Everything U Always Wanted to Know About Sex (on the L train)

So it's a few days before Valentine's Day and I am riding on the L train on the way home, minding my own business (not really, I am eavesdropping as usual....Note to Self: look up origin of "eavesdropping") when I spy a young woman across the aisle from me, sitting down, with a HUGE stuffed animal on her lap. I am talking the size of a St. Bernard puppy.....and she is ostentatiously reading a hardback copy (with torn dust jacket, circa 1971) of Dr. David Reuben's best seller, "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)". Now, she looks at first glance about 12, and I am thinking she swiped this book from her grandmother's library of dusty tomes from the Seventies. But she is wearing eye make-up, and chipped black nail polish. On second glance she looks closer to 30. An unkempt 30, to be sure.

Everyone once in a while she snickers, or grins or laughs out loud. She catches me staring, and flashes a bemused smile. I suddenly think that maybe she is a Brooklyn performance artist, testing out the reaction of numbed subway riders to her whole Gestalt. I mean, her peers are Tweeting and texting and hooking up, and she's reading a hard-back copy of Dr. Reuben? And that stuffed animal essentially takes up three seats, it's on her lap, but it poofs out on both sides of her and practically hides her face.
When I get home, I check out Dr. Reuben on Amazon. The last person who viewed his book also viewed "Contact" by Carl Sagan, about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life....you get the picture. Not the hippest fanbase.
But we probably all owe Dr. Reuben an effusive thank you for writing the right book at the right time....... (Maybe even our very existences....) So. Thank you.
But, really, thank YOU, Stuffed Animal Girl, for adding mystery and humor to my soggy, day-after-the-almost-blizzard-of-2010 subway ride on a late February afternoon. I hope you get an agent.

Two Italian Boys

First, I don't know for sure they are Italian. Or how old they are. They could be 15, they could be 25.

But I thought I recognized a certain Italian fierceness in the way his mother walked ahead of him as he lagged behind, that first boy. It was on the corner of Sixth Ave and West 8th, near Go Sushi, and I had seen them before. (I might have glanced quickly away, in pity.) This time I really looked.
His mother had a head of perfectly curled and blow-dried gray hair and she was about 5'2" in her stocking feet; compact of body, in a belted black dress and sensible walking shoes. She was leaning forward, at a tilt, as she towed her son through the waves of summer heat that roiled up from the sticky asphalt. He, not in any kind of hurry, let his too-large head dangle this way and that as he surveyed the crowd, his protruding eyeballs taking in everything he would never get to eat or drink or touch or kiss. His body had more angles than I could count at a glance- crooked back, twisted hips, knees knocking together. He shambled behind her, fierce tugboat that she was, secure in the knowledge that she was taking him someplace safe and known. Which she was. She truly was. He was her son, and she would take care of him if it killed her. I felt a sudden stab of envy for their bond. This was unconditional love, right in the dead center of Greenwich Village.
The second boy/man I spotted a few days later, in the early evening. I was returning slowly home along West 4th Street, thinking of nothing at all, when they rushed past, the dark-haired boy and his companion, who seemed to be his sister. It was only a glimpse, but I almost fainted. His complexion was a perfect pale porcelain, his features like a Greek statue's. He was laughing at something he had just said, looking back to his companion, and his thick dark hair was plastered back like an actor in a Bertolucci film set in the 1920's. He seemed unaware of his otherworldly beauty in his animation; he wasn't posing for anyone. But as I passed on, I wondered: Quasimodo boy, or Bertolucci boy: who will suffer more in this life?
Which one will be told he has been loved for himself, for who he is, and actually believe it?
Or, even better- just know, without needing to be told.

Dog Days in NYC or Zen and the Art of Fridge Defrosting

Okay, I said to myself yesterday, it's time to man-up and....defrost the icebox, the under-the-counter half-size object we so gaily refer to as "the refrigerator," evoking visions of a vast Eurostyle appliance, a Sub-zero thingie (why does anyone need something colder than zero degrees? ) bursting with organic watercress and runny French cheeses.... Mais non, ma petite fridge (as we so lovingly call her chez nous) she is full only of 7 kinds of moutarde and 3 or so varieties of berry jam, as well as some VERY ancienne unsalted butter. All of which will survive lack of refrigeration for 24 hours. (And anyway a little mold is good for you once in a while, n'est-ce pas?)

So here's my (soon to be patented) technique:
1- Turn off freezer control. Take a deep breath. Do not turn back now. Commit.
2- Jam clean bath towel into iced-over freezer compartment. (Trust me.)
3- Put large plastic bowl (on top of protective layer of garbage bags) against fridge to protect the charmingly warped oak floors from becoming more charming.
4- Put end of towel neatly into plastic bowl so melting water runs from freezer along towel to bowl. (Osmosis, don'cha know.)
5- Pour self a glass of wine (color optional).
6- Occasionally wring out towel. Surf Web. Watch Jon Stewart on YouTube.
7. Take bath.
8- Repeat 5, 6 and 7 until asleep or otherwise immobile.

If you are an AMATEUR in a HURRY, you can speed things up by using a hair dryer.

But WHY?

Slow down, cowgirl. Enjoy.

Savor the (drippy) hours. It's summer in New York City.

Poodles Goes All Spiritual On You

I've been working hard lately, trying to bring to fruition a creative project. This has meant isolation from friends, late nights, bad food, tons of self-doubt....To try to pull myself back to some semblance of a healthy center I treated myself to a yoga workshop on a recent Friday night. I felt so good afterwards that I lingered at the yoga center's bookshop, reluctant to return to my self-imposed domestic pressure chamber.

My gaze fell upon a book by Jack Kornfield, "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry"- which was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. I have been reading it steadily and slowly since that night, reluctant to come to the end. It is the only book on the pursuit of spirituality/wholeness I have ever read that manages to quote the writers Rumi, Emily Dickinson and Rilke, Helen Keller and Albert Camus...and make all their ideas and thoughts seem like one seamless whole.

It would be foolish to attempt to oversimplify or summarize this powerful book, but I will include one of my favorite quotes here. When I first read it, I almost literally heard the chime of a bell ringing a true note:

A man's life is nothing but an extended trek through the detours of art to recapture those one or two moments when his heart first opened.

Albert Camus


I am hoping I will finish my writing project with a deeper understanding, less ego, and more compassion for myself and others. Most importantly, I want to continue on the path this book has given me signposts to follow. I believe I will be able to.

And all the best roads lead home, don't they?

A Journalist? Moi?

Happily, the answer is yes- sort of. The monthly neighborhood newspaper called WestView ("the new voice of the West Village") has invited me to be a columnist, and is publishing my saga of growing up in Greenwich Village in a series of regular columns. It's called "Sex and Sinclair Lewis: Tales From A Greenwich Village Girlhood" and so far my work has appeared in their February issue, and currently can be read online in their March issue under my nom de plume, Barbara Riddle.
You can find it at westviewnews.org
I couldn't be happier- their main readership lives on the very streets, alleys and mews (mewses?) that I roamed as a 7- to 12-year-old, glorying in the wild freedom we had before cell phones could track kids 24/7.

Of course, such an adolescence is not generic to West Villagers.....I just happened to have had the good fortune to land here. Oddly, we kids actually knew at the time that we were living in the best of all possible (American)worlds. I totally missed out on that suburban-anomie-alienation thing, and didn't have a clue about the adult misery described in "The Feminine Mystique", since my mom had always worked and enjoyed it. No alcohol-soaked bridge games for her. (Although she could expound at length on unreliable younger-actor-boyfriend woes....)

The other night at a dinner gathering, we went around the table citing favorite movies. I mentioned "400 Blows" by Francois Truffaut- any readers out there have special films dealing with adolescence they'd like to mention? I also adore
"A Thousand Clowns", with Jason Robards. If you haven't seen it, rent it NOW. It is more timely than ever.

A Slushy New York Night With Campbell Scott

So if you're a Manhattanite & you can't get any friends to see a play called The Atheist (by Irish-born Ronan Noone), what do you do? You buckle up and go by yourself. Even if there's a foot of slush everywhere between you and the theater.
Criminy, where else in America can you actually WALK to see a play & actor of this quality? It's not even a fifteen-minute walk to get there from my apartment, and most of the sidewalks are clear even if the corners require strategic leaping and feinting through deep icy mush.

Campbell, you may not know it, but you and I have a date. Lookin' good, I think, hair just the right length & fake shade of red, blue eyes peeping over my new scarf with the blue and mustard circle pattern...The play is caustic & biting, a tale of a journalist gone bad (in search of his mother's love?), not searingly original but I love the telegraphic language & musical phrasing, and Campbell Scott is brilliant. Infused with energy I drift home, wishing I could discuss it over a pint with someone.
I pass the faux army surplus Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street and see that there are people shopping (wtf??) at 10 pm at night. Yikes. Further on, I enter a deli to buy seltzer to mix with my pomegranate juice at home. A very wet & cold Irish wolfhound puppy befriends me as his owner buys peanut butter. His wagging tail endangers the potato chip racks for 3 feet all around. I swear the dog is smiling. Do we deserve such good will from the animal kingdom?

"Be careful, don't fall...stay warm," says the Pakistani store owner as he carefully gives me my one cent change from the three dollars I handed him. As I push open the door the Guatemalan man wrapping roses in the little tented foyer just beside the entrance looks up and smiles at me. "Have a good night," he says. "You too," I mumble. (Yeah, right. He is going to be standing there in the cold for a few more hours long after I am home in bed.)
A block from my apartment, I pass the nursing home and see that an old woman is being wheeled out on a gurney by two ET's, into an ambulance. She is wearing an oxygen mask and her naked body is barely covered by a white bedsheet. One of the ET's tries to cover her shoulder, but the sheet keeps slipping off to reveal her pale, cold flesh. They don't have an extra blanket to spare? I am wearing a down jacket, scarf & gloves and she is practically naked in the middle of the street.

Just another night in the big city, eh, boys and girls? My emotions are swirling and I can't feel my feet anymore. Or maybe it's my heart that's numb. I keep walking. Should I have taken off my jacket and put it over the ailing woman? She was almost inside the ambulance....

I arrive home finally, and am soon secure in the warm cocoon of my pre-Campbell Scott existence. Was it as good for him as it was for me?

Somehow, I don't think he's going to call me in the morning.

Oh Joy: November 4, 2008

Oh personal joy....

New York joy....

American joy....

Japanese, Egyptian, French, Swedish, Australian, Polish, African joy....

Global joy....

Celestial joy....