CoffeeCake

It's early. 37 minutes more before we open for the day. I am in the staff kitchen, silently cursing my stupidity as I visualize the unintended whereabouts of my carefully prepared lunchbox of tuna salad, Ritz crackers, yogurt cup and apple slices. I am hoping the day will be a quiet one, hoping plans and preparations for the approaching holiday occupy most of our regulars.

Moira, white, attractive and slender, arrives a few minutes behind me. Eight months in and I still don't know precisely what Moira does or what her title is, just that she's one of the full-timers here who moves like she runs the place. She is bearing several cardboard boxes and a large square pan. She places them all carefully on the table close to the center, and invites me to help myself. The boxes contain small wrapped sub sandwiches, saran-wrapped pickles spears, and little individual condiment and plastic-ware packets. The pan is a chocolate chip coffeecake Moira proudly announces she made herself. She pulls paper plates from the shelf over the sink and generously offers me one of the thick pre-cut squares, along with my choice of sandwich and pickle.

I accept immediately, grateful for the lunch solution. The coffeecake looks amazing, the darkly glistening, half-buried chocolate chips dotting nearly the entire surface. I shouldn't, my sugar intake has been off the charts lately... I wolf it down. I am going to have a raging headache within the hour but it is totally worth it. The cake is dense and sweet; it is effing delicious.

I enjoy it so much that I wait a few minutes as Moira busies herself making coffee, then sneak back into the kitchen when I think she's gone to take another piece--maybe two--for later. She walks in and catches me at it. A blink-and-you've-missed-it side-eye as she serenely pulls down coffee cups.

"As long as there's enough for my team," she cautions politely and I am immediately chastened. I decide to keep the piece I've already wrapped in foil and stored in the fridge alongside my sandwich but abandon the idea of taking any more. I am embarrassed at my greed and Moira's observation of it. Annoyed too, faintly. Something about her demeanor--that super-polite tone with the hint of cool disapproval underneath it--suddenly reminds me of Molly. Molly with the delicate fine-boned face and tiny, ballerina waist. Is there a secret club all white women of a certain age belong to? For a moment, I hate Moira Conner and her precious homemade chocolate chip coffeecake and wish we'd never encountered each other. Maybe I should return that second piece, along the with the deli sandwich and the pickle. I can buy my own damn lunch.

It is later. I sit at my desk, munching the last of the pickle, stewing about Moira, I mean Molly, I mean Moira.

I mean Molly.

Actually not so much Molly as all of them, the whole Mulvaney clan, remembering them and Mom and me some 20 years ago, around the time of Molly's engagement to James. Remembering how afraid my mother was.

Here were these strangers, her in-laws-to-be, affluent, educated, attractive--the youthful Mulvaney women especially--and brimming with confidence and social ease. Their elder daughter, a University of Chicago law student, was living with her son in a Hyde Park apartment somewhere off Cornell. Jamie was waiting tables at that pizza place on Kenwood. What did he see in her? And why a white girl? A girl from a family so different from his own? If he was trying to make his mother feel insecure and off-balance he couldn't have come up with a better choice. I watched Mom try to be happy for Jay but I could see that... well, she had her doubts. Put it that way.

Miranda Mulvaney was happily married to the father of her four grown children. She had a thriving career of her own, was slim as her daughters, drove her own car, and was friendly and outgoing. My mother, a billing manager for a tire company, had none of these things. The Mulvaneys celebrated everything and there was a lot to celebrate: the sale of Mike's company upon his decision to retire, Peter's promotion and posting to London, the publication of Danny's new novel, Kelly's acceptance to Barnard. Whenever my mother found herself in the company of this family of accomplished, globetrotting go-getters she was reminded of everything her family wasn't, everything she wasn't, I knew.

So she kept me close. I was moral support. Maybe also a shield of sorts. From the first I felt this. But listen, I had my own insecurities and didn't liked to be chained to my mother every time she faced a gathering of the Mighty Mulvaneys.

Did I ever tell you this story..? The Joy Luck Club story? Yeah, well.

In the fall of '93, some weeks before the wedding, Miranda Mulvaney decided it would be nice if she and her girls and Maude and her daughter could do something together, just the women. There was this new movie she and the girls had been wanting to see, and she thought--why didn't we all meet at the theater and see it together? And have dinner afterward, her treat? I will never know with what degree of enthusiasm or reluctance my mother accepted this invitation. But she did and then she called to tell me. I was immediately wary. What movie?

What movie, Mom?

Well (long pause) it's based on that book by Amy Tan.

Amy Tan? What book? Which book? (Oh no...)

It--oh, what's it called--it talks about the lives of these Chinese America women and their daughters.

Uh-huh. (Oh shit... Oh no.)

I was aghast. Seriously? This was the way Miranda Mulvaney thought we should begin to get to know one another? The five of us passing popcorn back and forth through a 2 and 1/2 hour angst fest exploring the whys and wherefores of mothers and daughters who don't understand each other? And then, what, spending another hour or so dissecting it over dinner? I cringed at the very thought.

You have to understand: nearly all of my life my feelings for my mom have been this complicated, love-hate thing. I couldn't summon one iota of enthusiasm at the prospect of spending hours in the dark next to her, watching this of all films and then talking about the meaning of it all with three women who were near strangers to me.

I did my best to get out of going but my mother would have none of it. She half-bullied, half-begged me to cooperate. It would not have been nice to decline Miranda Mulvaney's invitation, it would not have been polite--these two would be mothers-in-law soon and grandmothers eventually, after all--and she was goddamned if she was going to face these suburban superwomen alone. (And besides, if Miranda Mulvaney's invite was the only way to get me to a movie my mother had been hoping we'd go see together anyway, so be it. Every time Mom saw a TV advertisement for The Joy Luck Club she nudged me.)

Honey, it's one evening out of your life.

What could I do? I swallowed my resentment and misgivings and I went. And... I don't know. It was chilly, but I don't remember what I wore. We ate somewhere close to the theater, but I don't remember where or what I ordered. I don't remember the post-movie conversation. Just the awkwardness and the super-politeness and the strain in my mother's voice. Or maybe it was my voice. Whatever, I couldn't wait to get away. From all of them, Mom included. I felt guilty for feeling that way and then angry about the guilt. The old conundrum.

I wonder if, after my mother dies, I will continue to write words like this. Will the remainders of love and guilt prevent any more of these conflicted ruminations about her and me? Or will her absence make the musings easier? I can't even hazard a guess.

It's late. Time to go.

Denial

I watch the local news, shaking my head. There is some kind of disconnect here that is not being talked about, at least, it seems, not publicly. It's no good marching arm in arm in the streets with matching tee shirts and signs, chanting Cease fire! and Put down the guns! and No more body bags! when the shooters are in fact your neighbors and kin and the self-imposed No Snitch rule remains hard and inviolate. Are the shooters gangbangers? Are the gangbangers strangers, some implacable alien force invading the borders of your community?

Or are they your children?

Brunch with Audrey

The skin on her face is so smooth, and her eyes so velvet and soft that though she is darker even than my half-sister I look at her think helplessly of Audrey Hepburn. Audrey, or some winsome, movie-star princess like her.

Her smile is Audrey's too. It's enchanting; warm and wide and very, very white. Her smile, and the way it animates her eyes, is what cinched my longing for her. Almost immediately I became obsessed with the ear to ear width of her smile and the perfection of her teeth. Now, surreptitiously, I watch her from across the table, trying not to stare, determined not to telegraph too much too soon. Audrey takes delicate sips of iced water, her long cocoa brown fingers sliding along the condensation beading the glass. She takes another bite of her ham and spinach omelet, laughing a self-conscious little laugh as she chews, trying to maneuver the bits of food in her mouth and still talk intelligibly. She startles and her hand jumps toward her face. When my half-sister does this I want to gag but on Audrey it's just adorable. Adorkable. From now on, in nice restaurants on Sundays, I will order omelets and eat them like Audrey does, winningly and with feminine gestures, even though the smell, really the very thought, of cooked eggs makes me violently ill sometimes.

She laughs again, mispronouncing superfluous. She forks more omelet, chasing chunks of egg and ham around her plate, and swallows. I reach for my water glass and take long, deep swigs, trying not to gulp.

A week or so later Audrey and I went to the Music Box to see The Last Waltz. Afterward we went to a steakhouse, a fancy one on the Near North side, and had dinner. I ordered grilled salmon. Audrey's ribeye was extremely rare.

This was our last date.

Pride 2014

I was wondering what to do for Pride Month now that June is finally upon us, when a handsome young man with the dark hair, skin and eyes of an Arab aristocrat walked up. "These are for you," he said, slapping two pamphlets on the counter and pushing them toward me. The cover of one pamphlet was titled The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah's Kingdom, the other was titled Awake!

"Thank you," I told him politely but before the words were completely out of my mouth he had turned and was walking away. I picked the pamphlets up and looked at them. Then I threw them into the  recycling wastebasket under the counter, still deciding about Pride.

Off Wednesday

16 April

It's afternoon, about 3 PM, my day off. I am trying to relax.

Two days ago I made what felt like a cracking good beginning, writing up what I'd hoped would be a blog contribution, the first perhaps of many, to the new Chicago Public Library's website. A combination essay and review of two books I have been sort of reading lately, both of them unsparing examinations of African American homophobia.

Sort of reading because I pick up these books, get absorbed in pages and pages... and then stop. Start and stop. Start and stop. Dropping them to wander back to Beatlemania, grizzly bear attacks, Windows 8.1 tutorials, and Barbra Streisand (specifically Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand by William Mann). But after a while something, some need, draws me back to The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality In Black Communities, edited by Delroy Constantine-Simms, and Homophobia In The Black Church: How Faith, Politics, And Fear Divide The Black Community by Anthony Stanford. I read avidly, hungrily. But not for long.

I don't know. Momentarily I'm hampered by technology; I don't know how to create a blog on the new CPL website or upload images of books I'm reading to it. But I'm hampered by something else as well, a creeping sense of dread and sadness and anger as the words reveal the ignorance, denial and cruelty that--

I don't know. I can't even finish the sentence. These books are well-written and compelling. But at some point they feel like taking bitter medicine that is good for you, all this documentation of black man--and woman's--inhumanity to black man and woman. It's frustrating. And hurtful. I read, and then I get angry, and then I have to put the book down.

I'm distracted also by thoughts of Michael, who called me this afternoon to tell me he was terminated from his job yesterday. From Mike's description of the meeting, the new HR manager who fired him seemed almost to be enjoying the process. More than almost. Actually.

Quisling asshole.

I feel such worry and sympathy for my friend.

Okay and I also envy him his freedom, however temporary, from managers and bus schedules and workaday grind.

I hope it is temporary, and Mike doesn't find himself sliding into the precarious existence my cousin found himself in, when the financial company he worked for collapsed in 2011 thanks to the incompetence and greed of the CEO. Both my Michaels, used by men and women that called their employees "family" and then tossed them away like so much used Kleenex.

The world is shit sometimes.

Boys' Night Out Revisited

Do you remember Boys' Night Out, the 1962 "sex comedy" starring James Garner, Howard Morris, Tony Randall and Howard Duff as the middle-aged Boys with Kim Novak as the blonde they all lust after?

Typical of the era, this a Hollywood comedy where the sex is all talk but no real action. Not on screen, anyway. (One can safely assume that then, as now, the real action was behind the scenes in Hollywood land.) I watch movies like this and feel suddenly nostalgic for a time in American life I was too young--and too black--to know. In the sixties only white people were having wild romantic misadventures like this. Apparently.

Tell me you remember this movie. If you don't, watch for it on Turner Classic Movies or one of those "romance" premium channels and see what you make of it.

Me, I love-hate the stuff. The performers in Boys' are second generation Golden Era ; slick, smoothly attractive, energetic and amusing. Watching them go through their paces is undeniably entertaining. But the story is utterly predictable. The early sixties was basically still the fifties. The New Frontier notwithstanding, America was still shoveling the same old shit about "morality." And Hollywood was still lumbered with a Code that mandated it tease American audiences with the promise of something it had no intention of delivering.

Howie (Morris), George (Randall), and Doug (Duff) are mad men in gray flannel suits, youngish marrieds longing to break free of the suburban restrictions of their lives. They envy what they imagine to be the swinging bachelor existence of their hunky buddy Fred (Garner), who, um, still lives with his mom, Ethel, played by the droll Jessie Royce Landis. (Catch her peevish tsk about the effrontery of a feisty waitress: "Have you noticed how insolent the help is becoming lately? Ever since the Kennedys got in!" It can't be coincidence that the witty Landis was Cary Grant's wisecracking mom in North by Northwest and Grace Kelly's wry and wily mom--and Grant's future mother-in-law--in To Catch a Thief.

And as long as I'm mentioning great character players, they really should have given the marvelously pixilated Ruth McDevitt more to do in this movie; she's nearly wasted as a snoopy neighbor. As is Jim "Mr. Magoo"/"Thurston Howell The Third" Backus as the opportunistic realtor. Where did the delightfully loopy Jim Backus go?)

Following yet another unexciting evening of wives, kids, and TV dinners, the married friends hit on the idea of jointly renting an apartment in the city and installing in it a Girl. A knowing, accommodating Girly-Girl they will democratically share. All they need is their pal, good ole Fred, to help them out. Unmarried, unencumbered Fred must know lots of knowing, accommodating girls or know where to find at least one, right? Fred is appalled--and intrigued. With misgiving he allows himself to get talked into setting things up.

Of course, nothing goes according to plan--that's supposed to be the fun, isn't it?--for Cathy the Girl (Novak) turns out to be brainy as well as beautiful. She's a grad student studying the adolescent fantasies of the adult suburban male. Well, of course. Cathy and Fred meet cute haggling over the rental of the deluxe apartment Fred has found for the guys. Realizing its purpose, Cathy decides for her own purposes to go along with the arrangement. (Incidentally, Christina Hendricks could have killed in this role.)

Cathy "goes along" only to a point; this is a Hollywood studio release featuring major movie stars, after all. We know going in nothing truly eyebrow-raising is going to happen in that bachelor pad. We're here to see how it's not going to happen.

And so what we get is the predictable: cold feet and confusion ensue as the neighbor snoops, the wives find out, and their mad men panic. Hysteria reigns, but only momentarily. The comely Cathy was never really a husband-stealing siren but a Good Girl in training to be a suburban spouse. In the end she wins over the wives by becoming one of them, marrying the hunky Fred and trading in her thesis for kids and TV dinners. Ah, Hollywood! In the America of 1962 I'll bet that ending was supposed to be very reassuring, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

What would life have been like if I'd been born a Cathy or some variation thereof? As I say, a part of me loves this movie and movies like it--the superior The Seven Year Itch comes to mind--and thinks the whole outrageous notion of being an alluring movie sexpot, all curves, hips and sly, full-lipped smiles, would be a hoot. Oh to be a Girly-Girl pursued by a quartet of furtive, randy skirt chasers!

Oh, put your eyebrows down. I said a "part of me" likes the idea. The rest of me--the part with the brain--knows damn well that a sexy woman being relentlessly pursued by skirt-chasing men would actually feel harassed, beleaguered, even demoralized. I retain enough memory of my twenties and thirties to know that only in fifties and sixties Hollywood movies is the experience of being pinched, palmed, and cornered by determined males something amusing.

Was the producer of Boys' Night Out Ross Hunter? It sure looks and feels like his kind of movie. Ross Hunter was not a skirt-chaser, unless we're talking Scottish kilts. He was gay. Like every Hollywood queer of his era he understood being gay was not necessarily a problem so long as you dedicated yourself to satisfying the heterosexist imperative. So while he cast Kim Novak as the Lust Object, the focus of the men's collective fantasies, one can't resist wondering whom Hunter would have cast if he'd had his Homo druthers. What would be the all-male version of Boys' Night Out (Note how the title totally works for this revision.)

Let's see.

In the Garner role--? Too easy. Rock Hudson. The strapping, handsome, homosexual Hudson, by 1962 an assured charmer with a silky baritone and impeccable comic timing, would have been perfection as the conflicted Fred.

For the others... I don't know. Tony Perkins? Rory Calhoun? Van Johnson? No, wait--how old is Van Johnson? I mean--you know what I mean--would Van Johnson have been too old in '62 to be one of the young and restless Boys? I think yes, so maybe not him... But you see where I'm going with this, yes? (Wait--wasn't Tony Randall gay? Was Rory Calhoun gay? Is it wrong that I honestly don't care?)

And for the blonde Lust Object...

He wouldn't have to be blonde of course, but since Novak was, I'm thinking inside the box. Who would have been the '62 equivalent of the young Brad Pitt? (Who is not gay, granted, but I'm talking sexual appeal, not orientation.)

Tab Hunter? How old was Tab Hunter in 1962? About thirty, wasn't he? About the same age as Novak that year? (Would thirty be too old? What is thirty in gay years?)

I mean, how different would this movie have been--and how different its impact--had the Boys all been down low brothers-in-arms? With Rock cast in the role of Fred, whose growing love for Tab, the blonde Boy Toy, forces him--forces them all--to confront his fears and come Out?

Okay, it would never have been made. Not in 1962, and not in any era with that cast. But that's a movie I would have paid to see, wouldn't you?

See Boys' Night Out starring Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Anthony Perkins and Rory Calhoun! With Tab Hunter as the delectable, dreamboat Boy Kevin! Howie, George and Doug are family men desperate for some man-on-man action. Watch the fun as with the help of their mother-dominated, confirmed bachelor friend Fred, they set up their own private playpen to make their fantasies come true! Nothing goes according to plan! The neighbor snoops! The wives find out! The mad men panic! And hysteria reigns!

But only momentarily.

Conceivably we could flip this in all sorts of directions: how about a gay black version of Boys' Night Out? Circa 2013? (Because frankly I'd have no idea how to cast it circa 1962.) With--help me out here--Tyler Perry in the role of Fred? What do you think?

And the closeted suburban mad men would be played by... Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan and Martin Lawrence? None of whom are gay--that I know of--but all of whom are very funny, and were very funny together in the 2010 remake of Death at a Funeral. They could, I think, bring a similar manic chemistry to another film about adolescent men having a lot of trouble growing up.

Note: Oh. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, it wasn't Ross Hunter who produced Boys' Night Out but the brainy beauty Cathy, star Kim Novak herself, who also worked tirelessly to promote the film. According to Mankiewicz, despite Novak's best efforts Boys' Night Out did only so-so box-office. Kim, slightly less svelte at age 29 than she used to be, took the film's relative failure as a sign that it was time to consider retirement.

Ah, well. If only the dynamic duo of Hudson and Hunter had been available... And the America of '62 had known how to lighten up.

Desperately Seeking Hepburn. And a Good Multi-Vitamin

Hand-wrote a good piece yesterday that I meant to post here. I'd planned to, just as soon as I got home. On the train I half-read my book, half-visualized myself at my desk pounding out my thoughts, publishing my words, and smiled the whole trip home.

But then I got home. And I didn't sit down and write. I hesitated, letting myself be distracted by thoughts of dinner (Why didn't I thaw the chicken breasts? should I just do a salad? are there any croutons? is there time to go out and buy some croutons?), wondering where UPS was with my package (I mean what the hell? where is it? the tracking page showed it "out for delivery" since before 1 AM!), my mom's sciatica (Is the physical therapy even helping? is she going to be in a wheelchair this time next year?) and The Looney Tunes Show (Okay, the jury's still out about the transformation of Bugs from anarchistic wiseguy to put-upon straight man but seriously, they nailed the perennially self-absorbed Daffy Duck; Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese should be pleased).

Then I was just...tired. I sat down for a while. Then I couldn't sit still. I didn't feel like sitting at another desk--having done it for six hours straight already--tapping on a keyboard. After a miserably cold and rainy April it was finally gorgeous outside; I should have been lacing my sneaks and heading to Washington Park for some much needed exercise.

Or continuing William J. Mann's dynamite bio, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn. I have to tell you, I am loving this book. I've just reached the chapter where the indomitable Kate, basking in the acclaim of her stage and screen work in The Philadelphia Story after a turbulent 10-year climb, is finally getting her chance to meet and work with actor's actor Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, the first of their nine films. Tracy was a married, devoutly Catholic, deeply troubled, hard-drinking man's man whose torment has been glossed over in nearly every account of his life. I like how Mann's sympathetic but clear-eyed examination of Hepburn's life and myth offers as well a more honest appraisal of her beloved "Spence."

So I was just settling in with Kate when the phone rang; ohhhhhh....it was Mike. My lovely, lonely Michael, who always promises to keep it short but will bend your ear for two solid hours, saying goodbye three times before actually hanging up. (No offense, babe)

By the time I returned to the book I was too sleepy to concentrate, nodding off over the pages and snapping awake to read the same paragraph four times before giving it up.

Tomorrow, Kath,
I'm there
I swear

So that was it. With reluctance I powered off my PC, promising myself I'd post the piece tomorrow. I was just too damned tired to do anything.

I have got to do something about my metabolism. This is getting ridiculous.