The View from Maine | November, 2022

Reposted from Atticus Review

After two years of research and failed attempts, I was lucky enough to close escrow on a drafty circa-1910 two story fixer-upper in a small town in rural Maine a week before what became the pandemic-induced lockdown of March 2020.

My purpose was to establish a cozy, affordable summer writing retreat from my ESOL teaching position in Florida, returning to my New England roots whenever I could. Fate had other plans. Within the year, my school in St. Petersburg had shut down for good and I found myself essentially unemployed and propelled into a new life a bit sooner than I had expected. I found a part-time job at minimum wage, but life here is becoming more expensive (I am now a person who pays attention to the price of heating oil). And, since there is nothing to do at night and nowhere to go, and I don’t own a television, I have absolutely no excuses not to be productive.

When most people think of Maine, they think of lobster rolls and lighthouses. I think of E.B. White, who in midlife traded Manhattan for a life in Maine and whose writing continued to be fertilized by both environments. If you don’t already own it, please purchase a  slender volume called The Elements of Style, 3rd Edition. (You can find used copies online for pennies.) To write clear and graceful sentences and paragraphs, it’s pretty much all you will ever need.

If you want to make a deep dive into the prose of E.B. White, it’s easy to find used copies of his iconic essays for Harper’s, One Man’s Meat, or Writings from The New Yorker, 1925-1976. Every word of these pieces is perfect, including the periods and the apostrophes. (To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s infamous interview in which she asserted every word spoken by Lillian Hellman was a lie, including “and” and “the.”) But back to White’s pithy New Yorker pieces which I once used as teaching examples in an ESOL class populated mainly by the very educated wives of Japanese diplomats and businessmen. White’s writing is a perfect example of  using specific, telling details to growing effect. His secret ingredients: humility, curiosity, humor, empathy. And mostly, paying attention.

Walking to Work, 2/13/37

From our home in the cinder belt to the 43rd Street pent-up house where we work is a distance of some nine blocks- in a southwesterly direction. It has sometimes occurred to us that we take an unconscionably long time walking it, the time ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours and a half. Three-quarters of an hour is about par. This morning, arriving at work at eleven-thirty, after being on the road for more than an hour, we felt that perhaps we should reconstruct the journey to see what the hell went on when we were supposed to be covering ground. There were dim memories of many uninspired shop windows, including an imaginary decision involving a pair of madras pajamas, as between the gray with the narrow stripes and the deep blue…..(ellipsis added)

There was the pause in front of the art shop’s nude-of-the-day, in company with the gray little group of men (art lovers all), each of us trying to look as if we were interested in gum erasers and T squares. There was the slowing of pace in front of Charles & Ernest’s, to see who was getting his hair cut today. There was the pastry shop, with its fascinating handling of yet undigested material. There was Abercrombie’s, effeteness blended with woodcraft; the side trip into the bookshop to examine new titles; the side trip to Radio City to see how the ice looked; the pause while two cats stared each other down in a parking lot. (And incidentally, why will men stop and watch cats carrying on and women never? Is it because a tom is an unmistakable rake?)

Our unreconstructed journey was not encouraging. The wonder is we arrived at all.

E.B. White, from Writings from the New Yorker, 1925-1976

I don’t know about you, but reading this makes me smile, lowers my heart rate and in general makes the world and the people in a bit more bearable.

This kind of lollygagging, this mindful idleness that refreshes and redirects, is what Jenny Odell writes about in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. If you pick one book to read this month, pick this one. Perhaps it’s the reinforcement you need to get back to basics and do the work you love, in the way that feels right to you.

There are so many writers  of clean, crisp prose I want to inspire you to read: Muriel Spark (The Girls of Slender Means), Paula Fox, with her deep, unshowy empathy (especially The Coldest Winter) or Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women). I’m just expressing preferences here, not passing judgments. Critics such as John Leonard, Anatole Broyard and Randall Jarrell taught me so much in their passionate and generous celebrations of writing they loved and their unabashed acknowledgment of what moved them personally (albeit backed up by their sharp critical insights and wide-ranging and enthusiastic reading habits).

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When in Maine, read Mainers, I told myself, and the isolation of the pandemic was made for the task. I went on a rampage those first few cold months, self-isolating and making crude masks out of cotton socks by watching YouTube videos. I tore through the brutal but brilliant memoir-cum–environmental exposé Mill Town (Kerri Arsenault), the evocative celebration of family in When We Were the Kennedys (Monica Wood), the letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay and, of course, the fiction of Elizabeth Strout. I’d already read Olive Kittridge and Olive Again, but I went all the way back to her first, Amy and Isabelle. (It’s a knockout.)  I admit, I aspire to be a bit of a “completist”— which led me to acquiring a copy of the ‘80’s cult novel by Walter Tevis on which The Queen’s Gambit  Netflix series (a juicy pandemic binge) was based. The novel is even heavier with chess strategy than the series, and I doubt if it would find a publisher today.

But Strout, again: I finished her latest, Lucy By the Sea, all in a gulp, ignoring every daily task that could be postponed, rewarding myself with a few pages as often as I could. What’s the source of this magic spell that can wrap itself around us for days? Can it be broken down and analyzed?  How does a writer use words on a page to create what her uniformly dazzled critics call “ruthless intimacy” and “vibrating silences” ? What is “style” in fiction? And why, when I picked up Strout’s Amy and Isabelle again to glance at its opening pages for a moment did I sit down with it for an hour, unable to stop reading? Figuring out how fiction writers ensnare and bewitch us is a mystery I’m never going to tire of trying to solve. Assuming the basics of clarity, grammar, etc. I think it comes down to firm conviction on the part of the author: this is a story I believe in, that you need to read. There’s no phoning it in.

Some well-known writers have been known to say they don’t read the work of others (for fear of unconscious imitation) while they are immersed in creating their own novels. Can writers afford to be so out of touch? Does it matter? Does dipping into other genres keep the juices flowing without blurring boundaries? I’d love to hear what other writers think about this. I oscillate wildly between the very newest (Night of the Living Rez, The Wrong End of the Telescope,) and various neglected (by me) classics. I’m currently reading a few pages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch every night, determined to catch up with this tirelessly referenced tome and get it off my punch list. My War & Peace project was richly rewarding: ten pages every night until finished, ten years ago. Essential reading, so timely. And now I wonder: who will write War & War?

Previously I had thought Middlemarch to be the name of some ghastly Victorian villain, but no, it’s the name of a very ordinary small town in rural England, and the goings-on are remarkably similar to what I am seeing every day in my little corner of west-central Maine—the petty social jousting, the gossip, the jockeying for power and the gentle, relentless backstabbing.

So, it’s full circle back to Maine and the world in a blade of grass. Or in one of the dozens of scarlet leaves, dropped this November by the towering Northern Red Oak outside my window that I have nicknamed Ruby. She looks so naked and embarrassed now.

I wish you all a Happy Late November Holiday Involving Cranberry Sauce and Brussel Sprouts, and possibly a Large Roasted Fowl or Curried Tofu Casserole. Here in Penobscot Nation, we don’t use the T__________g word. At the least, I think we can easily refrain and still celebrate the coming together of friends and family at harvest time to affirm our fervent common wish:  to live in inclusive, welcoming communities, and help each other survive the dark winter ahead.

What the Obits Omitted

Reposted from Atticus Review

Barbara Riddle remembers Barbara Ehrenreich, August 26, 1941-September 1, 2022

Oh, what college housemates know. The obits omit you, coming into our kitchen at 11 pm on a Saturday night after a few solitary hours chain-smoking in your room, doing extra physics problems for the sheer fun of it—your single, thick blond braid swinging across your narrow back as you impatiently made popcorn in your everyday outfit of white sweatshirt hoodie and white Levi’s.

Maybe your motorcycle-riding math genius boyfriend would show up, maybe not. You loved men; you despised (and brutally mocked) mansplainers. They had the wounds to show for it. At the time—and still—you were the smartest, wittiest person I had ever met. (Think Rosalind Franklin smart; Elaine May funny.) I doubt if either of us spent a nickel on mascara or lipstick during the early Sixties. Our Influencers back then were basically Marie Curie and her daughter.

Fast forward a few years—you and I embraced the freedom of flat shoes and miniskirts, and let’s just say, Barbara, you knew how to give a good party, where a guest hiding in the corner might well be lefty publisher Marty Peretz. Back then being Left did not mean being boring. I believe he was a major influence on your political evolution but I never see him mentioned anywhere. With him there was most likely a romantic crush—or more— in the mix,  as well.

Unlike many at Reed College, you were also kind more often than not. During one of our few ill-conceived experiments with legal mind-altering substances (Romilar, anyone?) who brought me a blanket when we were both dazed and freezing in our attic apartment? Possibly crawling on your knees? No Mt. Everest  Sherpa rescue could have been more dramatic. Who volunteered to forego the pleasures of her commute to campus by 10-speed racing bike so she could drive me to campus the year I had mononucleosis and could barely get out of bed each day? A born-and-raised New Yorker, of course I couldn’t drive—but you were a pro. (I mean, you were from Butte, Montana!) Never mind that the vintage navy blue Cadillac coupe  (bought for around $200 gifted by my dad) dropped its transmission with a thud a month later. We abandoned it by the side of the road, laughing hysterically.

After lending me the money I needed to fly up to the “secret” Reed College connection in Seattle a week before classes in September 1962 for a very illegal abortion, your divorced mom somehow met my divorced dad down in Pasadena and they started dating. (I know—what are the odds?) He died by suicide in July 1963; your mother also a probable suicide, years later. Both of us shared that eggshell defensive wariness that children of alcoholics can never shake. (I learned a long time afterwards that my dad had probably heard from your mother about my abortion.  Was it a factor in his suicide? I don’t know.)

You and I lived together off-campus in funky Portland apartments two years in a row during our time at Reed; McDonald’s fries were 11 cents a bag and we lived on pork steaks, peanut butter and mac n’ cheese for about $7 a week each. Our groceries were hauled home in the rear baskets of our bicycles. We were both chemistry majors, you a year ahead. And light years ahead academically. You were of course, the Valedictorian of your year (1963) while I barely managed to graduate in ’64. We both went on to obtain our PhDs, and both quickly realized the lab bench was not where our hearts lay. I threw in my lot with the world of creative writing as an outsider, not nurtured by mentors in an MFA program; you gradually became a major force in feminist health politics and the world of leftist journalism/activism.

In spite of your growing fame, you were always willing to help me, if often bemused. “Sure, I’ll write you a reference letter for the MacDowell Colony, but why can’t you just write at home?”  (I made the waiting list.) Whenever I compared myself to you, I always came off as frivolous and shallow, although I was pretty sure I wasn’t. It’s just that you were so disciplined and intellectually rigorous that being your friend was daunting. Anything you decided to do, you did with skill and flair: ocean kayaking, solo, off the coast of your beloved house in Key West! (I never made it there, although invited.) Double mastectomy ? No big deal. You just powered through it and wrote a needed book about the infantilizing (and profitable) treatment of breast cancer victims, while living and writing to the max another 20 years plus.

It sometimes seemed that no matter where I poked, your name would pop up. An unapologetic atheist (as were you) I once spent a dispirited midnight hour searching the Web for some kind of nonreligious affinity group that shared my values, and chanced on the American Humanist Association. And there you were, Humanist of the Year in 1995. (Not to mention my famously atheistic great uncle, the biologist Dr. Oscar Riddle, similarly honored in 1957.)  For more of your many awards and the astonishing list of publications, I’ll have to refer people to your Wikipedia page; one could grow old and gray reading it. Did you ever sleep?

Probably I’ve read more (though not all) of your books than any other single individual on the planet, except maybe your two brilliant offspring, Ben and Rosa. Favorites? “Witches, Midwives and Nurses,” (with Deidre English), an absolutely groundbreaking analysis of how female health care has been co-opted and monetized by men. And still basically is. I adored “The Hearts of Men,” which ripped into the road-buddy macho myths that underlie performative American masculinity to this day. Your only novel, “Kipper’s Game,” shocked me with its awkward dialogue and hokey plot twists. ( Nevertheless, I own a first edition; all my copies of your books are hardback first editions.) You almost certainly could have become a brilliant novelist—an American Doris Lessing—if you had decided to work at the craft. (I do think it was a secret, guilty fantasy of yours.) If only you had written the kind of dialogue that in reality rolled effortlessly from your lips! Nora Ephron, move over. But you didn’t  have much patience for the ambiguities of “fiction;” I was shocked when you  once told me you couldn’t abide the theater. “People pretending. Why?”

I didn’t find some of your glib one-liners about politics amusing, as in a  March 21, 2020 New Yorker interview with Jia Tolentino when you mused that you might be a Maoist, just below the surface. (You asked her not to print that in The New Yorker, but she did.) You never could resist a zingy one-liner. More than once you were inexplicably tone-deaf, in my opinion. Sometimes I think you just enjoyed shocking people, getting a laugh. I don’t really know and don’t care to enumerate. Those who are familiar with the wide range of your writing will know what I mean.

I was saddened by your memoir, Living with a Wild God—I had not known how terribly  unhappy you were most of your life. Your joking demeanor and fierce politics cleverly hid your confusion and misery. You were not one to wallow, that’s for sure. But looking at a gallery of images on Google since your death, I’m haunted by the deep sadness in your eyes in so many of the photographs.

Female solidarity? For sure!  You gave  me a boost whenever possible. I’m so grateful for the those gestures. Interviewed for “O” Magazine about long-lasting female friendships, you mentioned me and my novel, “The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke.” Reviewing J.D. Watson’s self-serving memoir, “Girls, Genes and Gamow” in the February 24, 2002  NY Times Book Review (wittily titled “Double Helix, Single Guy”), you cited my “fine, autobiographical novel” as a depiction of how some researchers in Watson’s circle callously created a sexist, hostile environment for young women struggling to be taken seriously as scientists. You cannot imagine how surprised and pleased I was at the mention.

Most grateful am I for the blurb you gave my book for its first edition; an analysis that unfortunately is as relevant today as when you wrote it in 2000; I felt seen, and heard.

Barbara Riddle has given us a sharp, funny glimpse into a little-explored moment in women’s recent history. The year is 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Brave young women were heading out to college looking for lives very different from those their mothers had lived. My excitement about “The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke” stems in part from the fact that I was there—heading for graduate school in science in 1963. I recognize Riddle’s heroine Bronwen for her spirit of adventure as well as her sometimes crippling self-doubts (carefully nourished by the all-too-realistic boyfriend-from-hell). Today’s 20-somethings will recognize her as a woman struggling, like themselves, for personal coherence in a world that still has difficulty seeing us as complete and entire human beings.”

Thank you, Barbara. Thank you for 59 years of unwavering female friendship, even as we were sometimes puzzled by each other’s meandering paths, opinions or habits.

I was a bit afraid of you.  I desperately wanted your approval. I loved you. It’s unbearable knowing you are not still out there somewhere, taking no prisoners and cracking people up.

So—I’m just going to pretend you have returned to your room to solve another fun quantum mechanics problem set, your long blonde braid swinging behind your back. Your spectacular and wholly unpredictable life is lying in wait for you.

BOOK REVIEW: The High Price of Freeways

Reposted from Atticus Review

The High Price of Freeways
by Judy Juanita
Livingston Press, 2022
210 Pages
Reviewed by Barbara Riddle

“But I’m still scared of white people. You know, not individual white people that I know, just individual white people that don’t know me. I’m scared of em. They invented Godzilla and Frankenstein and the fun house. Blacks invented the ironing board, the stoplight, blood transfusion and the elevator, all stuff to make life easier. Who invented tear gas and bomber jets? It’s the difference between can I help you & can I kill you.” (p. 177, “If 9/11 had happened in Harlem, this would be a different world”)

I’m writing this shortly after the terrible mass shooting tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where 4th graders and their teachers were slaughtered by an armed shooter just past his 18th birthday. Never has it seemed so urgent to turn to literature for answers about the root causes of the physical and emotional violence that humans continue to inflict on each other. Judy Juanita, an American poet, playwright and novelist as well as a teacher of writing at the University of California, Berkeley, has been writing and teaching for many years— but I sense that now is the time in our overheated, fraught culture for a calm, wise voice like hers to be more widely heard. Her poetry collection, Manhattan My Ass, You’re in Oakland, was one of the winners of a 2021American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and her just published story collection The High Price of Freeways received a Tartt First Fiction Award from the University of West Alabama. Mind you, this is not a “white gaze” at black culture and politics and daily life, this is the deeply felt report from the trenches of a writer who is fearlessly (and tenderly) chronicling the people and places she has been immersed in her whole life.

Judy Juanita’s work first came to my attention when an early draft of her coming-of-age semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul (Viking, 2013), was handed to me to evaluate from the slush pile of an eminent New York literary agent for whom I was interning in 2007-2008. I immediately knew this writer was the real deal, and was completely riveted by her bittersweet account of an idealistic young black woman’s initiation into the realities of black activism and male chauvinism in the form of volunteer work for the Black Panther Party in Oakland and San Francisco in the 1960’s. My boss foolishly passed on the manuscript, but Judy Juanita persevered, found an agent and a publisher for that novel and has continued staking a claim to unique literary territory with work that speaks to specific issues of the day in her own personal—powerful—voice.

In her most recent story collection, The High Price of Freeways, she covers some of that same ground but expands her characters to range from bright, insecure young women in California to a highly paid newspaper professional in New Jersey, always limning the ways in which the color of their skin affects and limits their prospects or creates dangers to which whites are oblivious. In 2022 we have words and phrases for this—white privilege, systemic racism, environmental injustice, microaggressions— and yet, unbelievably, many Americans are still unable to acknowledge these realities. Judy Juanita’s stories illustrate these concepts, but also don’t shrink from depicting colorism within the black community that causes so much pain (“the paper-bag test”), or the sexism of even the most forward-thinking black political activists in the 1960’s. Many of her settings are familiar to me as a native New Yorker who has lived in NYC, New Jersey and Northern and Southern California, but her characters mostly inhabit a ghostly parallel universe to that of my own life, even as their geographic or professional paths overlap my own, as single mother and writer.

If, like me, you find yourself alternately mystified and irritated by the appeal of much current short fiction about alienated 30-somethings navel-gazing and bed-hopping in their Ikea-cluttered flats, desperately seeking ways to make their lives meaningful, you’ll find these stories a bracing jolt to your awareness. Seriously, people, there’s work to be done! How refreshing it would be if stories like Juanita’s were read in well-meaning, genteel book clubs across America. (Well, I can dream.) Authentic is the word that keeps coming to mind. How rare and precious is that quality. Juanita is not writing to shock or ask for sympathy—she is writing to testify. The rest is up to us.

Harking back to the feminism (and activism) of writers rooted in the everyday, like Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, and the recently re-discovered Lucia Berlin, Juanita’s stories bring us vividly into the specific worlds of her characters, inspiring anger, sorrow, and empathy. Whether she’s writing about a reluctant sorority pledge in Soros or a high-powered journalist facing housing discrimination in A Lucky Day, Juanita’s quiet, powerful prose puts us into the sandals and boots of her characters and forcefully reminds us of many American realities that we already know—but what would prefer to forget. Sometimes the news is good, but ignored. In “Between General Macarthur and Admiral Nimitz, ” she casually refers to events that the stereotype-hungry media prefer to ignore, such as a swarm of vacationing black skiers who joyfully descend on Aspen, Colorado, “with money and attitude for the altitude.” In that same story, a father shocks his adult daughter by buying her a top-of-the line tent to occupy in his front yard (advice from the pastor) when she mistakenly thinks she can just rely on a cozy escape to the parental home after her careless life blows up.

It’s the ordinariness of her stories, the calm authority of narrators, that’s so radical. You just fall in love with her characters. One of my favorites stories is “Waterzooi.” It ends like this, with a brilliant summation of a young woman’s leap into adulthood:

“I never saw him again. First plane ride. First black power conference. First one-night stand. I guess sometimes once around does it.”

The High Price of Freeways is a necessary book; it will take you on a ride you’ll be grateful to take and will deepen your understanding of race relations in America. I hope for many more books from Judy Juanita. Remember her name.

A Fifties State of Mind

Reposted from WestView News

John Cassavetes, the Stonewall Inn and the end of the Cold War are all connected in my mind by two words. Two words that describe what we badly need during these politically insane times: resistance and hope; hope and resistance.

My thoughts were triggered during a book reading/signing I recently attended, a launch for an inspiring picture book for children about the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in the Village in 1969. This was of special interest to me, as my father lived on Washington Place, less than two blocks from the Stonewall Inn, which I must have passed hundreds of times walking weekly to and from his apartment and whatever temporary rental my mother and I were inhabiting in the West Village on Perry, Bank or West 11th (we moved often). It was always a treat, walking up the four flights to his sunny one-bedroom place with the skylight in the living room, right next to the church on the corner. Only a few blocks away were all our favorite places: the Blue Mill for sirloin burgers, the 8th Street Playhouse for French movies, Washington Square Park for toasted almond Good Humor bars. And, of course, the magazine section of the Sheridan Square pharmacy in a little triangle-shaped venue opposite the Stonewall Inn. If I was lucky, my father would buy me another glossy oversize “Pogo the Possum” paperback to add to my collection of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s scintillating eviscerations of the political scandals of the 1950’s—the conformist society, the McCarthy witch hunts. Did I “Go Pogo”? And how.

And did my father frequent the Stonewall Inn at night? I don’t know, but his suicide in 1963 might have been avoided if the revolution that started in the Stonewall Inn that June evening in 1969 (commemorated by this new children’s book) had occurred earlier. His life, I now believe, was dominated by fear—fear of being found out; fear of being “queer—weird, strange, not normal.”

HOPE AND RESISTANCE: Reading from “Stonewall” at Studio 620, St. Petersburg, May 2019. Photo by Barbara Riddle.

Similarly, our lives as teenagers in the 1950’s were dominated by fear; fear of horrific mass casualties caused by an atomic bomb being dropped mistakenly—or on purpose—by Russian bombers. And yet…we found joy in so many things, when we weren’t being brainwashed by the daily mass media to fear the Bomb. Going through my old papers the other day, I found a letter I had sent to my father, returned to me after his death. Bursting with excitement, I gushed on blue air mail paper about being chosen, along with other high school editors, to attend a press conference featuring John Cassavetes and celebrating his first feature role in the recently released Edge of the City. For me at 15, life was just opening up and exploding with possibilities. Cassavetes went on to become an iconic actor/independent filmmaker, resisting the Hollywood system and paying for his films with money earned from big studios in Hollywood and also from small private investors who believed in him. He fought for his own vision. And he won!

Now it’s 2019. New York City was not destroyed by an atomic bomb; the gay rights movement has had so many successes that a gay man in a same-sex marriage is a 2020 presidential contender. Several women are too. We’ve achieved the milestone of our first African-American president. The Internet is overflowing with amazing independent film efforts, long and short, distributed outside the old studio system. The racial and gender monopoly of white males in film, theater, and literature is cracking daily.

There are still myriad challenges, of course. When the hell haven’t there been?

The Berlin Wall has been down for 30 years. Think of Stonewall, think of the Velvet Revolution in Prague. Give thanks for the young climate change activists. Support local newspapers! Sanity will prevail. I truly believe it, but not if we give up.

Work for change. Hope. But mainly, resist. We can’t lose. We won’t lose.

One Square Inch of the Klondike

Reposted from WestView News

Memories swirl in puffs through my brain. Small puffs…the shape of Quaker Puffed Rice?

It’s 1955, and I am sitting at the yellow Formica table in our little kitchenette inside our two-room suite at The Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street. I could not believe my luck. My mother had managed to purchase and bring home a box of Quaker Oats cereal, inside of which was a deed—a genuine deed—to one square inch of land in the Yukon, home of Sergeant Preston and his valiant dog King. I was only 11, but I was a landowner! All I had to do was fill in my name and stash it somewhere safe.

Where would that safe place have been? Where is my deed now? Long ago, we were evicted from our suite. My boxes of Albert Payson Terhune collie books, my posters of Tab Hunter, and my deed to a square inch of land in the Yukon may still be gathering mold and rat droppings in the basement of the newly elegant Marlton Hotel; it is the current gathering place of the hip demimonde of the West Village.

Thanks to the Internet (the partially reliable gatekeeper of nostalgia and other lies we tell ourselves), I traveled back in time to verify Quaker Oats’ astonishing promotional campaign. It was the brainchild of Chicago advertising executive Bruce Baker. Playing off the popularity of the radio program “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” (cue whistling winds), the Quaker Oats company bought 19.11 acres of land in the Canadian Yukon and distributed 21 million “deeds” for a one-square inch of land. The deeds were distributed by the Great Klondike Big Inch Land Company, a legal entity Quaker Oats set up.

The lawyers Quaker Oats had consulted said the deeds did not need to be registered. (It was too expensive). Thus, none of the “deed” holders actually ever owned anything. The land company was dissolved in 1965 after the Canadian government repossessed the land because of $37.20 in unpaid back taxes.

Apparently, Canadian officials still have to deal with inquiries from heirs who have inherited these deeds, stuffed in trunks and desks all over America. Sadly, they are technically worthless, but as memorabilia, they might fetch $40 on eBay.

I wonder: Could Donald Trump have been inspired by the Great Klondike Big Inch Land Company? Did his fever for real estate, initiated by his father, get inflamed by the adrenaline rush of opening that box and holding in his hands the gold-stamped, ornate certificate? It’s a sickness, this wanting to own property.

To this day (and to my shame), I don’t remember a more exhilarating childhood sensation than signing my name on that deed. Of course, I was a little girl who had moved so often that my nickname became “rolling stone Riddle,” and I craved the security of a permanent home.

Even a whiff of that deceptive feeling of ownership was intoxicating. And still, for the Villagers new and old who roam our streets, probably our number one preoccupation is, in fact, real estate: the unending, grim struggle to secure a private, peaceful refuge from the chaotic outside world. If only we could return to the concept of the original inhabitants of America: The land belongs to no one. The land belongs to all.

My Uncle the Atheist (In Memory of Oscar Riddle, 1877-1968)

Reposted from WestView News

ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING AMERICAN BIOLOGISTS OF HIS TIME: Dr. Oscar Riddle is pictured on the January 9, 1939 cover of Time magazine. Photo by Peter Nyholm.

Is there a gene for skepticism, for extreme independence of thought, or intellectual bravery? I ask because of an incident in my life, not too long ago, when I suddenly felt genetically connected to an ancestor across space and time. In the depths of despair about the state of my country, I (educated as a scientist) was seeking comfort from some sort of nonreligious group. I suddenly perked up and Googled ‘Humanism.’ And there, on the homepage of the American Humanist Association, was the name of my long-forgotten great uncle, Oscar Riddle, as Humanist of the Year in 1959! I felt a zap of energy and some childhood memories came flooding back.

My Midwestern relatives had hardly mentioned his name (to protect me?) except to hint that Oscar was essentially the black sheep of the family who had messed around with pigeons behind the barn (perversion was hinted at) and had publicly come out as (gasp) an avowed atheist. Later, in graduate school, I found out that he was considered one of the outstanding American biologists of his time, appearing on the cover of Time magazine on January 9, 1939 (my birthday is January 9th!) in honor of isolating the hormone prolactin. (It turns out that doves lactate, and he had used them in his studies.)

Here I was, many years later, finding comfort in discovering that Uncle Oscar was not only an esteemed scientist, but an outspoken atheist and humanist. One of his main concerns was the role of organized religions in blocking open scientific research and rational thinking, and fostering violent conflict among different cultures. This is a concern I share, and obviously a problem more timely than ever in these insanely anti-intellectual times. My Uncle Oscar and I never met, but I feel so connected to this adventurous young man who explored the Orinoco River and taught biology in Puerto Rico before pursuing his career at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, among other places.

AN ADVENTUROUS YOUNG MAN, UNCLE OSCAR EXPLORED THE ORINOCO AND TAUGHT BIOLOGY: Oscar Riddle, above, taught biology at the Spanish High School in Puerto Rico (circa 1901). Photo courtesy of the Riddle Family Archives.

One last, darkly comic memory must be mentioned. As a conflicted and sad graduate student stuck in a biochemistry lab during the political protests against the “war” in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s, I somehow managed to contact my Uncle Oscar (two months before his death at age 91) and ask his advice: Should I quit my safe position and join activist friends in trying to extricate the U.S. from the terrible mess in Vietnam? His response opened a gulf between us: He urged me to stay at my research bench. I could be more useful there than if I joined the Army.

Talk about miscommunication! And, yet, he remains for me a symbol of sanity and discipline, a member of my weird family who was respected by the world. As a New York City child of divorce, whose Midwestern grandparents all died in Oklahoma or Nebraska before I was born, I had so much wanted an extended family, not just the admittedly “interesting” people who floated in and out of my parents’ parallel Greenwich Village lives.

I claim you now, Uncle Oscar!

‘Good Without a God’ is the American Humanist Association’s slogan. My uncle and I like it.

My Mother, the Screenwriter (Sort Of)

Reposted from WestView News

SHE NEVER LIVED TO SEE THE SUCCESS OF HER HARD WORK: Mary-Madeleine Lanphier and her daughter Barbara are pictured above in NYC (1945). Photo courtesy of Barbara Riddle’s Family Archive.

It’s in the nature of teenage girls—it’s almost their job description—to disrespect their mothers, to assert their independence as part of the necessary task of growing up and cutting that adult umbilical cord.

That said, I may have been one of the most critical teens ever to stalk the streets of Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. My beautiful, free-spirited mother worked by day as a hugely over-qualified secretary (for an ever-changing cast of unsatisfactory, leering bosses). By night and on the weekends, she wrote story treatments for independent films. Money was always short. Did I sympathize with her plight as a single parent who labored to keep her creative juices flowing and maybe one day have her proverbial ship come in? I did not. I wanted better clothes, better food, a larger allowance. (She often borrowed my dog walking money, to the point where she once owed me $70.) Most of all, I wanted to live in a real apartment, not the suite-with-kitchenette at the fleabag Hotel Marlton on West 8th Street (recently restored to its 1920s-era elegance.)

Thus, when she excitedly informed me in 1958 that one of director Morris Engel’s films (Weddings and Babies), on which she had collaborated as a writer, had shared a Critic’s Choice Award with Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries at the Venice Film Festival, my reaction was a big yawn. It wasn’t Cannes; it wasn’t the Oscars. Who cared? Not me.

She had already sold her rights for a small, fixed sum. The award had no discernible impact on my life.

Fast forward to 2001: I am sitting in the audience with my husband and daughter at the Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective of three films directed by Morris Engel, all of which are now in the museum’s archives. The films—Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies—are considered early classics of American independent cinema. Director Francois Truffaut credits Engel’s handheld camera and naturalistic style with inspiring the beginning of the French New Wave cinema movement. My mother, who died of lung cancer in 1981, would never live to see her name, Mary-Madeleine Lanphier, listed as a writer on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). She would also never know that two of the films she co-wrote can be ordered in boxed DVD sets or streamed on Netflix. Her efforts, eked out in furnished rooms all over the Village, her packet of Pall Malls right beside her, are part of the history of film, forever.

How I wish I could apologize to her for being that snobby 14-year-old. The greatest tribute I can give her now—and the only meaningful one—is to carry on her work ethic. Thanks for giving me that, mom. And, sorry.

So very sorry.

In the Dark: An Adolescence in Greenwich Village Movie Houses

Reposted from WestView News

STYLISH PLACES TO VIEW QUALITY FILMS: An old favorite of both the author and artist Edward Hopper, The Sheridan Theatre, is pictured above. Painting by Edward Hopper, 1937.

Apparently, Edward Hopper and I have something in common: We both loved going to the movies at the ornate Loew’s Sheridan, constructed on a triangle of land opposite St. Vincent’s Hospital. This movie palace, built in 1921 and ignominiously torn down in 1969, was often Hopper’s afternoon refuge and the subject of one of his most famous paintings from 1937. For myself, and my rat pack of scruffy ten-year-olds, it was where we spent many a Saturday afternoon after collecting enough Coke bottles to raise the 25¢ needed to enter ‘Paradise.’ A box of Milk Duds or Jujubes in hand, we’d sink into the velvet seats and lose ourselves in the antics of Jerry Lewis or Bob Hope. Only a few years later, we would drool at such hunks as Tony Curtis (named Bernard Schwartz at birth) in The Prince Who Was a Thief.

Soon enough, we were young teens entering Loew’s Sheridan two by two, shy and formal in our chino skirts and madras button downs. Sitting next to our Brylcreemed dates, we fumbled demurely with flimsy cardboard 3-D viewers in order to conscientiously watch The Creature from the Black Lagoon and scream at appropriate moments. I never did get to so much as hold the hand of Paul, my then-crush, but I knew for sure that my best friend was making out furiously with her boyfriend not too far away. In any case, I think I was happy enough concentrating on the giant images of Tony Curtis or Tab Hunter. Unreachable fantasies, who never disappointed.
Far more memorable was viewing On the Waterfront with my friend Linda Viero and her parents. Her dad, as good-looking as Marlon Brando in his brown leather bomber jacket, was an actual longshoreman and confirmed the accuracy of the film in portraying the corruption of unions. I think we may have sat through it twice, stunned by its emotional power.
The triangle of land where the Sheridan once presided (after a dreadful period as the site of an incinerator for refuse from the hospital) is now the home of an AIDS Memorial. It’s a lovely contemplative spot, and worth a visit.
So: Jerry Lewis at age 10; Tony Curtis at age 13. What would satisfy a 16-year-old’s tastes, ones nurtured in the streets of the Village, the museums of Manhattan? Of course, it would have to be foreign films at the 8th Street Playhouse, where my mother (dressed in black with a white apron) served the complimentary espresso with a twist of lemon for the privilege of seeing the films unlimited times for free. My peak viewing experience at that charming little cinematheque was Louis Malle’s The Lovers, featuring at least one daring scene (for 1958) with adulteress Jeanne Moreau naked in a bathtub.
Two of my other haunts were The Waverly (now thriving as the IFC Center) and the Art Greenwich Twin at West 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue (now an Equinox gym). My favorite film shown there was a lush 1954 British production of Romeo and Juliet , filmed on location in Italy. No nudity to speak of, but the young Lawrence Harvey was to die for.
Despite these many lovely memories aroused by musing on the cinematic past of the old Village, I feel that the world of film in the West Village is fully alive and vibrant, of global scope, and more connected to people’s real lives. No more living in the sexual closet for actors, writers or directors; no more dictatorial control by the big studios over every aspect of stars’ lives. There is a thriving independent film industry and more channels for distribution. There are also ongoing efforts towards diversity, equal pay, and punishment for sexual harassment—all foreign concepts back in the day.
And, as long as there is a Greenwich Village, there will be stylish places to view quality films: The Quad, IFC Center, Angelika Film Center, Film Forum…to name a few current venues.
Here’s to the cinematic seduction and education of future adolescents. May dozens of them grow up to make their own movies!

Remembering a Sculptor, and a Father’s Life in the Shadows

Reposted from WestView News

COULD HE HAVE HAD A DIFFERENT LIFE? The author’s father, Robert Riddle, is pictured above on Fire Island in the early 1940s. Photo courtesy of Barbara Riddle.

As a born-and-bred “childhood survivor” of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, often engulfed in an almost-paralyzing nostalgia, I am drawn to any book title that promises revealing anecdotes or a new take on life in any Village subculture from the 1900s to the present. (A personal favorite is Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage.)

Thus, a few years ago, I picked up the imposing tome by James McCourt, Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985. I was working at the time on some short pieces about growing up between two households—one apartment on Perry Street and one on Washington Place—as I attended P.S. 41 and then P.S. 3. I was the child of divorced free spirits who could not imagine life anywhere other than the Village and vowed to keep me there as a pupil in the superb public school system.

As an adult, examining tiny details of my somewhat unconventional upbringing, I was beginning to suspect that my father, an Oklahoma-born transplant to New York City in the 1940s, might have had deeply-suppressed doubts about his sexuality. All those trips we took to Fire Island every Labor Day weekend, his handmade buffalo-hide Fred Braun sandals, swimming in the Olympic-sized pool at the Hotel Shelton in Midtown (which was apparently a favorite meeting place for Tennessee Williams and his pals), the Broadway musicals: Did they all add up to something that would explain his depression and suicide in 1963, when I was 19, almost exactly six years before the Stonewall Riots?

The activism that ensued from those “riots” would change the dynamics of gay life in America forever. McCourt, in Queer Street, chronicles the myriad clues and rituals that helped gay men navigate and even enjoy the risky pre-Stonewall culture. Leafing through his book, I came across a page entitled, “A Sample Free-Association Queer Syllabus.” Skimming the names, I recognized so many from the coffee tables and bookshelves of both my parents. They became the standard by which I measured true literature, true talent: Colette, D.H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, Eudora Welty, Gerard Philipe, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Anthony Perkins, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote…to cite only a few. These were all sacred names to me, first glimpsed at age 10 or 11, or admired in French films like Dangerous Liaisons. (Gerard, how I worshipped you.)
But what did it mean?

And then the name Walter Rotan surfaced in my buzzing brain. He was a sculptor who lived in a Bing and Bing co-op (named after the prominent early 20th century apartment developers) with a green awning and a doorman, just down the block from the little park that now boasts a memorial to the Stonewall Riots. My father would take me to visit Rotan in his 1920s apartment with cast-iron railings. Inside, a little set of steps led down into the main living area, featuring several plinths on which sleek black gazelles or nymphs posed or gazed placidly into the distance. I seem to remember that salted peanuts, ginger ale, quiet conversation, and whiskey were involved, shared between my father and Rotan. Was it real? I bravely typed ‘Walter Rotan’ into Google, and, sure enough, he was real, but he had recently died.

IT LOOKED FAMILIAR: The sculpture Young Gazelle with Grapes by Walter Rotan (bronze, circa 1931), reminds the author of visiting Rotan with her father during her youth. Photo courtesy of artnet.com.

Walter Rotan (1912-2001) was born in Baltimore, considered an “American Modernist,” and was the winner of many awards; his work was housed in numerous permanent collections. One piece, entitled Young Gazelle with Grapes, seemed to be his most famous sculpture.

It looked familiar. And Rotan, all my instincts now told me, was, of course, gay.

On Sunday nights, after visiting with Rotan, my father and I would often walk to Fedora’s on West 4th Street, and enjoy their home-style ravioli, preceded by generous shrimp cocktails. To me at age 10 or 12, it was just a friendly restaurant with delicious Italian food. When I visited in 2004 with my husband, eager to show him a remaining jewel from my youth, we were the only heterosexual couple in the place.

All the other customers were elderly men, nattily dressed in well-worn suits, fussed over by the eponymous Fedora. The walls were plastered with signed, glossy black-and-white photos of drag queens. The food was exactly the same. Only my awareness had changed.

My heart felt pierced by a thousand arrows.

WestView readers: What do you think? Did my father miss out by a few years on what could have been a whole new life?

Does anyone miss the subversive and unique nature of underground “queer culture” the way McCourt seems to….just a little bit?

Man of Mystery: Sam Kramer, Master Jeweler

Reposted from WestView News

For years, I tried to pull the name out of the mists of time—the name of the avant-garde goldsmith on West 8th Street whose strangely anthropomorphic brooches and bracelets were modestly arrayed in a small glass display case below a Chinese restaurant on the North side of 8th Street, between 6th and 5th Avenues. No luck. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jewelry and display case, but no craftsman’s name surfaced. I wanted to write about this landmark of my 1950s adolescence, to honor the maker of my mother’s wedding ring to Jack, her second and last husband.

Then, one evening a year or so ago, I opened a book I had taken out of the library called Manhattan Mystery Stories. I don’t even like mysteries, but I was feeling nostalgic and I liked the idea of stories that were all set in Manhattan. I leafed through it idly, and my heart almost leaped out of my eyeballs at one of the photographic illustrations: There it was, a shot of West 8th Street from the corner of MacDougal Street, and there was the glass case, with a name in clearly legible letters: Sam Kramer! Mystery solved. It was like a pinball falling into the last slot. Jackpot! I cannot tell you how satisfying it was to see that name again.

As I began to read more about Sam, I was more and more amazed. Sam Kramer (1913-1964) born in Pittsburgh and educated in California, is one of the icons of modernist jewelry design. Collected by museums and sought after by private collectors, his quirky designs incorporate found objects, fossils, and taxidermy eyes in surrealist Dali-esque combinations and forms. These designs expressed Sam Kramer’s unique vision at a time when uptown jewelry featured birds and flowers in conservative settings.

The shop on the second floor of 29 West 8th Street was opened in 1939; Sam and his wife Carol slept in the back room. A 1942 New Yorker piece entitled “Talk of the Town” quoted Carol as saying that her husband often worked until 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m., but she always “got him up by 10:00 a.m.” Customers loved the street-level doorknob in the shape of a cast bronze hand that displayed a pigskin glove in the winter. To drum up business in the 1950s, Kramer sent his “Space Girls” into the streets at night to distribute wild and crazy flyers. They were dancers dressed in black tights, their skin colored an unearthly green, who handed out advertising handbills.

One of Kramer’s advertising cards read, “We have things to titillate the damnedest ego—utter weirdities conceived in moments of semi-madness.” Typical pieces suggested human embryos, or spirochetes, or squid-like forms, often embedded with glass eyes or gemstones. It’s an understatement to say that these designs were strikingly original! (WestView’s esteemed Publisher, George Capsis, still proudly wears his wedding ring from the shop of Sam Kramer!)

I remember my mother’s twisty gold wedding ring from 1958 as being sort of clunky and hand-made looking. It was vaguely embarrassing to me that she didn’t have a delicate, feminine one from a place like Tiffany & Co. Little did I suspect that she was one of the very lucky patrons of a true pioneer in the movement to create uniquely American jewelry that remains timeless and stunning to this day.

Madly for Adlai

Reposted from WestView News

In 1956, the most coveted political campaign pin was a bit of sterling silver shaped like the sole of a shoe. In the center was an etched whorl—a hole worn in the sole. It was a kind of large private joke: A news photographer had captured a picture of Adlai Stevenson working on a speech, his legs crossed and his worn-out shoe leather exposed for all the world to see. A marketing genius saw the opportunity and seized it.

My father and many of his friends proudly sported this silver symbol. Their candidate for president was the “egghead” Adlai, who spoke like a professor, lived like a poet, and carried himself like an English aristocrat. Wearing his pin made you a member of an elite society of fringe dwellers who dreamed of hopping the train into an America that would take Eisenhower’s legacy and craft it into something new.

I didn’t have a pin. But in July of 1960, I walked into the volunteer office at Stevenson headquarters. I was 16 years old. The Democratic Convention was headquartered in Los Angeles, where I was spending the summer with my father before heading off into my own hopeful future at Reed College.

It was Stevenson’s third attempt to run for president. Everywhere you looked, hordes of pretty young women, mercenaries in straw boater hats with red, white, and blue hatbands, worked the crowds for John F. Kennedy—a young Senator with big white teeth and a darkly handsome wife.

On the second morning of my voluntary servitude, I met a good-looking soon-to-be Yale freshman named Peter Wallace (son of the gruff TV journalist Mike Wallace). Within hours, between energetic bouts of passing out campaign literature, Peter and I were necking in every private nook and cranny of the convention hall. The rest of the week was a whirlwind. And then … the terrible day of the convention, when Kennedy was declared the party’s nominee and his straw-hatted bimbos erupted into an orgy of paid-for screams and gyrations. It was as if dollar bills had taken human form and were dancing on Adlai’s grave.

The fairytale interlude was over. Peter and I despondently scattered to our summer jobs and our sterling academic futures, promising to stay in touch. Peter was very much the gentleman, and I was still very much a virgin. I’m guessing that he was, also.

For two years, Peter sent me letters. Somehow our vacation times never overlapped, or perhaps we preferred to keep our brief, mysterious connection unexplored. Submerged in a heavy course load and barely keeping my nostrils above academic water, I stopped paying attention to politics. If Adlai wasn’t the president, I wasn’t interested.

The summer after my sophomore year, while I was on a brief vacation at his Pasadena apartment, my father approached me tentatively: “I’ve just heard something very sad. Your friend Peter Wallace was killed on a mountain-climbing trip.” It didn’t make sense. I left the room, feeling confused and incredibly guilty. Had I even thanked Peter for his last offering?

The previous Christmas, what seemed like a lifetime ago, Peter had sent me an inscribed copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam–one of those ornate editions. The cover was block-printed like wallpaper with rows of delicate green leaves and red flowers. Flowers such as you might see in the crevice of a rocky mountainside … if you had time to look, while falling.

In this year of unpredictable campaigns and unlikely heroes, I wonder what Adlai would say to Bernie Sanders. I bet he would press a silver pin into Bernie’s hand and thank him for his courage. And Peter. What I wouldn’t give to be meeting Peter Wallace this summer at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and celebrating the nomination of a man who has dramatically altered the business-as-usual direction of American politics.

I would give Peter such a hug.

A Boomer Roughing it on the Gulf Coast

Reposted from WestView News

Where to live out the last third of a full life?

Still craving museums, foreign flicks, yoga classes and organic, local blueberries and kale? Check.

Prefer to walk everywhere? Check.

Prefer not to navigate black ice and gray slush? Check.

Liberal, left-of-center Democrat? Check.

Financially challenged? Check.

Creaky bones? Check.

So, what’s a boomer bohemian to do?

Bouncing in the 1950’s between the various abodes of my divorced parents, refugees from the Midwest drawn to the wonders of Greenwich Village, I lived on Perry Street, Bank Street, Charles Street, Washington Place and even resided in “housekeeping suites” in the ungentrified Hotel Marlton across from the original Whitney Museum at 5 West 8th Street, the Hotel Albert and the Hotel Earle (listen to “Diamonds & Rust”). My education began at P.S. 41 and P.S. 3; roaming the streets as a latch-key kid completed it. I was brought up to believe that no matter what your circumstances, as long you managed to stay in the Village, life was sweet.

Flash forward to 2007, and I am reading a New York Times article about a town called St. Petersburg, Florida. I had already begun to think that I needed a plan for the future. My social security check was not going to cover life in NYC, and certainly not in the newly popular West Village, no longer a haven for bohemians without rent-controlled apartments. A free-lancer all my life, I had no company pension. The life I had carefully built up for twenty-two years imploded when I decided to exit from a difficult marriage to a complicated Czech filmmaker.

I hopped on a plane and spent three days in St. Pete. And, yes, I fell in love with the shabby genteel feel of this former booming 1920’s tourist mecca. Think of North Fork vs the Hamptons, and that’s how St. Pete compares to Miami. Much quieter, stunning natural beauty, situated between Tampa Bay and the Gulf, twenty minutes from pristine beaches and national parks.

Priding itself on a kind of Brooklynesque emphasis on local organic food and crafts and home to a thriving arts scene (Dali Museum, anyone?), it also has a liberal mayor and a strong sense of social responsibility—supporting movements as varied as gay rights, the Fair Food movement and climate change activism.

Haslam’s of St. Pete is the largest bookstore in the Southeast and just celebrated its seventieth birthday. Since 2007, I have been going between NYC and St. Pete, gradually weaning myself from the frenetic and demanding New York lifestyle that can be so stimulating and addictive. But—it is not the only way to live.

My friends on the Gulf are gay, straight, black, white, Latino; they are politically active Jewish atheists, Quakers and Unitarians who bring clothing and books to migrant worker camps, teach nonviolent conflict resolution in women’s prisons, and worked to get out the vote for Obama in both recent elections. Current hot issues are overturning Citizens United and climate change lobbying and education. You simply cannot find a better group of people anywhere in the United States.

And, oh yes, I am now in contract to buy a one bedroom, 660 square-foot co-op (with a screened balcony and parking) for $50K (not a typo) in a mid-century building which is an eight minute walk from downtown cafes and movie theaters, and a two minute walk from the library and a street with craft beer and vintage clothing shops. The monthly co-op fee of $500 includes a storage unit, electricity and central A/C.

This is one tenth to one twentieth of what a similar place would cost in the West Village. I can live like a human being for what I hope will be another twenty years! Most importantly, I will have time to finish my second novel and start my third.

I left the Village because I had to.

I’m settling in St. Pete because I want to.

Next up: How does a freelance writer and ESL teacher make a living in a city like St. Pete?

My Village, My Self

Reposted from WestView News

One beautiful spring morning in 2002, as I meandered along Charles Street towards the Hudson, I had the uncanny sensation that a map of my late mother’s body was unfolding under me, that I was walking along her asphalt arteries, traversing her cracked spinal column. Evolving under me was the body of my mother, indistinguishable from the streets and byways of the beloved Village that had nurtured me. It was a powerful sensation, an epiphany like those described by hippies discovering themselves through the tumult of India or mind-bending LSD trips.

The black and white photos from her childhood show nothing out of the ordinary: the girl-baby born in 1911 on a bearskin rug, the feisty Boston Terrier sprawled beside her.

On Easter, holding up a basket, huge plaid bow atop her head with its thick straight bangs, high-button shoes on her dainty feet.

Swimming in a lake, head aloft, grinning, with her girlfriends looking on from the dock.

How did this young woman dare to make the journey from Omaha to New York City, to Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, where I was taken home from the hospital as a new-born infant?

Was it the magnetic attraction of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, read by the young woman on the high school radio program beamed from Omaha out into the cornfields? After she arrived, how many detours were there on the way to becoming the writer she knew she could be? After five children, too many men to count, an editorship of McCall’s (it was rumored she invented their slogan, “The Magazine of Togetherness”- she, the eternal single mother!) her luck turned a bit.

An amazing team, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, took her in as a creative partner. She receiving writing credits on two films: Lovers and Lollipops (1956) and Weddings and Babies (1960). The latter shared the Critic’s Award with Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries at the Venice Film Festival. Both are in the archives at the Museum of Modern Art, and are now listed on various internet movie sites devoted to classic movies. Unavailable to the public for years, they can now be viewed in DVD format. French filmmakers like Godard gave credit to Morris Engel for sparking the independent film movement with the pioneering shoulder-slung camera that the ex-GI Morris devised, enabling him to shoot on location in New York City. The results were poignant, luminous films that found meaningful drama in the lives of “ordinary” Americans. Ruth Orkin’s brilliant photographs of New York street life live on in museum collections and note card reproductions.

Yet nobody (except her widely-scattered children and grandchildren) has ever heard of Mary-Madeleine Lanphier, the young woman from Omaha: writer, mother, artist’s model. She was the ravishing subject of a 1940’s painting titled The White Fichu by George Bellow’s best friend, Eugene Speicher, who was once the most celebrated portrait-painter in mid-20th century America. (His portrait of fellow student Georgia O’Keefe hangs in the entryway of the Art Students League in New York City.)

A young woman from the heartland, Mary-Madeleine was educated by nuns in a Catholic convent in Omaha from the age of 10, after her beloved mother’s death; she never finished college, never shot a wolf, never judged another human being. She adored the color chartreuse, made her own hats, gave bright pink boiled starfish as Christmas presents, loved sex and foreign films, Colette and gypsy music and Medalia D’Oro coffee. She sometimes hinted at Native American ancestry (with French Canadian heritage in her family, Lakota Sioux genes are a distinct possibility). She was self-destructive, spontaneous, foolish and fierce, always. She charmed her friends and bewildered her children. When she died in 1981 after a year-long, intense battle with the most virulent form of lung cancer, our family decided against placing an obituary in The New York Times. We later came to regret this omission.

The mystique and the gritty reality of my girlhood in the Village of the 1950s are both inextricably intertwined with the complex woman I call “mother,” though mothering was not exactly what either she or I would have called her forte.

What I came to realize, after an absence of many years, was that her peregrinations and upheavals (to Perry, Charles, West 10th, Bank, Washington Place, West 11th, in fleabag hotels and 4-story rented townhouses) all spiraled around two excellent public schools, and I had the best free public education any state in America could provide in the 1950s. The original versions of P.S. 41 on Greenwich Avenue and P.S. 3, on Hudson, were unbeatable, and their heirs are still magnets for families who squash themselves into tiny overpriced walk-ups or spring for pricey condos in the West Village just for the privilege of using these free institutions.

My friends and I had the benefit of that post-WW II plenitude of experienced, passionate teachers with ample bosoms and money to spare for art materials and cherrywood recorders, teachers took us on field trips to Washington Square Park to make charcoal sketches of the old “hanging tree,” or uptown to the old Metropolitan Opera horseshoe to hear Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Mrs. Elliot, the math whiz. Mrs Hill, the Revolutionary War buff. She brought shells from her Florida vacations and we made little animals with pipe cleaners and scalloped heads. Soon, we’d be sneaking off to watch Jeanne Moreau shed her clothes and hop into a French bathtub at the 8th Street Playhouse, but pre-puberty, one couldn’t have asked for better guardians. Mrs. Elliot, black-stockinged Miss Solimando; Mrs. Hill, I love you all, even if I didn’t then. You asked so much of me! “Could do better,” my report card sometimes read. What made you think that? (Me, the winner of the citywide Brotherhood Week essay contest, with my picture in the Villager? For cripe’s sake, Miss Solimando!)

However, you saved me, you gave me normalcy and goals and deadlines when all was chaos at my two alternating Village “homes,” when I was navigating a cautious path between my mother’s out-of-work actor boyfriends, and a divorced father (who loved his Four Roses blended whiskey a tad too much). I headed out for school every morning while mentally blocking images of scuttling cockroaches, saggy old mattresses, and empty Pall Mall packages, knowing I would be entered a realm where I was accepted and even admired.

Somehow, at who knows what cost to her own psyche, my mother managed to keep intact my umbilical cord to the best of the West Village that was right outside our ever-changing doors. It can’t have been easy, but she did it. For that, I am forever in her debt.

I know a little bit more now about motherhood—and chaos.

Dear Santa, Please Bring Me a Dreidel

Reposted from WestView News

When I was the10-year-old child of itinerant bohemian parents in the West Village, being Jewish to me was Kathe Kollewitz lithographs of thin women and hungry babies in your living room; Pete Seeger records on your hi-fi: If I had a Hammer, This Land is Your Land, There Once Was a Union Maid (who never was afraid, of goons and ginks and company finks and deputy sheriffs who made the raid….). Jewish was warm bagels and mountains of cream cheese and your grandmother with thick ankles and flesh-colored stockings rolled up just above her kneecaps, heaping strawberry jam on your plate.

Why oh why couldn’t I be Jewish? It was embarrassing, always being the guest. I wanted to be the host, to ask someone else to set the table, my table, before eating MY delectable food.

I tried unsuccessfully to bring my father into the spirit of my quest. Over hamburgers at the Blue Mill Tavern on our weekend visits, I probed. Couldn’t my great-great-grandmother named Mottsinger have been just a little bit Jewish? Couldn’t I, on the basis of this almost certain fact, be allowed to stay home on Jewish holidays? It was lonely at school on those mysterious days, whose rituals were never really explained to me; it was taken for granted that I knew. I hated not being in on the secret, but was too shy to ask the real meaning of those “holidays” – or were they actual “holy days?” They seemed a lot more serious than Christmas and Easter, with all the reindeer and bunnies and Bing Crosby on every friggin’ loudspeaker in Woolworth’s. A few blue and white greeting cards in the windows of the Hallmark shop did nothing to dispel the mystery. I was given no helpful clues by my lapsed Catholic mother, or my used-to-be Methodist father.

“No,” my father would repeat each time I asked, “The Mottsingers were Austrian mercenaries who made guns during the Revolutionary War. I doubt they were Jewish.” Then he’d signal the waitress for another drink.

It wasn’t fair. I wanted it so much. Being Jewish was co-ed summer camp, fathers with strange accents who said “vine” instead of wine and always came home without stopping first for a scotch and soda at the corner bar. Jewish was reading the newspaper and looking worried while dinner was being cooked and the kids did their homework. After dinner, Jewish was your father shaking off his day job, going into the den, and closing the door and doing his “writing,” like my P.S. 41 classmate Laura Liben’s father.

Jewish was kitchen cabinets chock full of canned apricots and pears in syrup, and boxes of delicious macaroons and matzohs and in the refrigerator tangy wine-colored horseradish and mysterious packages in white paper – sliced turkey – aged Emmenthal, roast beef that had just a hint of pink in the middle. Bowls of tuna fish salad loaded with freshly chopped celery. Ice cream in the freezer.

Jewish was teasing and laughing and sometimes your father shouting, like my best friend Janie’s when she ran up a $25 phone bill talking to her boyfriend, or if your new cocker spaniel peed on the old, valuable Turkish carpet in the hall. Jewish was art lessons and guitar lessons and fancy, painful wire braces for crooked teeth, and every spring new Capezio flats—but for your father, new heels on the same old brown lace-ups.

Jewish was inviting weird bohemian kids like me for dinner when we got locked out of places because my mother didn’t have the rent money. It was really my only chance to eat such good food: thick slices of pot roast, and string beans and beets and hot rolls with real butter, and noodle pudding sprinkled with cinnamon for dessert; or meat loaf with a crusty top of onions and tomato sauce— rye bread, cheesecake. No, Jewish was never fried Spam or chili con carne from the can or the Vegetarian Special at Riker’s in Sheridan Square. I fantasized that if I ate enough dinners with my Jewish friends, that I could BECOME Jewish. (My personal version of You Are What You Eat.)

Many years later, after I had left the Village for college and then returned as an adult, I was browsing in the Strand Bookstore in Union Square and opened a Best American Short Stories anthology. There, blinking in front of me as if in neon lights was one by a writer named Meyer Liben. He was the father working, night after night, behind the closed study door! My friend Laura’s father, a real writer!

You could be an artist, and your family could still eat delicious food. Who knew? You just had to be able to close that door sometimes.

Apparently there were many more stories. All the tip-toeing and shushing that I remembered had not been for nothing. I was suffused with gladness.

Being Jewish was doing something serious, and getting it right.

Note: Thanks to the Internet, I was recently able to find the following biographical note about my friend Laura Liben’s father. I found it incredibly moving— another slice of little-known history brought to you by WestView News.

About Meyer Liben

By Theodore Solotaroff (Editor, Best American Short Stories)— May 1967

Meyer Liben is one of those writers who come, as it were, out of the blue. A businessman who retired early because of illness, he began a second career as a writer when he was in his forties and has waited another ten years for the publication of his first book. Certain advantages have followed from this late start. Liben remains an amateur in spirit, though not in performance: he writes because he likes to write, because it is his natural way of expressing himself, of keeping track of the flow of experience, of situating himself in the world.

Though an experimental writer, he has none of the mannered obscurity one associates with the term: in technique, his experiments are rather simple, homey ones—an open conversational form, somewhere between narrative and essay, punctuated by headings at the transitional points like the subtitles of the old silent movies. (His fiction somewhat resembles that of Paul Goodman, though Goodman has told me that the indebtedness is his.) It is as though Liben one day dropped in on Literature, found that it was a pleasant place to spend his time, and, having passed the age of intimidation, rearranged the furniture just a bit to make himself more comfortable.

Silence, Exile and Sunning: Letter from Florida

Reposted from WestView News

Does absence make the heart grow fonder of the West Village?  Who knows? Sometimes a prolonged break can rejuvenate, inspire and give one fresh eyes for life in general.

There actually is life beyond Hudson Street…

These occasional columns will attempt to provide a West Villager’s eye-view of a part of the country so often lampooned and derided.  Is there anything to be learned from observing life on the Gulf Coast of Florida, in what is called the Tampa Bay Area? 

(Locals call it Paradise.) Stay tuned.

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So, here is my first letter from Paradise.

As I am preparing to leave Manhattan, I give my new mailing address to the Citibank teller:

“Moving to Florida!” I say happily.
“By choice?” he says.

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Day 1  In my mailbox: Free prepaid cremations, courtesy of The Neptune Society.

My friend recommends a hospital to me.  “You’ll love it – it’s where Jack Kerouac died!” Hmmm. (Wasn’t he a right-wing alcoholic by the end?)

Day 2  During my Sunday walk through the scruffy little urban park: A signboard proclaiming “Free TAMPA RAYS vouchers to all Blood Donors- today only.”

Day 3  Passing a racy, low-slung silver Scion with West Virginia plates, am startled to see a decal reading, “As I Lay Dying” on the rear window. A fellow Faulkner fan? Then I spy the “KISS” decal……just a metalcore fanatic. Sigh.

Somehow, all these reminders of looming disaster, of death and dying, are weirdly invigorating.

Day 4  It’s freakin’ hot and humid. Again, I find myself taking the shortcut through the little park. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. I pick up my pace.

My spring-green canvas Adidas trainers move quickly past the unshaven smokers slouching towards their tropical Bethlehems.  The men poke hopefully into trash cans, postponing that status-lowering trip to the Blood Bank.

“You take it easy now,” an older black man says to me when I meet his eyes. “I sure will,” I reply, my step a little jauntier.  I am not invisible inSaint Petersburg, as I was beginning to feel in the Village among all those models and bankers.
Screw that Citibank teller and the horse he rode in on!
(And ha ha, death, you haven’t caught me yet.)

Down here it feels so good, it actually feels naughty, just being alive.

Poignant Reflections from a Civil Rights Pioneer

Reposted from WestView News

HUNTER HOLMES: University of Georgia students shout and jeer in this 1961 photo at Charlayne Hunter, 18, left, and Hamilton Holmes, 19, as they leave the administration building after completing registration at Athens, GA. Admitted under federal court order, they will become the first black students to attend the university in its 175-year history. AP Photo.

To The Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement
By Charlayne Hunter-Gault
New York Times/Flash Point, January 2012
Reading Level: Ages 12-18

There was much to reflect on as I finished reading award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s “To the Mountaintop,” her account for a new generation of “post-racial” young Americans of her role as a brave, 19-year-old young woman integrating the all-white University of Georgia on January 9, 1961. (I turned 17 on that very day, a nervous college freshman studying for a chemistry test. Only years later did I learn what was really going on in America then; but I did make it to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech at the unforgettable March on Washington in August 1963.)

Hunter-Gault begins her book with a description of her delight in attending the 2009 inauguration of our first black president, Barack Obama, and gracefully segues back into the convoluted history of racism in America and her good fortune in having been a beautiful and gifted honor student from an educated “race-conscious” family. As the best of the best, she was chosen by civil rights leaders along with fellow student Hamilton Holmes to break the color barrier at U. Georgia, the oldest public university in America (founded in 1785). Without regard for her own safety, she unhesitatingly agreed to put herself on the front lines and braved mobs of brick-throwing white protestors.

Highly condensed, this short volume is expressly tailored for readers aged 12 to 18 and details the success of her efforts and those of her many colleagues and mentors, such as the Rev. Dr. King, Vernon Jordan, James Farmer, John Lewis and Julian Bond. The bravery, discipline and determination of these iconic figures, along with untold others whose names and suffering will never be known, served to overcome segregation in education, housing and voting and paved the way for the historic presidency of Barack Obama, as he fully acknowledges. This brief account will surely send adults back to Hunter-Gault’s earlier book, “In My Place” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992)—a very well-received, more detailed memoir—while younger readers will find it exciting to go to the websites listed in the index of this shorter memoir to explore the many pieces of original source material on the Internet.

As I sit here on January 15 (Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday), anticipating February 12 (Lincoln’s birthday) and the activities of Black History Month this February, I hope we will all reflect on the tough human qualities and decisions that have brought us this far in the fight for true equality in America. Will the protestors of Occupy Wall Street (whose general aims I support fully) have the discipline, organization and willpower to prevail in their struggle as well as Charlayne Hunter-Gault and her generation of black Americans succeeded in theirs? Can they muster the same passion and commitment?

I would welcome a piece of journalism by Hunter-Gault on how she perceives the next phase of politics in the United States. Can the remaining racial prejudice that still poisons our everyday life be eliminated? Seemingly, even the achievements of a brilliant, consensus-seeking black leader have not been enough to bring us over that second mountaintop.

The next generation will have to take over! The young multitaskers of today might consider pausing to read Charlayne Hunter-Gault—and absorbing some of her courage.

Note: I am pleased to disclose that WestView’s Maggie Berkvist was the photo editor on “To The Mountaintop,” locating the many historic images that illustrate the book. She told me that during her research she found in the Mississippi State Archives an extensive collection of police mug shots of the student activists, black and white, who had been arrested during the civil rights demonstrations and was struck by how very young most of them were—and by how brave they had been. Young people, take note: the world needs your energy and your idealism.