The Rake Magazine

Month: February 2005

  • When in Rome, Love Like the Romans?

    My pal Steve used to travel a lot for work, and he found himself in Thailand a few years ago. He tells me that one night in Bangkok does, indeed, make a hard man humble. He says there are hundreds of beautiful women who literally throw themselves at you. You cannot make eye contact with a woman in Bangkok, or you will find that you suddenly have a new best friend. This is depressing, I know—at least in principle. But Steve claims he had several conversations with these sorts of women, and he came away more impressed than depressed. While there are plenty of hard-luck cases, and there is little doubt that most young Thai women working Bangkok are looking for a ticket to America, many told him that Thailand is an open, accepting, joyful place. As an example of this openness, most Thai people will tell you that there are actually three genders: male, female, and transgender. Steve did not find it all that hard to behave himself—after all, he is a devoted husband and his wife was on the business trip with him. Still, he was astonished at the number of American men he saw availing themselves of the local offerings.

    Prostitution is a terribly exploitive and dangerous business—but that’s partly because sex itself can be exploitive and dangerous. Prostitution and promiscuity are two very different things, but they are parallel. And there are a lot of cultures in the world that think and act differently than we do about sex. Remember the old stereotype about Eskimos? That they considered it normal hospitality to offer their wives to visitors, and distrusted visitors who rejected the offer? That’s simplifying the matter quite a bit. Where it happened (and this is in the, uh, pre-missionary period), it was more accurately a form of spouse swapping for religious and social purposes. Even so, it happened enough to early white explorers that it seems some of them actually got tired of the obligation, but saw the necessity of assistance and goodwill in a harsh climate.

    And isn’t it interesting how indignant Americans can get about the old Mormon practice of institutionalized polygamy? Despite being “against the law” even in Utah, it is a fact that numerous Mormon men live today in situations where they have multiple wives, in practice if not in name. Never mind the shockingly resurgent activity of “swinging.” I recently stumbled across at least one website dedicated to helping married Minnesotans find willing and discrete extramarital partners. By the way, polyamory is not always a one-sided, misogynist phenomenon, either. In some Himalayan regions, and also in Oceania and Africa, there are polyandrous societies where a woman takes numerous husbands (or sexual partners).

    The reason I bring up all this anthropology is that ever since I started writing this column, I have received a considerable amount of mail about my first column, which asked the question, “Should married men go to strip clubs?” I have now pretty much heard every possible opinion on the matter—and mostly from thoughtful Minnesotans. On the far end of the spectrum, I have heard from women who were tortured and angry about their husbands going to strip clubs (or, say, looking at porn), who were literally getting divorced because of it. I am certainly not saying their pain isn’t real; at the same time, though, I wonder how it is possible that—at the other end of the spectrum—there are lots of women who don’t find it threatening at all, who maybe even find it a bit of a turn-on themselves. (Then the recriminations begin, the prudes claiming the promiscuous are self-deluded, and vice versa.)

    I suppose it all comes down to jealousy. Most of the women I have known have been incredibly jealous, not because I am any great shakes as a lover, but because that’s just the way they are. My precious has been an amazing exception to this rule. She wants and expects me to be unfailingly true to her, the way I promised I would be the day we got married. But a few weeks ago, she admitted that she sometimes fantasized about me making whoopie with another woman, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a friend of hers. Is that creepy? She made it clear to me that this was her own private fantasy. Like the widespread (usually male) fantasy about an orgiastic multiple-lover session, these are just ticklers for the biggest erogenous zone of all, the brain. But I do think it is a healthy check on jealousy to admit to each other that we find other people attractive, and that sexual fantasies can add a little spice to life. Jealousy is ultimately a very selfish, very insecure kind of emotion—as if to say to your lover, “If you can’t love me, then you shouldn’t love anyone.”

  • After the Party

    If you were looking for a young man with a great literary life in front of him in 1928, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a better candidate than 29-year-old Joseph Moncure March. His narrative in verse The Wild Party, a tale of Manhattan hedonism and the tragic hipsters who indulge in it, had been published that spring in a limited edition, achieving an immediate following and brisk sales. (A musical adaptation will open this month at the Fitzgerald Theater). The book even got banned briefly in Boston, bringing March something every writer craves—a prominent but not damaging censorship battle.

    He was the scion of one of America’s most prominent families: His uncle, General Peyton Conway March, had been chief of staff of the U.S. Army in World War I, his grandfather was the eminent philologist Francis Andrew March, and according to one genealogy he was the grandnephew of Moncure Daniel Conway, a great abolitionist and freethinker. (Various Conways, Marches, and Peytons figure in American history back to colonial times.) He was an alumnus of Lawrenceville Prep and Amherst College, where he had been a protégé of Robert Frost, and had served courageously in World War I. He held a prominent job on the New York Post‘s literary supplement, and had recently married the New York society girl Sue Wise. Perhaps the only stain on March’s record (besides a very brief early marriage) was a 1925 stint as managing editor of the nascent New Yorker magazine, where he’d become one of the many victims of the notoriously volatile Harold Ross—according to his successor Ralph Ingersoll, March on his last day at the magazine “was actually removed from the office by little men in white coats.” Even here, however, March had achieved some success: According to several sources he was responsible for putting the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section into its final brief-items format.

    Late in 1928, March followed The Wild Party with another versified narrative, The Set-Up, about racism and corruption in the boxing game. It met with even greater success, made the New York Times bestseller list, and seemingly cemented March’s reputation as a writer to watch. In his own description, March had nothing but contempt for the “respectable oldsters” who saw in him and his cohorts “a complete breakdown of the National Moral Fibre… We were The Lost Generation, they told us, and we couldn’t have cared less.”

    But the oldsters were right. If the promise of the 1920s turned out to be false for many Americans, there was a special default in store for Joe March. By 1928, he had already achieved all the success he was due; through the next half-century he would endure financial hardships, multiple indignities and a checkered writing career. He never recaptured the glory of The Wild Party.

    His bumpy career, however, took March far and wide, into the highest and lowest places of American literary and cultural life. Much of his work has been lost, miscredited, or ignored; he has never been the subject of a biography, rarely shows up in anthologies, and is remembered by few. But it’s no stretch to say that if you paid any attention to twentieth century American culture, you’re already a fan of Joseph Moncure March.

    “Looking back at myself, I’m amazed at how deceptively elegant I was, ” March wrote of his 1920s self in A Certain Wildness. In this 20,000-word reminiscence of composing The Wild Party and The Set-Up—a work that ranks among the best short literary memoirs—March notes that he could usually be found “rubbing elbows with prostitutes and gangsters and those wicked people from Show Business, all of whom recognize me as a kindred spirit.” He composed his signature work in pencil, sitting in a dark apartment, over three months of eight-to-ten-hour days. Surrounding that work was an idyll of jazz age swells, flamboyant artistes, and raucous parties culminating in blackouts, police raids, or both. This is the milieu he captured brilliantly in The Wild Party, wherein a Vaudeville comedian and his loose girlfriend throw a bash peopled by singers, actors, artists, boxers, goons, and hookers, of every gender and sexual persuasion. By the time the poem reaches its rhythmic, staccato end (“The door sprang open/And the cops rushed in”), one main character is dead and another is headed to jail. Not surprisingly, March explained, “The Wild Party caused a stir out of all proportion to the size of its limited edition.”

    In 1929, March brought out a limited edition of Fifteen Lyrics , a sheaf of fragile one-pagers that demonstrate his mastery of Frost’s conversational style and wry imagery. Percy Hutchison’s New York Times review called March “a writer of striking originality.” But these were not works to bring large fortunes, and by the end of the year, Joe March had joined a budding American tradition: New York writers making their way to Hollywood to ruin promising careers. Landing in Los Angeles under contract to MGM, March was promptly loaned out for several pictures—among them the British World War I drama Journey’s End and, more famously, the Howard Hughes classic Hell’s Angels.

    March’s work in turning the silent Hell’s Angels into a talkie is consistently underrated. Martin Scorsese’s Hughes biopic The Aviator omits his role entirely; movie buffs, understandably thrilled by the movie’s aerial spectacle, deplore the dramatic sequences as a campy distraction. But the Hell’s Angels dialogue credit means, among other things, that March originated Jean Harlow’s career-making line “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” Equally impressive was his work in turning ad-libbed lip movements in the silent version’s Zeppelin sequence into something approaching coherent dialogue in German; in fact, it was March who, after the silent version had been scrapped, crafted an entirely new story that integrated leftover footage with new scenes.The movie also got him in some serious hot water. Hughes sued Warner Brothers for plagiarizing from the Hell’s Angels script for its own aerial spectacular The Dawn Patrol (written by John Monk Saunders, a disturbed, alcoholic specialist in pilot pictures now best remembered as the first husband of King Kong star Fay Wray). With Hughes’ approval, and with an eye toward providing evidence for the lawsuit, March arranged through a private detective to “borrow” the Dawn Patrol script from a Warner secretary. The woman was setting him up, and March was arrested for theft of Warner property.

    As he slept in his jail cell, Joe March was approached by a guard demanding to know the value of the stolen script, ostensibly so that the judge could set bail.

    “I didn’t steal any script, ” March said, “and you can tell the judge if Johnny Saunders wrote it, it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

    The charges were eventually dropped, and possibly as a reward for not implicating his boss in the theft, March was asked to look after Hughes’ Caddo Pictures studio during one of the erratic tycoon’s months-long disappearances. At the time, MGM was also urging him to come back under a considerably more generous contract, but March, attracted by the lawless, improvisational atmosphere at Caddo, stuck with Hughes, a decision he would come to regret. (Hell’s Angels eventually opened to a mixed reception; The Da
    wn Patrol    ‘s script won an Oscar.)

    When Hughes’ movie operation slowed to a crawl, March signed a lucrative contract with Paramount, and his credits there, several for films starring queen of the weepies Sylvia Sidney, suggest what an interesting career even an unsuccessful screenwriter could have. Among his efforts are an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, several urban tough-guy pictures, and a version of Madame Butterfly with Sidney as Cho-Cho San and a 28-year-old Cary Grant as Lieutenant Pinkerton. (Incredibly, this last film is unavailable in either VHS or DVD.)

    Meanwhile, March’s domestic life had gone sour. “Gee, I might as well have popped myself off as got married like this!” says the wife in “Evening At Home, ” a Beckettesque short story of marital dissatisfaction and inanition he published in Cosmopolitan around this time. It’s not clear he was referencing his life with Sue Wise, but March later admitted he was “full of Sturm and Drang in those days.” In a 1931 letter, we find Dashiell Hammett noting: “I saw Joe March with the blonde Peggy Prior.” In love, Joe turned out to be third-time lucky; Peggy Prior, a Pathé screenwriter, would stick with him through thick and (mostly) thin, until his death in 1977. In early 1932, he divorced Sue Wise and married Peggy.

    Peggy’s first husband, the character actor Theodore Von Eltz, fought for custody of their two children, eight-year-old Lori and six-year-old Ted. In a publicized court battle, The Wild Party, with its gleefully immoral depiction of drunkenness, sexual high jinx, and murder, was introduced as evidence that Joe was an unfit guardian. While the case dragged through the courts, the kids were put in foster care, and Joe, dismayed at the ratty home they were living in and flush with Paramount cash, bought the foster parents a better house. They stayed there for nearly a year, hoping to move back with their mother; Lori March Williams recalls that one day, when the case was winding down in Peggy and Joe’s favor, she and her brother stood outside the foster home with a garden hose, ready to spray their father if he showed up to grab them.

    The family was united just in time for Joe’s screenwriting career to hit the skids. It’s not clear what defeated him in the movie business. Despite The Wild Party‘s uncanny depiction of the stages of drunkenness, Lori insists he was not a big drinker. Nor were his instincts excessively arty: The Wild Party is a familiar story of passion, jealousy and show business in the Pagliacci mode; The Set-Up belongs to a popular tradition of stories about fixed fights and struggling boxers. Perhaps Joe was hamstrung by what he himself identified as a poet’s excessive sensitivity. Here’s how he depicted the screenwriting racket in The New York Times Magazine a few years later:

    “Few writers are left alone to write for very long at a time. They are expected to turn in something on paper every few days, and if this does not happen the producer begins a routine known as ‘giving the writer the needle.’…Harassed in this subtle way, a writer often defeats the producer’s purpose by putting down anything he can think of, even if it is only the days of the week. He writes against time; in desperation; ‘from hunger, ‘ as the saying goes. As a result, the average creative effort is fairly low.”

    Low enough, as it turned out, that sometime in the mid-thirties, Paramount fired him—by Lori’s recollection, just before Christmas and just after Joe had blown a few weeks’ pay on presents. From the heights of MGM and Paramount, he drifted downward to Republic, a low-grade studio where his most prominent project was Three Faces West , an ungainly blend of modern western, John Wayne vehicle, and left-wing anti-fascist propaganda piece. (“Most of it was still being written by Joseph Moncure March while we shot, ” director Bernard Vorhaus later recalled, “which was a bloody nuisance.”) Hard up for money, the family moved constantly. If you want to understand what drove Joe March to leave the movie business and return to New York in 1940, check out his last credited film, Lone Star Raiders, one of 51 entries in Republic’s “Three Mesquiteers” series and a film that demonstrates why Variety took to calling westerns “oaters.” A forgettable and forgotten programmer, Raiders put an undistinguished period on a career March later described merely as “disheartening.”

    Back in New York, Joe and Peggy struggled to make ends meet with a handful of stories for the Times Magazine—most of them score-settling exposés about the movie business. Within a few months the promising jazz age writer had taken a job as a sheet metal worker in a Groton, Connecticut submarine shipyard. While the move appears to have been driven by financial need, Lori March Williams says there was an element of noblesse oblige in the 41-year-old poet’s decision to put his back into some manual labor. “This was during the war, ” she recalls, “and he felt it was important for the war effort.”

    If so, this wouldn’t be out of character. In 1918, fresh from a minor scandal involving a satirical newspaper he’d published at Amherst, March had taken a leave from school and, eschewing his family connection to the top general in the American army, enlisted as a buck private. “Joe March could have had a commission more easily than almost anybody in the U.S.A., ” a classmate later recalled. “Joe enlisted as a private and served the whole war in an infantry unit in France from which few came home alive.” In his own recollection of how the other guys in his unit figured out his family connection and asked why he hadn’t used it, March downplayed his nobility and highlighted his foolishness: “I tried to explain that my family regarded nepotism with disfavor, ” he wrote, “and that everyone was expected to make it on his own; but these specious arguments left them cold. They were realists, and had no patience with anyone who did not take advantage of his advantages. From then on, they regarded me with a certain amount of hostility and contempt, and I was sorry the incident had occurred.”

    In any event, March appears to have done well in his new job, and soon had become the manager of a sheet metal equipment manufacturing plant. He would elegize the power and drama of American industrial might in “Shipyard Symphony, ” a 1943 article for the Times Magazine. This article, with its boosterish prose-poetry, hinted at things to come. In that same year, he began writing and producing documentaries for the Office of War Information, launching the final stage of his career—as a writer of advertising and industrial films.

    One of the realities of distribution is that even a moderately successful advertisement gets seen by a larger audience than any work of creative art. Thus, Joseph Moncure March’s films for the advertising giant MPO Productions, Inc. may well be his best-known works. From the mid-forties until 1964, he wrote and produced several dozen films for the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Ford Motor Co., Monsanto, American Airlines, General Motors—all the giants of the Populuxe epoch. Many of these can be found in the Rick Prelinger archive of industrial films, and two inparticular— Design For Dreaming and A Touch of Magic , both Technicolor spots for the General Motors Motorama starring industrial films icon Thelma “Tad” Tadlock— have become favorites among the sort of ironists who think it’s the height of wit to mock the styles and affectations of a half-century ago. One couplet from Design, “Girls don’t go to Motoramas dressed in a pair of pink pajamas, ” has been picked up by
    fans as a tagline for all that was corny and square in the fifties. Do these sneering hipsters realize that the author of Design For Dreaming was once a sneering hipster like themselves? Both films have a Powell/Pressburger color and theatricality that make them hypnotic to watch even now; if the lyrics don’t indicate a poet at the height of his powers, they do show that March’s knack for catchy rhymes never deserted him.

    It’s enough to make you suspect March derived some secret gratification from this creative work for hire, but according to Lori March Williams he hated every minute of his time in industrial films. “He was my beloved stepfather, ” she says, “and he was truly a humanist and an idealist, not at all the type of person you might think from reading The Wild Party. But he was not a happy man. He had a certain bitterness about how his career had gone, and he became kind of dark.”

    His screenwriting career was now well over, but Hollywood still had a few humiliations in store. In 1947, March sold the movie rights to The Set-Up and the poem was made into a Robert Wise picture for RKO. “I was out in Hollywood at the time, ” he wrote, “and tried to get to work on the screenplay, but they didn’t want me around.” Nor did they want much of the story of The Set-Up. When the movie was done, the hero, “Pansy Jones, ” a black middleweight who gets railroaded out of a promising career because of his race, had become “Stoker Thompson, ” played by the white actor Robert Ryan. According to Joe, he didn’t find this out until he and Peggy had scraped together enough money for balcony seats at the movie’s New York premier. In a final insult, The Set-Up turned out to be a film noir masterpiece, with a great Ryan performance and the most riveting boxing sequence ever achieved in a dramatic film.

    All this time, March continued to write much and publish little. The large collection of Joseph Moncure March papers at the Amherst College Library contains dozens of prose works and poems, lyrics, non-fiction pieces, spec screenplays, and almost as many rejection letters. The highlight of the collection, according to archivist Barbara Trippel Simmons, is Hollywood Idyll, a long retrospective of the 1930s film industry that March tried unsuccessfully to sell over the years.

    But March managed to put one more work into book form. In 1968, Bond Wheelright brought out an illustrated edition of the The Wild Party and The Set-Up, and the author kicked in his memoir A Certain Wildness. The book received a few good notices, but the reprint is notable mainly for an act of bowdlerization by the author himself. Uncomfortable with some Jewish caricatures in both works, March rewrote The Wild Party and, much more substantially, The Set-Up, editing out the Jewish stereotypes and in the process eliminating the ethnic markers for all the other characters (except Pansy Jones himself). History has looked on these changes with no favor: The novelist James T. Farrell called the revisions “in fact…a concession to anti-Semitism” that “weakened a fine and original work.” When Art Spiegelman brought out his 1994 reprint of The Wild Party, he threw out the revisions and went back to the original text.

    In 1964, Joe retired, and he and Peggy moved into a family house in northern Massachusetts; but they were too old, frail and poor to handle living in a large house. Lori, now married and working as a soap opera actress, moved them across the country to a small house in Laurel Canyon, and Joe occasionally sold magazine pieces, without much improvement in his financial condition. “Joe wasn’t a very good businessman, ” Lori March Williams recalls, “He wasn’t really able capitalize on his successes, and he got used.”

    He did live long enough to see his work rediscovered again, and again changed almost beyond recognition. In 1975 Ismail Merchant and James Ivory made a movie version of The Wild Party for Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures. The movie transports the action from a New York apartment to a Hollywood mansion, conflates March’s story with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, and casts Raquel Welch and James Coco in the leads. The spectacle of Raquel Welch in the Merchant/Ivory universe, not to mention of exploitation king Arkoff making a prestige picture, is, predictably, macabre.

    “It put things out of whack when Raquel Welch came in, ” says Walter Marks, who wrote the film’s music and screenplay. “She was trying to get past her image as a sex object and wasn’t comfortable with the material. AIP was thinking it could be a big commercial picture, which it was never going to be. So it was the kind of thing we were glad to have done, although it wasn’t everything we’d hoped it would be.”

    When Joseph Moncure March died, a few months short of his seventy-eighth birthday, The New York Times published a 280-word obituary. James T. Farrell came through with a much longer appreciation a few months later. And that was about it. Having been an integral figure in the histories of The New Yorker, of jazz age literature, of early talking pictures, and of advertising, he is barely remembered, and would be completely forgotten if not for the many rebirths The Wild Party has had over the years.

    Which raises the question of why The Wild Party continues to attract new readers and new adaptations. “I don’t know why it continues to be revived, ” says Walter Marks, “because it ain’t all that great. I mean, it’s very good, but it’s kitschy and melodramatic. I wouldn’t call it a great work of literature. It attracted me because it has this kind of rhythm to the language, and a lot of cross-rhythms. It’s like a jazz improv, which is appealing across time.”

    The question “Is it poetry?” has dogged The Wild Party since its first publication. (The best answer may be William S. Burroughs’: “Of course it’s poetry. It rhymes.”) But whatever else The Wild Party is, it is sui generis. Rendered as a prose narrative, it would be banal; as poetry, despite some precise imagery, it doesn’t offer abundant language or compression of thought; strictly as a chronicle of jazz age lingo and characters, it’s pretty thin—nothing seems quainter or softer-boiled than the hard-boiled slang of a bygone era. But taking all these elements together, The Wild Party is a spectacular performance. The verse form heightens the artificiality of the language and plot, and the quick characterizations push the narrative along at such a rapid clip that only a drip would linger for long over the uses or misuses of the language. If there is a better rendering of the geography of an apartment party, of how drunks move around and watch each other in a tight set of rooms, I’ve never seen it.

    It’s also one of the great studies in the lost art of prosody, in how to achieve metrical effects. The underlying shape of the poem, despite some deceptively broken-up lines, is simple tetrameter, the verse form of traditional songs. But March continually fools the ear, inserting a ternary foot where you’d expect to find two duple beats, a series of accented syllables where there should be iambs, internal rhymes, near-rhymes, doggerel digressions, one-foot and even one-syllable lines that trip up the rhythmic flow. Here is a description of the poem’s leading man:

    Oh yes—Burrs was a charming fellow:
    Brutal with women, and proportionately yellow.
    Once he had been forced into a marriage.
    Unlucky girl!
    She had a miscarriage
    Two days later. Possibly due
    To the fact that Burrs beat her with the heel of a shoe
    Till her lips went blue.
    For a week her brother had great fun
    Looking for
    Burrs with a snub-nosed gun:
    At the end of which time, she began to recover;
    And Burrs having vanished, the thing blew over.
    Just a sample,
    For example:
    One is probably ample.

    In A Certain Wildness, March notes that he added a song lyric to the middle of the poem at the request of his publisher, who wanted to “show that sex wasn’t the only thing I was interested in, ” but the effect of inserting a strict form in the poem is like a flourish, a signal that The Wild Party is not just loose verse but a work by a poet who knew exactly what he was doing.

    On that note, it may be that Joseph Moncure March’s tough literary life is actually the fulfillment of every writer’s dream. He is now known only through his published works, with no carping critics subjecting him to unkind reassessments, no greedy or vengeful kids peddling tales of parental abuse, and—with one exception, which you are now reading—no busybody biographers trying to make sense of his life and works.

    If Joe March is forgotten, he’s not gone. Spiegelman’s 1994 illustrated edition of The Wild Party received glowing notices. In 2000, two different musical adaptations opened at the same time in New York—one by Michael John LaChiusa at the Joseph Papp Theater and another by Andrew Lippa at the Manhattan Theater Club. Though neither show was a breakout hit, Lippa’s version attracted a cult following and issued a popular original cast recording .This version (only partly faithful to the original poem) will be playing in St. Paul this month and next. It’s a fitting tribute to a poet who in twentieth-century America was everywhere present and nowhere acknowledged, who showed through a tough and often unrewarding career that the most you can hope for out of life is one great party.

  • The Last Resort

    Real-life emergency rooms are nothing like television. For one thing, there’s the pace. If you filmed a one-hour real-time show in an actual emergency room, the scene might never change. Last month, while I was finally leaving the ER with a freshly diagnosed “honkin’ kidney infection on its way to the bloodstream,” I heard the triage nurse tell a newly arrived patient that the wait was at least six hours. Six hours? Might as well go home, take two aspirin, and come back in the morning.

    Of course, I picked a popular night to drop by. During my five hours of waiting—and I did ask twice for Tylenol—I watched at least three ambulances arrive, and shared the company of about twenty other urgently ill folks. Twenty sick people, several hours, one well-sprinkled unisex bathroom, and a honkin’ kidney infection. Self-pity knows no bounds.

    Not everyone was outright sick; some were healthy but broken. Like the drunken guys who’d torn each other’s faces apart in a bloody fight. No anesthetic was needed for the sewing up; the massive amounts of alcohol did the trick nicely.

    Three other visitors were resting in wheelchairs with their injured legs propped up. One was a college student accompanied by two girlfriends; their cheerful complaining about classes and professors was oddly soothing. They even did some homework until exhaustion and David Letterman overcame them. (Speaking of Letterman, when did his hair turn white? He’s getting old—like everyone else. Emergency waiting rooms are so morose!)

    When Otto, a super-friendly male nurse, finally shouted my name, I was instantly revived. Otto! My hero! You’re a wonderful nurse! You’re working under such hard conditions! You’re so concerned about my ailment! You’re asking a few too many weird questions about my bowel movements!

    The doctor, on the other hand, was refreshingly focused on the only thing I cared about by now, which was to ingest a powerful antibiotic immediately. Normally, I have wonderful success with herbal remedies. This time, as soon as I began to feel a bit “off,” I started the cranberry extract-and-blueberries routine, and when that didn’t nip it, I turned to uva ursi, grapefruit seed extract, and oil of oregano. All the while I was thinking I was getting ahead of the curve, until I realized I wasn’t. So I resorted to some remedies that were as unpleasant as they sound: eating entire cans of asparagus; drinking large glasses of water mixed alternately with baking soda and cream of tartar; and, finally, a supposed wonder cure called D-mannose. I was waiting all day for the D-mannose to kick in, when, around eight in the evening, my entire lower back seized with so much pain I couldn’t stand up. And just like that, I decided that if I didn’t get some antibiotics right then, I would keel over and die. Since Jon had been urging me to see a doctor all week, he had the car started before I finished saying, “Let’s go.”
    For the next two days, I stayed in bed and slept. I didn’t read. I didn’t think. I didn’t even brush my teeth. I just swallowed pills and drifted—in between visits from my children, who, once they were convinced I’d be fine, quickly abandoned concern for my kidneys in favor of the zanier fun to be had with words they consider private and gross, like “bladder” and “urinary.”

    Through the mayhem, Lillie, my nine-year-old, was especially doting. She made up little songs to help me feel better. She dressed up in a smock and prairie bonnet as her version of a makeshift nurse’s uniform, took my temperature often, and read aloud to me from Little Women. She brought me water and juice and a Mickey Mouse pancake that she and her brother made from scratch. She also kept me posted on the news from school, since she attends the same school at which I teach—which can be awkward. “I told Mr. Lawton that you have a kidney infection,” she said. “He said that sounds serious.”

    “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m starting to feel better.”

    “I told Mr. Lucas you had an infection, too. A private infection.”

    “You told him what?”

    “That you had a private infection.”

    I resisted the urge to scream. “Why did you tell him that?” I asked.

    “Well, we were standing in the office, and there were a lot of people listening. So I didn’t want to say kidney, or bladder. I just told him it was very private.” She paused. “And that you couldn’t pee.”

    “Wow,” I said.

    “Just joking!” she said, laughing her bonnet off. When she recovered from the hilarity, she skipped down the stairs, composing another song as she went. “Mom,” she called from the landing, “what rhymes with bladder?” Life, in all its glory, was back on track.

  • The New Star Fish

    Unless you grew up on a schooner, in Tokyo, or with extremely food-forward parents, your introduction to tuna was probably a shredded pink pile of the stuff from StarKist. And like me, I bet there was no way that you could connect those mayo-lovin’ shreds to anything that swam in the big blue ocean. Long before Jessica Simpson pondered the chicken of the sea, we all must have wondered exactly what was crammed into those little cans. While it is sad that a fish with such beautiful, clean lines and tender flesh so often ends up blended with pickles and mustard, the fact is that tuna is the second most-consumed seafood (after shrimp) in the country. But even if tuna noodle casserole is still close to your heart, it is more and more likely that some of the tuna you’re eating bears the name ahi, yellowtail, tombo, or bigeye. And, sorry Charlie, even canned tuna has gone upscale, with premium fillets and imports now more widely available.

    You could say that ever since the world has had fishermen, they’ve been catching tuna. It has been fished since antiquity in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. Members of the mackerel family, tuna are hearty, strong fish, built for speed. Always in motion, they can power up to speeds of fifty-five miles per hour and eat up to ten percent of their body weight each day. It’s not unheard of to catch a six-hundred-pound tuna, depending on the variety.

    Albacore (or tombo in Hawaii) is the famed “chicken of the sea,” so dubbed by fisherman for its ivory flesh. Caught off the West Coast, albacore is used mostly for canning, as are the skipjack, tongol, and bonito. Yellowfin, or ahi, which cover enormous distances around the globe, have flesh that ranges from bright pink to medium red when raw, and cooks to a light yellow-brown. Bigeye swim at a greater depth than the yellowfin, and therefore have more fat to insulate them from colder waters. Many of them end up in Japan as sashimi.

    The bluefin might be considered the hottest tuna in the deep, cold sea. American and Japanese chefs drive the demand; those two countries alone account for about half of the consumption. The largest in the tuna family, bluefin are capable of reaching close to fifteen hundred pounds over their twenty-year life span. Swimming in cold Atlantic waters and feeding on mackerel and herring, the bluefin caught off the New England coast are favored by the Japanese for sushi and sashimi. In fact, they are so valued that few markets can compete with the prices Japanese buyers are willing to pay. The cuts of “sushi grade” tuna you see in America probably don’t pass muster with Japanese sushi chefs, so sophisticated are their tastes for this fatty, supple flesh.

    As the appeal of sushi preparations has increased around the globe, so the quotas and the market for tuna have changed. Fears of overfishing and stock depletion run with any fish that appears frequently on restaurant menus, and while the American tuna industry must abide by federally regulated quotas, European competitors are not held to the same guidelines. Some innovators have begun developing new agricultural techniques to widen availability. In January, for instance, the Taiwanese agricultural council unveiled a yellowfin that, within unique “net cages,” had grown from one kilogram to thirty kilograms in a two-year period. Fed a special diet and living a predator-free, pampered life, these yellowfin aren’t even hauled in by net. Instead, to protect the flesh from any damage, they are carefully borne out of the water by teams of men and carried off to the ship’s hold for a quick end.

    The demand for fresh tuna may be rising, but the canning industry, which recently celebrated its centennial, isn’t about to be left behind. Tuna can now be found in a pouch or a tin, in solid or chunk form, packed in oil, springwater, or its own juices. Canned tuna flavored with curries, jalapeños, or sun-dried tomatoes has recently begun to appear on grocery shelves.

    More important to American fans of the can, however, is the arrival of imported and boutique brands. The word on fishy lips everywhere is ventresca. From the Italian word for belly, ventre, ventresca is the silky-smooth belly of the tuna, known in sushi bars as toro. Ventresca from Spain and Italy tends to come in round, flat, four-ounce tins, which, when opened, reveal tender, wide, white strips of tuna that gently separate. The taste is beyond nirvana—buttery, creamy, incredibly delicate. Since prices range from $5 to $35, you’ll want to savor the flavor. This is no tuna for mashing into a salad; this is stand-alone, drizzle-with-olive oil-and-kosher salt eating. Putting it on a rosemary cracker is about as fancy as you’d want to get. Ventresca may be hard to find locally, but LaTienda.com has plenty (splurge on Tre Torri Ventresca di Tonno packed in extra virgin olive oil).

    The other development in canning is the small boutique canneries that have spawned along the West Coast. Holding true to a regional food philosophy, the small producers of the Pacific Northwest fish only by trolling (not with nets), and hand-cut and-pack only sashimi-grade albacore. They eschew all additives—oils, vegetable stock, chemicals, fillers—save for a smidgen of sea salt. While major producers cook their tuna twice, before packing and then in the can, the small canneries cook the fish just once, in the can, to preserve the natural juices and flavors. The resulting fish has a fresh, mild flavor; its texture can be a little dry, but that’s why it works so well in the tuna-salad genre—the result is less a mushy paste than a chewy, toothsome treat. Look for Great American Smokehouse and Seafood Company’s Deluxe Albacore Fillets or Dave’s Home-Style Santa Cruz Albacore at Whole Foods.

    With so many new options, it would be a shame to stick hard by your tuna salad or tuna melt. Even those who go in for dynamite sushi rolls or tuna seared with wasabi and soy could stand to swim in new waters. An easy tuna tartare might be just the ticket.

    Tuna Tartare with Wasabi Cream
    4–6 appetizer servings
    8- to 10-ounce sashimi-grade tuna
    (yellowfin/ahi or bluefin is best)
    3 T rice wine vinegar
    2 tsp. soy sauce
    1½ T sesame oil
    2 T (or to taste) wasabi paste
    ½ cup crème fraîche (or sour cream)
    1 T Sriracha or chili paste
    Black and white sesame seeds

    Using a non-serrated knife, cut tuna into quarter-inch cubes. Toss with rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce and sesame seeds. Whisk together the crème fraîche and wasabi, adding more wasabi if desired. Create individual servings by mounding about two tablespoonfuls of tuna on a small plate. Top with a dollop of wasabi cream, sprinkle with additional sesame seeds, and drizzle the plate with Sriracha sauce. Serve immediately.

  • Zodiac Maniacs

    Sometimes I read my horoscope and wonder if my fellow Geminis in the Sunni Triangle are “dressing for success today” and “playing it coy around that special Scorpio.” When you think about it, dressing for success might just as well mean body armor as a pair of Lucky jeans. And “coy” could be a euphemism for “remain indoors after curfew.”

    Once, back in Hazel Park Junior High, my study buddy Judy, who was convinced that our fates would be forever intertwined, passed me her dog-eared copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs under the desk in science class. It was a paperback as thick as a three-egg omelette, with the binding broken in the “Libra/Capricorn” chapter. That chapter foretold the marvelous life Judy could expect to start living once she began going out with the most popular boy in school. To be fair, the binding of this well-thumbed tome was also creased at the “Gemini/Aquarius” chapter, which highlighted what I could expect when I began going out with the friend of the most popular boy in school. Judy would also pass me long, speculative, dreamy notes. What the four of us would wear to prom, to our double wedding ceremony, and how we would live in houses next door to one another. BFFs forever. Yes, Sun Signs had it all worked out.

    Judy and I were roly-poly girls. We wore thick eyeglasses with plastic frames and ill-fitting clothes a season or two this side of stylish. Judy wrote out all of her class papers in dense, tiny, box-like characters that made every assignment she handed in look eerie and disturbed, like a furious ransom note. I was the type of girl who told disgusting jokes about bodily functions and laughed like a horse. I won’t try to kid you, I haven’t changed all that much. I didn’t need Ms. Linda Goodman to tell me our romantic futures. At slumber party séances, when I asked the Ouija board if I would get a date for the Snow Daze Dance, the plastic cursor would glide smoothly to no. Coincidence, or a warning from Captain Howdy?

    But even then, I understood the appeal of a horoscope. My tightly wound pal just wanted something, somewhere in the world, to make sense. Horoscopes offered a strange sort of hope. Because if every single personality trait, kink, and circumstance is written in the stars, then the notion of chance is snuffed out. If all people boil down to the sum of a mathematical equation, it erases the fear that humankind is just a random cell circus, tossed about in the big ol’ bingo hopper of life. Despite Ms. Goodman’s astonishing powers of prediction, I lost track of Judy once she made the college prep courses in ninth grade. Different crowds. (Have you ever gone to a Chess Club kegger?) Now I only check the horoscope once in a while, when I wonder what Judy’s up to.

    These days, a Sagittarian friend reads me her horoscope when many changes in her life are afoot. This woman always reads her newspaper fortunes to me with a quiet tone of finality, as if the die is cast and certain things can’t be helped. Because hey, if Mars moves into Capricorn and it stirs up the eighth house of transformation on casual Fridays, what exactly is there to be done about it? This same friend sleeps with her head at the foot of her bed whenever there is a full moon. I forget what mystical, Stevie Nicksian purpose this ritual serves, but I know she feels compelled to do it. Also, when she wants to sever contact with an annoying acquaintance, she writes the name down on a slip of paper and throws it into her crackling fireplace. Works every time. Well, it probably helps that she also stops returning their phone calls. This friend also lives in a South Minneapolis Tudor cottage constructed entirely of peppermint candy and sleeps with five cats. Just kidding. Except about the cats.

    I don’t mean to be a doubting Thomasina, but if the world’s events could really be charted and manipulated simply by being aware of one’s birth order and the lunar calendar, then I’m pretty sure the Renaissance Festival would operate year round, if you get my drift.

    The astrological wheel is confusing enough without bringing Chinese restaurant placemat soul animals into the mix. What am I, again? A monkey or twins? Twin monkeys? Well, that explains everything. Now give us a banana before we smear feces all over our cage and call you dirty names in sign language.

    As a longtime student of human behaviors (i.e. waitress), I’ve got to tell you, I’m more inclined these days to believe in a simple triumvirate to assign personality roles. I think people basically come in three types. Rock, paper, or scissors. Which are you?

  • Extreme Makeover

    Ask anyone who has gone through a breakup—the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Need a testimonial? Just ask the Star Tribune editorial board. Once upon a time, the Strib’s endorsement meant something. It was a player in Minnesota politics, an institution crossed at one’s peril.

    Not anymore. Minnesotans have rejected the Strib’s endorsed candidates with increasing frequency—Sharon Sayles Belton, Skip Humphrey, Roger Moe, Fritz Mondale, Patty Wetterling—the list grows with each election cycle.

    So what’s an editorial board to do?

    One strategy: Come up with a “big, bold plan” to reshape city government—which, if adopted, would make the Star Tribune editorial board a player again. The board has decided that Minneapolis city government is “inefficient, bloated, wasteful, arrogant, and hidebound.” In other words, it needs an extreme makeover. If Minneapolis would only follow “our preferences,” as the paper patronizingly wrote last December, then it could rekindle the ardor and respect of the state Legislature. The Legislature, mind you, is full of outstate politicians like Dick Day, the House Republican Majority Leader, who thinks, among other things, that Minneapolis schools “suck.”

    About those “preferences.” The Strib believes the City Council should shrink from thirteen members to six, four of whom would be elected citywide. The Strib would have the mayor appoint a city manager to run day-to-day business, and it would prohibit council members from speaking directly to city department heads and employees. Under the guise of “efficiency,” these proposals are anti-democratic and wildly out of sync with Minneapolis political culture.

    More than other major U.S. cities, Minneapolis is the land of “retail” politics, where politicians woo us and answer our phone calls. When gangster wannabes heaved a ten-pound rock through my window last summer, I was very glad I could call Fifth Ward council member and nearby neighbor Natalie Johnson Lee, who could intercede on my behalf with the cops and other city agencies.

    If the Strib had its way, Lee would have no choice but to direct me to the city manager’s office. This is not only inefficient and stupid, but clearly unconstitutional. How could a newspaper, presumably a First Amendment champion, advocate that our council members forfeit their free speech rights as a condition of their office?

    Beyond that, would an appointed city manager be as concerned about a rock through a North Side window as someone who actually lives in that neighborhood? Mayor R.T. Rybak doesn’t think so, and neither does the guy who wants his job, Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin. Rybak says the Strib proposal has some “interesting points,” but he questions whether Minneapolis needs a city manager; within the current system, he boasts, he has produced “five balanced budgets” and instituted major “developmental reform.” McLaughlin agrees that Minneapolitans would not accept an unelected bureaucrat running the city.

    Significantly, both Rybak and McLaughlin believe the Strib’s proposals would virtually wipe out African-American voting power. Rybak told me that “it is a well-known fact that the larger the district, the harder it is for minority members to get elected.”

    Beyond that, the Strib editorial board “prefers” that City Council members work part-time, with their salaries pegged at a fraction of that paid to the mayor. Apparently, they believe this is the best way to “recruit high-quality council members from the private sector’s professional ranks, including Republicans whose influence desperately is needed in city government.” A once staunchly DFL newspaper now calls for Republicans in city government. The Strib itself once upon a time railed against part-time council members because, it said, part-timers created inherent conflicts of interest and created a setup tailor-made for corruption.

    The Strib editorial board, with its misplaced fealty to the “private sector’s professional ranks”—the same people who brought us Enron and whose minions, such as conservative darling Tim Pawlenty, consider subsidized premiums for struggling Minnesotans “welfare” health care—must have ditched civics class in high school. Grass-roots democracy, the kind that Minneapolitans have come to expect, is by its very nature messy and, yes, sometimes inefficient, especially when compared to a business striving to produce the most widgets in a day. To the Strib’s apparent chagrin, true democracy is alive and well in the City of Lakes; it can thrive, however, only when all of its citizens have a chance to be heard.

  • Multi-hued Avenue

    It’s hard to tell for sure, but the trend may have started with bright tangerine five years ago. That’s the color that the then-newly arrived owners of Two 12 Pottery, a potters’ studio-cum-gift-shop, painted their building on Northeast’s Thirteenth Avenue. Since then, art and color have swept into Minneapolis’s old Polish quarter: storefronts along this stretch of street are embellished with cheerful balloons and cherry-topped metal art signage; some homeowners have splashed their porches with golds and teals. The vacant Ritz Theater, anticipating its rebirth as home to the flamboyant Ballet of the Dolls, is now cloaked in hot pink particleboard. And most recently, the once-inconspicuous 331 building at University and Thirteenth was transformed with a coat of fluorescent yellow-orange, signaling the imminent arrival of the neighborhood’s newest restaurant-bar.

    The 331 Liquor Bar will join a thriving scene of galleries—ArTrujillo, Easel Street, and Rogue Buddha, among them—along with fine restaurants, an upscale spectacle shop, and the Minnesota Center for Photography,. It seems almost contagious—even the chiropractor and prosthodontist are embracing an artsy identity.

    But this is no simple tale of gentrification. Thirteenth Avenue, known as “New Boston” in the early twentieth century, has long been a popular destination for fun-seekers. Until 1956, two streetcar lines crossed here, delivering hordes of diners to Robotins, the restaurant that preceded the Modern Café (two Modern regulars, an elderly couple, used to come in way back when for cherry Cokes) and enough moviegoers to form lines around the block at the Ritz.

    According to the new wave of enthusiasts and red house painters, the Polish immigrants who founded this quarter laid a foundation of irreverence and open-mindedness, thus paving the way for today’s artists and offbeat businesses like the Match Box Coffee cooperative. Ethnic and religious diversity was welcomed, too—both a Hindu temple and the metropolitan area’s largest Spanish-language Catholic church service are a stone’s throw away. Polish heritage is firmly rooted, however, at Europol Delicatessen, which stocks Slavic provisions and magazines, and the Polish White Eagle Association building, which presently serves no practical purpose other than as a venue for chess tournaments. But the Polish immigrants’ friendly yet tight-knit sensibility is best embodied by the longtime characters along this tree-lined street—most notably, vintage queen Madame Dora and Art the barber, who has been buzz-cutting at Boike’s Barber Shop for forty-seven years.—Christy DeSmith

  • The Model Philosopher

    “I was a troublesome model,” said Karen Ilvedson, who is now mostly retired from the business. “There’d be shoots where I just said, ‘I have to go.’” She was, however, quietly gracious during our Rake Appeal shoot (see page 53), even as the photographer asked her to pose in increasingly complex, contorted positions; even as a gaggle of stylists, assistants, and staffers, plus assorted construction workers, trained their gazes intently on her. What she was thinking, staring back at us?
    A lot, it turns out. Ilvedson enjoys thinking so much that, while modeling, she was also earning a degree in philosophy with a focus on metaphysics from the University of Minnesota. “People in New York would make jokes about me, the ‘model philosopher.’ They think the two don’t go together, but they do! Through modeling, I learned that so many things are illusion. I went from being a student to being a model in a matter of days. And so how do you define reality? When you’re traveling around the world, you start to wonder, is reality in my head, or in this physical place I’m at?”
    It’s understandable to question reality when stylists are dressing you in see-through plastic shorts with strategically situated fur patches, or when Yohji Yamamoto is using you as a muse for his new season. It’s also easy to understand how someone with so many passions of her own might resist serving the whims of other people’s creative endeavors. Ilvedson grew up shooting Super-8 movies and is now preparing to remake The Theory of Distractions, her thirty-minute, “tongue in cheek” film about how to “see beyond illusion, beyond the veil of reality.” (Who says philosophers can’t be funny?) She is a certified scuba diver and, more recently, a serious tea aficionado, inspired by the wealth of opportunity at the
    St. Anthony shop TeaSource. And in between practice sessions with her band, Ildved, she’s patiently reworking a two-hundred page “Faustian tale,” whose manuscript cover bears a picture of legendary ex-Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. “It might be decades before the time is right to publish it,” she said.
    Since moving to Northeast Minneapolis a year ago, Ilvedson has been drawn to a sprawling, gnarled tree on a vacant lot near her home. It gives off “a weird kind of energy,” she said. Having had her fill of Western philosophy—“the newer philosophy of the mind focuses soley on science; it’s too cold and rational,” she said—she is delving into the often misunderstood Hegel and older traditions that include a holistic, mystical, or more feminine dimension. The kinds of philosophy, in other words, that allow for sitting in a tree, taking in its energy.—Julie Caniglia

  • What It Said; What It Meant

    The letters on the sign above the bakery were as willful as inanimate objects could be. Hugo and Loretta kept an attentive eye out in case the force behind the mischief chose to make itself known. It never did. They had never had any trouble with the “E” until last week. The “G” was another story altogether, having annoyed them for years like a misbehaving child with its tendency to lean slightly out of line of the other letters. It often drooped, or swung with the wind; twice it had mysteriously turned backwards in the night.

    The first time it fell off entirely (the first of what was to be four instances in the thirteen-year history of HUGE DOUGHNUTS) the gravity of the slightly convex cube that was the “G” collided with the forward movement of a red Chevy van which was at that moment swinging into a parking space in front of the shop. Its blue and white plastic crunched and splintered onto the hood, leaving a mess of shards in the entry way, an insurance settlement to be paid, and a revision of the identity of the bakery. At night the gap in the letters was less noticeable as the newly transformed HU E DOUGHNUTS shone through the neighborhood with the promise, not of size, but of light.

    Loretta and Hugo Huge did not, in fact, embody the bulk that their name suggested. Slight people of birdlike intensity, successful in both metabolism and business, they were able to eat many of the pastries they produced (which were larger than usual—a slogan and a selling point) day after day without gaining the usual pounds and peevishness associated with their product. Thirteen years ago, when Hugo had asked for Loretta’s hand simultaneously in marriage and in store partnership (the name of which he had decided on in Loretta’s company at the Saturday night Scrabble competition), he had proposed simply.

    Loretta had just finished arranging her tiles into a vertical exclamation, transforming the monotonous “chant” into the charming “enchantment.” Hugo took advantage of the fire in her eye, the call of his heart, and the magic in the room to ask, “How do you like HUGE DOUGHNUTS?”

    Loretta instantly intuited his meaning. “I think I say I dough,” she replied.

    They were the sort of people who liked puns and puzzles, odd hours, and controlled, hands-on labor. They took life’s surprises—tremendous financial success, bad luck with pedigree dachshunds, and childlessness—in stride and mostly with good humor.

    Loretta liked the way her last name made an ironic comment on her size and gave a good chuckle to customers when they discovered that it meant more than the radius of the chocolate glazes. And, she had to admit, she especially liked those times when the “G,” acting up or falling down, reinvented the shop as HU E DOUGHNUTS. It was, well … colorful. She felt, in her new identity, not like someone who was missing a letter, or a sound, or a part of life, but like a person who had gained something: perspective, or even a separate and brilliant spectrum. She felt her banter with customers lighten; she felt her aura, or her spirit (her imagination, Hugo said) brighten with clarity.

    When the trouble with the “E” began and eventually left them as HUG DOUGHNUTS, Loretta’s spirit did not soar. She felt as if she had landed in a hippie commune of pastries, where everyone was expected to touch all the time. It was sticky. “Hug a tree” or “Have you hugged your child (éclair?) today?” paraded through her mind. She and Hugo discussed the options for restoring the sign. They agreed on when (as soon as possible; neither could fathom operating under that moniker for long), but not about how.

    What had happened was this: over a week’s time the blue lettering of the “E” on its plastic white cube (was the blue coloring paint? Ink? Dye? Loretta had never had an occasion to ponder it) faded until it completely disappeared. There was no explanation, and no other letter was affected. Whereas the “G”’s antics had perhaps been the work of an irritating but familiar poltergeist, the “E” seemed to have developed quickly and ominously into a black hole, imploding upon itself and achieving invisibility. Loretta secretly worried that the land on which the shop rested had become a time warp, or had always been haunted. One thing was clear: Loretta needed a change. “It’s a sign.”

    “Yes,” replied Hugo, “and it needs to be repaired.” He was already defensive, anticipating her direction.

    “I was thinking,” she said, “that it needs to be replaced.”

    A pause.

    “With what?”

    “Well, I’m not sure. I mean, there are all kinds of names we could come up with. Something kooky, something lively, or … ”
    “Different?”

    “Yes, Hugo, different. We’ve projected our own name from a marquee for a good long time. Why not change? Especially now with the “E”; it’s providential.” She took his hands. “I feel that the sign is telling us something.”

    A sigh.

    “Honey, try to understand. I am the shop, you know? I am—we are … HUGE, each of us. A name, our name, doesn’t it say something? Identity, heritage, dreams, future? I’m not sure I’d know who I was if I saw another word up there in front of DOUGHNUTS. It’s like looking in a mirror.”

    Loretta stared. “Sweetheart, sometimes a person needs more to look at than that.”

    Though tired from arguing, Hugo rose earlier than usual the next morning and took the Scrabble game from the closet. After a quarrel, whoever had been more at fault, more unyielding, or was more willing to apologize would leave a message for the other. Hugo certainly did not think he was at fault in any way, but he sensed that Loretta felt forlorn and confused about many things, and so he took the lead. The message consisted of the words tend, dewy, travel, lovely, and lucky, spelled with intersecting Scrabble tiles.

    Although they hadn’t spoken much in the shop, there was a friendly compatibility between them as they baked. Before he gathered his list, notebook, and satchel, as he did every Tuesday, to go have lunch and do errands downtown, Loretta smiled and said, “What do you mean by ‘travel’?”

    “Who knows?” sparkled Hugo. “Perhaps there’s a spaceship waiting for us right now, out back by the apple tree. Perhaps I’ve learned to travel through time, and I’ll bring you back a spice from the future that hasn’t been grown yet. Perhaps … an unknown destination awaits you.”

    In BOB’S, the café on the sixth floor of the Roberts Building, Hugo ate his usual mushroom omelette. For a moment, he mused on the name Bob, a strong, direct sign of confidence, and a palindrome, at that! Was his own name somehow lacking in energy, in chivalry? He thought of Loretta’s imagination, her maturing and wiry body, her tearful confession of boredom. Yes, he felt change in the air today; he felt change in his body like a butterfly flapping against his skin. Although they had finally compromised that the sign would remain HUGE DOUGHNUTS for another year, he was disturbed at Loretta’s restlessness, the claustrophobia about her. He would take her on an exotic trip, he had decided, somewhere tropical, balmy, un-city-like. Romantic.

    Hugo paused in the lobby as he waited for the elevator. He would go up to the sixteenth floor from here and order a new “E” cube for the sign, talking first with John at the desk about dachshunds. Later, he would buy guidebooks at the bookstore before stopping at the market for groceries. He couldn’t wait to present Loretta with his surprise.

    In the elevator, doors closed, Hugo, the sole passenger, pressed the button marked “16.” He searched for the one word he could utter to Loretta to indicate his vacation idea before he realized that no number had illuminated and the car remained still. He pressed “16” again, then “15,” “14,” “13.” Nothing. His mind settled on “Bismarck,” the sea or the islands, as his one-word clue for exotic adventure, as well as for his commitment to his and Loretta’s continuing endeavor in the bakery. His skin tingled. The cubicle jolted and the “Emergency” button lit up. Hugo wondered about the meaning of this as he rose to an anonymous floor. Or, as he thought to himself, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, how did he know he was really going up at all?

     

  • Boy Trouble

    My five-year-old son, Peter, is standing in the middle of the practice rink at Parade Ice Garden in Minneapolis. The other children, coached for this moment by their parents, can push off their skate edges in a wobbly glide. Peter hasn’t made the connection that skating is an entirely different motion from walking. He marches across the ice, arms akimbo, his blades tick, tick, ticking where they should carve and slide.

    My stomach turns queasy. I feel as though my husband, Walter, and I have sent Peter off to kindergarten without teaching him how to spell his name. A tiny boy flails into Peter and knocks him down.

    “He checked him,” I yell, grabbing Walter’s arm.

    Walter winces, too, but because his role in our marriage is to play calm to my storm, he takes a more benign point of view. “I think the kid just didn’t know how to stop,” he says.

    “But Peter can’t skate,” I say. “This is torture.”

    “It’s torture for you,” Walter answers. “But he’s hanging in there. At least he’s not crying.”

    A hockey player from a family of hockey players, Walter is confident that, given time, Peter will catch on. I share neither his confidence nor his enthusiasm. As I watch Peter struggle to keep his balance, I think back on a dinner party we went to when I was pregnant. I was in a crisis because the baby growing inside me wasn’t the girl I’d always envisioned. I think that the shock—or was it denial?—that I was having a boy was what made me announce that no son of mine would ever play hockey.

    The hosts, parents of two girls and two boys, rolled their eyes. “Why not?” the wife asked. “It’s a meathead sport,” I answered. “And I don’t want to raise that kind of boy.” That my husband is anything but a meathead was beside the point, I explained. Then I launched into a diatribe about how the macho locker-room culture was what made Walter decide to quit after tenth grade. Hockey, as I saw it, was aggressive and overly competitive. It developed the kind of brutish instincts that I didn’t think should be encouraged in boys.

    The wife had known me since junior high and reminded me that we used to play soft-puck hockey in our figure skates. “Don’t you remember how much fun that was?” she asked. “Well,” I answered, “if I have a daughter and she wants to play, I think I’d be okay with that.” As I saw it, harnessing aggression could be empowering for girls. But for boys it was the beginning of a trajectory that inevitably ended in violence. My friend retreated to the kitchen to get the dessert and her husband reached for the wine.

    Pregnant with her first baby in 1955, Adrienne Rich, as she would later write, “set my heart on a son.” Her reasons ironically stemmed from a desire for self-identification. “I wanted to give birth, at twenty-five, to my unborn self,” she explained in Of Woman Born, “the self that our father-centered family had suppressed in me, someone independent, actively willing, original—those possibilities I had felt in myself in flashes as a young student and writer, and from which, during pregnancy, I was to close myself off. If I wanted to give birth to myself as a male, it was because males seemed to inherit those qualities by right of gender.”

    Thirty years after those words were published, few Americans need to have boys to harvest the crops or take over the family law firm. Those women who have benefited most from feminism’s advances into the mainstream––namely the educated, career-oriented American women who populate my slice of the world––don’t need sons to live out our unrealized dreams. Why would we? Daughters, who are a closer approximation to us, can do it instead.

    I understood when I got pregnant that it was possible Walter and I could conceive a boy. But I didn’t believe it. Part of my blind spot, I’m sure, stemmed from experience. I was the oldest of four sisters and went to an all-girls school until I was in fifth grade. None of my childhood friends were boys. Girlhood was the only world I knew.

    My education encouraged this viewpoint. In 1986, while attending Barnard College, I was handpicked by my favorite English professor to join a campus feminist literary magazine called Eve’s Rib. When a Columbia student, whom I’ll call Josh, asked to join our cozy, all-woman collective, we debated the consequences of opening up the membership. Josh told us that he had been deeply influenced by the feminist theory he had learned in his courses and that he wanted men to also benefit from the movement’s insistence that both sexes are wronged by the patriarchy. We wondered aloud if his earnestness was really a ploy to sleep with one of us, but agreed that we shouldn’t discriminate against him because he happened to be a guy.

    Josh’s first job was to design a cover using an inkblot illustration that we felt was both abstract and sophisticated enough for our endeavor. His finished product, however, was not what we had hoped for. Josh had, we decided, phallocentrically set all the type thrusting into the inkblot’s blank spaces. “This is what happens when you let the patriarchy in,” one of my colleagues announced. Josh had to go.

    If I tell this story with the same bemusement I use to recount my children’s learning experiences, I want to make it clear that I’m not recanting my feminist education. Feminism, as it was taught in the 1980s, wasn’t a share-your-feelings detour away from rigorous thinking. Rather, it was a disciplined, intellectually engaging philosophy that showed young women like me how to critique the world around us. It taught me not only how to challenge male privilege—no inconsequential realization when you consider that twenty years later men still earn more than women and hold the overwhelming majority of government positions—but to question my own lofty position as a rich white kid.

    What feminism didn’t teach me was that mother love messes with ideology. Today when I think about Josh, I wonder not only about what all of us in the collective missed by not trying to work out a solution with him, but also whether Josh talked to his mother about his expulsion from our garden. Did she see it as a kind of historical corrective and valuable learning experience? Or did she imagine her almost-grown son as a vulnerable boy standing in the middle of a skating rink?

    When I got pregnant, most of my friends had daughters. I had watched them raise their girls, my mental notebook filling with ideas for when my time came. I was enchanted by the attention they paid to encouraging their girls’ uniqueness. One wrote books about body image and classroom self-esteem for junior high school girls, and she and her husband put her research into practice at home with their two daughters. Their living room was stacked with library books portraying spunky female characters like Pippi Longstocking and Reckless Ruby, an aspiring firefighter who cringes when her mother calls her “precious.” My friend bought (or sewed) only clothes the girls could stain or rip when jumping off the highest rung of the monkey bars or calibrating the liquid to dirt ratio of a mud hole. When the older daughter got her period, the entire family celebrated with an all-red dinner: spaghetti with tomato sauce and heart-shaped meatballs, sliced bell peppers, and cran-raspberry juice.

    This was how I imagined I’d raise my daughters, too. I assumed mothering a girl would come naturally to me because she would possess more of the qualities that I valued: She would be less physical, more creative, more connected to her parents when she became an adult.

    At our week nineteen ultrasound, the doctor pointed a pen at a skinny triangle sticking out from between the baby’s legs. “So you tell me,” he said. “What do you think we have here?”

    I stared at the screen. At first I couldn’t make out anything, but I forced my eyes to focus on what looked to me like a crescent moon with a blob in the middle. The doctor explained it was the baby’s butt and the bottom sides of the thighs. The moon wiggled. I squinted to get a closer focus. And then I saw it. That triangle, that blob. It was the baby’s labia.

    I couldn’t believe it was so obvious.

    “A girl?” I whispered.

    Walter raised his eyebrows at the doctor. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “Honey,” he said. “That’s a penis.”

    That I was disappointed by the news was deeply troubling. Our baby was, after all, healthy. But what was equally disturbing—and perhaps more surprising—was the tepid response I got from a lot of other women. “Well, at least you’ll raise him to be a good man,” they said. “We need more women like you to have boys.”

    Before I got pregnant, I would have agreed with them. Before I got pregnant, I also said this to friends who were expecting boys. The promise of feminism as I learned it (but obviously wasn’t ready to put into play when it came to Josh) lay in the liberation of both sexes from rigid gender roles. Women gain access to the upper reaches of institutional power and change them to not be so hierarchical, and men are finally allowed to enjoy an emotional world our culture previously denied them. A feminist education tells boys they can be vulnerable, that they are worth more than the thickness of their wallets. A feminist education instructs boys and men that the search for an authentic self is a birthright. It challenges the callous assumption that men’s lives can be disposed of for national defense.

    All of these convictions didn’t matter in the face of my ignorance and fear of boys. I wondered how it could be that I—a woman with massive ambivalence about her child’s gender—could be the right kind of woman to have a son. To me, boys were not individuals, but rather a gang of sports-crazy thugs. If they were not part of a pack, they were anti-social future engineers who shunned sunlight in favor of an afternoon fiddling with an erector set or working a computer keyboard. I made exceptions, of course: My husband, my brother-in-law, all the men I was lucky enough to call friends. But these were men. With the exception of my adored nephew, who was less than one year old, I didn’t know any boys intimately well.
    If a man with a similarly negative view of girlhood was to have a daughter, I know what my friends and I would have called it: A tragedy. Why then, was it good that I might (might) influence my son to be less “like a man”? Was it because I had noble opinions about what could, in an ideal world, make a man? Or because I wanted to raise a man who would have enlightened ideas about women? If the job of a parent is to encourage a child to grow into their own unique self, it was clear that I was in trouble.

    Worried that I would be a complete failure as a mother, I called my only close friend who had a son and tearfully admitted that I was terrified of having a boy. “Loving a child has nothing to do with gender,” she assured me. “This little boy will steal your heart.”

    My friend was right, of course. Now that I am the mother of two boys—our younger, Henrik, is two years old—I’m so steeped in the marvelous complexities of boyhood that it’s almost impossible for me to relate to that pregnant woman sobbing into the phone. Like all parents, I believe that my boys—as well as the daughter my husband and I are adopting—are the children I was meant to have. But more than that, I believe that my sons were the children I needed to have.

    In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia writes, “When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think—men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.” Ten years ago, I would have tried to dismantle her praise by pointing out that at the time the George Washington Bridge was built, people didn’t believe women could physically handle the rigors of manual labor—not to mention engineering. Now, I am moved by the fact of the accomplishment and Paglia’s determination to claim it as such. I still hope that today’s bridge builders and designers are both men and women and that my sons can grow up to choose to be stay-at-home dads, if that’s what they want (or, more important in today’s realities, can afford).

    Because of my sons, I look at people as individuals rather than representations. Boys are not monsters. Nor are girls naturally kinder and gentler. That’s not to say that even this more nuanced idealism goes untested. In my short parenting career, I have steered Peter away from a Southern belle Halloween costume and talked him out of a pair of pink-feathered mules. Sure, I bought him a purse and the Barbie he begged for, but if I’m honest with myself I’ll admit that it was because I knew he wouldn’t take them out of the house. Or at least not beyond the backyard, which is where I last spotted the doll, naked and face down in a clump of damp leaves. The fact that I will gladly let my daughter parade around as Spiderman or cart a convoy of trucks to the playground strikes me as one of the greater inconsistencies in my philosophy. Partly, this censoring comes from an understanding that the world we live in is still suspicious of and frightened by boys who walk outside prescribed guy boundaries, and I don’t want my sons to be emotionally taunted or physically harmed. But I worry that by going along with these rules, I’m reinforcing the notion that they can’t express everything they are in public. By indulging my protective instinct, I’m foregoing efforts to make America, or at least my corner of it, a better place for boys of any stripe.

    At the same time, I’ve told Peter that he isn’t allowed to wear camouflage and that Santa doesn’t make plastic rifles. When Peter got to check out his first books from the school library, his choices were The Navy: At War and The Air Force: At War. While I wished that he had chosen the sled dog picture book that the girl in our car pool clasped in her hands, I knew this was more about his newfound ability to figure out what he thinks without his parents’ stage management. So we went home and read both books cover to cover. Two weeks later he told me: “I don’t like killing and I am for peace. But I still think looking at guns and weapons is interesting.” The next book he checked out was about skeletons and skin.

    Today my home life is a blur of crayons, clay, and blocks, not to mention a fleet of construction vehicles and toilet paper rolls turned into weapons—often pointed in my direction. I’ve given up trying to stop the shooting, mostly because I’m too overwhelmed to spend my entire day playing peace cop—and I figure that if they are happily engaged I’ll get a chance to read the paper—but also because I trust that they won’t grow into men who believe that killing people is a sport. I hope to have accomplished at least this much as a mother. If I didn’t have sons, all the paper cannon-building would horrify me. But because I understand the tender hearts of both these boys in particular, I feel that it’s healthier for them to work out their aggression than to suppress it. (Who knows, maybe the mothers of playground bullies think the same way.)

    That doesn’t mean that I’ve reconciled myself to the militaristic expectations our culture has for its boys. In 1976, in the shadow of the Vietnam War, Adrienne Rich wrote that under patriarchy, all mothers of sons worked for the army. Today, even with American forces stretched to their limits in Iraq, there is no draft. But the deeper truth of Rich’s statement still stings. Whenever I go to Target, I’m struck by how somber and boring the boys’ cargo pants and striped T-shirts are compared to the glittery oranges and pinks and purples across the aisle. And don’t get me started on the rows and rows of fighter jets (which my sons adore) and Legos that turn into endless variations on the grim reaper. Even though I find these norms dispiriting, I dress my sons in the standard American boy uniform and cut their hair short. And when the top item on Peter’s Christmas list was an aircraft carrier, I decided not to be too hard-core about my conscientious objections.

    The other day I overheard Peter humming a tune from Mary Poppins. “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats/And dauntless crusaders for women’s votes/Though we adore men individually/We agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.” I could tell by the way he was mumbling the words that it was the tune that mattered to him and that he hadn’t processed the song’s meaning. But listening to him did make me wonder how I’ll talk to him about the personal revolution his birth set in motion for me. While I hope that what my boys feel most powerfully is my unyielding love for them, I suspect that one day we will all have to reckon with the complicated emotions I brought into our family-making.

    When Walter and I decided to have a third child, we agreed to adopt. Part of the reason was because we wanted to choose our baby’s gender, to parent a girl. Though I deeply love my boys, I still wish to put all those girl power philosophies into play. The desire is like a phantom limb. I wonder, though, about the crown of expectations I’ve made for my daughter. I’ll have to remember that she’s not a mini me. I’ll have to be supportive and bite my tongue, even if she wants to wear pink dresses and bake pies for the rest of her life.

    Two weeks after that wretched first hockey practice, Peter learned that by pushing off the edge of his blade, he could travel farther than if he just walked across the ice. To glide and keep his balance was a thrill for him. Not to mention a revelation for me. A hockey player, I suddenly realized, must not only master the difficulties of skating, but combine that skill with quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination. In the glow of Peter’s newfound enthusiasm, nothing about hockey—except perhaps those infamous 5:30 a.m. ice times—repulsed me. When Peter scored a goal during a scrimmage, I was so excited that I called my mother from the rink.

    Last week during practice, I wandered over to the vending machines near the main rink where members of a junior high team were being put through their drills. It wasn’t until I got closer that I was able to make out the ponytails falling down their padded backs. Before Peter was born, this would have been the only game at Parade Ice Garden that I cared about. Today it’s the icing on the cake. For as much as I would love to stay and cheer these girls on, I leave. My son is learning how to stickhandle. And I want to be there to see it.