hits so swift, blindsiding you. The luncheon date doesn’t show up, you don’t hear from your brother that night, your father stares at you blankly while the dentures fall out of his mouth just minutes after he was whistling “Can’t Take That Away From Me” on West Broadway.

Filling the hole left behinds seems impossible. Last week on Gray’s Anatomy, after George’s dad dies, he tells Christina that he doesn’t know how to live in this life without him. Life will never be the same. As we move forward, get back to our jobs, medicate, go away from the scene of the crime as far as we can, we believe that the hole will fill itself. But it remains there, your soul permanently perforated.

And so it was with reluctance that I filled out the form to reserve our space at Forever Hollywood’s annual Day of the Dead festival. Although my brother and I had made a commitment to each other, as written on this blog a year ago, to construct something commemorating our father, my enthusiasm had waned to a snail’s pace. In the weeks preceding the event, Phil and I half-heartedly discussed a few conceptual ideas but I was secretly hoping he would back out so I could have an excuse to stay home.

I suppose this is why I’ve heard it said that death affects the living the worst. Maybe it's the fear of reliving that first moment of loss. In contrast, I’m sure the spirit world is ecstatic when Dia de los Muertos comes along. And my father is not to be excluded from this rowdy group.

After agreeing on who would bring what, we arrived at 9:30 AM and stayed in that cemetery until past midnight. I didn’t imagine I’d spend an entire day among gravestones and all the while, having a ball. We cavorted with skeletons, admired the dedicated and commercialized Ramones fans, cleared the path for hordes of Aztek dancers and performance artists, feasted on homemade tamales and reminisced about our father to thousands of visitors. Once we started, it became easy to talk about him. There were so many quirks that made up his sparkling personality.

We created a simple altar, covering an old card table with chili peppers, charms, sun flowers, a DVD of the Red Sox World Series win, a JFK souvenir, traditional skeletons and the makings for martinis. For our backdrop, Philip had enlarged and mounted photographs which we crudely attached to bamboo poles stuck into the earth. We laid marigolds, sage and clove incense among the candles.

Invariably, his Ted Williams t-shirt on display sparked the question “Did he get to see them win?” and guests were disappointed that he hadn’t until we pointed out a ticket from Fenway where we illegally spread his ashes.

When it got dark, and the temperature dropped, we lit our candles and plugged in the large old-fashioned Christmas lights similar to the ones Bob was caretaker to at our house on Pratts Mill Road.

Later in the evening, I learned that we had brought our gringo approach with us. We didn’t realize that offerings, such as food & drink items, were for the dead. As we talked about Bob, it just seemed natural that someone should start mixing martinis. Philip took the job, and while people gathered around the altar looking at our memorabilia, we passed out lollipops and stuffed olives and recalled especially memorable character traits about Bob. At one point, I looked over at my brother, donning his Sox cap chatting with four visitors, all sipping from concave cocktail glasses, laughing about something, Sinatra softly crooning in the background. I thought Bob would have liked this. A party where everyone is welcome.

Already in the works for next year's festival are designs for an elaborate altar where we plan to grill steak. And I encourage you to celebrate the life of those you’ve loved and lost by joining us at the Forever Hollywood cemetery. To borrow from "The Wonder Years", "Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, and the things you never want to lose.

Wait? Wait for What?

2006-11-05T21:00:00.000-08:00

IMG_0342.JPG
Originally uploaded by artthrobb.

Way back circa 1990, pop author Bret Easton Ellis penned a New York Sunday Times article titled “Generation X”, a moniker my age group had recently acquired as part of a Fortune 500 marketing campaign seeking to identify and target new consumers, precisely young adults whose teen years spanned the ‘80s. The piece claimed “X'ers” to be a bunch of spoiled boobs who tooled around on mountain bikes, recycled and contemplated getting a job, thus, the slacker profile was born and movies like “Reality Bites” were made.

Incensed at Ellis’s self-important opinion, I fired off a letter to the editor including his counterpart Jay McInerney in my rebuke. The duo had been dubbed the de facto voices of my generation, writing characters I didn’t identify with; rich, bloated white people who snorted cocaine and hung out at New York hotspots like Nell's. I certainly didn’t endorse them speaking on behalf of me or my friends, most of whom were holding down two jobs just to be able to live in Manhattan and pay back student loans. It wasn’t all work; we did have a great time; and while most are married with children, the debt moving from Fanny Mae to mortgages, these friends, from childhood, college and those I’ve met along the way, continue to actively vote, voice their opinions and participate in their community.

Enter John Mayer’s new single, “Waiting on the World to Change”, hitting the airwaves almost two decades later and stirring the gumbo pot of controversy from the Mayfield estate to members of his own age group. The song muses about his peers facing criticism about doing nothing, but since the world is so fucked up, they are paralyzed, and therefore waiting for the world to change when they will be old enough to take over. The lyrics struck a chord in me, and I felt compelled to act in response.

I’ll give John this, when the CBS Morning show correspondent told him that he was the voice of his generation, he shook his head. Apparently, according to a Boston Globe interview, he’s just the messenger.

"I don’t read it as depressing. It’s honest," says Mayer, who co-headlines a concert with Sheryl Crow at the Tweeter Center on Tuesday. "Why aren’t people marching in the streets? The song is supposed to kind of come off a little irresponsible. I’m sure some people will say it encourages not doing anything. I’m an observer, and sometimes that’s the most damning evidence. It’s not in my drive or my skill set to want to write a song telling people to wake up and change."

Which seems a little hypocritical considering that the music video features a graffiti artist spray-painting the words “WAKE UP!” on a New York City building.

And if Mayer were really an observer, he would note that there are people all over the world, including more than a few of his music industry contemporaries, actually doing something so that others' future won’t be so fucked up.

I thought about the AmeriCorps and Habitat for Humanity volunteers manning the trenches in St. Bernard's Parish/Camp Hope with an average age of 25. I didn’t think they would appreciate being lumped into a catchy tune about apathy, just like I didn’t like being lumped into an article about idleness.

Given the exorbitant amount of work they’ve undertaken coupled with the meager support they were getting from the outside world, one can’t help but stand in admiration at the enormous rebuilding effort they are determined to pull off. They are the light at the end of a long, long tunnel, taking charge of organizing and orienting the hundreds of volunteers that may come in any given day (the week before we arrived, there were 23, our week brought 350), supervising transportation, housing, meals, work loads, obtaining and keeping track of tools, and maintaining the sketchy power supply.

Even with their weary attitude, something Mayer sings about, these “Y’ers” are truly committed people, members of his generation without his means, doing something meaningful with their time, living their ideals. It takes a lot of gumption and perhaps a little insanity to forfeit hanging out with your friends and working towards a career; instead living with strangers in less than comfortable conditions and shoveling out other people’s crap for free, but these are the actions that plant the seeds to a thoughtful future.

It’s hard work, being an activist. High profilers like Al Gore, Neil Young, the Dixie Chicks, Bono, the Flaming Lips, even Marilyn Manson face scrutiny on a very public level for tirelessly working to reignite voters of all age groups into caring about the democracy we live in and the earth we inhabit.

With a swelling population fused to easily accessible information on a global scale, the negative can be overwhelming. I’m not blind to the general malaise shrouded over society, but in this winter of discontent, it’s a damn shame that a Top 40 song melodically lamenting your contemporaries as hopeless is being touted, words that counter a course of action, in fact, inspiring disaffection.

Someone once said “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”. And then you get to write a pop song about it. I applaud Mayer for saying he is what he is, John Mayer.

But I’d love for him leave the 100 pairs of sneakers, 200 guitars and 150 watches he's amassed behind and follow the advice of Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Think of the inspiration someone with his talent could create.

P.S. My friend Jon writes: “It’s too bad that people like Mayer & Ellis are celebrated for the kind of glib generalizations that brand whole generations of people as greedy or lazy. Every generation has it’s own slackers and it’s own heroes”.

So for your information and continued reading pleasure, I’ve included some links to a few of my cross-generational heroes. After all, as my brother Phil puts it, we’re all in this together:

Katherine Brengel, organizer of Peace Vigils

Deirdra Serego, co-leader of LA's District 30 chapter of the Peace Alliance Initiative

Leonardo DiCaprio, eco-activist.

Lisa Snyder, a lobbyist for affordable housing.

Mark Zupan, Paralympic Gold Medalist

Ed Norton, founder of GreenBuilding.Com

Nancy Dolan, who consistently gets on the phone encouraging people to vote.

Tom Morello and Serj Tankian, founders of Axis of Justice

Pearl Jam, longtime activists for the Surf Rider Foundation

Barak Obama

Dr. Julie Crosby, Producing Director of Women's Project, an off-Broadway institution for women playwrights and directors.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink

Bono, Founder of One

Members of The Actor's Gang who aren't afraid to produce politically charged theatre.

Bill Clinton, founder of Global Initiative

Neil Young

Gorbachev, founder of Global Green

My parents, who worked tirelessly for Equal Rights for all people.

I encourage you to add your own!

South Dakota: A Melancholy State of Mind

2006-10-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

The results of a 7 year drought
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

There is no doubt about it. Ever since I liberated myself from the corporate grind, I have been on the road, whether it’s a cross-country journey or flying off to Berlin to see friends. So when I tell you that within two weeks of my NoLa, I found myself landing at the Rapid City Airport to join a group of strangers headed towards Eagle Butte, South Dakota, I know you’ll probably shake your head and say “When did Kat turn into Carmen San Diego?”

In February, I committed myself to two summer Habitat trips. Truth be told, it is hard to refuse Ronnie’s southern drawl and infectious energy. When he emailed me a list of builds he would be leading this year, I picked one and signed up. Since leaving Disney, I’ve participated in four builds and have recently joined a group traveling to Mongolia next July. There is something certain about starting a project with your bare hands, hitting hammer to nail, contributing to part of the sum. And to do this alongside a group of people who share the same purpose, whose energy has driven them to a remote town in a still remoter state with the ultimate gift of selflessness and thoughtful introspection, it’s a wonderful space to coexist in.

Words to describe central South Dakota don’t come easily. My friend Mark Miller eloquently cited this area of the United States in his last email to me “It's an austere landscape out there on the Great Plains, but it has its subtle charms.” I recalled an old Variety article about how the Dakotas were trying to boost film production, however, their chief problem was that most couldn’t place them geographically and the general assumption that it was always cold. In fact, my favorite building in New York, built in 1882, ended up being christened “The Dakota” because it was so far away from 14th Street, where the fashionable set was living at the time.

So much of nothingness surrounds our four-hour trek to Eagle Butte. A soft breeze proves to be constant, and with a seven-year drought in effect, can be maddening, gritty and unpleasant. Rolling, grassy hills, dried out lakebeds and kettle ponds pepper the roadways. Sunflowers woefully bend their necks away from the sun, as if in disgrace, their growth stunted due to lack of water and irrigation. Corn crops resemble broad leaf weeds. The effect leaves you feeling thirsty and helpless to their plight. A wide-open sky never peaks above pale blue.

Housing can be a bit of a surprise, so you prepare yourself for anything. You could be sleeping on a church floor, a cheap motel or as we were, in a rebuilt government house with non-opening windows and two bathrooms to share between 12 people. After a long day of building amidst constant wind and dust, we are dirty, sweaty. The rooms are crowded with bunks, there isn’t any space to move about, let alone relax. We collapse on our beds and wait our turn for the shower, hoping for hot water. At night, I try to shield my evening cigarette away from the wind and dirt that finds it way into my teeth.

The team spanned the age spectrum from 16 to 70 beginning with two teen-age Korean boys from Vancouver to an elderly go-getter from Iowa. That our Septuagenarian hails from Dubuque is a fact she reminds us of constantly as if all things flowed from Dubuque; pie tastes better, roads are smoother, the air sweeter. Her voice is a piercing soprano pitch, a trait that forces me to call upon all of my inner strength when I stumble out for coffee at 7:AM. When one of my roommates ambles by and whispers ‘shuddup” in my ear, I laugh right out loud. She is trying to contribute, but by day four, I have forcefully confiscated the keys to one of the rented Suburbans from her. Still, I do admire her. She is active, frequently traveling with elder hostels and habitat trips. And I sense that while Dubuque is home, it is probable that she is quite lonely there. Ironically, we also have an introverted exhibitionist in our midst as well.

There are four decades between the three women I share bunk space with starting at 19. We fumbled into the same, cramped room and in that tight space, I found kindred spirits. We make a list of our favorite books, music and movies and plan a trip to the Grand Canyon. We laugh a lot. And the last day, we cry.

I am reminded of Mark’s sentiment as we caravan back to Rapid City through a corner of the Badlands. There is peacefulness, which resonates here. Land, untouched as yet by the quagmire of homogenous development. Though the reservations struggle to maintain their meager population and economic growth, they also serve as protectors of a vast territory. There is profound bravery in this task. To be able to drive and drive … and drive... without a Chili’s on the horizon, just the earth, a landscape that is probably pretty much the way it was and always has been, is quite settling and I find myself to be grateful for the nothingness.

Eagle Butte may not have been exotic, but a sense of what life was like “On the Rez” affected me. Quiet. Bleak. Desolate. Dry. Poor. Despite the harsh elements, the people are kind, quick to laugh, ingrained with a sense of place, a feeling I lost when my parents sold the Sudbury house.

When I arrive home, my eye catches one of the many inspirational passages on my fridge. “Every year, go somewhere you’ve never been”. I add one of my own. Stay home for two weeks in a row.

Letter from South Dakota

2006-09-27T17:43:00.000-07:00

Government Housing circa 1950
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

Almost two weeks following my New Orleans return, and thanks to very generous donors, I was able to join another Habitat build in South Dakota. One of the reasons I love volunteering for this organization is the opportunity for true cultural immersion and Eagle Butte was no exception. The experience opened my eyes to something completely unexpected.

Before arriving, the team leader suggested we read Ian Frazier’s On the Rez, his account of the Pine Ridge reservation, infamous for the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 and the AIM/FBI occupation in 1973. Frazier is one my favorite contributors to The New Yorker, often chronicling ridiculous, factual accounts of say, the growing population of wild boars in red states. But On the Rez was quite different in tone, painfully human in fact. And while Eagle Butte sits on the Cheyenne River Reservation, due north of Pine Ridge, he seemed to channel the same place. Noting the numerous death markers sprouting from both the sides of Interstate 212, belatedly claiming “You Don’t Have to Die”; a warning against drinking and driving I began to keep a mental list of similarities which grew throughout the week.

When our caravan stopped at the locally owned DairyQueen, I picked up the Eagle Butte Newspaper and flipped through the pages, stopping at an op-ed column titled “Letting Go of the Past”. The simple editorial urged people to put resentments behind them, enjoy their lives and move forward. A bitty smirk escaped before I could reel it back in. I thought of South Dakota’s blighted history, the massacres at Wounded Knee, broken treaties in the name of gold leading to an ongoing dispute over the rightful ownership of the Black Hills, decades long in litigation. Huge expanses of the original Great Sioux Nation have long since been dispensed to share croppers and suburbs of Rapid City, resulting in its own little development bustle on the perimeter of Wal-Mart’s Super Store. In Eagle Butte, water continues to be diverted from the Cheyenne River in order to power southern states. We all can agree that the government owes Native Americans big time. And it’s my belief that the ambivalence reigning over the recent cropping up of Indian casinos belies a silent act of contrition; atonement for the brutal acts of departed kin.

According to the last census, Eagle Butte has a population of 700, of which 48% live below the poverty line, making it one of the poorest communities in the country. I probably saw about 17 people during the week, including the counter girls at DQ. There is no doubt about it, this is a corner of the world without much reason to visit, unless you happen to be one of the thousands of bikers that trek through every August on your way to Harley Week in Sturgis or a devout follower of the Lewis & Clark trail. A handful of cinderblock buildings line Main Street. Food choices are limited to cheese balls, fried chicken salads, hamburgers and the like. Cell service is very limited unless you catch a passing satellite, and email, if you find access, is good old dial up.

The Habitat affiliate is led by Jerry Farlee and the first thing he tells us is that although he is light skinned, he is Cheyenne Lakota Native American. He is very candid about his shortcomings and lack of perfect English, but his energy is brilliant and we find ourselves wanting to spend as much time with him as we can. He is pretty much single handedly keeping the Okiciyapi Tipi Habitat office afloat, in operation since the 1994 Jimmy Carter blitz build. Among his numerous activities, Jerry runs about 100 head of buffalo on his 33,000 acres on the Southeast corner of the reservation, about 45 minutes away from any of his neighbors. He is constantly invited to speaking engagements, operates a camp on his property encouraging people to embrace the earth and each other’s differences, works with at-risk teens by challenging them to participate in sweat lodge ceremonies with him, a sacred ritual that was outlawed up until 1978 when the Native American Freedom of Religion Act was passed. He is committed not only to being a leader in his community, but keeping the community together as well. When it comes to owning a decent house, Jerry tells us that while it is fairly easy to get a car loan, it is near impossible for Native Americans living on reservations to obtain mortgages on land that is not foreclosable, making organizations like Habitat extremely vital.

There is a different time frame on the Rez, but even with the late starts in the morning and the longish lunches, we managed to get an enormous amount of work done, sheet rocking 95% of one property, and completing finish work on another in Bear Creek. The houses are pretty simple in layout, but Jerry has added character here and there by raising the ceilings and designing built-ins. Tin roofs top Harley board siding in colors of purple, red, and tan. These are pretty three-bedroom homes, a definite upgrade from the shoddy 1940s government housing that surrounds it.

After our last day of toil, the group piled into rented Suburbans and drove into the grasslands towards Cherry Creek for their 117th Pow Wow. Kids ran about the circle throwing dirt at each other. Young men and still younger boys took the helm at big, beautiful hand crafted drums. An elder at the mic cracked jokes while puffing on his cigarette, George Burns Sioux style, encouraging everyone to sit down, line up, and get ready for the procession. The drums hit a steady beat and a beautiful parade of beaded and bedazzled women entered the circle, led by four veterans, acting as color guard for the tribal celebration. The Pow Wow was small and not very impressive, but I was moved that in this small, out of the way, hidden town of trailers and struggling farms, people laced up their intricately beaded boots, packed their drums and jingle dresses and headed out on a Friday night to honor their past, include their children in ancient traditions and perform historical dances and songs. But mostly, I was stunned by the presence of the four vets proudly wearing their uniforms and medals. I recall from On The Rez, the fierce patriotism among tribal nations. Wasn’t this the ultimate act of absolution? To serve a country that almost successfully annihilated an entire race?

Seeing those four men gave me pause; inspiring thoughtful introspection of the dead weight we carry around with us. I realized I was resentful on behalf of the Lakota I was working alongside. Embarrassed that my own ancestors hunted Indians and had forts in Iowa outposts named after them. I don’t even know exact details, it’s something whispered during family reunions when the maternal side gets together about every twelve years, but it’s been in my personal history for as long as I can remember. And while I am not personally responsible for those actions, perhaps I can make reparations of my own by volunteering my time and sharing this experience with you.

To view more photos from my trip,Click Here

Kitty Kat's New Car

2006-09-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

kat-kar
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

In February, the Benz lost its transmission in the left turn lane at Victory and Alameda. It was a Saturday and I had just left my mechanic who informed me to sell the car right away. The knocking I had just reported hearing was something serious. I took this as a sign from God and sold the car to a retired couple who planned to convert my old friend into a bio-diesel sedan. I watched them tow it away. Aside from its failed transmission, the car was immaculate, my chariot for over five years. It had 300,000 miles on the odometer.

In June, I purchased the Element and took off across the country. Can you believe this is the first new car I have ever owned?

Initial Thoughts on St. Bernard's Parish

2006-08-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

In the past twelve months since Katrina hit the coastal towns of Louisiana and Mississippi, news, photos and pleas for donations have inundated the airwaves creating a well-known moniker for one of the century’s most destructive storms. In its wake, several fund raising resources and grass roots orgs have sprung up in support; The Edge’s “Music Rising”, the Common Ground Collective, Dave Matthews, Harry Connick, Jr. & Branford Marsalis have been instrumental in the construction of Musician's Village, Bill Clinton & George H. Bush’s sprouting of a multi-million dollar Katrina Fund. Anderson Cooper even landed a Vanity Fair cover for his reporting of the crisis in New Orleans and Spike Lee’s four-part HBO documentary will air later this month.

Images of Oprah’s chartered helicopter circling the Superdome, while Gayle, on the ground, laments about staying at the 4 Seasons, are still fresh in my mind. And while my colleague Derek’s interpretation of Gayle sends me to floor with laughter, I can’t help but wonder if the actual state of things are tripping the light fantastic. Celebrity involvement has made the slow rebuilding efforts of Katrina wreckage seem, at least to me, out of proportion, bordering on the edge of what seems reasonable and even believable. However, although I had signed up with the Habitat NOLA office last year, it was Ellen DeGeneres’s impassioned plea during a guest spot on the Tonight Show that inspired me to pick a date and get my ass to New Orleans. In fact, I’ve never even watched her hit show, but the quiver in her voice as she relayed what she had seen moved me to action, so my sister and I set off in the new Element, heading south.

As we hit the I-59 towards Picayune, Mississippi, signs of Mother Nature’s wrath surrounded us as if a giant straddled the four-lane highway; arms outstretched and neatly halved the spindly pine trees bordering the route. From that moment, we were deadly aware of a force greater than ourselves.

A few days later, when asked whether I was taking lots of pictures, I had to think about why I had stopped snapping away. A 4 x 6 perspective cannot accurately depict the setting and, deep down, although the township of St. Bernard resembles a ghost town, it seemed disrespectful. Not even Ellen’s description could have prepared me for the wreckage and complete and utter devastation of this community. Neighborhood after neighborhood remains empty. Apartment buildings, stores, gated communities with their steel enclosures ripped open, telephone poles atilt and piles of debris, including cars, boats and appliances, line the sides of roads. Walk down the middle of any street and rarely will you encounter other people. Some houses that are due for demolition have graffiti like “Kiss My Ass Katrina and Levee Board” spray painted across the front of them. Closer to the delta, treetops entrap skeletal remains of mangled furniture and household items. It sounds bad. I’m here to tell you that it is bad.

One of Camp Hope’s frequent volunteers said that what we were looking at was 100% improvement from March. Imagining that, I found myself simultaneously depressed and overwhelmed. Described as one of Louisiana’s proudest and strongest communities, the Parish’s entrance sign declares “We’re Coming Back” but it’s hard to believe. Only 18% of the population has returned to the 27,000 homes that were damaged or destroyed by the storm. Equally disturbing was the lack of support from commercial entities with the money to rebuild. Wendy’s cement slab foundation sat vacant next to its nationally recognized red sign. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and several local stores have stapled signs on boarded up windows, half-heartedly stating “We’ll Be Back”. It took seven full months after the water receded for Home Depot to open its doors. Grocery shopping is difficult and fast food trailers serving Po-Boys and ribs pull in and out every day. Car dealerships, curiously, are primed for business, stocked with new inventory. Transportation isn’t one of the three basic necessities, (food, clothing and shelter), but after seeing the pile of cars along side Route 46 on the other side of town, you understand that in order to get people back into their homes, they’ve got to be able to move around.

Residents who have relocated nearby or who live in FEMA trailers on their front lawns hurriedly try to salvage their houses in order for the deadline of August 29th, the anniversary of Katrina. I’m not exactly sure what this deadline means, either derelict homes will be bulldozed or the state will seize your property. Habitat for Humanity has taken on the enormous task of gutting to the framework approximately 7,000 residences that belong to the disabled and/or elderly. As of two weeks ago, 1,700 had been completed.

On most homes, the front door has been knocked down or removed. Furniture, having been afloat during the two weeks the parish was under water, has settled elsewhere in the house. As if to prove its point, a waterline permeates rooftops. Food has disintegrated in the cupboards and the refrigerator. You are warned multiple times at orientation to resist temptation and duct tape the fridge shut. There are hazards. We are advised to be on the lookout for rats, copperhead and rattlesnakes, brown recluse and black widow spiders lurking in dark, damp corners as well as shredded mirrors and hand grenades. Closets sprout black mold. The driveway and flooring is slick with muck; a combination of mud, silt and dust that literally cements to soles of your shoes and bottoms of your pants. The smell is vile; truly appalling; an odorous concoction of spoiled food, rotting wood, wet carpet and clothing. A full-face respirator mask was my constant companion.

Once a passage way is hollowed out and windows opened, you tread lightly through the darkness of this mess. You are now somehow the custodian of someone else’s things, trespassing with a sledgehammer. Furniture, Christmas decorations, official Louisiana Saints and Mardi Gras memorabilia, carefully collected by the owner, are now in your jurisdiction to be relegated to an enormous debris pile on the front yard or set aside, hidden from looters. It’s hard to know what a prized possession is or isn’t and after all, since it’s been sitting there for eleven months, I’d be lying if I said I spent a lot of time weighing the odds. Water and time have turned stuff into crap, easily shoveled away and it’s easy to adopt a Mad Max mentality. You begin to relish the sound of breaking glass as you return to the house with your wheelbarrow. Our original team leader listed our responsibilities with indifference. For him, it wasn’t about sifting through someone’s life; it was tearing walls down and smashing things apart and keeping an eye out for firearms ever present in these southern homes. Within two days of this intense work, bearing the brutal heat and humidity of Louisiana, focus is set on clearing out and moving onto the next one.

There is much to be done. (Click here for my slide show)

Everywhere, people ask us to send more volunteers down, to tell our friends about what we’ve seen, to spend our money because they need the business desperately. A resident gratefully told us; “Thank you for coming, it makes us feel like we’re part of America”. I was embarrassed that the feeling of being unprovided for in this country of wealth lingered on.

It’s not for lack of volunteers and private funds as listed above. I barely saw any government services in action with the exception of FEMA trailers, the likes of which families are exasperated at living in for so long, canned FEMA water (not a welcome sight at the Camp) and sporadic debris removal. I cannot begin to assess what process rebuilding this landmass would be; tune into the next blog for my opinion. I will say that I believe if this were a government priority, we would be looking one hell of an improvement.

What is clear in this quagmire of strategic planning boards and hoo hah is the enormous rebuilding effort, generously financed and compassionately completed by the people, including celebrities. Without their familiar faces keeping Katrina current, she would be just another name. Let’s face it. Most people don’t read the in-depth articles like Dan Baum’s Letter From New Orleans in this week’s New Yorker or Charles Mann's August 28th Fortune piece, but they do have time to scan a pop up blurb on AOL about
Matthew McConaughey’s charity eBay sale of his 'Vette or
Brad Pitt’s recent design sponsorship of a 12 Unit green Apartment building for the lower ninth ward. And if bidding on a ’71 Stingray spreads the word that communities remain in need, well I’m on board with that.

HELP & HOPE: St. Bernard Parish Recovery Project

2006-08-06T00:04:00.000-07:00


As I was formulating my thoughts about my trip to St. Bernard's Parish, I wanted to share a video one of the volunteers produced. It truly explains what my sister and I were doing there. More to come... check this out.

M.I.A.?

2006-07-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

Indeed, dedicated readers, I am still here! I have either been uninspired these past few months, up to my ears in movie premieres, or over inspired and have not been able to find the time or be willing to make the time to write about my adventures. However, I am committed and hope to complete the half-dozen half-finished blogs I've stored in my "In Progress" folder. Until then... cheers!

Kat Tales of the City: Part I.

2006-03-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

It’s St. Patrick’s Day in New York. I can’t say that I’ve ever been to the parade, but I can claim one St. Patty’s Day belly up at an Irish bar with my pals from college, The Pig N Whistle on 47th Street. I have, however, spent a lot of nights walking these streets and avenues tottering my way to the bat cave on 19th Street I rented. Tonight, after dinner with Vanessa at Shima Sushi on Second Avenue, I got to witness to the revelers tottering their way from bar to bar. To be sober in New York on March 17th is a whole different experience.

Insert any year here, location Manhattan. Drinking and making merry on these evenings that call for it, like tonight for instance, Halloween, or New Year’s Eve, the faces are different, but the actions remain the same. Girls cry, (I passed three on my way home, one sobbing into a cell phone, another to a gay friend about his lover’s bad behavior, and an Asian twenty-something blubbering in her native tongue. I couldn’t translate what she was so upset about, but I could keenly surmise that Cosmopolitans were the catalyst). A kid on a skateboard stopped to vomit between two parked cars. The streetlights were out at 10th & 2nd Avenue, and traffic was beginning to pile up, the two cops walking the beat more concerned about a group of college boys drinking 40s wrapped in brown paper. My brother and I spent one New Year’s Eve drinking beers out of paper bags, but we had straws. We knew the score. A lengthy line had gathered at 11:30 PM outside the infamous McSorley’s where, if memory serves me correct, you have to drink or get out. Your selection: beer or whiskey. Non-alcoholic beverages are not to be found unless you count the tap water from the tiny bathrooms in the back. Even when I was a regular bar hopper, I refused to cue up, preferring a good local place with a well-stocked jukebox and a bartender who knew me. This trait follows me. For example, all week long, I’ve been anticipating the Trader Joe’s opening on 14th Street, and tonight, the line for purchases wrapped completely through the store right out the front doors, an employee holding a sign with a large green clover announcing “Line Ends Here”. Discouraged, I left. Clearly, waiting is not my forte.

As I trotted Lily around the block for our last evening’s pee-mail, I wondered why people were shivering outside of McSorley’s so late. And I think, it must because they haven’t yet found someone to make merry with tonight, that stranger who you hope will hold the answers. Although the odds are long, there is always that expectation of something more. We hear those fairy tales of one-night stands turning into the love of one’s life. I know these stories intimately having friends happily married who have met this way. So we wait in the cold, biting wind, at an hour when “nothing good can happen” my mother would say, with the hope that Some One Wonderful will fall in love with us over a pint of Guinness. And we’ll totter home, happily ever after.

Inherit the Snap

2006-03-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

gingergoo
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

There are certain traits that you take for granted you will inherit through the sheer brilliance of DNA; a great golf swing, the ability to whistle, perfect pitch, the simplicity of baking a ginger snap. My mother is not only a great cook but also a fantastic baker. Nobody can top her piecrust. Her mother was a great cook and baker, even making the household bread every week. Now, on the paternal side, my Nana’s culinary contribution was her fish croquets, added annually to the bounty of Christmas Eve dinner. Apparently not a baker, I must get my genes from her.

I don’t know how I got this bee in my bonnet, but for the past few years, I’ve have been trying to break the ginger snap code. Randomly, this question will pop in my head, I could be on the Sepulveda Pass, I could be flying from Newark to LAX, but it will come upon me, what makes a ginger snap snap? And why is this feat so difficult for me to accomplish?

My ginger snaps don’t snap. I follow the recipe, but they come out gingerbready, which, don’t get me wrong, is great, but it’s not a snap. A snap is like a slap on the ass, but in a good way. That thwap sound that you know is going to melt in your mouth. The soccer hottie I’m involved with now (save your questions for the comment section), spent his years following college as a baker in Northampton, Massachusetts. I explained my situation to him over iChat one afternoon while I was blending ingredients for “Cranberry Nut Bread”, another Grandma Sue favorite. He suggested using only yolks, but informed me that his specialty was carrot cake, cheesecake and his ability to knead two loaves of bread at the same time. He wasn’t a cookie man. I consulted the expert. My mother’s suggestion was to lower temperature for longer cooking. This information extrapolated after I begged for her secret. Her reply: “I don’t know, mine have always snapped”. Well, bully for her.

The other evening, I was at Trader Joe’s where I found myself in the check out line debating with the cashier over a canister of ginger snaps or chocolate chocolate chip cookies. Glaring at the ginger snaps, I relinquished the tin to Rafael and decided that this would be the night to tackle the ginger snaps again.

I did not heed the advice of the soccer hottie, but instead decided on a few secrets of mine own, like using one teaspoon of baking soda instead of two, adding double the amount of ginger and substituting King Arthur with gluten free flour. Then I heeded Mom’s advice and lowered the temp from 375 to 350. I waited. The result is what you see here. A glob of ginger goo. Not even that tasty as sometimes goo will be. My experiment ended up in the trash, and I pulled out the never fail good old oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe, another one passed down through the family. At least it’s not fish croquettes.

High School... 20 Years Later

2006-02-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t as if the year 2005 escaped my notice for monumental rites of passage, the grand finale being my 20th High School reunion.

Since I flat out refused to attend my 10th, so averse was I to anything alumnus related, I had been dropped from the invite list. It wasn’t animosity, rather a “been there, done that and didn’t need to go back” feeling. I didn’t have a horrible teenage experience; on the contrary, it was pretty garden variety. Like most peoples’, life at Lincoln Sudbury began on two left feet, but I survived. There were a lot of good days and few bad ones. I skipped school and drove to Wingaersheek Beach, pulled pranks and fire alarms, had great friends, took all the classes I wanted and graduated in three years, racing to get through high school, so that I could race through college so that I could start my fabulous career. I barely had time for boyfriends. In fact, now that I think about it, I didn’t really even have boyfriends. O.K., I dated Dan McBride for a few months my freshman year, but he barely got a kiss, our “relationship” consisting of a lot of sweaty handholding. The following year, I “went out” with Dickie Cicciu, a gymnast, Gemini and a senior. “Going out,” meant we sat on the hallway floors, talking about God and ESP. It seemed so sophisticated. He drove a beat up ’69 burgundy Firebird convertible. We’d turn the heat up and put the top down, winding through the back roads to White’s Pond, where we’d wade around in the moonlight, continuing our oh-so-serious conversations. This went on for about two months before he reconciled with his ex-girlfriend, a wispy actress from Lincoln. Tristan and Isolde was what he compared their love to. Our evening swims were anything but passionate, and I took the break up pretty well. I mean, there weren’t any historical make out sessions, just a lot of talk. (In the years that followed, however, he’d somehow track me down and we’d engage in long, late night phone philosophy about our connection and question if we belonged together. In 1991, he called to tell me he was in New York for a long weekend working as a carnie. He arrived at my Astoria apartment a few hours later, sold me long distance service and disappeared into the night. That was the last time I saw or heard from him).

The point is, love did not figure into my plan, and I handled the subject rather rationally, wise beyond my years. Didn’t I have all the time in the world for love? Why would I want to waste these valuable years on someone I know I’m going to leave for the Big Apple?

So although I can’t recall the impetus, I jumped at responding to the invitation my pal Suzanne forwarded and encouraged my girlfriends to join me. While they grumbled that I owed them, I took a long awaited opportunity to remind them of the silent treatment they invoked, forcing me into attending the Class of ‘83’s Senior Prom with Doug Huie, a friend of their boyfriends. Awkward and resentful, I’m confident I ruined whatever high school fantasy he imagined about back seats and motel rooms, insisting that he take me home and spending exactly five minutes making out in my driveway before I was sure my mother would flick on and off the lights, our signal for me to get the hell out of the car and in the house.

But back to November 25, 2005. Location: the Crowne Plaza, Route 9 Framingham. It surprised me that class of ’85 hadn’t aged at all, and I thought, could this is the fountain of youth? Surrounded by people you grew up with, you could forever retain the same childlike countenance through their eyes. Everyone seemed genuinely happy; there was a buzz about the room, as if we were waiting to march down the hill to the football field in that late May afternoon of graduation. As the hours flew by, I hated for the evening to end, imagining myself joining the committee for the next reunion, and perhaps persuading them to plan a three-day retreat. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but I was caught up in a euphoric energy; brought on by the keen absence of high school insecurities, and wanted to stay put. I knew these people. Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School (or Drinking Drugsbury Reasonably High School as some liked to call it) was no different than any other. It could have been a scene right out of the iconic high school movies chronicling the 70s and 80s like Dazed and Confused or The Breakfast Club. We had the same Madonna look-a-likes, computer nerds, jocks, rats, (smokers clad in denim jackets) and motor heads populating the hallways. And with those stereotypes, some things don’t change. Not a few of our former cheerleaders had become classic suburban hard-bellied moms, MILFs if you will, donning tight designer jeans and revealing shirts, accessorized with an accordion packet of their progeny. A slide show projected, among other snapshots, our former class president’s virtual photo album of over-achievements. There he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, climbing Mount Everest, biking the Tour de France route, running the Boston Marathon, surfing in Tahiti. And there were a lot of family photographs. Most of the attendees were settled into a lifestyle I never had time for.

Much can happen in twenty years. Nobody knows the glorious triumphs, spectacular failures and tragedies we’ve lived over the past two decades, but that banquet room was a safe harbor. I felt a kinship to my fellow graduates. There is something important about these relationships, and perhaps it is the shared adolescent experience of surviving the roughest, toughest part of growing up, puberty, and we’ve made it. And by being in this presence, even years later, you reveal everything. The bond has stuck.

I’ve started keeping in touch with a few that I hadn’t seen since graduation. One of them reminded me that I ran around with a “tough crowd”. The fact that I was a real prude may surprise you. I was almost always the designated driver, dubbed “the Big V”. (Figure that one out yourself) and all around parent’s favorite. It was an exciting time. I’m always envious of kids flying the coop for college. It is an exquisite feeling, ankling the house for the first time when you are ready, really ready, to be on your own. I know parents must get squirrelly about their kids leaving the nest, but I hope for them to appreciate the independence and excitement their kids are experiencing. Mine weren’t worried about me at all. In fact, they began giving me luggage when I was sixteen, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to leave. I minded later when I found myself in a therapist’s office wondering why she was telling me I had abandonment issues. By 25, I was working twelve hour days and getting four hours of sleep, hitting bars and after bars, way up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and student loans, loving life but at the same time wondering why it was all so hard, wishing I didn’t have to have the worries. Did I want to be an adult way too fast? Is this why I find myself trying clothes on in the junior department, looking at my reflection, silently saying to myself, “Wow, I am almost 40. I can’t be wearing this Roxy jacket”.

As I walked in and out of conversations in that generic banquet room, Prince’s “1999” in the background with the Madonna girls on the dance floor, I was reminded of what I felt at 17. At the top of my game. Cocky. Smart. I was getting out of town and nothing could stop me. Here, in 2005, club soda in hand, I flit in and out of conversations and silently take in how people remembered me, like when I hit the road for NYC, I was going places. If only we could see ourselves as other people see us, harness that and keep for personal reflection when the going gets rough. Turning down an offer for a ride home from a former class mate and soccer hottie, I take my place as the designated driver and through the frosty night, I realize that I still am going places. I am at the top of my game again.

Reunion 2005
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

Remembrance of Things Past and Resolutions for the Future

2005-12-27T21:51:00.000-08:00

November 1st. My brother Philip and I join the “Day of the Dead” revelry at “Forever Hollywood” cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard. By the time we arrive, the sun has set and prayer candles of orange and blue have been placed on top of tombstones throughout the grounds. The winding walkway leads us to the reflecting pool commemorating the Douglas Fairbanks, father and son. The surrounding area has been set up with decorative, skeletal altars celebrating family, friends and even Hollywood icons that have passed on. One group has spread a buffet over an above ground crypt, complete with tablecloth and candelabra dripping its waxy tenants. I decide that I like this holiday very much, predicting that it may prove to be my favorite in years to come.

Honoring deceased ancestors is traditional among several diverse cultures; and such celebrations are traced back as far as ancient Egypt, China, Japan and Aztec Mexico when departed souls were venerated during the great festivals of Osiris, Ching Ming, Obon, and Dia de los Muertos. My favorite is an African tribal ritual mourning the dead over a three-day period. On the first, they physically fight to beat out their anger; the second, they weep; and the third, they feast in honor of their loved one’s final rite of passage. Also traditional are “Irish” wakes where everyone gets drunk, cries, fights and then doesn’t speak to each other until the next wedding or funeral. Say what you want, but there is something civilized about this admission of feelings. Certainly Americans observe Memorial Day, but it usually entails ribs, beer and a four-day workweek. And yes, there’s Halloween, the dead conjured up by children pushing around a oujii board in the attic, sugar dripping from their mouths. During his interview for an HBO special on “6 Feet Under”, Alan Ball asserts that in America, death is a topic largely avoided, that most of us have a hard time acknowledging grief. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but I can relate to that.

Later, my brother and I splurge at Sushi Ryo on Western near an “adult magazine” shop and a Chinese/Donut take-out, common in the Los Angeles Basin. For you outsiders, don’t be fooled, the best sushi bars are often in grimy strip malls. Over our spicy tuna, we talk about our father, a subject we have managed to skate around. We agree that not a day goes by that we don’t think about him. He was a memorable person, bringing a bright light to every space he filled. Both Philip and I were with him when he left this life. I don’t conjure up the night he died very easily. Don’t want to think about it. Don’t want to talk about it. Maybe that’s why I feel part of my life has been stilted, rendered somewhat immobile, as if in wet cement. I’m stuck in the Bubble Lounge in lower Manhattan trying to decide whether the CPR I learned during my 6th grade swimming lessons will revive my father.

In the past few years, defibrillators have become a mainstay in public places. Many people over sixty have them installed at home. After the Angry Man’s sister in law, an ER doctor, bluntly announced their 85% success rate, I had to leave the room. I thought I was going to be sick. Instead of honoring my father’s life, I’ve been avoiding my own grief.

When I find the courage to go back to March 25, 2002, I remember it to be a perfect evening. I was working for Disney, preparing for the premiere of “The Rookie” in New York. Bob was a huge baseball fan and many of the old timers he knew would be attending, Fred Lynn, Willie Mays and Yaz, among them. I was thrilled he could be there. I arranged for him to meet me at the hotel where we would hook up with my brother and get dinner. It all sounds so boring in retrospect, but the thing is, we had a great time. We motored down to Raoul’s on Prince Street in Bob’s Chrysler LeBaron, (I liked to call it his old man car). Bob had a few martinis, smoked a pack of Benson & Hedges and expostulated about his favorite subjects: sports, politics, Marilyn, Jack and Bobby. But he also took the time to tell us how proud he was of us, how he was grateful that Phil was pursing his music, that Siobhan & Frank were wonderful parents to their children, that I had followed my dreams. He gave me some much needed advice, was saddened by the disappearance of a family member, worried about my mother’s health, thought the democratic party was going to hell in a fast car. We talked about so many things of relevancy, snatches of this conversation come up even now, and I think, is it weird spiritual coincidence, or did he have a gut instinct that he would be leaving the earth soon, just as soon as he shook hands with Willie Mays? What I remember most clearly, for myself, is looking across the table, through the smoke, and smiling, thinking, “I love this man. I really love this man”. And I should feel lucky that I have that, that there was no unfinished business, that we had a pretty honest relationship.

When people ask about it, half of them will say, “What a way to go. Steak, martinis and jazz”. My friend Vanessa, who was performing at the club, recounted, “One moment I was looking over and there was Bob smiling, one kid at either side, and the next moment, he was gone”. It was as quick as that. I even thought I could see him the doorway, trying to tell me that it would be OK. Later on, the doctors said there was nothing I could’ve done. That if the EMTs couldn’t revive him, I probably couldn’t have either.

His exit strategy was especially poignant as Philip and I steered the LeBaron through a freak late March rainstorm, meeting my sister at a truck stop along I-95 truck stop during the eight-hour drive she had from Massachusetts. But the rain. It blinded us, threatened to deter our way, but we refused to pull over. I think my brother would have driven to the very bottom of Florida if we hadn’t been on autopilot.

My mother stretched out her arms to us, already having emailed family and friends, arranged for his body to be transported to Virginia, requested death certificates, written his obituary, and kept herself busy, busy, busy. How do you fill a space that’s been occupied for over forty years? Two days later, strangers occupied the pea green velvet pews of the Elkton church. The minister started her sermon with: “I didn’t really know Bob…” Having only lived there for about four or five years, there was no way she could have fully appreciated the spirit he was given. Thankfully, an old friend, Big Jim, recalled some funny stories from the Pittsburgh days and my cousin Rob got up and spoke. Three of my oldest friends flew in from Sudbury. My mother’s family had moved mountains to be there. My oldest brother, Frank, gave a moving eulogy.

When I got back to LA, and my bed, and my desk and all of those cards and phone messages that are so very nice, but what do you do with all of them? I couldn’t think. And for the past three years, I’ve been avoiding the memory. It’s so painful, that I’ve adopted forgetting as my anesthesia. But the drug wears off eventually, and the energy spent trying to forget is really the aspect that brings the most pain. I knew my family was grieving as well, but when you are 3000 miles away from the inner circle, it becomes easy to isolate those complex emotions. And once you’re in that isolation, it’s so difficult to move away from it. It becomes the womb of wounds.

I recognize that I probably remain in shock, although it’s a combination of shock and gratitude. Emails announcing that Miss Trouble will be performing at the Bubble Lounge I cringe at, but I’m grateful that I was there, with my father. That he wasn’t alone. That Philip and I were by his side when he left this world, holding his hands, and that we were able to share a good meal, some loud liberal politics and a couple of Beefeater martinis for the road.

It was good to walk through this labyrinth of the dead and see people with hopelessly sad memorials for children, girlfriends and soldiers lost too young, but also to see people laughing, as if the skeletons they had erected were the source of humor and the dead were laughing right along. My father would have liked that. So, my brother and I decided that next year, we are going to create an altar for Bob, who’s spirit justly rightly deserves to live on and inspire others to love their life, whistle a happy tune, enjoy the subtleties of barbequing.

According to Oaxaca tradition, family should put out things that the dearly departed loved. That would be a very dry martini, garnished with green pimento stuffed olives, steak medium rare, Sinatra on the ipod. I put on “You Make Me Feel So Young”. This is the day I will remember, and by remembering, celebrate, my father.

Walden Pond

2005-10-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

Walden Pond
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

My friend Valerie sent this in after reading the latest posting.

Sushi Comes to Sudbury

2005-10-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1997, my parents sold the house at 187 Pratts Mill Road, a 7-room Cape called home for 27 years. I was between jobs, and in the clutches of my 20-something debt, but I knew I had to get back to Sudbury and help my parents pack up the house. With $400 remaining on my Choice Visa, I bought the ticket and headed east.

Maybe because I’ve been clearing out the drawers, closets and shelves in my house that it’s time to sweep out the attic in my brain. Usually I stay with my sister four or five towns away, not wanting to disturb or distort the memories of my perfect, dysfunctional childhood, but during this trip, I am inspired, (and perhaps brave enough), to drive the Old Boston Post Road and into downtown Sudbury.

New England suburbs are distinguished by their history, houses painted white with black trim, placards announcing the original owner’s name and date of erection and Sudbury is no different, although when I drive into town, I pass the odd juxtaposition of Selim Alptekin, DDS, who promises “Whiter Teeth in An Hour!” and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn where I had worked as a front door hostess replete in period costume sewn by our neighbor, Mrs. Bausk. Another common oddity shared by New Englanders are the town militias who dress up and recreate revolutionary war events, even marching to Concord at 4:AM every April 19th followed by a pancake breakfast hosted by the local church. In fact, Sudbury even boasts the zip code 01776. Rumor has it that the selectmen fought to get this sequence of numbers when zip codes were assigned in 1963. I imagine the men were thrilled to lord this over the neighboring Concord, (where the first of many famous battles with the Red Coats occurred), and Lexington, (where the shot heard round the world was actually fired), and probably pleased as punch that Philadelphia (where the Declaration of Independence was signed) began with 19000. Sudbury isn’t home to any famous authors where Concord is the primary residence of Louisa May Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau, (my siblings and I learned how to swim in Walden Pond), although Washington did sleep at the Wayside Inn. But let’s face it, Washington was on the move. He slept everywhere.

Despite this slight historical disadvantage, I loved the Sudbury of my youth. It was a wonderful place to grow up, to get a great public school education, to lie outside on the lawn while the breeze lightly brushed your face or play kick the can with the neighborhood kids until Moms rang bells for dinner. On the fourth of July, banana bikes bedecked with streamers, Minutemen and fire trucks lined up behind Star Market, all waiting to wave to our families sitting on the steps of friends’ houses along the parade route. Screen doors were kept open all summer long, filling the corners of the house with the soft tolling of the bell from the First Parish Church, the spire crooked, legend has it, from a musket shot. We’d spend evenings at Featherland Field watching dads compete against each other at softball; my father in center field, cigarette dangling from one hand and the worn in Rawlings glove on the other. At least a month in advance, my mother would ask us what we wanted to be for Halloween in order to give her enough time to design and sew the costumes for October 31st, trick or treating beginning as early as possible. We rode our bikes through the back roads, side streets and secret passageways behind the woody expanse of people’s yards until winter, when we would throw our skates on as soon as the bus dropped us off in hopes to chase the last bits of sunshine gliding around Stern’s Mill Pond, incidentally, where the old Babe Ruth house still stands. Probably the reason my father chose the house on Pratt’s Mill.

Driving through those densely forested parts with finger ponds and lakes, the lack of urban sprawl was a wonderful surprise. Thick, verdant tree cover hovers over the long stretches of road that join Upton to Hopkinton, Stow to Hudson and all of the townships in between. What I really treasure about August on the east coast is the lushness. The air feels soft; smells sweet, as if lawns were perpetually mowed and the lilacs forever in bloom. Summer has wound down. Football practice is in session. The Red Sox at the tail end of the season. Teenagers are anxious about starting school. At least my niece is.

While Uxbridge, Upton and Andover have retained their sense of small, Sudbury has not. The town selectmen, and the folk that have since moved in, have changed the landscape of the town forever and there is no restoration in sight, nor do I believe it possible. Although my parents saw the advantages of Sudbury, they never liked the town politics. Looking back on video I shot during the summer of ’97, they all but predicted Sudbury’s sad fate.

The farmland has diminished as the population swelled, developed into huge houses complete with granite counters and walk-in closets. I recall my parents balking at the first house priced at $100,000. They couldn’t believe that anyone would ask for such an outrageous sum. You can guess what these soccer moms, driving around in their hands free Lexus’s in a scene eerily similar to “Desperate Housewives”, paid for the 01776 ideal. The tree farm, once part of Babe Ruth’s homestead, was parceled off in the mid-‘90s for at least a baker’s dozen of abfab homes punched on a postage stamp spread.

The main road is congested with traffic monitored by local policemen on shiny white Harley Davidsons. Imagine a cop ticketing someone for disturbing the peace while bombing around town on a Harley. I smile to myself, the pigs driving hogs!

Maroney’s, where we went for donuts, has been sold. For the three years we were Catholic, we fought with the rest of the church going population for chocolate covered custard and glazed donuts, peeling out of the Our Lady of Fatima parking lot, making a mad dash for the bakeshop. For coffee and donuts, one has the choice of Starbucks, lodged in the colonial looking strip mall (and quite unfriendly, I might add) and the uber New England drive- thru, known in Sudbury as “Dunkin’ Donuts Place”, abiding the town’s zoning ordinances about lighted signs.

I’m grateful to hear that Sudbury Pizza, my first real employer, enjoys the same weekend crowds. When I see the owner, Nick, getting out of his minivan, I don’t stop, although he’d surely remember me, having an uncanny total recall of every face and corresponding pizza order. I prefer to keep this observation to myself, an insider on the outside. It was at the Pizza Place where I learned about bribing the cops. Everyone at the shop was in on it, trading free pizzas in return for a little leniency on future driving incidents. This favor coming in handy one summer night when I got pulled out of a car where I had been sucking face with DW, (the townie/speedracer/metrosexual), my blouse moving towards unbuttoned, suddenly the flashlight blinding me. I thought for sure David would get cuffed and hauled off to jail, possibly even beat up. Instead, the officer squinted at me and said, “Hey there, you work at the pizza place, right?” I nodded. With a wink, he instructed me to get right on home. The crime rate has never been much; random robberies, drunk driving arrests and sporadic teenage assaults on mailboxes. Currently, my friend Suzanne tells me the menace is coyotes.

But the real slap and tickle is that sushi has come to Sudbury. Sushi! Imagine it! Sushi, that once decadent Far East delicacy is now a staple. And get this, there isn’t one, but two restaurants, “Oishii Too” named after it’s original Boston location and “Fugakyu” which sounds pretty suspicious when you sound it out loud. Go ahead, try it. The thing is, donuts, pizza and Chinese were always a treat; dinner out reserved for special occasions. It was the sushi restaurants, (plural), that threw me off my reverie of memories. After that, it was if my eyes adjusted to the light. I remembered how the Vanas sold their house with the driving range and miniature golf course that was their livelihood for a generation to developers who put in an upscale strip mall with the usual homogenized shops. I had picked golf balls in the wee hours of the morning with Kim Vana. It wasn’t easy work and I’m sure the range didn’t bring in much money. The Vanas were one of the larger families in town. Why shouldn’t they have some money to make their lives a little easier? I don’t blame them, nor do I fault the Maroney's, who sold their family business and home to develop “Carriage House Lane”, address to at least fifteen condos priced at 1/2 a mill each. It may not seem much, but the loss of the driving range, the bakeshop and other the other Sudbury staples of my youth have left a gaping hole where people once communed.

I couldn’t stomach driving by my old house on Pratt’s Mill Road, not with other people living in my house. This was where my brother was born, where I had been allowed to stay up late with my father to watch Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dance on the ceiling, played hide and seek, built a tree fort, a flower garden, got ready for my senior prom in a black gown I made in home-economics class, fooled around with Paul Dalpe (a townie/photographer/metrosexual), on the stairs while my parents watched “Jeopardy” in the TV room, celebrated my sister’s marriage, and listened over the railing to my parents and their friends singing “Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris” in the wee hours of the morning after one of their famous parties. It’s too painful to face those homeless memories. I loved my house. I believed in the haven it provided, the fact that there was always someplace you could go in the world, a safety net, if you will. Once it was sold, I lost that sense of security.

There’s a new Audioslave song on the radio these days, “Doesn’t Remind Me”. I love this track because I know that reminded, I can go directly to the dark places in my mind without a flashlight and become disoriented by the topography. I’m sharing a space with a presence that makes me uncomfortable, prickly. I find my way back to Siobhan’s in the dark with only the lights from the dashboard, the stars that manage to peak through the oak trees and sparse incandescent bulbs still used for streetlamps in these parts.

Beverly Hills 9021ZERO

2005-09-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

I’m on South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, sister city to Cannes, France. Imagine Beverly Hills having a sister city. Funny. At 1:30 pm, there is no parking. I am already a half hour late for my appointment. In fact, both of us are caught in the parking crunch, driving aimlessly around looking for a meter or an opening in the public garage. The streets that branch off from Beverly are restricted, the homeowners clearly having a questionable “in” with the city council. There is absolutely no parking without a permit, thus the curbside remains pristine and empty, yet, the parking police wait, they wait patiently all day long for someone to fuck up and forget to feed the meter or park sans permit.

This ticket alone can mess up your driving and insurance record for at least five years. As if to accentuate their pretense, the speed limit in BH is 20 mph and the police station looks like a manor house. I was pulled over one Saturday night on Wilshire Boulevard alongside an African-American guy who stood aside as his yuppie-looking Toyota got the full work over while another officer searched his sax case. It was laughable in a predictable, stereotypical kind of way. Here I was, driving a rusty old ‘71 Superbeetle that backfired. Yes, I was driving over the 20 MPH speed limit. I smiled sheepishly at my cohort, as if this was some sort of consolation. This was the beginning of my bitter dislike for BH 90210.

I am walking down the street to my meeting at Peet’s Coffee passing four girls with BH High cheerleading outfits and matching black UGGs who sip their frosty coffee drinks and dangle cigarettes while junior agents, (not yet able to afford the blue tooth technology) tail them making lascivious comments.

I finally arrive where my friend and I share our parking tales of woe. To avoid the pile up in the alley behind Peet’s, I turned the wrong way out; it’s either that or gets caught up in the quagmire of stopped traffic. I am quickly reminded at the corner by a biker pedaling along that I’m going the wrong way. I know that. But I smile and say “Thank you for pointing that out.” None of this gets under my skin, I just notice my snotty response and stifle a giggle. I gain a space in the garage after illegally waiting on the street with my engine idling. I glance around Peet’s after ordering hot regular drip. The Good Samaritan biker is there, curbside to the counter. I smile at him and say hello; he bites into his lemon bar and looks away.

Life is a Ball and Don't You Forget It!

2005-08-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday, our moods adding up to a pitiful sum, my date and I hid out at the Laemmle’s Sunset 5. In a moment of good sense, we opted to see the documentary on the U.S. Paralympics Rugby team, "Murderball" over the Kurt Cobain tribute, “Last Days”. It was a wise decision, an amazing film and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

“Murderball” blends together a group of compelling characters who deal out adversity with panache; a dash of current events when two of the players pay a sobering visit to Veteran’s Hospital in Virginia where young, newly amputated troops appear shell-shocked at their present condition; loud cursing, smutty sex talk and crashing around on the court in the name of professional rugby. This type of unique content is exactly why this documentary raises the bar.

For myself, the film’s subject matter was much more personal. While clips from the Athens 2004 Paralympics flickered in front of us, my date turned to me in genuine awe and said: “Wow, the world has certainly changed”. I found myself moved to tears at how much.

Certainly having Christopher Reeve as a spokesperson elevated visibility of people living with disabilities in the ‘90s, although it is important to remember that a sizable part of this population was living in state nursing homes until as late as ‘70s when de-institutionalizing began and Vietnam Vets began to appear on the streets. One of the featured men in “Murderball”, Joe Soares, a former quad-rugby player turned coach, maintains that his life would be different if his parents didn’t emigrate from Portugal. Remembering the ethos of decades past, as a polio victim he would have been sequestered from sight. The progress this community has made over the decades is enormous. However, we, as the rest of society, are unaware of these steps; taking it for granted that we are physically able to go wherever we want, and easily so.

I was first exposed to physical disability when a ramp was installed in our garage so my father’s friends and colleagues from work could enter the house on their own, often joining him in loud, ranting play by plays during weekend Red Sox games. During his tenure as Executive Director for the Boston Center for Independent Living, my father was one of many instrumental in implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act set forth in 1990. Beginning as a small company in the back of a True Value hardware store, BCIL subsisted on donations, United Way grants and a handful of truly committed people. These centers were created to teach self-advocacy, lobby for increased housing, jobs and education for those living with disabilities. Remember that up until this time, there were no buses equipped with elevators, ramped sidewalks or designated parking spots. With the exception of the Architecture Barriers Act of 1968 in which any new construction of federal buildings required accessibility, most of the world was not.

While we meet a group of extraordinary men who have overcome extreme difficulties, reflecting on their tragic circumstances with gratitude, the filmmakers take a pointed unsympathetic view on their subjects, a directive which prompts reviewers to colorfully describe the featured players as everyday guys, like, “Hey, they’re just like you and me! They’re ballsy, athletic and talk trash about sex!” Even the Rolling Stone review qualifies by apologetically stating: “it’s about quadriplegics in wheelchairs – but wait, it's not depressing!”

Obvious and ignorant as it sounds, the sentiment requires attention. The other day, I mentioned “Murderball” to a friend of mine, who immediately shook her head “I can’t watch that film!” Society’s blinders prevent people from seeing this film. We naturally gravitate towards subjects we want to look like, act like, dress like, and be like, not people who don’t function like we do. It’s the fear of simultaneously feeling gratitude and guilt for being “normal”.

All of the reviews I’ve read glow with keen admiration because, let’s face it, how many people have actually seen wheelchair sports? Or knew that the Paralympics have taken place the week following the Olympics since 1960 and in 2004, counted 136 countries representing 25 sports categories? It’s impressive. But what truly sets this documentary apart is how the film itself transcends disability, a feat that provokes an unambiguous connection, prompting us to look inward. How do we overcome that which holds us back? How do we harness the actual strength of spirit each of us possess; strength we rarely tap.

This point is dramatically made when we meet Joe’s 11-year old son Robert, a bookish violinist who doesn’t carry his father’s athletic gene and we witness Joe’s harsh treatment as if Robert were the one with a disability because he’s not like him. The chair doesn’t hold Joe back, his inability to see his son’s unique gifts does. Joe’s growing awareness is a poignant moment, speaking to the binary relationships we have with our parents, our children, the care we want from them and perhaps, how they, in turn give care, especially when the shit hits the fan.

The film isn’t about a bunch of guys crashing around like gladiators and talking about picking up chicks at bars. It’s about people whose dreams were stripped away from them in an instant and how they created new dreams for themselves. It’s about the ability to see ourselves for who we can be and the courage to harvest our character. It’s about love and service. It’s about a small, but valuable percentage of the world’s population making progress with courage and the desire to make life a little easier for themselves and others to come.

In a world constantly blinking by with new episodes of CSI and Jaguar models, it’s easy to become myopic to remarkable ways in which the world has evolved. It reminds of me of that Margaret Mead quote “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.

The “R” rating and the subject itself is killing “Murderball” at the box office. I encourage you to see this film. I challenge you. Bring your friends, bring your children and tell your neighbors about it. You can handle the sex talk and the swearing, and I promise, you’ll walk away inspired that world is a better place.

For me, watching “Murderball” was an earnest reminder of my father, his passion for his work and the community he hoped to build for all people.

The New New York

2005-07-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

Twelve years ago, I packed up my apartment on 19th Street and, via Paris, headed west, my last address burned in my memory ever reminding me that I still think with one foot planted firmly in Manhattan.

My various careers have led me back east frequently, however, ten months have passed since I worked
M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Pillage” premiere in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The space between gave me the opportunity to see the obvious changes collectively, if not lucidly.

“Destination New York”, as my friend Dr. Crosby dubs it, is a cleaner, sparkling place. On June 28th, the Times featured the $150,000,000 redevelopment plan for the East River esplanade. It was amazing, sure to give the city “a much-needed break from the quaint…vision of New York that is threatening to transform Manhattan into a theme park version of itself…” But hasn’t that already happened? The article recalled the park’s “gritty integrity” and I thought of its broken down amphitheatre, since renovated by Erin Brockovich in 2002, as one of my favorite hideouts.

The subway stations are no longer lit by bare bulbs hanging from crusty, water damaged ceilings that promote mysterious growth, the N & R train suddenly lurching to a stop beneath the 57th Street Bridge and a crackling voice from the depths of the car reciting: “This train is now out of service” at which point everyone on the train would slam their copy of “Bonfire of the Vanities” shut and make eye contact with each other, sighing, cursing or stifling snickers.

One can no longer quote "A Chorus Line", once the Broadway mainstay, “New York is falling apart” to which my late mentor, Norman Rothstein, would always reply, “New York is always falling apart. “

Gone are Carmel Cars’ beat-up Caprice Classic fleet, replaced by two-year-old Lincolns, and frankly, quite luxurious.

Gone is the bus station quality of JFK’s United terminal, having recently gotten a glossy, pastel face-lift. The grime seems to have moved to the outskirts; and although I enjoy the comfort of the new United terminal, I miss the grime.

Gone is the thrill of hitting every green light on Ninth Avenue, your taxi driver weaving in and out of lanes pockmarked with potholes. Traffic jams the city at all hours. Tokens are obsolete. One is encouraged to purchase a plastic Metrocard, preferably from the machines rather than the clerk, fares currently $2.00 per trip, a 200% price increase from when I moved to town.

Gone is the Beekman Theatre, immortalized in “Annie Hall” when Alvie Singer, waiting for Annie, is accosted by a fan from the cast of “The Godfather”.

Gone is the St. Mark’s Theatre, where on my 25th birthday, I watched my favorite film “Gone With the Wind” for the first time on the big screen and wondered why everyone tittered. Could GWTW be melodramatic?

Gone are the creative outfits in the past. As if at a loss for some originality, fashion photographer Bill Cunningham’s June 27th Sunday Times spread featured an onslaught of gold over-the-shoulder tote bags.

Gone are the Staten Island ferry girls with their bunched up socks and high-top aerobic sneakers. Two decades have passed and big hair is a relic, but I shuddered witnessing several ladies on the avenue caught in a sudden summer thunderstorm without a change of shoes. Ruined shoes were a reoccurring NY nightmare for me and could easily throw me into a funk for days.

It’s summer. Normally, only the die-hard New Yorkers would be in residence, a cold bath the only respite from the swelter, but the streets are festooned with ladies in pretty floral skirts and strappy sandals that show off pretty pedicures. Every female, age indifferent, resembles Carrie Bradshaw a la “Sex and the City”, a desperate attempt to imitate a shiny New York that only wet down streets and film cameras can bring to a celluloid reality. To emphasize the illusion, one can actually book a "Sex and the City" bus tour.

PAX and Cosi, “upscale” gourmet eateries offer a pricey alternative to the Korean delis that flourished during the ‘80s. For the first time in decades, Dean & Deluca have rivals. On the Upper West Side, Whole Foods Market competes with Zabar's and Fairway. Living on the opposite side of town, I shopped at the blue-collar Gristede’s and wistfully recall how my brother could easily shoplift a steak and the hit and run rat sightings we would compare. Think what you want, but these were the adversities that brought everyone together.

Restaurants are huge, meaning spatially enormous, invoking envy from renters struggling to find that extra bit of room. And speaking of restaurants, 145 Starbucks populate the island of Manhattan alone. 145. That means if you were to walk from the bottom of the battery to the tip of Washington Heights, that’s one almost every block and a half. Not that I mind. I am a devoted Starbucks customer and find myself frothing if I can’t find one near me, especially in a city that boasts 145. The city is also wild with French bistros, as if New York restaurateurs are out of the closet, blatantly admitting their Francophile status. While nyc.com lists 92, Yahoo does not discriminate, claiming 121. From the Hotel Gansevoort, I could've thrown a stone to either Pastis or Markt on opposing corners. I also discovered two L.A. hot spots, A.O.C. and Le Pain Quotidien. Are New Yorkers acknowledging their sister city on the other coast? When I lived in New York, L.A. was known as “Hell A”.

And yes, I know you're asking, "Where Have All the Hookers Gone?" It’s hard to coolly overlook the revamping of 42nd Street, a feat that Norman, once a member of the “42nd Street Restoration Committee”, would declare could never be done, not without “at least 25 million bucks”, which no one in those days had or wanted to part with. But millions came in the form of The Walt Disney Corporation. The impeccable restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre and the installation of Disney’s “The Lion King” replete with vendors hawking beanie baby Simbas up and down the aisles during intermission laid the groundwork for a full block renovation, attracting other corporate entities to plug into the 42nd Street glorification like Starbucks, Chevy’s, Bubba Gump Shrimp, and London’s famous Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

Hiking up to the theatrical production office on 43rd & 8th which employed me, disembarking at Times Square station, coffee and roll with butter in hand, my comrades on the street of dreams were working girls and cops flipping through the porn magazines at the peep show entrances. Now, bar signs on 8th Avenue have all been painted to look like quaint village taverns and only McHale’s sports its original neon sign.

Most surprisingly, Red Sox fans have come out of hiding, as if to provoke the defeated Yankees, people sporting hats and t-shirts everywhere. In 1991, I went to a Yankees-Red Sox game where the number of fights threatened to stop the game.

Why this melancholy reflection? It all started with the Basquiat Retrospective hosted by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Rather than wait until the show traveled to L.A., I wanted to see Jean-Michel on his own turf. I left the galleries depressed, prickly and peevish. I jotted some notes down, struggling to figure out why my mood swung into such a low and bleak place. Certainly Basquiat will do that to you. His paintings are angry, lonely, sad and we witness the artist at the beginnings of his career, never getting to see what might have been accomplished had he lived to be an old man. But deeper than that, Basquiat reminds me of the 80s and a permeated sadness that dwelt in the city during that decade. Maybe it’s the me I miss when I first arrived here, fresh off the Amtrak. I miss The Palladium, The Limelight and turning 21, feeling like an adult ordering my Absolut Tonics and long neck beers here’s-my-ID-thank-you-very-much-off-we-go-to-an-after-after-hours-party-and-still-make-it-to-work-at-10:AM. It was messy and dirty and fabulous. During those days, a full face lift wasn't required, the city swept the mess under the carpet.

In fact, if any of you have seen “Party Girl”, “Pieces of April” or even the biopic, “Basquiat”, that is the New York I remember. Small dark apartments with hundreds of coats of paint so much that the cornices and crown molding from the 19th Century look like globs of toothpaste. No matter. Your apartment is where you sleep; the city is your living room, your den, your piazza, your dining room and back yard.

I lamented these observations with a few friends. Most people agreed that the city had lost its edge. You could be in Chicago. You could be in St. Louis. Jon commented that the last time he returned east, he thought he was “going to New York and ended up at City Walk”.

That said, New York is still one of my favorite cities and is home to many of my favorite things, like Café La Fortuna, Arturo’s Pizza, Katz's Deli, ABC Carpet, Strand Bookstore to name a few.

I also love walking home in the early morning hours without a care in the world. I love that you can sing out loud, talk out loud, dress out loud and no one will take notice. I love that random newspaper sheets still blow down Broadway and tackle people in the face. I love taking the subway out to Coney Island. I love how green the trees get in August, how summer hosts a parade every weekend, how Century 21 is still the best place anywhere bar none to get a great deal on designer shoes. I love walking past the Neil Simon, the Music Box, the Golden, the Walter Kerr just after the curtain goes up, wondering what the audience, seated in the dark, thinks about the mystery unfolding before them on stage. I am thrilled that the amphitheatre I once dreamed on has gone through rehab and is home to the East River Music Project.

And I love those moments that you can only have in New York, like this one: I was on my way home via the N Train suffering from what else but “mal d’amour” as Norman would say. Dejectedly looking out the window, a homeless man stood in my periphery by door. As the train pulled into the next station, he blew up a red party balloon, twisted it into a flower, and presented it to me saying, “You look like you need this”. That to me was the spirit of New York, a complete stranger, more down on his luck than I, putting my emotional welfare before his in the most surprising way. He stepped off the train before I could say thank you.

According to Jerry Quickley, for whom volunteered for at KPFK last week, I’ll never really be a New Yorker because I wasn’t born there. And I thought it was because I wouldn’t embrace the Yankees as my home team. However, the eight years I put in marked me in a beautiful way, (and I’m not talking about my first tattoo!), and I think of them lovingly, without regret, but with the nostalgia that maturity brings. Those messy years are moving so far away.

Taos Lingers

2005-06-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

I’m guilty of guilty pleasures. I read People Magazine in the checkout line. Being in film publicity for the past seven years, it was an everyday habit and old habits die hard. So when I hear “Taos”, I picture Julia Roberts lounging around her fabulous southwestern spread, native art adorning the walls and designer landscaping; and yet there is always some sort of spiritual descriptive connected to anything one reads about New Mexico. Taos is no exception.

Arrival

Leaving Ojo Caliente at well over 265,000 miles on the odometer and my Rand McNally road atlas, I drove into Taos County from the south passing three doublewide trailers from which hundreds of car skeletons spill out in metal crop circle formations, the dormant airport marked by a lonely windsock and an Enterprise Rental Car outpost. Clumps reflecting bright shimmering sunlight appeared as an oasis out of the long deserted desert road one drives from Santa Fe. This is a Biotecture development known as The Greater World Earthship Community. These buildings could double as the set of “Dune” and are made of recycled material, mainly old tires. They self-generate enough energy to get off the grid. Even this section of Taos has its celebrity resident; Dennis Weaver of “McCloud” fame is a proud owner and hosts a promotional video demonstrating construction. I did not see him, or anyone for that matter, hauling rubber.

Past the eco-community is the seemingly unstable Taos Gorge Bridge, voted the “World’s Most Beautiful Steel Bridge” in 1966 by the American Institute of Steel Construction, proving that yes, Virginia, there is an award for everything. Spanning 1200 feet, canyon rocks spilling 850 feet down into the Rio Grande, the bridge is rumored to be haunted by a woman clad in blue jeans and a white t-shirt and a popular place to throw yourself over; fatalities averaging three per annum. Once over the span of death, I entered a valley surrounded by snowy peaked mountains, the town spreading out before me, adobe housing blending into the foothills.

Triple-A cites Taos as a “hippie haven” with an “anti-establishment influx” due to the “counterculture idealists” who flooded the town in the 1960s. As if to prove this, parts of “Easy Rider” were filmed here in ’69 and Dennis Hopper is one of the Hollywood homeowners. Despite these quixotic descriptions, Taos thrives on people with deep pockets. An April 15th 2005 travel article from the New York Times makes no pretense about the fact that Taos is ultimately a place for buying art, getting a massage and enjoying the natural surroundings. The grey lady is in most respects, correct, however, what she omits is that while Taos is destination tourist, local tolerance for outsiders is about 48 hours coupled with an underbelly of gangster wannabes, heroin addiction, and sordid crimes right out of a David Lynch movie including a decapitated developer left to be eaten by his West Highland terriers (OK, that crime dates back to 1929, but authorities never did find the head) and a local senator pummeled by his wife with a hammer after she found him with another woman. He lived and filed for divorce, see page one of the Taos News, May 16th.

One road connects the North side to the South side of town, known by several names, but commonly, "Main Road". Both begin and end with the small eatery, “Rita’s Tacos”, and “The Bean” coffee shop where, quoting “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, Julia can be spotted, disheveled and unwashed even! The smell of exhaust mingled with diesel fuel from monster trucks permeates the air like a busy street in Bangkok. There is an alternate route that the locals know about, secretively called “bypass”. The main street is unabashedly stuffed with art galleries and shameless tourist shops that proclaim “I Love Taos”. Sagebrush and surprising lilacs grow everywhere reminding me of summers on the east coast. There is no escape from the sweet, pungent scent.

The must-see tourist attraction is the Taos Pueblo, located on over 100,000 acres deeded back to the Taos Indians by Nixon. The Pueblo is over 900 years old, home to several multi-storied buildings housing cozy beehive fireplaces within, but to maintain historical standards, no running water or electricity has been added to the Pueblo proper. At least 150 people live within the traditional settlement and every tribal member speaks the Tiwa language. We are given a tour by a young Native American college student named “Ilona”, which as she informs us, is Hungarian. Given the bellicose history between the Taos Indians and the Spaniards, I’m surprised to discover that the pueblo is 90% Catholic, although they worship the Earth Mother and leave Christ off to the side in a child-size casket. The magical Red Willow River halves the pueblo’s center, but the surrounding meadow has been cleared for a parking lot. One of the elders sports a WWII Veteran cap and flashes the brightest blue eyes. These men group together, selling buffalo pouches and bolo ties. One of them asks where I’m from and promptly informs me that California is going to fall into the sea. He whispers that I should go live with them, although I wouldn’t be allowed up to the sacred lake. He confides that the Indians listen to the earth, and this I know, but I can’t help but think he is trying to seduce me or sell me something. This is the New Yorker in me, and while I acknowledge the cynicism, I’m not buying.

The Community

Over the two weeks, I talked to three transplants, each of who had been living in Taos for over ten years. All of them sort of arrived there and never left, either participating in a workshop, waiting on parts for broken down motorcycle or finding a lover that you just can’t quite leave yet. I can understand the desire. Taos lingers. It invites you to carve out a niche, find purpose, or disappear. Natural beauty abounds and the cache of local secrets I found devilishly attractive. I longed to puncture the tourist pleasantries and get down to the heartbeat

Triple A is also correct in printing that there are three distinct influences within Taos proper: Spanish, Native American and Anglo. Although the guide also states that they mingle, I learned otherwise. One of the folks I met told me that occasionally, someone well into their cups will curse him out ending with a loud “Whitey!”

I spend an evening out with Mark, our lovely concierge from The Indian Hills Inn, where we hop from the Taos Inn to the Adobe Inn, but even though I greet the baristas from World Cup Coffee, (simply the best coffee in the world and to which I’m an avowed lifelong fan and a twice-daily customer), they are not quite friendly in return. It’s as if you’re welcome as a tourist, but they don’t want you in their shit and they certainly don’t want you hanging out at their local bar. I don’t know if I could pick up and move to a small town on my own because there seems to be a bit of hazing involved with the process. First you’re a curiosity, then ignored until you can prove you have something to offer. The other fact I found unsettling was that virtually no one we met, with the exception of Mark, was interested in the fact that we were building for Habitat for Humanity or even knew of the Taos affiliate. The Saturday following our arrival, the local radio station heavily promoted volunteer orientation seminars for Habitat and I was disheartened to learn that only two people showed up.

There is definitely a disconnect, as though the many Taos websites cannot even use the influence of the Internet to create community. When my friend Lonn asked me what I thought it was, the word “heartbreak” came to mind. The land breathes an overwhelming sigh. It is a place for people to forget, be separate, belong, start over, start drinking again, become the artist they always hoped they’d be. Not surprisingly, there is a large amount of alcoholism. According to the Albuquerque Journal, “Taos County is one of the worst in the state for alcohol-related crashes.” For a town so small, the inhabitants keep to their own kind, everyone protecting their slice of reality or sanity.

The Build

Many people asked me who in Taos needed homes, since real estate is expensive, a surefire result when celebrity moves to town. From the pages of US Weekly, Taos appears to be the Malibu of the South West, however the medium income of its 7000 residents is $18,000, most employment being service-related, typical for a ski/summer sports town. Keep in mind that for a family of four, that’s the 2004 poverty level rate.

We are entrusted with the families' names and their stories, but I will tell you that a home will change their lives. For domestic habitat builds, it’s very difficult for the families to take time off of work, many of whom have more than one job. Such is the work ethic in the United States. When I was in Thailand, the entire family pitched in, including neighbors and tribal chiefs. I am there to build, that is the bottom line, but associating the faces with the houses is a very important part of Habitat, it gives the “humanity” portion of the company clear definition. Since a day off was impossible, we were invited to the pueblo where a dinner was held in our honor. It was incredibly moving, reminding me that I have not known real struggle. My parents worked in social service and didn’t really make any money, yet we had a house and a back yard that we loved for 27 years and never wanted for anything. It breaks my heart that people, native to the area with family surrounding them, are forced to move elsewhere because of the outrageous land prices. By the end of the evening, everyone shed tears. I felt blessed to be there, to be part of this and to be able to somehow make some small difference in the lives of these beautiful, courageous people.

The houses will not be finished by the time we leave. The first one is about 85% done and the second, 60%. We roofed, chicken wired, hung doors and sheet rock and secured the vigas that act as support beams across the roof. You would be surprised at how cool the homes are inside as opposed to outside, about 20 or 30 degrees. For days, all one could hear was the pounding of hammers and we diligently worked, I lost in my thoughts. Our site leader, Kyle, was the pure definition of positive energy and kindness. At one point towards the end of the trip, he asked me if I was staying, suspecting that I had felt the famous “Taos Pull”.

One of the group suggests the “Taos Hum”, a low throbbing sound from deep in the earth. I do some research and find the following "straight dope". But I know it is the heartbreak and the beautiful Rocky Mountains, the Rio Grande and big sky that draw me near like a strong set of shoulders to rest on.

It's true... Taos lingers. After a tearful goodbye to my new friends, I pick a bunch of lilacs to accompany me on my way back to Los Angeles.

She's A Brick House

2005-06-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

She's A Brick House
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

The KROQ Weenie Roast and My New Love for Tom Morello

2005-05-23T14:46:00.001-07:00

Last week, upon re-entry to Los Angeles, my new friend, Lonn, invited me to join he and his daughter to the KROQ weenie roast in Irvine. Fortunately, I was carpooling with his pal Mark later in the afternoon. Not that I didn’t want to see who was on the second stages, it’s just that a hot afternoon filled with sausage smell and general “street fair” fare is not my scene. Everything smells like Italian sausage, gyros, someone’s always throwing up and there is trash everywhere. At the Verizon Amphitheatre, it was no different, although when we arrived, people we just starting to pile into the amphitheatre, the Red Bull guzzling contest was just ending and sunburned bodies were peaking on their beer red bull buzz. The line up that I caught was The Killers, Audioslave, the Foo Fighters and Motley Crue. The audience was fantastic, all types of tattoos adorned everyone, the crowd a mixed group of ages and races, multi-mankind brought together by music the boom boom of the bass from The Killers, covering Depeche Mode. Girls in t-shirts and tiny shorts proving that rock chicks will always be rock chicks, there is no change in fashion. Long hair, short everything and heels. It’s like a timeless uniform. The energy pounds through you, my heart sped up and I felt about 15 years younger, wishing I could get down on the floor. Rock concerts are the only place, I’m convinced, in this day and age that people can be openly sexual. It’s the way everyone was moving and grooving, like a come on, transformed into their animal spirits.

The Killers were great, and having saw Audioslave the night before at the Wiltern, they were consistent in their outstanding performance. Tom Morello is thing of joy to watch. I remember seeing Yo Yo Ma for the first time, tears coming to my eyes at being able to witness someone whose soul was identical to his instrument, his music and his love for it. Tom Morello is no different. I could watch him play a Back Street Boys song on his guitar and weep with the beauty of it. If you haven’t seen him, you must. He also plays under the name of The Night Watchman. The stage spins after Audioslave wrecks me with their song "Like A Stone" and The Foo Fighters begin playing and don’t stop for at least an hour. I’m still trembling in awe. All Hail the Foo Fighters! It was the most spectacular musical/band performance I’ve seen since Prince, and if you saw the show, that was pretty hard to top. Dave Grohl is a herculean rock star.

The evening was capped by Motley Crue, Tommy Lee manning his drums with make up that rivaled Peter Criss and actual pyro! I was instantly transported to the 80s and scene from “Spinal Tap”. Indeed, I heard there was one too many Jaegermeisters thrown down back stage, but no matter. It was great – shout at the devil man!

Don't be tempted!

2005-05-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

Don't be tempted to toss your ex
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

Apres Spa

2005-05-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

Apres Spa
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

The Boulders at the The Boulders

2005-05-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Boulders at the The Boulders
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

Long Beach. Wrong Beach.

2005-04-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

Forgive me readers; it has been two weeks since my last blog. I have once again, been out of town and as you’ll learn, out of touch.

Three weeks ago, when my sister asked me what I was doing in Long Beach, Washington, I pondered the question and replied, “I don’t know”.

In my quest, I decided a positive plan of action would be to purchase another property, fix it up and join the flipping market. I love doing the work and I think I have a knack for it. I’ve found this takes a lot of research and a plethora of real estate agents. Since Long Beach seemed to be a great place to invest, I made up my mind. I would certainly find a good deal, rent my Oak Grove house, move south and spend the next year renovating the new property. I came across a listing on Pacific Realty dot com; a house that for Long Beach, California seemed too good to be true - a 1921 pretty little cottage on two acres within walking distance of the beach at a bargain price tag. This should have clued me in, but since I'm not really familiar with Long Beach, I eagerly emailed the listing agent. I didn’t find out until after the email exchange was in full swing that the property was in Long Beach, WASHINGTON. I was two states misplaced. The word “pertinacious” comes to mind as I reminisce on what followed. I googled the area, spent a few minutes watching the live web cam hooked up on Main Street, discussed the property with the realtor several times and decided that my next residence was going to be in the most remote part of the world, truly the edge of the west.

Being a good little consumer, I completely bought into the realtor’s six phone calls letting me know the market was booming and that the house had two families from Los Angeles bidding on it. I consulted a few people who I knew would agree with my irrational reasoning, purchased a last minute deal on Cheap Tickets and found myself driving a white Pontiac Sunbird out past Cape Disappointment onto the historic peninsula, right where Lewis and Clark burst out of the wilderness only to be, well, disappointed. To speed up my travel, I left Burbank on the first flight to Seattle, arrived at 9:AM and made it to Rhonda’s by 12:30 PM. That’s right, we are very far away from major airports.

The house was fantastic, truly my kind of project, however, Rhonda, a former B-Actress, told me quite plainly, “I’m not going to lie to you”. I listened with mixed feelings as she told me of the variety of unattended allergens flying through the air, the most popular being black mold and, believe it or not, ladybug infestations. Other highlights of Rhonda’s tell-all included a shoreline that was at least a mile away due to the protected marshland as well as a “no rent” policy on houses for summer vacationers. At this point, semi-resolute, I answer my sister Siobhan’s query and navigate my way to the Plum Village Inn while avoiding being mowed down by the convoy of 3500 series monster trucks that literally everyone drives. (Yes, of course there were flashbacks to the cowboy/roadie/metrosexual! The signs are everywhere.)

I check into the dubious looking old Sands Motel, which has been bought and renamed “Plum Village Inn.” Fellow travelers, it is very important to read customer feedback when booking rooms off the Internet. Once again, here I am, well-traveled, and I find myself in a scenario resembling “The Shining”. I meet the owner, a silicone valley fallout who has moved his wife to the area where they are now hoteliers. I discover that I am the very first guest. The “inn” consists of one solitary unit painted lime green with plum trim, standing alone while the other former Sands Motel cabins, weathered naturally with chipped blue paint and white shutters, surround it, waiting to become a member of the Plum Village Inn family.

The finished unit has been divided into four separate rooms numbered 6 – 9 and have clearly been furnished from the new Ikea catalogue. The innkeeper lets me inspect each and decide on which one I like. I pick number 7, where I can reach my car in a hurry. There are no phones and cell service is sketchy.

The next morning, I leap out of bed around 8:AM. It is freezing - about 40 degrees. I walk down to the beach and sure enough, it is four miles of beautiful coastline. Almost instantly, the weather turns belligerent. I fend off an attack of angry rain pelting my face like tiny ice picks while being hurled off the beach by the wind. The ocean, aptly named “The Graveyard of the Pacific”, threw its querulous waves at me as if to say “Go Back, Go Away, Get Lost. You Don’t Belong Here”. I struggled to keep track of my footprints in the sand, the only map I had to the little set up I was staying in. As soon as I crawled back through the mile deep marsh, the wind died and the sun spread it's golden warmth.

I took Rhonda the realtor’s advice and drove to the most northern part of the peninsula, sweetly named “Surfside”. It was exactly the oceanfront I was looking for, reminding me of Cape Cod, Cape Hatteras and the Jersey Shore. The houses were perfectly aged, grey from the combination of wind and briny water. Heartened, I drove through Surfside to Oysterville where the year round industry is evident by the eight foot piles of oyster shells left by the sides of the road. An old train depot has been converted into “Bailey’s Bakery” where a cheesy bread aroma mixes harmoniously with the salt air. I find beach access and decide to face the ocean for a second time. The walk is incredible and for the next two miles, my spirits rise and I look to the sand dollars speckled in the shore as a good omen. There is no sound so sweet as the wind in my ears and the waves rolling, rolling in. This, I think, is the place. I note available property and head back to Rhonda’s office.

After looking at some very promising lots, I discuss my building plans with Rhonda. Now I’m a builder. I’m going to build my next house right here on the most western shore of the West Coast! The thought that I might be isolating myself crosses my mind, but I shrug it off. Who wouldn’t want to visit me at my fabulous organically built house at the beach! Property is selling, and Rhonda is certain I can get a permit to build two houses on the acre she shows me. Holy crap - I’m a developer!

Although Rhonda asks that I drive to become more familiar with the island, I don’t think she’s happy with her decision. She sucks in her breath and whispers “oh my” several times. We drive to Cape Disappointment. We drive to the North Head Lighthouse; we drive to Port of Ilwaco where a group of artists have renovated the old pier into galleries and cafes. We’re happily discussing the future of the Long Beach Peninsula, the businesses I could start there, the annual Kite Festival. Just then, just as I’m designing my beautiful beach house in the middle of nowhere while driving through Fort Canby State Park, I ask Rhonda about the ocean. Since the season for vacationers is April – October, I’m curious when the ocean would be warm enough to swim in. What else do people do here? She flatly replies, “I’m not going to lie to you. If you go in, you die”.

I think she’s talking about the temperature, but no, she is serious. I learn that we are at the mouth of the Columbia River and the current is so dangerous that going in over your knees puts you at risk. In fact, she warns me that there are no lifeguards and that if you get carried out, none of the locals will go into save you. She finishes this tale of terror by adding, “Whenever I see parents letting their kids splash around in the water, I say to myself, there goes another one”. I listen quietly, all the while thinking, “WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?” I drop Rhonda off at the office promising that I will think about the property and speed off to Seattle. In fact, I have a ticket to prove it. At 68 MPH, the infraction totals almost half the airfare and car rental. In hindsight, I probably should have refrained from telling the officer that 68 was hardly speeding.

I check my email at the airport. My mother has sent a quote: “When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity... I can be sure that I am right.” - Federico Fellini

This lifts my spirits and I arrive home, to my beautiful house on Oak Grove, where the poppies are bursting out in reds, oranges and pinks and my animals are crying to greet me.

** Since I haven't had any traffic violations in the State of Washington in the last eighteen months, I will not incur points on my license. This is good news. You can imagine what my insurance is!

If you go in, you die.

2005-04-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

If you go in...
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

Toujours l'amour

2005-04-13T22:31:00.000-07:00

Toujours l'amour
Originally uploaded by beautykat.

My New Office

2005-04-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

One of my New Year's resolutions was to set up my home office and file a DBA although I don’t know what business I have filing a DBA when I don’t know what business I’m actually in. So, on the day of another eclipse, I stare at the remaining few piles of paperwork, old rolodexes from other careers and literally hundreds of pens I’ve rubber banded together in an effort to “organize”. All of this littered on the office floor waiting for a file drawer to hide out in.

The room is not spacious and finding a desk that would make it conducive to writing, working, creating has been quite a challenge. My quest led to Ikea in which I found many other items I absolutely needed, but none that fit into my office. My college chum and co-contractor for Oak Grove, David Lebarron, suggested that we visit the lumber section of Home Depot where he sold me on an idea to cut a piece of plywood and somehow attach it to the wall. Then he left for Cambodia. Desperate, I consulted Simon, a salesperson whom I befriended at Crate & Barrel Pasadena after spending loads of money there when I was gainfully employed. He recommended his friend John, a rockabilly tattooed young man who has quit his job as a carpenter in the film industry to start his own business building furniture and outfitting Bad Ass Coffee Shops around the country.

After a lengthy email exchange, he came over to check out the room, bring some visuals and take measurements. The result was a beautiful corner desk, shelving, and a return with file drawers. The piece would be built out of burled aspen. I loved his portfolio and his infectious enthusiasm to “zen out my creative space”. One could actually call him a carpenter/retro-rocker/metrosexual. I was immediately attracted to him. However, as I’ve learned, these qualities come at a price. To customize my “zen palace” would cost me $4500.

I tried the dining room, the kitchen cutting board, even the comfort of my bed, which I still prefer above all else, but I quickly learned that working from my home is impossible when you have Pets With Problems. There seems to be an unwritten "No-Closed Door" policy and the cats will literally hurl themselves against closed doors until entrance is gained after which kneading, nudging, swatting and even head butting are the methods of getting attention. This neurotic behavior sets off the dog, her nails clickity clicking on the floors anxiously, finally finding her way into the room leading to hissing, crying, more swatting and a very annoyed human.

Even though I have a room of my own, I really don’t. I wonder if Virginia Wolfe has any advice on this subject.

I needed something that could act as an office and I needed to get out of the house. I set out to test the waters of several coffee shops around town. I can drink coffee practically anywhere, but settling in, actually claiming a chair for several hours at a time takes some research. Finally, thanks to Lebarron, I've hunkered down at a quirky joint in Atwater Village named Kaldi. I am strangely drawn to Kaldi and find myself having withdrawals when I’m away from it for more than two days. You can usually find me there every other late morning or late afternoon depending on what time I rolled out of bed. I’ve even begun to answer my cell phone “Kat’s New Office”. What is it about this place where snacks consist of Twinkies and Ho-Hos, there is no decaf and ice tea is a rarity. But today, I studied the new art installation and it came to me. It reminds me of the old Onyx Cafe in Los Feliz.

Unfortunately, the Onyx has since been transformed into a buttoned up French bistro owned by two Turkish brothers, but back in the day, in the early 90s, I spent hours writing in the smoking room at the Onyx. The space had unusual local art adorning the walls, most displaying death and mayhem in Los Angeles and was appropriately painted black. Kaldi is very similar with the exception that the baristas that work here are quite friendly, the walls are grey and smoking has been banned in public places since 1999. There are about five late twenty year olds who work two-hour shifts at a time, constantly tagging off as if in a relay race to keep the shop open for fourteen hours. James, the owner, is a connoisseur of coffee and is even attending coffee conventions in Seattle and Las Vegas. He is very knowledgeable about his corporate competition and can tell you why Starbucks coffee tastes burned. I've always thought so, but weakly gave over to my addiction. They serve exotic, 100 % organic tea as well with names like "White Peony", "Golden Emperor" the most rare being "Yunnah Golden Needle" priced at $4.75 a cup.

An informal “stitch and bitch” club meets here Thursday evenings and before I realized that it was a weekly event, I would look up and find myself surrounded by the lot of them, crowded in around the sofa and other club chairs. It is an unlikely group of various ages and I note that they are all seem to be knitting, croqueting or piecing together large, hulking sections of yarn all the while giving each other tips about keeping their mates in check. I learn a lot about this, and spontaneously find myself interjecting my opinion even though I don’t know how to keep a mate, let along keep one in check. I do knit, but I’ve decided not make Kaldi a Thursday night affair.

At the moment, two seniors have plopped down into my writing space. I have gathered from carelessly eavesdropping on their conversation (how can I help but not listen) that they are on a blind date. They are trying to find common ground. The man has been married three times and they have both seen “Fahrenheit 911”. Will there be a second date? I want to tell her that three marriages seem excessive, but then again, I never listen to my inner alarms, so who I am to intervene?

The greatest thing is the vinyl easy chairs, which I've claimed ownership over. Before ordering any java, I quickly spread my books, notes and amulets all over the coffee table to ward off other slackers. Wireless is free and plugging in is not a problem. This is very important if you spend the first part of your morning using up your battery power checking your emails and various horoscopes. I usually read about three different astrologers until I find the one that suits my mood. If you're really lucky, a local Indian man who works Glendale Boulevard and walks with a bodyguard will pop in to read five-minute fortunes. For someone who's future is unclear, this is a great perk to have hanging around the office. He's been scary accurate about my past, but I can't seem to get a clear prophecy about tomorrow, this summer or the rest of this year. I've promised to keep our exchange a secret, and since I'm very superstitious, this will be easy. It's definitely a good reason to continue coming back to Kaldi.

Roses are Red, Blue Men Are Blue (and butterfly guts are yellow)

2005-03-21T17:07:00.000-08:00

Witnesses can attest that I can do several things and drive at the same time, but sadly typing is not one of them and since I have been driving up the coast to Santa Rosa and through the desert to Sin City, my random thoughts have taken a back seat.

Although the rains have wreaked damage on several Malibu homes, it has generously spread its power over the farms and fields of Pismo, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Soledad, Gilroy (which you can't mention without the requisite: GARLIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!) and other small towns that make up the historic El Camino Real, now known as the 101 Freeway. Everything was so green and smelled so sweet as I motored up to Hope Sutton's house in Morgan Hill, I wanted to jump out of the car and lie right down in the middle of it all. Beyond Hope's back fence is a gorgeous mound and one is tempted to run up to the very top and spread out under the low growing California Oaks stretching their limbs, as if protecting the crest of the hill. The property is off limits due to the grazing long-horned steer, but the sheer greenness of it all and the solo comical conical shape silhouetted against the sky was glorious and warranted fantasies of random running and rolling.

The rain has made everything new again, including the normally dry, dull and arid Mojave I-15 Freeway where the only respite is “The Mad Greek” until you reach Primm and gratefully, Starbucks. The desert is in full bloom, and in contrast, the hills near Silverwood Lake are stretched and straddled with red and green veins running through them and Big Bear snowy mountains rising out of the mist in the background. Butterflies are swarming, which is beautiful if you’re not doing 85 miles an hour. The unremitting splat of radioactive looking yellow guts was so dreadful to behold, I felt murderous.

So, I entered Vegas with a windshield coated in bright yellow streaks and 260,000 miles on my odometer. I have an idea for a revue and thought a research trip was in order. However, telling someone you're doing "research" seems mighty suspect when you're buying a single ticket to "Showgirls of Magic", a topless number hosted by the San Remo, a smallish casino wedged behind the MGM. The usher hurried to get me into an open chair in the front, but managed to I slip out of his reach and into the obscurity of back row seating. March Madness and spring break had collided on the strip and college students were everywhere. Three boys from Kansas State sat in front of me insistent on finding out what school I attended. At first I was confused, but when I realized they meant “college”, I responded that while flattered, I had already graduated. Best to keep it vague. A tow headed lad politely inquired over his Bud what I was doing later – Hello, Mrs. Robinson! The compliment was much more compelling than the actual show and I was grateful I was able to sneak out during yet another "illusion" where the girl is cut in half, a dove flies out of a scarf and tops miraculously fall off while Kid Rock tunes serve as the soundtrack. I wonder if he knows just how raunchy his “Cowboy” has gotten.

I am lucky to stay with LeeAnn on these trips and her classic 1960’s ranch is lovely to return to after a night on the town. I adore the neighborhood, historical by Vegas standards, everything being built new and developed and subdivided and sold as fast as the stucco dries. The guest room is at the front of the house and as I was lying in bed trying to find sleep, I was reminded of an evening two years ago when I had driven out for LeeAnn's 40th gala birthday party. At the time, I was quasi-engaged* (see definition below) to the townie/speedracer/metrosexual. What? A pattern? You think?

Anyway, there I was, lying in bed remembering the party and how that night I met a Blue Man. I noticed him right away. Blue Men share some commonalities. They are bald. They are in great physical shape. There is usually a bit of blue somewhere around the ears where makeup remover has missed its target. The Blue Man and I eyed each other and then circled the patio like a cats until finally we found ourselves facing each other. For hours, we sat by the pool chain smoking, talking books, music, classic films, existentialism and how we are all connected. We were forehead to forehead in a deep trance like state. I was wearing this fabulous retro dress with a plunging neckline straight down to my sternum. In hindsight, the attraction might have been the free floorshow. Although I had completely forgotten about it in past three hours, I felt I had to tell him about my high school obsession to whom I was quasi-engaged. Even though I could hear this rattling off my tongue, I was beginning to doubt it. The Blue Man looked good. We had lots to say to each other. And you know me; I always have a lot to say. It was in this room that we said our early morning goodbyes, he having forged his way through the juniper hedge and ancient rose bushes to kiss me through the screen that separated us.

Later that week, when confessing my sin to a girlfriend, she rushed past the important details, (like what I was wearing, our spiritual connection, etc), and gasped, "You Met a Blue Man!?!” How was I to know the rarity, the one in a million chance of meeting a Blue Man? A hairless character cast in a non-speaking role, painted with patented latex seemingly from head to toe who wows audience every night with paint drums and Twinkie tricks and, if one of the TV Blue Men, fly around powered by Intel! And I had decided that to return his calls would be unfaithful to my current situation. What a huge mistake that was!

My quasi-engagement with the townie/speedracer/metrosexual ended a few months later when I realized that I couldn’t compete with Laguna Seca. I learned that the Blue Man had found a sexy go-go dancer who worked the Palms Casino. True love had eluded me once again…

"quasi-engaged" means they've asked you to marry them, but haven't ponied up the ring. Lesson: Don’t any answer without ring in hand, especially when a Blue Man is wooing you.

To Live in LA...

2005-03-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

Indeed, I am alive and well in the city of Los Angeles, County Los Angeles, State of California, Country of the United States, the Northern Hemisphere, The Earth, The Universe and the Galaxy. After encouragement from readers, I've decided to chronicle my life as a non-productive member of society PLUS I'm absolutely certain most of you have been dying for a teensy break from the corporate office jobs, the kids' gymboree and your own hectic lives. I've decided it's up to me to provide some entertainment. I'll try to briefly bring you up to date.

When I last left you, I was on my last days in Bali. After being gone for a month, I was ready to come home. After being home for five months, I'm ready to go away again. My last days at Disney were wonderful. My department really sent me out with a bang and I was overwhelmed by everyone's affection as well as the x-rated tribute poster Jay & Tracy created for me. For those of you who saw the "King Arthur" posters, superimposed over Keira Knightley's face was mine complete with an enhanced bust line that literally pops out of that belt costume! The funny thing was that I didn't even notice it until one of my friends pointed it out to me when he saw it displayed in my home. I guess I've always considered myself ample.

December and January brought a new romance in and out of my life with the same gale force winds we were experiencing in Southern California. Since I have a lot of time on my hands, I spent most February trying to find the answers, first by travelling to Vegas to visit LeeAnn and then to Houston, Texas to see Miss Lupe and her husband John. Unfortunately, I was so far gone in my head of heartbreak that just seeing the Palms Casino where the cowboy/roadie/metrosexual got his last tatoo threw me back a few paces, so off to Houston, where I was sure the multitude of cowboys walking around the streets would give my sanity a run for it's money. However, Lupe, being the strong, insightful woman she is, had armed me with "He's Just Not That Into You" earlier in the year and miraculously, I had tossed it into my carry-on. By the time my two hour Denver layover was over, I was cured.

I am happy to report, on the eve of the Ides of March, that I am feeling much better. In fact, I am completely over him and feel that our brief romance (yes, five weeks long!) was right to end. Of course there are times when I miss his tattoos, the sexy piercing in his back, his white cowboy hat, the monster truck and ipod full of metal music, but everything happens for a reason and distractions, no matter how cute they are, are just that. Distracting. Yes, I had reverted to my 22 year old East Village Drama Queen Self, but that's what happens when you don't have b-roll and celebrity egos to fill up your day with.

P.S. Cowboys don't hoof it around idly in Houston. I didn't see a-one.