"Be Careful With My Heart," POP Arts at Hetrick-Martin

After our visit to the Zoo, we headed into Greenwich Village to see a POP Arts show at The Hetrick-Martin Institute. POP Arts stands for Peers Outreaching to Peers, and the program educates young people about safe sex, STI and HIV prevention, and facts about STI's and HIV/AIDS. They also learn acting techniques and scriptwriting, and together they write their own play to inform other youths about what they have learned.

This year's show was a stunner. Called, "Be Careful With My Heart," it portrayed just about every kind of relationship: straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Kids of various orientations attended a party where couples went off to bedrooms together, and heavy consequences resulted. There were breakups, there was risky sex, heartbreak and betrayal. Yet there was also a lot of built-in comedy so that the show was anything but grim.

One young woman sang a beautiful song, and there was a hot and humorous dance number. This is a talented bunch of young people coming to terms with different sexuality and with the hormonal ups and downs of horny teenagers. After the show, the performers answered questions from the audience. Many people were so touched that happy tears were shed. It was truly a moving and educational performance.

I was particularly struck by the dilemma one young woman faces. She is Muslim, and their tolerance of gays and lesbians is slim to none. I had to admire her courage in coming to Hetrick-Martin and taking part in this show, and I hope it will not blow up in her face if her father ever finds out what the show was all about.

Hetrick-Martin accomplishes so much with kids who would otherwise fall by the wayside. I'm proud to be associated with this great organization.

Star Trek: The New Movie

This time, it really is the next generation. All of the old actors from the original show have been phased out, except that Leonard Nimoy as the elderly Spock still had a part.

I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through space and time. It was pretty easy to tell who the bad guys were: they had pointy ears, deathly pale faces, and wore ugly, sharp-edged facial tattoos. Clear signs of villainy.

It was amazing witnessing the "birth" of James T. Kirk and then seeing him briefly as an adventurous and rowdy twelve year old rocketing around in an antique car (retooled from the 20th century!). I don't know cars so I would not attempt to describe the model but it clearly dated back to the early 1960's or even before. Most of the new actors fit perfectly into their roles as "baby" Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc. Uhura seemed a little older than the rest whereas on the original show she was either the same age as the captain or younger. Chekhov bore no resemblance to the original actor, but that didn't particularly bother me.

It was a fun movie, despite the destruction of Vulcan and the loss of Amanda, Spock's mother. I wonder if they will be able to go back in time and prevent these tragedies in a future episode. If so, or whatever they decide to do next, I'm up for it.

The last moments of the movie, light playing over the "brand new" original Enterprise, with the words, "Space...the final frontier..." as a voiceover, put a chill right down my baby boomer spine. And Generation Y'er Jason loved it as well. So did Bruce. All three of us recommend it highly.

"The Mermaid Chair"

After reading The Secret Life of Bees I got Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair and read that also. I enjoyed this book just as much.

It had elements of The Bridges of Madison County. Jessie's been married for twenty years and has a grown daughter in college. She's facing a mid-life crisis with her marriage gone stale, and is seeking something she's not sure of. At the same time, her mother, who has been steeped in excessive religiosity since Jessie's father died, has erupted into madness, cutting off her own finger.

Jessie goes to her mother without her husband Hugh, a psychiatrist and a bit of a know it all. The island she grew up on, Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina, has a peculiar custom. There's a monastery there to a St. Senara. Legend has it that this saint was a mermaid who converted to Catholicism, and became a saint. There's a carved "mermaid chair" kept at the church that is carried to the docks and used to bless the fleet on St. Senara's Day.

While she's trying to help her mother and to unravel the puzzle of her mother's self-destructive act, Jessie falls in love with one of the Benedictine monks, Brother Thomas, who has not yet taken his final vows. Jessie and Brother Thomas (Whit) find they have tragedy in common. Jessie's father died at sea when she was nine years old, supposedly blown to bits by a spark from the pipe she gave him. Jessie has lived with a terrible sense of guilt for all these years. Brother Thomas, a former attorney, has joined the monastery to escape from the pain of losing his wife and unborn daughter in a car crash.

The story is permeated by mermaid and siren symbolism and imagery, just as bees permeate the story of The Secret Life of Bees. Jessie, away from her husband and having instigated a separation, begins to find herself, to expand and be the artist she has always longed to be. She realizes that she has pushed herself into too small a space, always putting Hugh and their daughter first and her own amibitions and desires second. She's very similar to Francesca in Bridges in this respect.

The lovers are both "saved and damned" by their connection. Their brief affair forces them both to look at what they really want in life and what they have been hiding from. The mystery of Jessie's father's death is revealed, too, and brings a healing both to her and her mother.

I'm quickly becoming an avid Sue Monk Kidd fan, and I look forward to her future novels.

The Secret Life of Bees

In May our Book Club will discuss Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees." This was a book that surprised me. Some of the works we have read have been way too depressing. This book is a book of hope.

It begins in the summer of 1964, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights movement. Lily, fourteen years old, has bees living in the walls of her room. Her father, T. Ray, is neglectful and contemptuous of her. Lily's mother is dead, and her death is a source of Lily's shame and guilt, because she remembers just enough to believe she is the one who accidentally shot her mother to death at the age of four.

Their maid, Rosaleen, decides she is going to go and register to vote. That's controversialin the south where they live, and Lily foresees danger. She accompanies Rosaleen and it goes badly. Rosaleen is accosted by three very bigoted men and she retaliates by pouring snuff juice on their shoes. For this insult both she and Lily are hauled off to jail, and T. Ray bails Lily out but punishes her by making her kneel on raw grits. He calls them the "white Marthas" and I don't know what the origin of that expression might be, unless it's a contrast with the black Mary we meet later on in the story.

Lily has two mementos of her mother, a photograph and a portrait of a black Madonna. On the back is written, "Tiburon, SC." Coincidentally (not), her mother's name was Deborah, which means "bee."

Lily helps Rosaleen escape from the hospital where she is recovering from a savage beating by the three men who accosted her. They head to Tiburon just because Lily believes her mother must have once been there. In a grocery store, Lily sees a jar of honey with the same black Madonna on the label, and realizes the connection. She's led by this synchronicity to the home of the Calendar sisters, May, June and August.

August is the beekeeper who manufactures the Black Madonna honey. When Lily and Rosaleen arrive August welcomes them and allows them to stay with the family. She teaches Lily how to help with harvesting the honey and making the beeswax candles August sells to retailers across the country.

June, however, is not so welcoming. Her attitude to Lily is harsh at first. She makes Lily feel like an outsider in a black home when Lily is the one white person. Later, though, her attitude softens.

May, on the other hand, is so sensitive as to be dysfunctional. Anything that upsets her starts her singing,"Oh, Susanna," and running out to her "wall," a homemade "Wailing Wall" where she writes her sorrows and prayers, and puts them between the stones she has piled up there. There was a twin to May, named April, but April could not stand the restrictions and humiliations of racism, and she committed suicide as a teenager.

In this home, Lily begins to flourish as a young woman should. She learns beekeeping and she takes part in religious ceremonies where the sisters and their friends worship the black Mary, a ship's masthead that has become their holy icon. It's a blend of Catholicism and their own, woman-identified worship, that gives them all a feeling of strength and solidarity. One or two men take part in these ceremonies as well.

Lily meets Zach, the student who has been helping August since he started high school, and a tenuous, forbidden love starts to grow between them. In that era, in the deep south, there is no "place or time" for a black boy and a white girl. Yet they do have a few stolen moments, apparently condoned by the other women. Zach is determined to become a lawyer and fight for civil rights, a determination that is only strengthened when he is jailed unfairly for supposedly throwing a bottle or rock at the police.

The bees, their honey, and their secret lives, as they work for and tend the queen,become a metaphor for the family that Lily has discovered. She has found her hive, with the sweetness of love. The black Mary has become her loving mother, the one she has yearned for, the one whose love she has missed out on all her life.

The symbolism of honey, bees, and the black Mary permeate the book. Synchronicities abound, and Lily discovers that her mother did indeed stay at the sisters' home when she ran away from T. Ray. Even Lily's name has a symbolic meaning.

T. Ray tracks her down and tries to force her to come back to the peach farm with him. Legally he has that right, but it turns out that August and the other women are able to convince him to let Lily stay. She's lived through May's suicide, June's marriage, and she's learned the full story about her mother. She's found her hive and her queen bee, and she's ready to become a woman.

I enjoyed this book immensely with its spiritual overtones, with the majesty of the downtrodden, "like royalty among us," as Lily says. Even with Zach, there is a bit of hope because they walk together in the halls of the white high school where he has boldly enrolled, and ignore the taunts and crumpled paper students throw at them.

Honey is a healing agent: that's recently been "discovered" though people closer to the earth have probably known it for centuries. Synchronicity and following her heart leads Lily to Tiburon where she finds her heart's desire.

Read this book!It's not brand new, and I missed it when it was, but if you missed it the first time around now is the time to read and savor it. This seems to be a book designed to be read during the summer heat, set as it is in the sweltering Carolina summertime.

Dreams From My Father

I've just finished Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, a memoir of his childhood, youth and young adulthood. His struggles to come to terms with an absent father, his interracial and international background, and his entry into community organizing, are all here. Obama is an eloquent writer and it's a pleasure to read his descriptions of people, landscapes, and inner thoughts.

What this brings across to me is that President Obama has a handle on life in other nations and other cultures, that most Americans simply can't imagine. He's lived abroad and visited the country of his roots. How many of us have done that? I know when I toured other countries I felt removed from the people there, on the outside looking in at their daily lives. Tourists see museums and national monuments, not the living rooms of the inhabitants. Obama's experiences go so much deeper than that.

He has thought long and hard about his background and his image of his father, mostly compiled of stories told by his other relatives. He's thought long and hard about his racial status and about how to elevate the African American's status in our society.

It's refreshing and encouraging to have a President who can think, examine his own emotions, and write. I'd certainly recommend Dreams From My Father to anyone who would like a greater understanding of our new President.

Nothing to be Frightened Of

Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes is a major departure from most of the memoirs I have read recently. It's got to do with his own family life but not in the usual way. He speaks of his parents' personalities and their attitudes towards death, as part of his own musings on the fear of death, and the influence of his own atheism (and more recently in his life, agnosticism) on his fear or lack thereof.

He brings in the stories and thoughts of many other famous writers: Flaubert, Renard, etc. What distinguishes this memoir is that it is not the usual litany of sorrows, the typical dysfunctional family or terrible disease that generally crops up in these books. It's about ideas first and the circumstances of his life second.

I've gotten so tired of the typical "my life was dreadful but I have triumphed" story line. That doesn't mean I am boycotting memoirs but I'd like to see more variety in them. Nothing to be Frightened Of isn't a light book, in fact it is so dense that I am reading it much more slowly than usual. Yet Barnes has a sense of humor about it all and manages to say something funny on almost every page. He's also talking about a subject that haunts us all but almost no one ever speaks about. I appreciate that.

"Milk"

This afternoon I met Jason in Chelsea and we saw "Milk." The price was high: $25 for the two of us, no student discount and no matinees. I don't feel gypped at all, though my wallet is considerably lighter.

"Milk" was excellent. Sean Penn did a wonderful acting job and I hope he gets an Oscar for it. As the film progressed, I realized that even though I'd known of Harvey Milk and his assassination, I really never knew the details of his life and what he accomplished.

After the Stonewall Riots, there were certainly the stirrings of a gay rights movement afoot, but Harvey Milk seems to have put it on the map. He brought the gay population of San Francisco together to fight against the discrimination, harassment, violence and even murder that dogged them, just because they were gay. He lost his bid for City Supervisor three times but came back again until he won. Because of his leadership, gays gained a voice and gained many rights they never had before.

Though I don't remember his activities and speeches per se, I do remember his arch-opponent, Anita Bryant, and her revolting, bigoted efforts to relegate gays to second-class citizenship as people who were not acceptable to right-wing Christians and to God. I do remember seeing buttons lambasting her with the slogan, "A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine," a parody of her orange juice ads years earlier (a day without orange juice is a day without sunshine).

The film delved into Milk's private life. Yes, it's a cliche that when a person becomes deeply involved in a cause larger than himself, his intimates often suffer. So Milk's lover, Scott, picked up on impulse in a New York City subway station in 1970, left him because he could no longer stand to be part of the political campaigning that took up so much of Milk's time and energy. And Milk's next lover, the passionate but emotionally frail Jack, committed suicide because Milk came home late from the Supervisor job one time too many.

I'm not sure at what moment I realized who Milk's murderer was going to be, but towards the last quarter of the film it became clear that another Supervisor was going to kill him, and the Mayor as well. Milk is portrayed as sensing in advance that he was not going to live to see 50, and that his death would be violent. He'd received death threats and he knew his stance as an openly gay politician was extremely dangerous. So we see him, at intervals throughout the film, speaking his story into a tape recorder, to be aired only in the event of his assassination.

Sadly, his fears came true, and he was murdered along with the Mayor. The candlelight march through the streets of San Francisco in their memory was a very moving scene. Jason whispered to me that he had tears in his eyes. So did I, and that doesn't happen very often.

Thirty years ago, just a year after Harvey Milk's murder at age 48, a teenage boy was beaten and raped in a New York City homeless shelter, because he was gay. Instead of acting to protect him, the shelter authorities blamed the victim and threw him out. Two gay men, one a psychiatrist, were appalled at this story and started a voluntary program to help LGBT youth who were not adequately protected by the system. From their efforts grew the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the home of the Harvey Milk High School.

A particularly poignant scene, for me, was the one where a gay teenager calls Harvey Milk and begs him to help. He says his parents are going to send him away to be "treated" for his "sickness" of homosexuality. The boy says he is going to kill himself. Milk tells him to get on a bus and get out of there, just leave home and head to a big city where he can find understanding and others like himself. The camera pulls back and we see that the boy is in a wheelchair. His situation seems hopeless, and Milk is forced to hang up the phone because a riot is going on in the street.

Later in the film, we learn that the boy got a friend to put him on a bus to LA, and he calls Harvey Milk in the middle of a referendum on Proposition 6 (the notorious attempt to strip LGBT's of their rights to housing and jobs), to tell him that he is doing fine, and that Los Angeles has voted the proposition down.

It's kids like that boy who show up at the doors of The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Seeing "Milk" has made me doubly proud to volunteer there, and indirectly serve the students at a high school named for Harvey Milk. My highest recommendations for this movie!

Mosaic, a Novel

Recently I finished reading Mosaic, a novel by Soheir Khashoggi. It bears similarities to Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, the true saga of Mahmoody's escape from Iran with her daughter, against her husband's will. In Mosaic, Dina's husband Karim spirits their two youngest children away to Jordan in the belief that he must do it in order to raise them with proper Muslim family values. After living in New York for decades, he's come to the conclusion that American values are flawed and decadent, and he must take the two younger ones away from their influence before they turn out like their teenage brother Jordy.

Like Mahmoody, the fictional Dina refuses to hand her children over to Karim to raise in a completely different culture. She fears for them, because they are American children in a country where Americans are not liked. Her husband's betrayal shatters her happy life and sets her on a dangerous mission to retrieve her children at any cost.

In her time of need, Dina reaches out to her two best friends, Sarah and Em. The three of them each have a "man" problem. Em, an African-American woman from Louisiana, has an ex who walked out on her and their son 15 years earlier, and has hardly ever contacted his son. Sarah is divorced from her Israeli husband, who refused to give her a get (a Jewish divorce).

Each of these characters is well developed and has her issues move to resolution. But in the meantime, Dina finds herself a professional rescuer of abducted children and travels to Jordan to try to get her twins back. Her in-laws are hostile and suspicious except for her sister-in-law. Karim is overbearing. He's the man and he fully intends to continue doing things his way, whether Dina likes it or not.

The attempt doesn't come off. John Constantine, the rescuer, spots trouble in the form of Karim's security men, and backs off.

Meanwhile, however, Karim is struggling with his own conscience. He'd like to feel wholly self righteous, and he'd like to believe he was acting in his children's best interest, but guilt nags at him. When he sees how unhappy Suzy is, he agrees to let her go home to New York with Dina so long as he can keep Ali. Apparently it is important to him to keep Ali safe from the pernicious influences in America that affected Jordan, their eldest.

The big secret about Jordan: he's gay. That's acceptable here, but in the Muslim world, it's an abomination, unnatural. Karim seems to think that if he keeps Ali in the Muslim culture he can save him from following in his brother's footsteps.

Without giving the whole story away, things reach an acceptable, even hopeful, conclusion, for just about everyone. I found this book a pleasure because it portrayed everyone as a three-dimensional human being with good points as well as flaws. Karim is no one-dimensional villain. He's wrong, by my lights, but he's a real person who can reflect and acknowledge mistakes. These are real people, everyone from his or her own specific background, and their differences make up the beautiful mosaic that the title refers to.

Mosaic is also the name of Dina's business, and part of the marital drift between Dina and Karim is her independence and success as a businesswoman. Karim sees it as taking time away from her family, and in fact he abducts the twins while she is out at work. Mosaic, the novel, raises relevant questions about male/female dynamics, Muslim culture versus mainstream American culture, and ethnic paranoia on both sides of the 9/11 divide. I recommend this book highly.

Whodunit?

Years ago, I took a class in genre writing with Marvin Kaye. He taught us the formulas for several genres of writing: Science Fiction, Suspense, and Mystery. At that time mysteries seemed more clear cut. There was one body (a character we barely knew and didn't particularly sympathize with), several suspects, and one master detective to put all the clues together.

Today, mysteries have become far more complex. There may be more than one detective at work, and their characters are far better drawn than the detectives of the past (other than Sherlock Holmes that is). Not only that, but there may be more than one criminal at work, and there are almost always multiple bodies.

It makes for more interesting reading than the more straightforward mysteries of the past. I just finished Dr. Death by Jonathan Kellerman. I've been a fan of his Alex Delaware series for quite some time now. This was a convoluted tale, all right. I figured out one of the murderers before he was revealed in the book, and another was obvious, but the third seemed to come completely from left field. I suppose the clues were there, but maybe I missed them.

So is it better for the reader to be able to guess "whodunit" partway through the book, or should we be in suspense until the bad guy/gal is finally revealed? Is it good to feel cleverer than the clever detective, or more satisfying to watch a brilliant mind at work?

I'm glad I figured out the identity of the worst of the killers, but it's also fascinating to be surprised and then groan when the "obvious" clues are recounted. I'm also glad that mysteries are more complex and psychologically engaging than they used to be. They're also more gruesome, but I'll have to take the bad with the good.

Another Train Wreck

I just finished reading The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls. This was another train wreck about abused and neglected kids. Only this time, the abject poverty wasn't caused by a misguided belief in polygamy, but by an alcoholic father and a self-centered flake of a mother.

I give these kids, Jeannette and her siblings, credit for having the gumption to get the hell out of a horrible situation and flee to New York City. Since they fled in the early seventies, there were still jobs to be had. Three of the four landed on their feet. Oddly, the youngest, who visited other people's homes and got fed there, has been the one who's had the hardest time adjusting.

Ms. Walls may have forgiven her parents but I was less forgiving. From the standpoint of a mother, I could not help but be judgmental about people who failed to feed, properly clothe and house their kids, or even to protect them from danger. That's a parent's job, and these people were the shiftless type that makes a conservative's eyes gleam. Yuppers, they chose to be poor, don't deserve a darn bit of help.

No, they didn't, but their children were helpless victims of their parents' chosen lifestyle, and they most certainly did deserve much more help than they got. Once, a child welfare official came to their home, but there was no follow up. By then the children were well trained to distrust anyone in authority so they wouldn't have told him anything about their living conditions anyway.

Rather than lift a lazy finger to improve their lives, the parents had an excuse and a justification for every one of their failures. If a child got hurt because of the parents' negligence, why, that would just make them strong. Rather than go to the police and complain about a sexual predator who sneaked into the house at night and fondled their daughter, the parents took the attitude of, "See, you are all right. We knew you could deal with it."

These kids wore castoff, junky clothing (not good clothes that were recycled, which would have been fine). They had no food many times and Jeannette described scrounging through the trash after lunch at school, and eating other kids' leftovers. With all their supposed economic troubles, Mom and Dad refused to apply for welfare. They probably knew that their lousy parenting would be exposed and the kids would be hauled off to foster care and a better life. Not that foster care is a picnic, but it would have been better than dumpster diving for dinner.

Whenever some money is found, or the kids save up, the parents misuse it or steal it from their own children. Mommy Worstest buys giant chocolate bars and eats them under the blankets so the kids won't find out. I was glad when her four hungry kids snatched the chocolate away from her and ate it themselves. When the kids find a diamond ring, Mommy decides to wear it instead of selling it for some money to feed her children.

There's mental illness, sure, but the selfishness quotient is extremely high.

Some reviewers have cast doubt on the authenticity of this story. Are there medical records to show that Jeannette really got serious burns by cooking hot dogs unsupervised, at the age of three? Did Daddy Worstest do the "skedaddle" with her, ripping her out of the hospital before she was fully healed? We don't know. It does seem suspicious that, as it comes out at the end, Mommy was sitting on a $1 million parcel of land, and didn't lose it for failure to pay property taxes.

So in the end, I don't know whether it is a true story or a hoax. You see Jeannette's mom in a video on Youtube, and she does look like the bag lady Jeannette says she is. If all this is true, and Jeannette has managed to forgive her parents, she's either a better person than I am, or in major denial. I do wonder about denial, because she writes with such a lack of affect through most of the book. Her first husband "isn't right for her" so she divorces him, but gives us no insight into her feelings about this.

Once I was accused of being a helicopter parent, by a busybody who wasn't a good friend and had no business passing judgment on my child rearing. I think I'm an involved parent, a caring parent, and a strong advocate for my son. If that makes me a helicopter parent, so be it. Yes, I homeschooled Jason for four years, as the Walls parents supposedly homeschooled their kids. But I took it seriously and abided by the state regulations. Yes, we bought hand me downs at the thrift store, but they fit properly, they weren't full of rips and holes, and by golly, all his winter coats zipped or buttoned up to keep him warm.

If there was a problem at school I went in and politely dealt with the issue. Yeah, Rex Walls would have shown up at the school, but he would have been drunk and his belligerence would have only made things worse. Parenting involves sacrifice. Parenting involves watching over your child, taking care of basic needs, taking care of health. These parents failed in all these areas.

So I'm not real impressed with Rex Walls for taking Jeannette into the desert at night and giving her Venus for her Christmas present. Maybe that was a bright spot in her childhood. In an otherwise normal childhood, it would have been a sweet, nonmaterialistic gift. But in this case, it was just a way of being "creative" when the man's pockets were empty, through every fault of his own. And if he'd been smarter he would have used that idea to sell deeds to the stars, just like some company is doing today. Makes a great Christmas gift, and you can even put food on the table.

Parallel Lines

Wednesday night, Bruce, Jason and I watched Nina Davenport's 2003 film, "Parallel Lines." We were previewing it for possible use at a movie night with the Brooklyn Humanist Community.

For that purpose, "Parallel Lines" flunked the test. It was solid documentary where I expected a bit more of a story line from a "docudrama." Still, although it reached no solid conclusions, it was a road movie that captured the thoughts and emotions of so many different Americans.

Some were deeply affected by 9/11, even from thousands of miles away. Others hadn't even heard about the attack until several days later, and it didn't impact much on their emotions or their everyday lives. But for most people, it evoked feelings about loss and sorrow in their own personal histories.

Nina Davenport seemed fearless as she trekked across America, taking the scenic route in order to arrive in New York City in time for New Year's Eve in Times Square. She entered strangers' homes, took boat rides with them, got into their cars to film their responses as they drove. She did, in short, all the things our parents warn us not to do. Yet, she emerged unscathed from all this risky behavior, her deepest wound being the personal sense of loss 9/11 brought out in New York residents.

Ms. Davenport encountered so many lonely people, the entire cast of "Eleanor Rigby." Talking about 9/11 brought out personal tragedies: the mother whose children were taken from her, the flea market man mourning his father's death the week before, the cowboy whose mother had killed his violent father. Davenport stopped in Oklahoma City to speak with a woman who'd escaped death in the Oklahoma City bombing only because she was sick and not at work that day. Her survivor guilt is a mirror for all those who were absent or late to work on 9/11, while their colleagues and friends perished.

Sometimes she encountered negative attitudes: the man who said, what does the United States expect, we've done things like this to people in so many other countries, did we really think it would never happen here? She encounters an elderly black man who is so suspicious that he nearly calls the police on her just for being someone he doesn't recognize. But then he realizes she is not out to hurt anyone, and he invites her into his ramshackle home to tell her his story.

In D.C., suspicion runs rampant. Davenport is nearly arrested for driving around with her camcorder mounted on the roof of her car. She explains over and over that she's making a road movie and the camcorder is filming the view of the open road. Not having any of it, the police tell her to move along. She decides it is high time to get herself back to New York City, the place where she belongs.

Arriving back in NYC on New Year's Eve, Davenport joins the crowds in Times Square, under much heavier security than ever before. But the crowd sees the police as friends and protectors, and when the ball drops at midnight, the police receive loving hugs from the assemblage.

In the final scene, Davenport goes to Ground Zero. Unable to directly look at the wreckage of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, she films a pigeon on the sidewalk and then films the facial expressions of people as they return from the viewing platform. A fellow photographer breaks down in tears and tells her that he, too, needs to keep some distance from looking directly at the destruction. And thus it ends.

It was a moving film, funny at times, but more often sad. We don't reach a conclusion or a satisfying wrap up. Instead, we're left to make sense of the senselessness of the attack, just as we were in real life.

The Giver

I've just finished reading The Giver by Lois Lowry. I have to admit it was beautifully written and sucked me in from the very first page. I finished the entire book in one evening, all 179 pages.

So kudos to Ms. Lowry for her excellent, suspenseful writing. But the story line..well, the words "trite" and "overdone" came to mind. It seems to me that ever since I was a child I've been reading books about communities that instill mindless conformity and manipulate reality in order to keep the population under control. This is just another of those stories, even if the writing is outstanding.

I could name several books this one reminded me of. It's not as brutally coercive as 1984, but there's recommended physical punishment of young children and the elderly. There are endless rules that even restrict one's use of language. Jonas is scolded for his use of a vague, meaningless term like "love." One of the rules is to use language "precisely." Thus, exaggeration for effect, such as saying one is starving when really just hungry, is cause for reprimand. This reminded me very much of the manipulation of language through Newspeak in 1984.

Those who don't conform, die. That's a pervasive theme throughout many of these dystopian novels. Certainly it is central in 1984 and also in Logan's Run (where it is a capital offense to turn 30 years old without presenting oneself for immediate termination). "Release" is the euphemism for state-sanctioned murder here. But it is treated as something positive (similar to Brave New World, where children visited the hospices and were given ice cream on the day someone died), and the polite fiction that the "released" persons are sent "Elsewhere" is maintained.

The ugly secret is that not just the elderly are put to death (which is bad enough), but anyone who doesn't fit in, even the smaller of a set of twins or a baby who is fretful at night, can be "released" if the community decides this is necessary. Jonas discovers to his horror that his "father" (no child is raised by his or her biological parents) who appears to adore children, is capable of casually murdering newborn infants, all the while talking to them in the same cheerful patter as if he were nurturing them. Irony of ironies, his profession is called Nurturer!

Meanwhile, Jonas is being trained to become the next Receiver of Memory. This is an important position because the community has chosen to forget many things: love, family, strong emotions of any kind, any kind of suffering, and even colors and music, in order to remain safe and comfortable. They have given up way too much, it is abundantly clear. But Jonas, under his training by the former Receiver, now the Giver, is rediscovering the memories of ecstatic pleasure and unspeakable pain, and he comes to the realization that his community has given up too much. If he leaves, the memories he has received will be released and his community will have to experience and deal with them. They will therefore be forced out of their conformist complacency and made to face the realities of life again.

What happens at the end? It's not clear whether Jonas, escaping with little Gabriel, a baby scheduled for release because he cries too much at night (colicky babies beware!) finds a community living the way we do, with love, with family, with all the attendant pleasures and pains of existence, or whether he and the baby perish in the first real snow he has ever seen.

I also felt this book has its roots in the propaganda movies of the fifties. I saw similarities to movies like "It Came From Outer Space," and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The people in Jonas's community have given up so much and are living in such color-blind and tone-deaf conformity to the "Rules," which govern them to the point where no one makes an independent choice of mate or profession, that they appear as soulless as the Pod People. Is Lowry striking out at "Godless Communism?" Probably not but her use of a Christmas tree in the loving family scene Jonas "remembers" suggests that part of her objection to the conformity of the community includes their jettisoning of Christianity in favor of rules that restrict their every action, every word and every thought.

I am sure we will have a great discussion because even though the subject matter is in fact overplayed and has been done many times before, the details of the story will give us plenty to talk about. This book is only 15 years old and I can't help thinking that Lowry borrowed her ideas from the dystopian classics. However, she certainly did do an excellent job of it.

Sundays at Tiffanys

Sundays at Tiffanys surprised me. I've read many books by James Patterson, part mystery and part thriller. They are definitely page turners. So I wasn't prepared for this sweet romantic tale about a young woman who had an imaginary friend when she was young, and meets him again as an adult. Apparently imaginary friends aren't so imaginary after all. They are similar to guardian angels, assigned to take care of children, but unlike angels that stay with you your whole life, imaginary friends leave when the child turns 9.

Most children forget their imaginary friends and go on with their lives but for some reason Jane does not. And then when she finds him again, in the flesh, she recognizes him at once. More than an imaginary friend, he becomes more and more human until it is clear that he is her one true love.

It's written so simply that I wondered if I had picked up a "Young Adult" book by mistake, but no. It was James Patterson, showing a completely different side of himself. Sundays at Tiffanys was a quick read and a good one.

What a train wreck!

No, I'm not talking about a subway collision. I'm talking about Shattered Dreams, the book we are going to discuss at the next BHC book club meeting.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead!

It's about Irene Spencer, a woman who grew up in a polygamist cult right here in the United States. She was brainwashed into believing in "The Principle" as the most important of God's commandments: to be polygamous and bear as many children as possible. The rationale behind this seemed to be that the man who creates a huge family with 7 or more wives will be some sort of mini-god in the afterlife and will rule over some other planet, with his wives and children exalted along with him. Those who don't live the polygamous life, women that is, can't be pulled through the veil by their husbands, so they end up as "angels," lonely forever in eternity.

Using this as a justification, the children were indoctrinated to believe they must live in a polygamous marriage. And Irene followed the rules even though she did not agree, and was made miserable by "doing God's will." She ended up in a polygamous marriage of over 7 wives, more than 50 children altogether fathered by one man, Verlan LeBaron. Not only did she suffer the pangs of jealousy and loneliness (which these cultists claimed was a sin), she also endured back breaking work raising her own 13 children and often taking care of the other kids by other wives.

Because no one man can possibly support such a family on an ordinary salary, and Verlan was no Trump or Rockefeller, Irene and her c0-wives endured terrible poverty. They lived in places like Mexico and Nicaragua to avoid detection in the U.S. which enforces anti-polygamy laws more stringently. Often they lived without running water, without indoor toilets, in incomplete houses or even in refurbished chicken coops.

Even with the obvious suffering and the patent absurdity of trying to live this lifestyle and give one's children adequate love and attention, not to mention getting love and attention from one man who rotates his schedule to spend time with each wife, Irene was expected to put a happy face on it and pretend in public that she was thrilled to be living in lonely, degraded squalor for the sake of celestial glory.

Although she argued and tried to fight back as the humiliations grew worse and worse, Irene never quite got up the gumption to walk away permanently from the train wreck of a polygamous life. And here's where I am afraid I have to lose a bit of sympathy for her and begin blaming the victim.

If no one in her life had encouraged her to think outside the cage, I'd have to concede that her brainwashing was so complete that it might absolve her of the responsibility to take control of her own life. But that was not the case, and here's where I just don't get it. Her mother was made miserable in polygamy, and encouraged Irene to break away from it. At 15, Irene had a boyfriend named Glen, a man in his 20's, who loved her dearly and wanted to marry her -- monogamously.

Despite her mother's urging and Glen's adoration, she fell right into the trap. Personally, I think she dug her own grave and should have gone with Glen when she had the chance. Yes, her sister and brother in law (later her husband) intervened, but she had no backbone and no guts. She walked out of Glen's house where she'd been holding his hand and planning their future, and then meekly and stupidly got into the car with Verlan and Charlotte (his first wife and her half-sister), and ended up marrying Verlan.

Throughout all the deprivation, loneliness and poverty, as the humiliations mounted each time Verlan put another woman before her, Irene didn't gather up the gumption to walk away. She finally told Verlan she was going to leave him. But was she, really? We'll never know, because Verlan was killed in a car accident. If this wasn't a memoir, I'd call that a cheap use of Deus ex Machina to help her escape when she didn't have the courage to do it herself.

Oh, yes, part of her excuse was that in her cult, a wife was free to leave but the husband "owned" the children. What nonsense. Other than Charlotte, none of the other wives were legally married to Verlan. They could have picked themselves up and taken the children with them, and the "husband" would have had no legal recourse whatever. In fact this legalism was exploited by these families, who got the mothers and their children on welfare claiming to be "single mothers" who somehow got pregnant again every year.

And then when Verlan died, Irene went through intense mourning for "a wonderful human being." What wonderful human being, may I ask? Oh, he was brainwashed too, but in his case the brainwashing worked in his favor. But this was the man who would only make love to her once a month and not when she was pregnant or after menopause (though she was able to beg enough to get him to break with his principles just a little bit). This was the man who forced her to "give away" subsequent brides to him in the polygamous marriage ceremony. He even took her wedding ring and put it on the finger of one of his subsequent wives. So her deep mourning for him just doesn't ring true. He wasn't in her life often enough to warrant it, even though he was her "husband" for well over 20 years.

Irene escaped the misery of polygamy by an accident, and she later became a born again Christian. She is now in a monogamous marriage that she never would have had if her "husband" had lived. I'm glad she is living the life she always wanted and receiving all of one man's love, but she is no heroine. Yes, she wrote her memoir and she speaks out about the realities of polygamy but I would respect her a lot more if she had stiffened her spine all those years ago and married her first love.

Chosen Forever

A few days ago I finished reading Chosen Forever by Susan Richards. It's her sequel to Chosen by a Horse which I haven't yet read, but sounds like a lovely and touching memoir. In Chosen by a Horse she wrote about Lay Me Down, an abused horse she adopted, and then fell in love with. Her relationship with this sweet mare went a long way towards healing her emotional wounds from a childhood of being ignored and unwanted.

In Chosen Forever Ms. Richards describes her experiences after her first book is published, when she goes on a book tour that tries her courage and brings her back into contact with old friends and family. She's also "chosen" once again by a confident older man who knows what he wants the moment he sees her. Ironically, she lives in a house he once owned, and she remembered him as being arrogant at the closing.

But she realizes that what looked like arrogance is confidence and belief in himself, two attributes she very much lacks throughout most of this memoir. Towards the end, though, she begins to relax and not be so frightened of reading before an audience, or worse yet, reading to an empty room.

And the man who has chosen her finally wins her over, and at last, she marries him. It's a happy, almost a Cinderella ending, and it is all because of Lay Me Down, the mare who chose Ms. Richards. One serendipitous event leads to another, and finally, leads to happiness.

One anecdote that stands out in the story is the episode where Ms. Richards is suddenly visited by six men, when ordinarily she hardly ever has visitors. They comment about the horses being in danger on the ice of her pond, and just after they say this, a horse she is boarding walks out onto the ice and falls through. Then the men rush out onto the ice and rescue the horse, saving her life.

The message she got from this was that she would receive what she needed when she needed it, and that people would be there for her. This was an important message that went to the core of her insecurities.

It's a good book, though at times I felt she was whining a bit about her tough childhood and her anxiety level when she had to read her work aloud. Now I'd like to read Chosen by a Horse and see if it measures up.

The Joys of Love

I enjoyed reading Madeleine L'Engle's The Joys of Love as an interesting first novel and period piece. Written in the 1940's when Ms. L'Engle was in her twenties, it describes a young woman whose passion has always been the theater. Now she's on a scholarship, spending the summer as an apprentice to a theater troupe, and her life is about to change.

Liz is in love with Kurt, the wealthy young director, and he pays some attention to her but is maddeningly attentive to other women too. Her friend Ben is clearly in love with her but she doesn't perceive it, is barely aware of him as a man even though she can tell him anything and she greatly values his friendship. She's got a best friend among the apprentices, Jane, and there are various other characters, the obnoxious Dottie, the lazy Bibi, and so on. In the background is Liz's aunt, who disapproves of the theater and is grudgingly providing the $20 a week for Liz's room and board, which is not covered by the scholarship.

The writing, to be expected from a woman who later won a Newbery medal for children's literature, is excellent, but the story seemed quite a bit dated to me, and also not so different from several other stories written at much the same time. I'm thinking of Marjorie Morningstar, the overly long saga of a young woman who believes she's destined to be an actress, but in fact will go on to live an ordinary life, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie falls madly in love with a man who hid the fact of his marriage in order to seek solace from a woman on his last leave before shipping out to the war, and later falls back upon a young man who is much better for her.

Warning: Spoiler


Similarly, in The Joys of Love, Liz's bubbly crush on Kurt bursts when he lures her to his room and tries to seduce her. She realizes she's being used, and flees. It's Ben who emerges as the suitable and loyal lover. This seemed to be a common "coming of age" theme in the forties. The man who wants sex is the bad guy, and the one who is waiting in the wings, loyal even though he's been overlooked, is the true Mr. Right.

While I felt this was a cliched ending, I did appreciate the writing and the characterizations. It was fascinating to read a book by the young Ms. L'Engle before she really won her writing spurs.

Only a Theory

A few days ago I finished reading Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. With my background in anthropology, the story of human evolution has always fascinated me. In fact, I'd read so many books on it as a child that I already knew the first half of my physical anthropology course in college.


Professor Miller leads us through a thorough, scientific debunking of the "intelligent design" scam. I won't give it the honor of calling it a theory. He demonstrates in a number of ways that evolution is the best explanation for the way life and its systems have developed.

The Intelligent Designers (ID as he calls it) claim that there are structures within the cell that are of irreducible complexity, and couldn't have developed step by step. But he shows that in fact, they may have other uses when they are not fully complete. Also: the process of blood clotting, thought by the ID devotees to require a precious layout of proteins in order to work properly, something that couldn't develop by evolutionary means, actually could, because there are animals that lack some of these proteins and their blood does in fact clot to close a wound.

Professor Miller also shows that we clearly have kinship with the great apes. Chemically it can be shown that whereas our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, have 48 chromosomes, while humans have only 46, it's clear that a pair of chromosomes somehow became fused with another, reducing the number but not the corresponding genetic material. Further, while many other animals can create Vitamin C within their own bodies, humans have lost this ability and have to eat fruits and vegetables that supply this essential nutrient. So have the great apes.

Professor Miller gives the ID notion serious scientific scrutiny as if it were any other scientific theory, and finds it wanting. Rather than produce hard science to prove their point, the ID'ers simply claim that anything they can't explain is the work of "intelligent design," which boils down to a supernatural creator. Furthermore, their own proponents have admitted that they've not found any scientific proof for the idea of intelligent design.

But that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. There have still been school boards trying with varying success to force public schools to teach kids an unproven idea, and arguing for "fairness" as if science depended on fairness rather than hard evidence of who is right and who is wrong. What's more, from the writings Professor Miller has uncovered, the underlying aim is not just to bring religious ideas into the public schools on the evolution issue, but to drive a wedge into the whole idea of rational, scientific research, and bring it down, replacing it with an establishment of religion and a "science that serves Christianity."

How long before school kids would be studying that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth?

This is an excellent book for humanists and traditional religionists alike to read. Professor Miller also addresses the idea of a grand design in the universe, and finds it not incompatible with evolution. He counts himself a Christian but does not confuse religious beliefs with hard scientific facts. More power to him!

Pig Candy

Pig Candy by Lise Funderburg is a memoir about, "Taking my father south, taking my father home." Somehow just from reading that subtitle, I knew that the father in question was going home to die. I was right. Ms. Funderburg's father George's last years as he slowly succumbs to advanced prostate cancer are the subject of this book. But there's more to it, much more.

It's a book about growing up and being the adult child of a difficult, controlling and demanding father who nonetheless loves his daughters, even though he is highly critical of them. It's a book about being the biracial child of an interracial marriage in America, and about the social codes George grew up under down South. Those codes defined him as "colored" even though he was extremely light-skinned, and defined the way he was treated.

In the tiny town of Monticello, Georgia, George indulges his farmer fancies, buying all sorts of farm equipment, animals and so on. He's donated money for a park to be named after him, and suspects illegal delays in getting it built. His many enthusiasms show him to be a man with a zest for life that's not diminished until a stroke dulls his thinking and flattens his emotions.

The title refers to a special type of pig roast in a "Caja China" that turns the pork and the skin so sweet that it is called "pig candy." This is George's latest enthusiasm as the book opens, and he purchases a Caja China and a large pig with which to celebrate with his family. It represents George's lust for life, even in the face of his terminal illness.

Lise Funderburg brings her father to life again, describes him and the other family members as well as townsfolk they interact with, with a skill that reflects her journalist background. She has a keen sense of place as she conveys the farm and the town of Monticello in great detail. I enjoyed this book and recommend it highly.

Read more about Pig Candy here.

Summer Reading

I've been lazy and haven't written in 2 weeks. So before I get back into real posting, here's my upcoming reading list:

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. If I take notes, this might be the basis for a future program with the Brooklyn Humanist Community.

Chosen Forever, a memoir by Susan Richards

Pig Candy, a memoir by Lise Funderburg

The Joys of Love, by Madeleine L'Engle, written in 1941 and published posthumously this year. Ms. L'Engle lit up my childhood with her prize-winning Wrinkle in Time, so I'm curious to read this early work of hers that has been a sort of "lost novel" until now.

I'm in the middle of Stephen King's Lisey's Story, in which one of the central characters has been dead two years, but is a "puffickly Huh-uge" presence. (That's one of his expressions).

Earlier this summer I've read a great deal of historical/paranormal romance (Highlanders from other centuries are apparently the hottest, though the deadest hunks in the known universe), and a number of detective thrillers by James Patterson, John Sandford, and the Kellermans. I also read Peony in Love which was also a sort of paranormal love story by Lisa See. A few months back the BHC Book Club discussed Lisa See's more famous Snowflower and the Secret Fan, so I was curious to read another of her novels. Peony in Love wasn't quite as good but it was still quite interesting, and the theme of women's writing and its importance, as well as disastrous failures to communicate, was the same as in Snowflower.

If anyone's read these books please feel free to comment.

For One More Day

Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie was a book that touched me deeply at a time when I was struggling with the loss of my friend and mentor, Richard Price. So when I saw his newer book, For One More Day, I had to read it.

What a stunner. I have read many books about the dead returning to save a loved one in despair, but this one was so immediate, so real, that my eyes were wet. That doesn't happen often when I read a book.

It made me think of my own mother, and it also made me want to hand the book to Jason and tell him, read this before it is too late.

There are chapters headed, Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother, juxtaposed against other chapters titled, Times My Mother Stood Up for Me.

Somehow, really, we expect this relationship between mothers and children. Mother gives her all, and the mother in this book, Posey, certainly did. She stood up for her son whenever she perceived a threat to him. On the other hand her son, Chick, didn't stand up for her when he thought it was a contest between his father and his mother, or his mother and the outside world.

Sometimes, though, he did. His parents divorced and so his mother became an outcast, with other women afraid she would charm their husbands away from them. When Chick caught some boys spying on his mother with binoculars and saying, "Look at the divorcee," as if it were a smutty word, he did react and beat them up.

But, he felt he abandoned her to follow his father's dream of making him into a baseball star, and she succumbed to a heart attack. Who hasn't felt he or she wasn't there enough for Mom?

Even though it's in the nature of things, it felt deeply satisfying to see Chick get his one more day with his Mom, and accompany her in the spirit world to minister to people who were about to die. Wonderful story of salvation, because when he awakens, Chick sets about repairing his own broken family, cleaning up his alcoholism, and becoming a part of his daughter's life again, where once he was such an embarrassment that she didn't even invite him to her wedding.

And Mitch Albom dedicates the book to his own mother and reveals that at least one incident in the story came directly from his own life; there's a photograph to prove it.

I guess it is fitting that I read this right before Mother's Day. It is the perfect Mother's Day present... from a mother to a child.