Both my novel Lillian in Love and my collection Lillian's Last Affair and other stories are now available on CreateSpace and Amazon.
I'm available for interviews, readings, visits to book clubs, being the entertainment at your party, talking about senior sex at your senior center, talking about love in senior housing, and any other creative ways to get the word out about my work.
Lillian’s life at 84 is tumultuous. She is moving to Manor House to be near Sarah, abandoning the demands of her own home, which has been colonized by her children. How will she and Sarah deal with the reactions of relatives, ex’s, and neighbors to their romance? How do two old women negotiate new love? Will slow-dancing, vibrators, and pot brownies help smooth the way?
“If I’m going to go after one more affair of the heart at 84, I’d better get my ass in gear,” says Lillian, speaking for all the characters in these six stories.
Ruby has a run-in with a waterbed and Catherine tokes her first joint in the bathtub with Victor. Elegant Anna’s introduction to kinky sex is bittersweet. And then there’s the neighbor with the strange attachment to the grocery cart. Sue Katz’s hilarious, tender, and impeccably written stories confirm that age fails to erode our eccentricities or dull our ardor.
Buy Lillian's Last Affair and other stories in paperback on Amazon and in ebook form on Amazon and Smashwords.
My friend Eleanor and I hopped into Panera, knowing we could grab a booth and a nibble for a long-awaited visit. I have a home-made button on my backpack that says “Ask Me About My Book.” It’s been there since my last book, and I never remember until some says, “So tell me about your book.” Which happens not infrequently.
It’s a low-cost marketing strategy that relieves me from approaching people and lets them ask if they’re interested. The guy behind the counter is interested and so I give him a little leaflet about Lillian in Love I keep in my bag. We get our food and settle in, when the guy comes around and says that the whole staff wants to buy a copy together – how much does it cost? He leaves and comes back with $13 and I inscribe it to the “Panera Staff.” When Eleanor goes up to order a cup of coffee, they give it to her on the house.
A minute later a young woman who works in the back comes out and says she wants to buy two copies – one for her and one for her best girlfriend. I run out to the car where I keep some in my trunk. We get to talking: she’s half Brazilian, half Dominican but says her Portuguese isn’t all that good. She says she finds the topic very interesting – and I wonder which topic she means – old lesbians? senior housing? She asks me if I’ve written other books and Eleanor mentions Lillian’s Last Affair. She wants a copy of that too. I get one out of the trunk of my car and when I return she’s got another tenner for me. We hug.
It reminds me of my friend at dance, who’s just in the midst of doing an advanced degree and who is a fantastic dancer, who astonished me one night when I had the thrill of leading her in a dance. She said that having read my book, she feels like she’s dancing with a celebrity. An actual author. I realize that not everyone hangs out, like I do, with a lot of writers. These exchanges all made me feel so good. I’m desperate to feel good because otherwise, with fascism looming, I don’t feel so hot.
GET OUT is about the objectification, use, and abuse of the Black body. This is what makes it a horror film. It is also about solidarity and the crucial friendship between the protagonist Chris (played vividly by Daniel Kaluuya) and his captivating best buddy Rod William (Lil Rel Howery). Even though the two guys were rarely in the same space at the same time, TSA agent Rod was a viewer favorite. GET OUT is not, as some reviewers say, a satire about the awkward social interactions of Rose and her parents’ circle of friends when they meet her new Black boyfriend. The sustained tension of the film bears the weight of what racism feels like – not just what it looks like. Huge kudos to Jordan Peele (of the comedy duo Key & Peele) for giving us this “social thriller” (as he calls it) that he says has been living in his head since he was 13.
My thoughts:
GET OUT is the only horror film I’ve ever seen. So all the references to classic horror flicks that other friends of mine spotted in it went over my head. Nonetheless, my impression is that the horror isn’t the blood per se: it’s the racism. To me this film is about the Black experience of racism. It conveys how something that might appear to a white person as a micro-aggression, may very well have a much bigger impact on a Black person because of the context of their lives. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery were followed by the Jim Crow era, itself followed by contemporary types of institutional racism. Top this all off with a hateful President and a vicious regime. This very dangerous, very heavy reality can turn what seems like a small insult or a well-meaning asinine remark into something that feels perilous and threatening.
I understood this by thinking through the experiences behind my own fears:
Try to stick with me as I attempt to explain. The same day as I saw GET OUT, I happened to be watching a TV show called House Hunters while I was washing the dishes. It’s just one of those low-budget cable series about people looking for houses and realtors trying to meet the conflicting desires and needs of the couple/family/etc.
This episode featured a husband who, because of years of sports, had several knee operations and hated climbing stairs, so he was insisting on a ranch house. His wife said over and over to both the realtor and the husband that she had to have a two-story house because she would feel unsafe for herself and any future children sleeping on the ground floor. She repeated that she needed a staircase between herself and any potential intruder. The husband never heard what she was saying. As a big beefy white man he saw her desire for a two-story as frivolous.
But I could relate to what she was saying. I have been raped. It happened in the 60s. Not a day goes by, hardly an hour goes by, since then, that the fear of being raped again isn’t hovering close to consciousness. I relate to the house hunter’s fear of living on the ground floor. When I’ve stayed in the rural cabins of friends to write, I am afraid of the noises at night – not because it might be a bear or a wolf – but because no neighbors are close enough to hear me if I scream when some man breaks in.
Racism continues to color every experience in this country.
The house-hunting husband didn’t get it. He hasn’t experienced that kind of threat and has insufficient empathy. And too often white people don’t get the reactions of Black people to what the whites see as “compliments” or innocent “mistakes.” And not just because of slavery – which formally ended only in 1865 (just 50 years before my dad was born – not so long ago). Books have helped me understand the continuum of racism until today. When I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson, I understood for the first time how profoundly murderous the Jim Crow south was after slavery. She told of the man who was fatally tarred and feathered because he pointed out to a white shop-keeper that he had given him wrong change. How one man was mangled viciously, never to really recover, because of a false accusation that he had stolen a chicken. How surreally severe segregation became.
But although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ostensibly ended Jim Crow, in fact other kinds of institutionalized racism were developed, as I read in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This includes almost every arm of the criminal justice system, from the massive funding of the prison-industrial sector, to draconian sentencing regulations, to the use of profiling tools like “stop & frisk”.
Now we are facing an openly racist, fascist agenda by a regime unlike any we’ve seen. The unrelenting, tenacious, pernicious racism of the United States is the true horror. I’ve rarely seen a film that has made me think so hard and so long about the experience of racism, and how, within my own life as a woman, I can find connective paths to insight about the oppression of others. I am grateful to GET OUT.
The writing of author and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) blew my mind when I was young and continues to strongly affect my world view in the periodic re-readings I do of his work. Most recently I revisited Another Country, an incredibly passionate novel based on his time in France that explores gay, bi, and straight sexuality with a candor that is hard to believe for 1962. But he had already published Giovanni’s Room (1956), to me one of the most elegantly written, beautiful, and courageous gay novels we have.
As a lifelong fan, I am so thrilled that filmmaker Raoul Peck was able to take the 30 pages of the unfinished book Baldwin was working on and turn it into the film I Am Not Your Negro. In the just-started book Remember This House, Baldwin wanted to give his personal perspective on the lives and the murders of three crucial black leaders, all of them dear friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
What is astonishing about I Am Not Your Negro, is that every word of the script is written or spoken by James Baldwin. Either Peck uses clips from numerous interviews and speeches, or the single cast member, Samuel L. Jackson, reads the writer’s own words with restrained power, off-camera.
We follow Baldwin’s own expanding understanding and come to understand how, at age 24, the combination of racism and homophobia drove him to live in France and how the images of a lone teenager attempting to attend a white high school drew him back to the fight in the States in 1957. We see scenes of vile racism, clips of the Civil Rights Movement, and footage of the vicious reaction of the officials and police.
There are few voices more iconic and prescient than that of James Baldwin, as the multi-award-winning I Am Not Your Negro shows us so clearly. It is a film that I most highly recommend and plan to see again. But there is a gaping hole, an elephant in the room, a strange silence about Baldwin’s own love of men. His homosexuality was so fundamental to his perceptions and his literature that it is puzzling that the film only made references once or twice that were so oblique that few would pick up on them. It is a brilliant film about a beloved historical figure, but the film remains closeted – as Baldwin refused to do.
Because you and I have bigger things to worry about, I have kept my list of the crimes of the film La La Land to just 10. I present them here in no particular order, although some are more egregious than others.
The film uses Black people as props, mainly as jazz musicians whose music we can hear but who have no spoken lines. The exception is John Legend, but then he is more famous and popular than the stars themselves. (The casting director also has about two sentences of speech.) Ryan Gosling’s character feels justified in grabbing a woman of color on the street and dancing with her to the distress of her husband. After all, this white man is about to save jazz and its history.
Emma Stone’s character dumps her dear women friends and roommates the minute she gets a man and we don’t see them again until they turn up loyally to her sparsely attended one-woman show.
Neither Stone nor Gosling can dance or sing. This is a musical and we must suffer their squeaks and stumbles throughout. The only real dancing is a tiny couple in silhouette, clearly “stunt” people.
There isn’t a shred of attraction or passion between the lovers. Even in bed they remain dressed. They barely touch. They never sizzle. They only get a bit excited when they’re talking about their ambitions.
They’re privileged and self-absorbed. They’re supposed to be impoverished unemployed artists, but she drives a Prius, and they never mention money or worry about it. Their only concerns have to do with becoming rich and famous.
Their cell phones only seem to work one way: incoming calls. They are frequently interrupted by their ringing cell phones, but when she’s not going to make it to their first date and when he’s going to miss her opening night, they don’t call. He drives uninvited to another state to deliver a third party phone message to her.
Nothing in this film evokes the brilliant musicals of decades gone by.
The special effects are annoying. They’re not very special and they go on and on.
The dual ending seems like a focus-group quandary and a cheap solution for a director/writer (Damien Chazelle) in way over his head. As my friend observes, the director lacks the confidence of his storytelling.
The biggest crime? The film is excruciatingly boring. Who gives a fuck about these people and their drippy problems?
Dear people who dismiss the demonstrations as "been here, done that" and "Trump doesn't even notice or care"...
Not everyone has been here and done that. I've been on the streets several times since the inauguration (my yellow sign to the left says Jewish Lesbian Against Islamophobia - I was at the demo photo below), and I'm seeing thousands of young people who have never before had the experience of mass demonstrations. Who have never been surrounded by a sea of people who share their views. Who have never been given that sense of hope that you get when 175,000 people turn up while you were expecting 20,000 (such as Boston's Women's March). And then there are the people who may be older than young - for whom this is their first active, public political engagement.
To those who say that these executive orders are "distractions" - not the really serious issues, my favorite film reviewer and good friend Danny Miller says, "There is no order of importance to the daily horrors — ALL must be protested. The Muslim ban is as bad as it gets and must not be tolerated — how could it be seen as a distraction? That's like saying the Nazi death camps were a distraction from the occupation of France."
Quit poo-pooing these astonishing, spontaneous, street actions. They are energizing, they require a public stand, and they show others that it can be done. To all those who are tired after decades and decades of demonstrations (and in some ways I am one of them), look around. There are other generations ready and able to take the lead. And at the head of those other generations, the activists are women. From Black Lives Matter to the Women's March, the lead activists are women. At the mic and at the mic-check, the speakers are women. Quit condescending to the marches and rallies. They are a training ground for waves of fresh energy.
I am lucky to be at the Creating Change Conference with 4,000 other LGBTQ activists. We are so inundated by workshops and speakers that there is no time to go on Facebook or turn on the news. Yesterday was the last day of the Obama era and today is the start of the abyss, but I am deep in this Conference of commitment, surrounded by other activists, and happily in the bubble of hope. Here’s how my first day went, starting at the end.
The National LGBTQ Task Force appears to hire staff from such a range of ethnicities and sexualities that they get most things right. They connect with multiple queer communities because they ARE multiple identities. They are not a rich white male leadership with a symbolic weak “outreach” – their staff seems to encompass the richness of this country and therefore to draw us all in. As they welcomed us to the conference at the 8:00pm plenary, they immersed us immediately in the kind of true diversity they represent. For example, we were treated to an amusing and enlightening explanation of how to be at a conference that is being simultaneously translated into Spanish and Sign.
A memorial presentation for both the victims of Orlando and others murdered by homophobia and transphobia looked at the unspeakable wounds of that violence, especially to the Latinx community, and at the ways in which people pulled together to look after each other. I wept; everyone around me wept.
The Keynote speaker Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is a commanding figure – broad, clad in purple, with a countenance both handsome and strong. He schooled us in the real meaning of the concept of intersectionality. He spoke at length and with an unflagging passion about his Southern strategy, using the amazing successes of his alliances in North Carolina as examples. He talked about how people of color, poor people, and the LGBTQ communities share the same enemies and how we are used against each other. He has always walked the walk – convincing NAACP and many Black churches to support marriage equality during that struggle. His talk was interrupted countless times as we jumped up to clap and scream, recognizing the privilege of his insights. Just one quote: “Nothing worse than being loud and wrong. Every one of our statements must have a footnote.” I was a fan before I heard him in person and now I’m a fan forever.
Most of the day had been spent at the Aging Institute – looking at the activism of older people in the LGBTQ movement. I wrote on my evaluation form: “This is clearly one of the main attractions for the older people in the LGBTQ community who come to Creating Change. It is a day that is run with impeccable skill by the charming if masterful Serena Worthington, of SAGE. The variety of voices - mainly from among Philly's elder activists - enlivens a very long day and impresses with the range of ways in which elders are organizing to change the country. Serena manages just the right mix of small groups, interactive plenaries, riveting panels, and mixed media. Elders created and hold the history of our movement and should be more widely showcased at a time when history is being turned around and our achievements are being threatened.”
I should mention that at the Elder Institute I did my first reading of my new book Lillian in Love. I’m having a “soft launch” here and will really launch it in a couple of weeks from back home. The reading was prodigious fun and people bought over half the books I brought with me to Philadelphia. This evening I have a whole workshop to myself and to Lillian in Love, where I’ll read additional excerpts.
I’m a huge admirer of the splendid organization of this gigantic conference, but I do have one beef. Here is what I wrote on the evaluation form to the organizers. “The organizers of Creating Change do an astonishingly fine job of putting together a massive conference with many dozens of conflicting demands. However, they seem to have little understanding of the needs of the movement's elders. The Institute was held in the very furthermost, the very last room down a very long hall as distant from the elevator as possible. The nearest bathrooms seemed to be nearly a mile away, quite literally, back up that long hall, and along two more very long hallways. Many of the attendees have mobility issues and the Institute had to build in longer breaks just so people could get to the bathroom with the canes, walkers, and scooters. While aging is clearly not a priority topic, one is puzzled at the ignorance of the needs of our older activists. To add to what begins to feel like an insult, the Elder Hospitality Lounge is also the very furthermost down a hall of many Hospitality Lounges that winds around the entirety of this huge hotel. What could possibly be the thinking behind these barriers to our comfort and participation? Please place us close to the elevators in coming years.”
I fucked up my knee dancing. A PT misdiagnosed it and so I continued dancing. The knee locked and the pain became unbearable. An MRI showed a shredded meniscus on both sides of the knee and a bunch of unanticipated arthritis. Everyone predicted surgery, perhaps a knee replacement. My chiropractors sent me to a non-surgical orthopod with whom I’ve agreed to try a non-surgical strategy.
Here, now, is the story with emotions and characters and sham surgeries:
A few weeks ago I was dancing, as is my wont, at my favorite venue’s monthly Saturday night dance when I felt something pop and my right leg locked. I apologized to the woman I was dancing with and limped home.
The next day I went to Vermont, as scheduled, but still couldn’t unlock my leg and could barely walk. Valerie and Mark’s 4-year-old had to carry my cosmetic bag up to the bathroom so that I could basically hop up the stairs. Susan had to give me her arm when we went to the hotdog restaurant to hear Patty Carpenter make fine music.
I went to a loud Trumpy PT who insisted my problem was a tight IT Band, so I returned to my favorite dance class, after which I was in excruciating trouble. My great chiropractors identified a problem with my meniscus and gave me the name of a non-surgical orthopod at the clinic I belong to.
I had an MRI on Monday. The terrifying results arrived on Tuesday: shredded meniscus on both sides; “diffuse bone marrow edema;” fissuring of cartilage; massive swelling; very advanced arthritis – and much more. A friend who works in rehab read the report and talked of knee replacement. I live alone. I have a book coming out and a conference to attend. It’s more than bad enough I can’t dance.
Meanwhile, I had to cancel anything that involved standing or moving, including my work teaching fitness and dance to elders. My doctor suggested a cane. The nurse brought me one along with a copious sheaf of paperwork in which I had to promise to pay for it if my insurance didn’t. “But I have Medicare. Don’t they pay for canes?” She wasn’t supposed to say, but she thought not. “How much does this cane cost?” No one knows until the bill goes to insurance and is rejected and falls into my lap. “No thanks.”
Instead I bought one from Goodwill for $3.00. That evening my friend Bambi, a medical person, adjusted the cane for me and I watched YouTube videos to learn how to walk with it.
Today I met with the young, sweet non-surgical orthopod. He fulfilled my primary wish and gave me a cortisone shot (elder friends of mine call us Steroid Nation), as well as this big ole knee brace with metal hinges. He recommended a certain PT in the same building, with whom I made an appointment for next Friday.
He told me of a study in 2002 described at this link in comprehensible and fascinating language outlining the reasons many are skeptical about arthroscopic knee surgery. I’ll include a quote at the end of this blog for those who are interested.
The orthopod doctor said I should aim for 50% improvement in a month. I’ll take it! I could live with half the pain and twice the mobility, not to mention fewer pain pills. I asked him what I could or could not do and he said that obviously I cannot dance, but that otherwise to listen to my body. Right now my body is asking for yet another pain pill. Right now – besides dreaming of waking up and finding out that Bernie is president – I’m hoping that the cortisone shot is going to click in and do its job.
Thanks to everyone who has proven to really give a shit about me and my wounded knee.
“But it wasn’t until 2002 that we first had any real evidence about whether the procedure actually worked, when a novel study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Somehow doctors convinced 180 veterans from the Houston VAMC to enter a trial wherein patients were randomized into 1 of 3 groups: arthroscopic lavage (washing the knee with at least 10 liters of fluid), lavage with arthroscopic debridement (trimming and shaving the joint), or sham surgery wherein patients were given an anesthetic and surgical incisions made through the skin without actually operating on the joint. In the latter group, surgeons called for instruments as if performing the procedure and even mimicked the lavage by splashing fluid onto the knee and floor. God bless the vets who volunteered for the trial, the doctors who enrolled them, and the hospital’s Internal Review Board that had the intellectual honesty, curiosity, and cajones to approve the study. Neither the patients nor the providers who examined them afterward knew which had received the sham or the real surgery. Patients were examined at multiple intervals for up to 2 years afterward and compared with regard to pain, mobility, and function.
“And guess what? There were no differences between the groups at any time during the follow up. The sham surgery worked just as well as the real surgery.”
And if you want an additional article, here’s another:
When we began the lesbian/gay liberation movement shortly after Stonewall, I was in it with both feet. I stomped around in my shit-kicker lace-up boots being a revolutionary dyke in the company of others like me. We had been through hell before the movement started, just for loving. I had been in love with a woman in high school and after two years of being together, we were caught, separated forever, and punished harshly.
The new concept of being “out” was one of the greatest thrills of my life and I was damned if I was going to be anything but out in my studded leather cap and jacket ala Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Those were also the early days of my training as a martial artist, and I was a bad girl on the streets. Very bad, if revengeful is bad. Those were kick-ass days indeed.
When I left the States for Israel in 1977, I suddenly had to go back into the closet. I knew how to do it having lived as a closeted lesbian from about 1963 to 1969. My youth was spent in that small dim place. I knew how to do it. I had the skills. I knew how to switch pronouns when I was being overheard on the phone. I used the closet language: “friend of Dorothy” or “part of the family.” I survived the mafia bars. I published my gay writing under a pen name when I had a job I could lose.
One of the joys of moving from Israel to England, where I lived throughout the 90s, was the ability to be 100% out there. At work, on the streets, in social settings. 100%. It was exhilarating.
So as I watch one devoted homophobe after another become part of Trump’s administration, I feel like it won’t be long before those discarded closets are going to be re-established. People may well have to be careful at work; be secretive in their houses of worship; misrepresent their relationships when they’re trying to rent an apartment. I’m not sure how safe it’s going to be to cuddle on the street or stroll along the river hand-in-hand. Kids could become an issue – getting them and keeping them.
I think of the few young gay friends I have. These folks weren’t even born when Stonewall came down. They never existed in a world where being queer meant having a mental disorder that required hideous therapies. Where you could be arrested for failing to wear three “sex appropriate” pieces of clothing. Where your sexual acts themselves were illegal.
I worry that we elders will have to run how-to workshops on self-loathing, cringing, pretending, avoiding, and self-defense. And all while the real perverts – the racist, woman-hating, queer-baiting assholes – drag this country into its darkest, dankest corner yet.
So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.
Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.
I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.
I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.
I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.
Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.
One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.
Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier. If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!
I have a couple of personal memories of Tom Hayden, who has just died of heart disease at the young age of 76.
The first time we crossed paths was when he came to my apartment in Inman Square, Cambridge, to teach us the Japanese Snake Dance – must’ve been 1967 or 68. At that time I was working for the New England Resistance – a movement against the war in Viet Nam. Tom had learned this formation from leftists in Japan, who fashioned much more structured demonstrations than we ever did. It was a non-violent technique for breaking through police lines by linking arms in a certain secure way and moving forward rhythmically.
We were operating church sanctuaries for men refusing the draft because of their opposition to the disastrous war in Viet Nam. We were mobilizing people on the street. We were in constant friction with the police and needed ways to cope.
I had a kind of driveway path to my scuzzy ground-floor apartment and Tom came there to teach us the Snake Dance, which we actually used (to little effect) in subsequent confrontations with the police.
Some months later I was in California for a movement meeting. This all happened between his early 60s marriage to Sandra Cason and his 1973 marriage to Jane Fonda. Tom offered me a bedroom for a couple of days in his Berkeley commune.
There was a huge St. Bernard in that commune – I think it may have been Tom’s. I was awakened by something beating against my face. It was this dog’s dick – and it was huge. Think baseball bat. The dog was all over me, thrusting his massive cock at me – the strangest sexual assault I ever experienced. I was scared, screamed, and Tom came and took the dog out of my room.
I don’t recall much about Tom personally. But not a dog goes by that I don’t remember his beastly animal.
I saw Gladys’ solo act last night in the City Hall auditorium in a former industrial town called Lynn about 23 miles away from where I live. Born in 1944, Gladys is now 72 – three years older than me. She looked (from the excellent seats we snuck into once the lights went down) like someone in her 40s or early 50s – cool haircut, bling-decorated blue gauzy pants outfit, and high heels that she surely wanted to kick off at her first opportunity. It was those heels that bothered me the whole 96 minutes (no intermission) that she was onstage. I kept thinking that wearing them at this point in her life for every show was just about too great a price for any woman. What, after all, is the point of becoming an elder (she has sixteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren) if you can’t rock elasticized pants, upholstered shoes, and braless / spanx-less outfits? Or am I projecting?
Gladys Knight has had four husbands, but the most wrenching separation for me as a fan was when she left the Pips to go solo in 1987. In the early 1970s I was lucky enough to see them live several times. I realize now that for me, the Pips (made up of her brother Merald "Bubba" Knight and her cousins Edward Patten and William Guest) were the key to my love of the act. I saw them about the time they were wrapping up with Motown ("If I Were Your Woman" and "Neither One of Us - Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye”) and moving over to Buddha Records ("Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me" and “Midnight Train to Georgia"). I didn’t just love the Pips: I wanted to be a Pip. I wanted to wear those matching suits and do those smooth moves. (See clip below.)
This City Hall auditorium is Lynn’s main venue and it resembles a 1950s high school auditorium, complete with perfectly functional bathrooms that seem scaled down to say 2/3 the size of today’s stalls and bathroom fixtures. Worked for me. The audience seats were simple but more comfortable than most movie houses. The staff and volunteers were proud, chatty, and excited to be hosting big stars. The sound system was cranked up to an unfortunately murky level and the speakers seemed unable to handle the high level of reverb. I love supporting regional performance and theatre venues, but it’s hard to admire a singer whose sound is being muddied.
Her performance was more Broadway-diva than Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame. It was all about her astonishing pipes and the fact that, without the slightest doubt, she still has it. She did Streisand and her four young backup singers did a set of Prince. She did a lot of diva covers, numbers from musicals and whatnot, and only a few of her hits from the days of the Pips. For those following her career all along, that was fine I’m sure. For someone like me who stopped buying her LPs when she and the Pips parted, it was not exactly what I was hoping for.
Her patter between songs was long and canned, full of homilies that were vaguely spiritual and perhaps reflecting her 1997 conversion from Baptist to Mormon. There was little spontaneity, although there were two raw moments. She made a quick, quiet side comment about missing the Pips. (Me too!) And she made an uncharacteristically snide remark about Marvin Gaye stealing “Heard it Through the Grapevine” from her. Her 1967 version was Motown’s best-selling single in Motown history up to that point, but when they released Gaye’s recording the following year, it became a much bigger hit. (Apparently, though, he had recorded it before her but Motown released hers first.) Gladys Knight did go on to talk about Marvin’s genius and all.
The crowd was my age, her age, and mixed Black and white. I expected that people would be dancing in the aisles, but in fact that only happened on her last song, when she told us to stand up and party.
Watching her all made up and perfect and thin and gorgeous and singing all around the stage at 72, my overwhelming feeling was gratitude that I was no longer ambitious and that being beautiful was never for a moment a goal I set for myself. The flawed sound system did not stop her fans from being amazed at her vocal longevity. And she herself reminded us, from start to finish, perhaps a dozen times, that she is an elder, that she is old, and that aging is her dominant present reality. I could relate.
I’m not generally a big fan of Phillip Roth, but I’ve gotta tell you. His novel The Plot Against America (2004) is the most prescient piece of literature I’ve read since 1984. Roth nails, absolutely nails what is going on in this country during the Trump campaign for President.
Here’s the premise. Heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President in 1940 by running on an anti-Semitic platform, promising not to get involved with WWII. He is cozy with Hitler and his crowd. There are rabbinical sell-outs, over-protective neighbors, and a young Jewish kid trying to figure it all out.
To read this book now, now! as in right now, is to be bedazzled by the parallels with the present presidential campaign. It’s also a page-turner, funny in parts, and compelling in its own right. I recommend that you get it immediately. It’s resonance with our daily reality will blow your mind.
By the way, I’ve read it as an audio-book in the car – and it worked well.
This summer I experienced a change to my character and behavior so fundamental that I’m surprised my friends recognized me. Let me first lay out the context:
Having lived in London for 10 years, I have maintained my bank account there and in that bank account are all of my pounds sterling. Because of Brexit, those sterlings are less sterling, and have lost a generous chunk of their value as punishment for the stupidity of the vote – 13% on just the day after.
When I arrived and started to understand what that meant – that a good deal of my very hard-earned money had evaporated without my consent – I remembered all the other times throughout my adult life that burst bubbles, stock crashes, and government perfidy erased the savings I am a chump to have worked towards all my life. And now the uncertainly of Brexit.
I could’ve succumbed to depression if I hadn’t decided to make lemonade out of lemons. Since I had just been ripped off of years of effort and modest living, I decided to live as if I weren’t Sue Katz, She Who Saves and Worries About Every Penny (only to be sucker-punched.) I decided instead that I should spend my money, not just surrender it without choice to sleazy financial and governmental bodies. I should add that I’m about to turn 69 and since I have saved and saved for old age, and since old age seems to be arriving for a visit of unknown duration, it is time to switch around and spend.
All of which is to explain why, contrary to a life’s habit, I ate where I wanted and what I wanted. As one friend said, I read the menu from the left instead of, as has always been my habit, from the right. I had eggplant stuffed with minced pork at an amazing Vietnamese restaurant and then went back twice for succulent cubed beef. I established myself as a regular at a neighborhood restaurant which, while the menu could only be called that unfortunate term Nouveau Cuisine, served the most scrumptious vegetable crepe and a damned good hamburger. I brought so many guests to this restaurant over the month that Kevin the gay proprietor squealed my name whenever I came in the door and seated me at the hidden back garden table for VIPs. And it’s no wonder: I was single-handedly paying off his mortgage.
Not pinching pennies – which can take both hands and half a brain – means I was able to luxuriously pass the time with one friend after another – at least one or two per day over a month – without a gnawing concern in the back of my head about whether this particular meal would mean that I’d have to die a week earlier in my dotage. Friends came to see me from Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Tunbridge, Whitstable, Bristol, and Brighton – not to forget south London – and I broke bread with each one without reserve. It meant that I could go to my favorite Turkish restaurant where “greasy grilled lamb ribs” does not begin to describe the orgasmic delight, and pick up the check without it giving me indigestion. It meant that I could go to My Old Dutch Pancake House and split not one but two confections with my buddy.
I broke down on my resolve to be a bigger spender many times, slinking off to the Pound Stores and the cut-rate supermarket, but then I’d shake myself out and saunter down to the – she says spitting over her shoulder – Whole Foods, which has followed the wave of gentrification into the neighborhood. There I bought the most delectable elite tea without bothering about the price at all – enough tea to sustain me during the month and to secret back into the States where a cuppa is sitting next to my computer as we speak.
Sitting, in fact, next to the pile of mail I have received from my London bank – surely credit and debit card accounts that I am unable to bring myself to open, now that I have returned to my scrimping real life. Perhaps one more cup of tea and I will buck up, stiffen my upper lip, and settle my arrears, putting that life of unfettered indulgence to rest.
These two institutions are worthy to be on the shortlist of any visitor’s London destinations.
The British Library has six miles of shelves filled with more items than any other library in the world. I remember only too well all the kerfuffle when the library was separated out from the British Museum (and various venues around the city) and pulled together under a new roof in 1997, after taking longer and costing more than intended. The British do not like their institutions messed about with, but in fact, this high-tech, temperature-controlled new location has been a very successful move.
The free exhibitions that the British Library mounts for the public are often tantalizing. I made it to “Shakespeare in Ten Acts,” a multi-media tracing of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare – over and over again through the years. He has undergone a rainbow of reinventions and reinterpretations – and it’s not over yet.
Most fascinating to me were the rooms on racism and sexism – looking at the reluctant inclusion of people of color and women on Shakespearean stages. Using their own vast resources, the exhibition offers a peek at such rare items as the last surviving manuscript hand-written by the man himself. (Check out the video intro to the exhibition at the bottom of this piece if you're interested.)
Speaking of precious papers, no visit should skip the displays of British Library treasures. It’s truly sobering to read Michelangelo’s handwriting from letters he sent in 1550 or to view the pages of Da Vinci’s 1508 notebook. The Magna Carta (1215), written in Latin on sheepskin parchment, is right there behind glass, with its teeny-tiny left-leaning font. I loved the dual letter – half by Anne Boleyn and half by Henry VIII – pressuring Cardinal Wolsey in 1528 to expedite the papal annulment. Wasn’t Boleyn holding out on Hank until they were married?
A bit more modern, but personally arousing to me, was the original binding of 15-year-old Jane Austen’s “The History of England” – a parody illustrated by her older sister Cassandra, who, if I remember correctly, burned many of Jane Austen’s letter in an act of family reputation management, thereby robbing the rest of us of the inside story.
Tate Modern: Georgia O’Keeffe and Bhupen Khakhas
The best way to approach the magnificent Tate Modern museum is by walking over the Thames from the glorious St. Paul’s Cathedral via the Millennium Bridge – opened for pedestrians as a kind of Tony Blair vanity project in June 2000 only to be immediately closed for two years to deal with a disconcerting wobble. It’s beautiful and affords exceptional views.
The Tate Modern is part of a series of Tate museums in Britain. It opened in 2000 in the building that housed from 1947-81 a giant power station. They’ve done an impressive transformation and re-purposing. Recently they added another wing, making the navigation inside a bit complex.
This summer a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe was mounted including rooms with the range of her works. We know her best by her painted vagina-flowers, but she did many other kinds of work. I was impressed by her New York cityscapes, where she mostly lived from 1918-29 with her partner, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose work is generously included throughout this exhibition. I was disconcerted, during my visit, by a number of quotes from O’Keeffe and comments by the curators on the explanatory plaques rejecting any sexual interpretation of any of her work. She seemed to fully repudiate feminist admiration and it all smacked of a kind of repression that diminished rather than defended her art.
I was much more excited by “Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All.” Khakhar (1934-2003) was a gay Indian man whose figurative work uses vibrant color and multiple images to tell profound stories. In this first international retrospective, we see his kind of public coming-out period – after a stint in the West and contact with open gay society. He paints men fondling each other’s penises. His early portraits of workers and tradespeople on Indian streets were affectionate and energetic. His late work, when he was dying of cancer, was brutal and honest – in that same way that Frida Kahlo depicted her spinal problems without flinching.
Khakhar’s painting and his commentaries are sometimes hilarious. About winter in the UK, he said, “You are not allowed to smile during this season which lasts for ten months of the year. If you are sensible then try to look as grumpy as possible. English people appreciate grump.”
Despite the throbbing in my feet, I took a quick run through the Media Networks exhibit, where there were copious varied treasures. First I ran into one of my favorite painters, Fernand Leger, a peacenik at the height of the Cold War whose work often commented on industrialization. Here I saw the 1948 “The Acrobat and His Partner,” a huge colorful thrill.
Cildo Meireles’ “Babel” (2001) is a massive tower of radios playing all at once. Instead of achieving communication, we get only info overload and incomprehension. It stands by itself in a tall room and is a sobering reminder of how we live today.
My final mention goes to the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective from 1985-90 that pointed out the wretched gender bias in the art world. One, showing a sliced dollar bill, said, “Women in American make 2/3 of what men do. Women artists earn only 1/3 of what men artists do.” I cannot imagine that too much has changed.
In the 10 years I lived in London, the only time I was near Buckingham Palace was when we had a Lesbian Avengers demonstration around the big statue installation of Queen Victoria.
In 1992 there was a fire at Windsor Castle (owned by the same family, of course), so in 1993 for the first time they opened the Buckingham State Rooms to mere mortals for a handsome fee (today it is £37.00 / $50.00) to help with the Windsor repairs. (Irrelevant postscript: A half dozen years later I spoke at a European Conference on volunteerism at Windsor Castle. Yes, you may kiss my hand. If you buy me a ring, you can kiss my ring.)
Now they open it to the masses for about two summer months and, as far as I can tell, put the takings towards their significant, inherited art collection. Of course the Queen and those who share her aristocratic DNA are staying at one of their other domiciles during the onslaught, probably Balmoral, Scotland.
There is a great deal of walking involved with this visit, which each year consists of two sections: first there is a special exhibition of some sort, and second is the tour of the State Rooms, that is to say, the rooms people are allowed in anyway, not the family bathroom or kitchen or tv room. The State Rooms are where the Queen meets diplomats and ambassadors and other worthies.
This summer’s special exhibition, Fashioning a Reign, starts off with a four panel Andy Warhol portrait of Queen Elizabeth that is sprinkled with diamond dust. Even though he comes from my hometown, Pittsburgh, I’m not a fan of Warhol, but frankly this portrait is a high point. We are led through endless displays of Elizabeth’s couture, from her christening gown, used by 62 royals before it fell apart and was reproduced for subsequent generations, to all the clothes she wore at this and that coronation, anniversary, national celebration, and bar mitzvah. It is a boxy collection, all monochrome (so that she can be easily found in the crowd), leaving at least one journalist wondering why, with infinite (unearned) wealth, she chose the dowdiest items on the rack. There is also a very extensive line of hats, which, when hung as they were without a head, make for a strangely post-modern tableau.
I rushed past the mesmerized millions of visitors to escape this exhibition. What I really wanted to see were the State rooms. The original building was enlarged by John Nash when King George III bought it. The two of them were Masons, so there are secret man-symbols interwoven in the designs. These rooms are full of the expected domed roofs and gilded everything; the newer wings seem a bit less ornate. Somehow the overall impression is pale, restrained, at least when compared to many of the ornate European palaces.
I did love the chandeliers, in particular the four in the Blue Drawing Room with the doubly high ceiling. But then when you realize that George IV kept 30 people employed just to keep the candles in good order (on, off, changed, etc.), you understand why Queen Victoria converted them to electricity. I hated the Table of the Great Commanders (1806-12), a spindle shaped round-topped thing made entirely of gilded porcelain. Napoleon commissioned it to be decorated with the profile head of Alexander the Great circled by heads of the less worthy commanders and philosophers from ancient days. To name a few of these minor figures: Pericles, Pompey, Augustus, Caesar, and Hannibal.
Here’s what the Royal Collection website has to say about this tribute to testosterone: “The table was the most prestigious and conspicuous present given to George IV by a grateful Louis XVIII, two years after the defeat of Napoleon. So highly did George IV regard this gift, and such was its status in his eyes, that it became part of the ceremonial backdrop for all his state portraits.”
Then we get to the royal gallery – a long expanse made from knocking down the walls of four rooms in a row. These people (I’m trying to be generous to the Royals) own the biggest intact art collection of any of the world’s royals. I could run down the copious invaluable paintings, but one will serve: the exquisite, inviting 1638 portrait of Agatha Bas by Rembrandt (my favorite painter). Why, I ask myself, should this family inherit such a treasure when it should be in a museum that does not cost a soul $50 to see two months of the year? If I weren’t an anarcho-socialist already, I would have been converted quicker than Victoria switched to electric.
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