Tinker, tailor, bridesmaid . . . aieeeeeee!!

Please bear with me if all this is a little disjointed: I'm working from fragmentary information cobbled together from a "documentary" (read: TV sideshow) on TLC called My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

I don't watch bridal shows as a rule, mainly because they bore the piss out of me. (My own wedding was minimal, but lo and behold, we just celebrated 38 years together.) But here is a culture which seems to live for weddings and first communions, the recipients of these rituals so swathed in foamy tulle and caked-on makeup that they are barely recognizable as themselves.

This is all about "gypsy" culture, mainly of Irish descent, living in various parts of Britain in communities that resemble a typical North American trailer park. Strictly speaking, since they aren't Romany (the East European itinerant culture that has existed for centuries), they aren't really gypsies at all. Such a moniker is almost like using the n-word for black people.

They prefer to call themselves "travellers", though I didn't see much travelling going on in these first two hour-long episodes. Mostly I saw little girls in skimpy, trashy outfits gyrating and wagging their butts suggestively, brides so immobilized in grotesque, tacky gowns that they had to be carried, and matter-of-fact descriptions of a culture that oppresses women so completely that no one even thinks of violating their rigid, sexist rules.

I did a bit of digging (but only a bit: I was sent reeling backwards by these bizarre extremes, and several times was nearly convinced it was a TLC-perpetrated parody), and found out that, ye gods, me own Irish ancestors, bless their shabby little souls, might have been lumped in with these people. It seems odd to me that they're sometimes called tinkers, a term used in the most derogatory manner possible. Tinkers were tinsmiths who mended things like pots and pans (back in the day when everything wasn't just chucked out and replaced). They also made various kinds of practical, useful kitchen implements.

How do I know? At my grandma's house, my grandma on my mother's side, there were two blackened old cookie cutters made of ancient tin. One was a pig and the other was a dog, a lean stretched-out dog like a greyhound. I eventually found out from my mother that these had been made by my great-grandfather before the family emigrated to Canada (perhaps to escape the potato famine: I'm still not sure about that). Which means that my great-grandfather, a tinsmith by trade, was probably called a tinker.

It's strange, because my mother never mentioned any sort of prejudice against the family and talked about her grandfather as a good honest working man with a solid trade. Did he have an old wagon with pots hanging off it and banging together, and a "tinker bell" (yes, there really was something called a tinker bell, though I can't find a definition of it anywhere) letting people know that he was coming?

And what's so awful about that, I ask you?

I think in those days, and in these days too, people get lumped together. To say that "gypsies" or travellers or whatever-you-call-them were completely innocent of some of society's charges would be simply inaccurate. Though the first couple of episodes of this alarmingly extreme program were vague about it all, a little digging brought out the fact that many of these travellers are squatters, setting up their "caravan" communities on land that does not belong to them.

Wait a minute, isn't that. . . theft? But we can't say that about gypsies!

I have a few more problems with this program. OK, a lot more. Those hideous nuclear-explosion gowns and the black leather dominatrix outfits commonly worn at receptions are all custom-made and must be extravagantly expensive. So far we've been told that the girls, who marry at around age 16, must stick to housework and raising children. But what do the men do? How do they raise enough money from, well, probably not being lawyers or stockbrokers, to pay for all this superficial, ostentatous, ludicrous-looking shit?

My research on the careers of travellers seems to be a couple of hundred years out of date, stating that traveller cultures usually breed greyhouds or Gypsy Vanner horses, which is pretty hard to do if you're itinerant and don't own any land. I don't see how they can raise those big old draft horses in a trailer park (particularly if it isn't theirs). I'm looking forward to seeing how the show gets around all that (if in fact it does), as it has already decided to be completely sympathetic to these (probable) squatters who are refusing to pay rent, yet spending thousands on these eyesplitting explosions of tulle (some laced with flashing LED lights) that will never be worn again.

Though this is the kind of show you watch between your fingers, it may just shed a little light on a subculture which has seemingly been reviled since time began. I would be fascinated to see a program about real gypsies, the Romany people of Europe, and whether or not they insert their six-year-old daughters into stiff, scratchy gowns that cripple them and leave angry red welts on their bodies.

I don't understand all this superficial display, this flaunting of - what?, and the jaw-dropping bad taste that just keeps escalating until we catch sight of the mother of the bride, so caked with makeup that her face is brown, wearing elbow-length black leather lace-up armbands to her daughter's great moment: her bizarre funhouse-mirror Disney-princess moment that signals the end of girlhood and the beginning of a lifetime of oppression and servitude.

(Just had one of those creepy moments. Real creepy. I never wondered about the pig cookie cutter; the drunk lolling in the gutter with a pig for a companion was an awful Irish stereotype. But the greyhound? I can't imagine a stranger subject for a cookie cutter, with all those long slim legs breaking off. Didn't Wikipedia mention the travellers raising greyhounds? Is there something I'm missing here?)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Grandma's little bunheads

Erica and Lauren (who don't usually wear a pound of mascara) had their triumphant debut as ballerinas in today's matinee performance of Get Up and Dance! Three more to go. . . on with the show!

My daughter interviews my granddaughter on CTV News

CTV British Columbia - Shannon Paterson with the Canucks superfans - CTV News

Flash! Best Vintage Ad Ever!!

I think you can still get these.

Ad-ison Avenue: now and then

http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/

Do not adjust your set! If you enter this site, you may never get out again. ("We control the horizontal. We control the verical." Oops, wrong program.)

This may be the best internet site I have ever encountered: more than 100,000 print ads and posters from the 1840s to the present day, culled and collected from God knows where and lovingly scanned for public consumption. You even get to choose from two different sizes.

These ads cover food, fashion, medicine, pets, even space-age inventions like the computer, which in the 1940s filled a room. Each ad is a sociological treatise in capsule form. Some are extravagantly beautiful, some stylish, some stark. Obsolete products like "brain salt" mystify, and one ad from the 1890s recommends tapeworms to cure a weight problem. A baby glugs from a 7Up bottle, beer is recommended for nursing Moms (hey, even I remember that one - I got a lot of mileage out of it), and smoking is something that soothes the throat, eases asthma and keeps a girl slim.

I may never get out of here, though I am beginning to think I should stop saving images and just leave them where they belong. This site is simple and extremely easy to use, without any of the annoying bells and whistles and things popping up and squirming around in the corners that drive me mad. There is no long wait for downloading: in fact, no waiting at all!

It's a time machine, one that I will jump back into (like the Time Tunnel!) over and over again. Try it. It's a trip.

Kirstie Alley & Maksim Chmerkovskiy - Cha Cha - Finale

Kir-STIE! Kir-STIE! Kir-STIE!

Sea Monkeys

Stranger than truth?

Mystery Horse

It looks like I'm not quite finished with my comic book ad obsession. I've found so many of these on so many sites, I feel glutted and overwhelmed.

I'll be using a few of them, of course, once I figure out which ones are my favorites (most bizarre, most unlikely, most tasteless, most unrealistic, and even most aesthetically pleasing: some of these are damn beautiful!). For now, I played around with the Mystery Horse, free inside every box of Wheat Honies.

I remember cereal box prizes. Oh yes, I do. In fact, I still have cornflake dust up to my elbow. I never waited until we used up all the cereal. Oh no. Did anyone, except some idiot with time to waste? I rummaged around with my grubby little paw until I got to the very bottom of the box, then grabbed the little red fire truck ("made of sturdy plastic!") or the submarine that you filled with baking soda so it would perform miracles in the bathtub.

The Mystery Horse is not some poor unfortunate beast who was cut off at the knees. He was one of those little walking toys with a string and a weight. You sat him on the table with the weight just over the edge, and as it slowly moved towards the floor the creature would "walk". I remember a yellow walking camel that came in the Chee-tohs bag, highly prized. (How I wish I had kept some of this stuff!).

When I tinker around with these images, which is probably highly illegal (but so were all those scans I found on the comic book sites), strange things happen. Colors spring out at me that aren't really there. This time, when I reversed the colors into a negative, it created an eerie 3D effect that I've never seen before.

I want a Mystery Horse. I want a horse that walks along on its knees, a horse made of sturdy plastic. I want to go back and back, to that time before I made any really serious mistakes. I want to be a child again, but this time happy, and aware it'll all go away so lightning-fast that I'd better enjoy it with all my might.

Ahnie: even then he liked to pick up women

Mail Order Monkey

This story has been repeated so many times on so many sites, I think it's in the public domain by now. It fascinates me because I always wondered if anyone actually got one of those monkeys you could supposedly "win" from comic book ads (after selling hundreds of dollars' worth of merchandise). The chihuahua in the teacup was dicey enough, but this monkey - ummm, primates aren't known to be particularly friendly (look at humans) unless bribed, and these little buggers didn't come pre-trained. The following account is a little hair-raising. I wish there were more of a denouement, i.e., what happened to the monkey, not to mention that poor guy, after the 28 stitches?

A firsthand account follows from a guy who ordered one of those monkeys from an ad in the back of a comic book. To keep his parents from finding out, he had it shipped to a friend's house...

It came in this little cardboard box. I mean, I’m saying small. It was probably the size of a shoebox, except it was higher. It had a little chicken wire screen window in it. There was a cut out. All you could see if you looked in there was his face. I brought it home, and I actually snuck it into the basement of the house.

No instructions [were included]. He had this waist belt on, a collar, if you will, on his waist, with an unattached leash inside the box. So I opened the box up inside the cage, the monkey jumped out, I withdrew the box and found the leash. I have no idea where it came from; I assumed it came from Florida. I figured, well, it’s probably near dehydration, so I opened up the cage to put some water in it. It leapt out of the cage when I opened it up the second time! I mean, it was eyeing the pipes that I was unaware of. As soon as I opened the cage, it leapt up and grabbed onto the plumbing up on the ceiling and started using them like monkey bars, and he was just shooting along in the basement, chirping pretty loud. It was heading towards the finished side of the basement, where there was a drop ceiling, and if it got into those channels, I never would have got it. It would have been days to get this thing out of there.

I grabbed it by its tail, and it came down on, starting literally up by my shoulder, like a drill press it landed on my arm, and every bite was breaking flesh. It was literally like an unsewing machine. It was literally unsewing my arm coming down, and I was pouring blood. I grabbed it by its neck with both my wrists, threw it back in the cage. It’s screaming like a scalded cat. I’m pouring blood. My friend’s laughing uncontrollably, and my father finally comes in the basement door and goes, ‘Jeffery! What are you doing to that rabbit?’ And I go, ‘It’s not a rabbit, it’s a monkey, and it just bit the hell out of me.’ ‘A monkey? Bring it up here!’ I’m pouring, I wrapped a t-shirt around my arm to stave off the bleeding, carried the cage upstairs, and I don’t know why I bothered sneaking it in, because they fell in love with it, and it was like, there was no problem at all. They took me to the emergency room and I got 28 stitches on my arm.

Angry beaver roams through N.W.T. town - North - CBC News

A large, agitated beaver attracted a crowd in Fort Smith, N.W.T., this week when it meandered through town and got hissy with a German shepherd.

The beaver was spotted Monday evening wandering around a residential neighbourhood, along a busy street, through a graveyard and golf course, all the while escorted by an N.W.T. Environment and Natural Resources officer.

Mike Keizer, a longtime resident in the town of 2,400 near the N.W.T.-Alberta border, said he hopped on his bicycle as soon as he heard there was a beaver on the loose.

"It looked huge. I always thought beavers would be smaller," Keizer told CBC News on Thursday.

"All the beavers I've ever seen have been in water, so you only ever see pieces of them; like, you don't get to see the whole beaver."

Another Fort Smith resident, Jason Mercredi, shot video footage of the beaver moving in a ditch and on a sidewalk along McDougal Street.

"There's a beaver holding up [the] main street," Mercredi says in the video, before asking his uncle if the animal would attack.

"He's pissed," Mercredi remarked.

Got agitated, flustered
The wayward animal, which Keizer estimated was the size of a dog, zigzagged across people's lawns and around their homes.

"Every time it got agitated or flustered, it would bang its tail on the ground. I mean, I was amazed at how fast it moved when it was agitated," he recalled.

Keizer said the beaver became especially agitated when it came nose-to-nose with somebody's German shepherd, with just a chain-link fence separating the two animals.

"It never backed down once. It grabbed the fence, it was hissing, and the dog was barking," Keizer said.

"When the ENR officer went to get it turned [around] so he'd get it away from town, he had a plywood sheet in front of him, and it rushed the sheet."

Keizer said he rode his bike ahead of the beaver, knocking on residents' doors and warning them to bring their dogs indoors "because there's a wild beaver walking through town, heading your way."

"While I was there, all kinds of people were driving up in their trucks and their cars and taking pictures," he said.

The beaver wandered about another kilometre or two before it headed towards the Slave River rapids and disappeared.

Keizer said in his 17 years living in Fort Smith, he has never seen a beaver — never mind a beaver so large — come into town.

Angry beaver roams through N.W.T. town - North - CBC News

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Memories

Alive

I've been on a bit of a Stephen Sondheim kick lately, maybe because of his longtime connection with Anthony Perkins, one of my perennial preoccupations/happy obsessions. These two were similar in that they were both intricate, impossible, brilliant, and (in spite of their vast creative contribution) essentially unknowable.

Though Perkins was prematurely snatched at 60, Sondheim is still with us at 80-some. One of his many legendary shows was Company (1970), in which T. P. almost played Bobby, the still point at the centre of a comedy of couples. When it comes to relationships and love, Bobby won't commit, but committed people (or people who should be committed) swirl all around him.

Somehow Tony Perkins wasn't available. Another commitment, you see. Or he didn't really need to "play" Bobby; he was too busy being him.

I tried to find a really good version of an incredible song, Being Alive, Bobby's final soliloquy/aria/heartsong. I went through Bernadette Peters, whom I've always loved; Patty LuPone; Barbra Streisand; even Julie Andrews. Nada, naynay, nonenonenone, can't get into it and am almost at the point of giving up.

Then I stumbled on. . . this.

It's Dean Jones, yes, that Dean Jones from the Love Bug series and innumerable other Disney flicks. I didn't even know he could sing. It's a recording session, probably the original cast recording judging by the fact that Sondheim looks like a middle-aged juvenile delinquent. But what Jones does here is beyond singing. He opens his mouth, his eyes soft with a frightened vulnerability, and releases this hymn, this almost unbearable paean to the aching neccessity of love.

Jesus! He can't just sing: he can fly. Where has he been all my life? I don't know if I've ever heard a song turned inside-out like this. Along with flat-out artistry, he possesses a soaring technical brilliance, the ability to sustain a phrase in a clean, steady arc for an impossibly long time. He builds and builds the drama as the orchestra crescendos and begins to thunder at the end. . .and when it's over and he stands there with a tense, "was that any good?" look clearly visible on his face, there's an eerie silence in the studio. Sondheim mumbles something about it being adequate. Then, almost like at the end of Laugh-in, sparse applause, the sound of a few hands clapping.

When I hear something this good, which is never, I want to do something really extreme, like throw all my manuscripts on a bonfire, committ suttee or whatever it is (but my husband would have to do it first, damn it). When I hear something this exalted, I want to just chuck my ambitions and go take a long walk in the park (ten years ought to do it). But at the same time, it goads me to be better than I know how to be.

This song is about someone who can't fully live until he learns to open himself wide to the splendors and catastrophes of love. I wonder why I have such a visceral response to it. Love is at the centre of my life, and in fact, I know it is my central purpose. Of this I have no doubt. But what does it mean, what does it really mean to love? Do we ever get it right?

Grog Grows Own Tail

Can't say just what started this, but maybe it was my daughter-in-law saying, "By the way, I sent away for the Sea Monkeys."

"The. . . the. . . (gulp)". . . (I was already being dragged into the past, and all those summers at the cottage with the Jimmy Olsen Annual).

"Oh yeah, but there's only one problem with them. They only come with a year's supply of food. So what are you supposed to feed them after that? Rubber boots?"

So you could still get them. It was hard to believe, in this age of cynicism and truth in advertising, but there it was. And kids still wanted them. My own grandkids wanted them. It was all a little hard to absorb.

The sea monkeys, along with so many things we yearned for in those old comic book ads, were the stuff of legend. We never actually sent away for them or for anything else, though I considered the 100 Dolls for $1 (not having any idea what they meant by "Lilliputian cuteness": would 9-year-old girls be likely to read Jonathan Swift?). It all had to do with American-ness, the American dollar looking nothing like the Canadian dollar. We just knew it was Different. You had to send actual dollars, because no one had heard of a money order in those days, plus all these things only cost about a buck.

Anyway, back to the sea monkeys: it was a very long time before I actually saw any, and I don't recall whose house I was in. There was a small plastic tank full of cloudy, smelly, slimy water, with little multi-legged things squirming around in it. Doing tricks, I suppose. No sign of a castle or royal sceptres.

The rest of the story wasn't filled in until about 10 years ago, when my husband and I made a trip to Utah and saw millions of brine shrimp, the only creatures who can withstand the thick saline waters of the Great Salt Lake.

Oh, OK then (choke), but there was still the Onion Gum ("Tastes like. . . like. . . ONIONS! It's too funny!" This was one of our favorites. I devoted a whole post to this tiny ad, riffing on it with all sorts of different photographic/photoshop effects.) And there were the hundreds of strong man ads with pictures of nearly-nude, wildly overdeveloped men flexing every muscle at once. These seemed to interest my brother Arthur, though I have come to wonder about it since.

Comic book ads were all tied in with summers at Bondi, a resort in Muskoka that qualifies as a little bit of heaven on earth. (The fact that Bondi is still there, preserved by my friend Nancy and her brother Brian, is even more of a marvel, and somehow gives me hope). For two weeks we were absolutely free. And of course we didn't fully appreciate it: we rampaged through that time like wild horses, and before we knew it we came to that miserable moment when we began to count the days we had left.

I wonder to this day how many live chihuahuas were delivered to kids willing to sell photo-finishing door to door, or unload tubes of salve. Or that poor monkey: how would it survive, and wouldn't it be so full of fear that it would bite everyone? Attitudes towards animals were different then (and the word chihuahua wasn't even used: but for God's sake, if we were supposed to understand lilliputian, what was so hard about chihuahua??). They were freight to be shipped. I wonder how many kids just didn't tell their parents.

I used to wonder about Grog, until I saw a Hawaiian ti plant at some sort of horticultural display. You just stuck it in the ground, and, voila! a shade tree in minutes. Whether Grog kept producing another tail, and another and another and another, was anyone's guess. But what can you expect for a buck?

Seeing these again gives me that queer feeling of deeply-buried deja vu. Many of the ads have been so enhanced that they look a thousand times more vibrant than the original grainy, 2" square things, usually plastered together on a great exuberant wall of ads. (These make great wallpaper, by the way.) And I even solved a few mysteries. For example, I found out exactly what you got if you sent away for the 100 dolls.

These looked like very chintzy Monopoly tokens, all of them made of pink plastic. There were maybe 30 different designs, but the thing is, they were 2" high and about a billionth of an inch thick, standing up on bases like those farm animals I used to have. I saw a collection of them on eBay, where they are now worth a lot of money as collectibles (though only if the 100-piece set is intact: people do count them).

I don't know, I get the strangest feeling seeing these. Paradise Lost, then found again. Not having, of course, and not just looking, but coveting. We wanted these things, we ached for them as only a child can ache, a child with no money and no power and no parental approval. I know a buck meant a lot more then, but why go to so much effort for such a lousy return? And wouldn't most people want their money back?

I don't look at comics now, they're all different, though I guess you can snoop around and find vintage ones if you're willing to pay top dollar (and I'm not). We don't put 15 cents into an envelope to get Onion Gum, not when there's PayPal and the like. I don't save Kellogg's box tops and send away for little plastic submarines that you fill with baking soda. It's a whole different game.

Tastes like. . . like. . .

Why Archie and Jimmy Olsen are the same person

Are you gay or bipolar?

Actual conversation, recently overheard at a party.

(Her) So they're saying, you know, he's (blblblb)

(Him) He's bi-whut?

You know. Bipolar. That's where -

Yeah, I know what it is, baby.

So he says he's like, on this stuff that's like, um I guess it's like lithium, and I'm like

What sort of shit is that?

You know, it's like when you have mood swings?

Shit.

And you take this and it like, levels them out?

Bipolar. That's all I ever hear about. All of a sudden everybody's bipolar.

Like, I don't think so? Like, he's never been what you'd call normal.

If I thought my son was bipolar, you know what I'd do?

(seductively) Whuu-uut?

I'd take him out back and shoot him.

You would?

Put him out of his misery. Hell, I'd do it for my goddamn dogs.

So, you'd like. . . I mean, kill him if he was like. . .

Like I said, put him out of his misery. I'd rather he be dead than fucking crazy.

What if he was, you know?

(mockingly, but she doesn't get it) Whuuu-uuut?

You know, gay.

Jesus.

What would you do?

Well. (Thinks, with difficulty). I don't know, I guess if he has a job -

And a haircut? (giggles)

If he was, you know, holding it together. If he kept on going to church.

Does your son go to church?

What the hell are you talking about?

I mean, do you know anybody like that.

Of course not. But I mean a person can change.

They can change if they're bipolar?

Shit no. I just told you I'd shoot him in the head and it would be the best thing for him.

But they can change if they're you know. . .(coyly) gay?

I saw this thing on TV. Gospel camp, a bunch of ex-gays. Sure, a person can if they want to.

Can they?

Hey, listen. If you were in love with your boss, would you just come up to him and say. . .

Doubt it (giggles).

So you'd keep it to yourself.

So it's OK to be gay if you keep it to yourself.

That's what I'm sayin'. It's a decision, you just don't act on it.

So if you're like, heterosexual, you can just decide not to act on it.

I guess maybe. . . I don't know, that's different. But I guess so.

So being gay is OK so long as you don't act on it.

If you don't make a big deal out of it. Just keep it to yourself.

But if you're bipolar -

I told you, I'd blow his brains out.

What if he like learned to, like, keep it together? Kept on going to church.

I see where you're going. No thanks, dear, it's a whole 'nother issue.

I don't believe you.

I told you already. I'd do it out of love. I'd do it for one of my dogs, and I'd do it for my son.

But is it OK if you, like, keep it to yourself?

Forget it, darlin'. Mental illness is the end of the line.

One more time. . . one more time

Johnny Adams - There Is Always One More Time

Bukowski!

So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Outrunning the black dogs

Right. This is one of those mornings that I wish I could make disappear. The weather around here has been putrid, unrelentingly cold and wet and grey, dank, with dampness seeping in everywhere. My beautiful new Mother's Day hanging baskets of flowers are wilting and turning slimy and brown. I don't want to go out.

I had something happen to me today, and I guess I shouldn't even been surprised, but it has lit the fuse of memory of every other time I have been stepped on as a writer. I know I shouldn't feel that way, and somehow that just makes it worse. I should be cool and detached and never take offense. But I've never been any good at that.

Sometimes I think that writers (like me, I mean, not successful ones) have to roll around showing their pink bellies to people who then slash at them with a razor blade. Or something like that. And I'm supposed to be fine with it.

I'm not fine with it. I hurt so bad it might just ruin this whole week, so I want to throw my mind into a topic I've been turning over for quite a long time. (It seems the only anodyne to the agony of being a writer is more writing.)

Several years ago, before I was run out of town by some people with very sharp teeth, I wrote a blog for Open Salon. I had been trying to read Gone with the Wind for about the third time, and was once more getting stuck on black stereotypes that sometimes made me feel literally nauseated.

I started doing an exploration of such things, and what popped out of the Google images was a riot of pulsating energy and saturated color: the works of dozens and maybe even hundreds of African- American artists, many of them taking the phenomenon of the black stereotype and turning it on its ear.

Drawing on ceramic salt-and-pepper sets of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, old ads with grinning black children eating watermelon, and (in a much darker exploration) the old slave posters that equated selling a human being with "needles, pins, ribbons &c. &c.", these artists recombined the images into a potent mixture of parody and protest, shoving it under our noses in the most provocative way possible.

Betye Saar created Aunt Jemima's Revenge, seen above, in which the comfy and familiar Mammy-figure on the pancake-mix box wields a shotgun. There were so many others I had not heard of: Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, Mark Steven Greenfield. There was a unique creative energy here, subversive, riotous and "in your face".

One of the purposes of art, of course, is to disturb and unsettle. Back a few years ago when I did my GWTW exploration, I encountered paintings that were probably the most extreme of any of them: deeply saturated colors so vibrant they could trigger a migraine, with figures that were both fierce and embarrassing.

Embarrassing only because of their Mammy-ness, their Little Black Sambo-ness, their resemblance to those Golliwog dolls that people like to buy at craft fairs and collect. They were salt-and-pepper shakers come to life.

The artist was a man, and there was a web site, and I didn't save the link because I was sure I could find it again. Art this potent had to have a following.Well, guess what.
I can't find it. Can't even find his name.

I've been looking for days now, beating the bushes. I've found sites that list literally hundreds of African-American artists in every genre. My artist might be in there, but I just don't have time to go through all of them.

In some cases, I found long, stuffy, scholarly articles that filled the entire screen with flyspeck print, and no illustrations. Fooey. Even if he's in there, he's buried.

So all the little girls in neon gingham, the little boys with spikily nappy hair, and all those other down-on-the-old-plantation characters that he has transformed into a strange kind of protest, is lost to me, seemingly forever.

What happened? How can you suck back something that's been on the 'net for years? You can't. So I don't know what's going on. If I just had a name. I'd have something to go on.

So I could forget this punch in the stomach. Maybe.

Woof, woof, cha-cha-cha

Yeah, but the bike has training wheels!

Kirstie Alley: in it to win it

Get one thing straight, people. I never watch Dancing with the Stars. It's just too cheesy and spangly and phony. OK, I did watch Kate Gosselin until she was eliminated, but that was that.

I don't quite know how I got hooked in this time, but I am ashamed to admit that, like a lot of people, I began to follow Kirstie Alley because I was surprised that she'd even try a thing like this. I think a lot of people tuned in to see her fail.

The thing about Kirstie is that she rampages through life with a lusty recklessness that kind of reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor. She's up, she's down; she's a Vulcan in Wrath of Khan, she's a wisecracking comedienne on Cheers; she's fat, she's thin, she's on Oprah showing off her body in a bikini, then, shit, she's fat again!

Because of her yo-yoing weight, women view her with a mixture of compassion and scorn. For God's sake, an attractive woman like that - a woman who used to look downright sultry, with smoky eyes and a husky, almost Kathleen Turner-esque voice - how could she ruin it all with nachos and beer? On top of that, she made a desperate grab at restoring her career by starring in a "reality" show called Fat Actress. It was a case of "look at me, I'm pathetic," and I had to look away.

But this is a different Kirstie, feisty, energetic, and determined to win. In a marriage of opposites, she has been paired with Maksim Chmerkovskiy, a man who has that arrogant indifference (combined with a prowling panther's body) that attracts women like kamakaze flies. The two of them either hit it off, or hit each other, I'm not sure which.

Her first dance was dynamite and wowed the judges, who were probably feeling sorry for her right out of the gate. I think it was a cha-cha, the kind of dance where your feet can't be half an inch out of place. She was rather heavy but looking sultry again, and her joy in performing was evident.

There followed a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs which somehow reflected the course of Kirstie's life: Max's leg collapsed under him and both of them tumbled to the floor. This was a fault in choreography, as far as I am concerned - a 200-lb. woman should not throw her whole weight on a 150-pound man's knee. But it was painful to see the "fat girl" fall, and I am sure many people sneered.

And just when you thought she had (literally) picked herself up again, there she was sitting on the floor frantically fiddling with her shoe. It had partly come off and she was trying to get the strap back on. It was an awkward moment, but somehow they graced through it.

After fast-forwarding innumerable boring routines by I-don't-care-who (including that guy who used to be the Karate Kid, who seems to be cleaning the floor with his feet), my admiration for the Big K just grows. We're coming up to the finals next week, and Kirstie's still in! It's obviously gruelling work for a 60-year-old of substantial build. The rehearsal scenes look painful: she always seems to be falling down. She looks blowsy and dishevelled, and you wonder how in the world she'll ever make it.

But every week it's the same: she somehow pulls herself together and, tossing back that caramel mane, struts out onto the dance floor with her Ukrainian (or whatever-he-is) paramour. She sells the dance through sheer acting talent and a kind of voluptuous joie de vivre. When she and Maks or Max or whatever-he's-called did their Argentine tango, he showed off her considerable weight loss by lifting her gracefully and effortlessly off the floor.

Kirstie Alley is more than twice the age of most of the other dancers and at least 50 pounds heavier, though every week more of it seems to melt away. In reality, she's rehearsing and rehearsing (and cursing) it off. She's in it to win it. It's not likely, but she'll give the others (and who cares what their names are anyway? That guy with the Chiclet teeth, that blonde, or those blondes - hey, are they really the same person?) a good run for their money.

Kirstie Alley is back, and we're glad to see her center-stage where she belongs. Cheers.

MR. ED - intro en español

Ola, Wil-burrrrr!

I Remember

There's a story behind this song. I posted the lyrics yesterday because I think they're stunning: Stephen Sondheim mixes cliches with simple yet startlingly original images ("and ice like vinyl on the streets, cold as silver, white as sheets/Rain like strings, and changing things/Like leaves.")

This wasn't written for one of his legendary musicals, but for a quirky little TV special from the mid-'60s called Evening Primrose. A disillusioned poet (played by that disillusioned poet of Hollywood, Anthony Perkins) breaks into a department store at night, hoping to find shelter from a cruel and uncaring world, and encounters a whole subculture living there (kind of a prequel to that cheesy '80s fantasy/drama Beauty and the Beast, which I used to slavishly watch every Friday night while putting away copious quantities of fizzy peach cider).

Anyway, since no one taped things in those days (it was deemed too expensive, which is why the networks erased most of Ernie Kovacs' programs and taped quiz shows over them), this 50-minute musical was long lost except to memory. But sometimes a kinescope (a crude sort of tape taken from the TV monitor) remained, and not long ago someone unearthed a "pristine" copy from a vault somewhere and reissued it on DVD. It's on its way to me from Amazon, and I'll be reviewing it in agonizing detail when it comes.

The reason I'll bother is that the song I Remember, now a classic, was written for this show. Unfortunately, Charmion Carr, fresh from her triumph as the eldest Von Trapp daughter in The Sound of Music, played the inevitable romantic interest, just so Tony Perkins could have his usual awkward, ambivalent love scenes with her.

Unfortunately, and in spite of TSOM, Carr couldn't sing. So she basically massacred this lovely, haunting song, this song which makes me cry every time even though I always swear I won't. When I hear it, it makes me wish Anthony Perkins had sung it: with his sweet lyric tenor and great care with lyrics, he would have given it its due. (And I think he knew what it was all about.)

Since recording artist were quick to issue covers for this gem (kind of like that hymn to dysfunctional relationships, Send in the Clowns), I encountered a few different versions on YouTube, but I remembered one from a CD called Cleo Sings Sondheim that never failed to stir me.

This video has its limitations. Every Cleo Laine video I've seen has silly special effects, and this one is no exception. Losing my Mind has the following choreography:

"The sun comes up, I think about you." (Cue the sun streaming in the window.)
"The coffee cup, I think about you." (Cleo sips from a Starbuck's cup.)
And so on, and so on (giving little "gee, what shall I do" headshakes that almost destroy the song's indescribable yearning). All that's missing is the Swiffer duster to illustrate "all afternoon, doing every little chore".

I Remember is almost as inane. When the lyrics mention snow, little bits of styrofoam begin to sift down on her. When it's "leaves", pieces of paper blow into a doorway. It's just too sad.

But the performance: no one else captures the delicacy and pathos of this song, especially those last lines, "I remember days, or at least I try. But as years go by, they're a sort of haze/And the bluest ink isn't really sky. And at times I think/I would gladly die/for a day of sky."

Close your eyes, and sink into it.

By Sondheim

I remember sky --
It was blue as ink.
Or at least I think
I remember sky
I remember snow --
Soft as feathers
Sharp as thumbtacks
Coming down like lint
And it made you squint
When the wind would blow
And ice, like vinyl on the streets,
Cold as silver, white as sheets,
Rain like strings
And changing things
Like leaves.
I remember leaves --
Green as spearmint, crisp as paper
I remember trees --
Bare as coat racks
Spread like broken umbrellas.
And parks and bridges, ponds and zoos,
Ruddy faces, muddy shoes.
Light and noise
And bees and boys
And days.
I remember days --
Or at least, I try.
But as years go by
They're a sort of haze.
And the bluest ink
Isn't really sky.
And at times, I think
I would gladly die
For a day
Of sky.

The man in the arena

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

I've long admired these words, even though they come from Teddy Roosevelt, not exactly an admirable figure in my books. But he's on to something here.

I don't know how many times I've met people who have told me, "I'd like to be a writer," or at least "I'd like to write". I've even met with people a few times, usually steered to me by someone else (we'll never know why) who want to know how to get started.

Usually I ask them, "What sort of writing are you interested in?" Nine times out of ten, they give me a blank look. They haven't stopped to think. Either that, or they push a mass of paper toward me, fully expecting that I will hand it directly to an editor at Random House and say, "Publish this. It's brilliant."

It doesn't occur to them we're all competing for the same few glittering prizes. Competitors should respect one another, but not score goals on their own net.

Attitudes toward my craft are funny. People are uncomfortable with it. One guy stood at a booth I was person-ing for a writer's group at Word on the Street in Vancouver and talked for fifteen minutes about how his "sister" was interested in writing, and his "sister" wanted some pamphlets, and his "sister" was. . .Finally I eyeballed him and said, "Your sister?" "Well. Uh. Yes, no, I mean. It's really me." I guess this is worse than admitting you have a bladder control problem.

Maybe after talking to me they walk away dejected, I don't know. But I want to try to warn them for their own protection. In general, the attitude towards writers/writing is very strange. It's something only a bloody fool would try to do for money.

It's all conjured out of the page in some sort of arcane way. It's magic, opaque, obscure. This is why it is so damned uncomfortable for me to answer the simple, common question "what do you do?" I have had a wide variety of responses to saying "I'm a writer" (and thus breaking some sort of mysterious taboo that no one ever told me about). These are actual quotes:

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" (with the inflection rising, then falling.

"You're brave."

"Yeah, right."

(doubtfully) "Oh?"

Or confused silence, a look of misunderstanding or even slight aversion, as if you've just said, "I have psoriasis on my buttocks".

If I talk about my work at a gathering where other people are talking about nursing or teaching or tending bar, after a while people get that glazed-over look you see when someone is being extremely rude. Unless you're Stephen King or the 4 other writers who've really made it, writing isn't work, not proper work at all. It's not quite a hobby either, in fact we're not sure just what it is, but one thing it isn't is something you discuss in public.

I can't blame sane people for shying away from this field. Most aspiring writers aren't willing to go through what I have for the extremely modest level of success I've attained (and even that is debatable, if measured solely in book sales).

Oh, I guess my attitude might be a little skewed. Someone said to me recently, "Why is it, Margaret, that every time you accomplish anything you immediately raise the bar?" Because I can? Or because I think I must?

Perhaps it's because I aspire to be that "man in the arena", the one who actually does the work, whether anyone else really understands it or not. Will they ever "get it"? Will I ever chuck this thankless game forever?

The answer to both questions is the same.