My mother was born in St. Louis just before New Year’s, 1920, to Bessie Grossman from Ukraine and Hyman Mandel, from Lithuania, under unusual circumstances. Not the usual unusual circumstances: it wasn’t that her family lacked money. Her father was an educated man who became a successful plumber in the New World. It was a time of hope and prosperity, but not in her house: on Passover, her parents would be taken from her and her siblings: Mildred, 2; Rena, 5; Iola, 8 and Sydney, 11.

My mother, Selma, was three months old.

Selma Anne Mandel was taken into the home of an Italian woman whose name we do not know; a woman who wet-nursed her, providing what her mother couldn’t. When my mother came to the Orthodox Jewish Children’s Home, they said she had a speech impediment, but we think it was an Italian accent. My mother always said, that was why she made such great veal parmagiana. Her Italian mother loved Baby Selma so much, she kidnapped her and took her to Florida; the authorities had to go after them to peel them apart.

So, at three, Selma lost a mother a second time. At that time, they felt a Jewish child needed to be raised Jewish, and couldn’t stay in a Catholic home.

What I know about The Children’s Home was that they taught her to walk like a lady with a book on her head, and they fed her evil gray vegetables she hated, especially eggplant. To annoy her, all you had to do was mention eggplant at the dinner table in our house. But many of her housemothers were kind. The Home was a cultured environment, and she was able to go to the musical theatre and operetta. In fact, a young British actor who’d been performing nearby once bought her an ice-cream cone; his name was Archie Leach, otherwise known as Cary Grant.

Although my mother was only allowed to have one doll, her sisters Rena and Iola were there to keep her company. Her sister Mildred lived with her grandparents, who she saw often.

My mother delighted in telling Ya-Ya Sisterhood-style stories of the escapades she had with her cousins The Gold Girls. Many cousins were like siblings to her, because she was raised by everyone in her mother’s family. She loved all of them her whole life, particularly the glamorous Mildred, Loretta, Beverly, and Farilyn Gold; Harold Gold, and her cousins Gene and Eileen, who became Debbie Reynold’s dress designer in Hollywood. She was so proud of that. In fact, in her last days, she kept thinking my sister was her sister Mildred and that I was Eileen.

Selma was taller and had a more colorful personality than most girls. Everyone tells me how glamorous she was, but she felt like a geek playing the cello in the school orchestra. However, she blossomed into a woman with outstanding, um, assets, and legs that made Betty Grable look dumpy. And inside, she was full of love and enthusiasm: for art, for books, for clothes, for hats; for shoes, for theatre, for the movies — but most of all, for music. Her love came pouring out through music.

As my cousin Patty wrote to me this week:

Aunt Selma was a beautiful woman. She was always upbeat and had great style. My fondest recent memory of her was as she went upstairs in her auto-chair, she was waving to me and singing Give My Regards to Broadway.

My mother left The Home at 16, and struck out on her own, working as a salesgirl in department stores in St. Louis, then living with her sister Iola, who was a fashion illustrator in Chicago. Then she moved to the Deep South. It was the early 1940s. It wasn’t easy for a Jewish woman out on her own in The South those days; she’d get thrown out of rooming houses as soon as they found out she was Jewish.

In 1943, she was a secretary for the Navy in Jacksonville, Florida, and singing for the USO. One night she was performing for Jewish soldiers at a Rosh Hashanna dance. The soldiers wanted her to sing My Yiddishe Mama, a popular Jewish song at the time. But she didn’t want to sing a sad song; she wanted to sing something uplifting. The soldiers were giving her a hard time. My mother was so kindhearted, she didn’t know what to do. Finally, a tall, dark and handsome stranger in uniform came out of the crowd and onto the stage, took over the microphone and said, “Let this pretty lady sing whatever she wants, it’s her show.” They all quieted down as he left the stage and disappeared into the crowd.

That man was my father, and my mother’s life took a turn for the best.

My father, previously known as “Morty” or “Mutty” as his mother called him, was entranced. When they met again at a dance the following night, he told her his name was “Monty.” A great love affair, a love that was to last more than 65 years, began.

He called his mother, who he’d told my mother was a very fancy New York lady. “I’m engaged, Ma, you wanna meet Selma?” He put my mother on the phone. My midwestern mother expected high New York society, but she got Grandma Rose. “Selma, how’s by you? Mutty says he wants you should marry him.”

And so my very midwestern mother married my very Brooklyn father. He was shipped to India, she was shipped to 499 Ocean Parkway. She was like a Chinese bride, living with her in-laws in an alien apartment; she hadn’t had anyone to call Mom since she was three! She also acquired three brothers-in-law, Artie, Howie and Jackie, who was a little boy at the time.

Although my mother always had one foot in St. Louis, she became as close to her sisters-in-law Ettie and Sylvia as anyone could be to any sister. And who wouldn’t love this trio of fabulous babes? Among them they had all the heart, brains, and beauty Brooklyn could bear. They opened their hearts to my mother and my mother made NYC her home. I never heard quarreling or back-stabbing. I learned love, compassion, tolerance, and how to tell a good story from my mother and her sisters-in-law.

And when Uncle Jackie, my dad’s kid brother, grew up and was in the army, my mother suggested her little cousin Vickie in Arkansas write to him, and they got married — making my mother’s cousin Vickie the fourth fabulous Leschen sister-in-law.

Did you know my mother was Miss Internal Revenue? In Brooklyn, she got a job for the IRS, and her boss was apparently quite impressed with her. But when he started to get fresh, my mother took off her Miss Internal Revenue sash. “I don’t care if I have to give up the crown, I am a happily married woman with a husband overseas!” she announced, proudly.

My mother didn’t know how to cook, she didn’t have a mother to teach her. The first time Grandma taught my mother how to make chicken soup, my mother strained the soup down the drain and left the limp chicken and exhausted parsnips in the pot. She had to learn everything about being a mom and a wife — she had no role models, well, except for Grandma, Sylvia, Ettie, and I Love Lucy. In fact I used to confuse my mother with that other wacky redhead, Lucille Ball, because they looked so much alike.

My parents had my sister Gloria exactly 9 months after my dad returned from the war, on the same day of September on which she just left us, the 25th.

They lived in a tiny walk-up on Pacific Street, where they befriended a couple from Cuba and Jamaica, Sio and Oswald. She taught them how to live in America. Sio had a son, so in return she helped her learn to be a mom, and they become lifelong friends. They had us over every single Christmas day so we wouldn’t have to eat Chinese food on Christmas like other Jews. I was fascinated with them.

You see, my mother loved people from all different cultures. She knew what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land. My mother had few acquaintances…if you were acquainted with my mother, you were her friend. She just couldn’t be phony, it just wasn’t in her. My mother loved showing people how to shine in a new world. Where other families went to an amusement park, my family went to Idlewild International Airport to watch Italian families cry and greet one another as they got off the planes. And she always wanted to find the planes that came in from St. Louis, just in case she knew anyone.

In the fifties, my parents and sister moved from Pacific St. to Bell Park, a paradise where my mother would live, as it turned out, for the rest of her life.

My mother set high standards for herself and her family. Because having a nuclear family was something she’d never had, she needed to prove she could do it. And of course it was a time when everyone had to be beautiful like Donna Reed and practical like June Cleaver. My mother was both, but she was also quirky. When she put up stylish modern curtain panels, the neighbors didn’t get her artsiness; when she listened to the opera, lowbrow neighbors complained. She wanted a group of artistic, fun people to hang out with, so she started the Bell Park Choral Group. If she saw somebody washing their car and singing, she would walk up to them: “Do you like to sing? Why don’t you join our choral group?” And one by one she formed a choral group who became lifelong friends. She was also active with the Queens Village Players, putting on shows so they could build new schools for their burgeoning families.

I have no idea how my mother did all she did. I work at home and can hardly defrost at the end of the day.

Right after they moved to the duplex on Springfield Blvd, they had me. With two children, she worked, first at home selling sweaters, then in department stores,  later as a transcribing typist for the Probation Department at the Queens County Court. She had the Choral Group, the Queens Village Players, Bell Park politics, being a good wife, whooping it up with an entourage of friends that partied every weekend and went up to the Catskills for more partying on a regular basis; weekend BBQs at “Leschen Park” in Smithtown or in Canarsie with my very missed Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Artie; visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Brooklyn—and she still took the time to make our Halloween costumes from stuff around the house. They took my sister and I on long, historical road trips, and trips to bungalow colonies in the Catskills.

And when my mother served dinner, we always had an appetizer, fresh rye bread from the Pettifour Bakeshop, a salad, a vegetable, a starch, a protein and a dessert. The first time I had my first boyfriend over, I was horrified as she insisted we serve him ketchup out of a little dish. And she did it with pancake makeup, complicated underwear, a glamorous, whimsical mole on her cheek, and matching costume jewelry, belt, scarf, hat and bag. She wouldn’t mail a letter without lipstick on.

And come to thnk of it, neither will I.

But she was far from superficial. My mother was fascinated by the intricacies and infinite complications of peoples’ lives, and she was there for anyone who, in her words, “had problems.” Unlike many who succeed against the tide, she never, ever blamed people for not being able to rise above their circumstances. She was a lover of civil rights, and she always stood up for the downtrodden. She knew how hard life was, and that not everyone could pull themselves up by the bootstraps. She knew that not everyone HAD bootstraps. She opened her heart and her home to many — a young, mentally-disabled cousin and his sweet, devoted wife, having them over to dinner again and again; my teenage cousin Esther, her sister Iola’s daughter, for almost a year; anyone in the neighborhood who “had problems” — and for years she took the train to St. Louis to see her relatives and make sure her sister Iola was taken care of.

“I don’t say this about most people,” said Aunt Ettie, “but she never said a bad word about anybody.” Many people told me that this week, including my dad. She taught me never to look down on anybody, either. My mother knew there was always more than meets the eye.

And of course, my mother loved to SING! There isn’t a member of my family or a close friend of my mother’s who hasn’t had her sing at one of their weddings or bar mitzvahs. As if they could prevent it! My mother would literally sing at the drop of a hat. She sang over the phone for many of my friends in California. And she had a beautiful voice! I have videos of my mother singing only one year ago, sitting at the dining-room table with my father, dancing in her chair and hamming it up to Show Tunes, Klezmer — which my father loves so much — and Christmastime in Hollis Queens by Run DMC! My mother loved to sing and dance, and she sang and danced to show tunes with a senior group that performed for schools and nursing homes over 200 times. This is something I only learned the true value of when my mother herself had to suffer a couple of awkward months in rehab last fall. And wouldn’t you know it, she went in squirming but when she left, she’d made friends with everyone, and everyone adored her.

“At first, I resisted everything,” she said to me later, when she was sprung. “But I learned to just play the game. The people that work here are just frustrated with their jobs, and I found that if you just observe them, you can learn a lot. It’s very interesting. Now when someone new shows up, I tell them not to fight so much; it’s better not to waste the energy.”

Selma, 88, enjoying Halloween festivities last year at Little Neck Nursing Home.

Wow. How enlightened was that? My mother was a Buddhist and she didn’t even know it. “I’m still doing that Yoga exercise you taught me,” she’d say, years after I had forgotten it myself. In fact, I was very proud of how she continued to learn and grow and read as much as she could, even up to about a year ago. We’d pick out Netflix movies over the phone. My mother was more than open-minded, and she was smart as a whip.

When my mother was in the ICU last April, we didn’t think she’d make it. I waited ’til my father and sister left, and sang her Sunrise, Sunset softly as I tried to contain the big tears running down my cheeks. But she made it! The next day, she was weak, but she was listening to a radio playing nearby, playing the song Lean on Me. I started singing along. It was a theme that my son Liam and I sang together often, arms around each other, swaying back and fourth—and she loved me to sing with her. So the next day I brought in the words on my computer, set it in her lap, and she and Gloria and I had a singalong. The nurses and other patients loved it; they thought she was adorable.

My sister took such great care of my mother — and my father. For every birthday, every holiday, bringing them perfectly-wrapped presents and balloons and party hats, making them chicken soup and running out to Queens from Upper Manhattan every single time my mother wound up in the Emergency Room. My sister took care of my mother a lot, and she loved her fiercely. She will miss her terribly.

For the past year, my mother was ill—but mentally she was strong. She was not afraid, and she often enjoyed the little things in life—music, my father’s jokes, food. Man, she loved food. Right before she left us, she was angry with my dad for something, and was inconsolable. In the middle of her rant, my father walked out of the kitchen with a slice of cake. “Selma, would you like some cake?” She stopped talking, paused, and in her most ladylike voice she said, “Why yes, I’ll take a piece of cake.” She forgot her suffering.

Even the bizarre little things that were happening in her brain served as a source of entertainment for her and those around her. She was so creative: “I know you won’t believe me,” she said one day over the phone, “But I could swear the room was upside-down this morning! And there was so much room to put things!” she said. “I guess Daddy was right, it probably didn’t really happen, but — to tell you the truth — I was a little disappointed.”

She had the best possible caretakers — Maggie and Barbara. Maggie during the day, who made her work hard to “be all that she could be” — Maggie is a little like the US Army. Maggie was strong enough to get my mother to do what she had to do, made my dad’s life easier, and I know she loved my mother. Unfortunately, she came to us because Elsie next door passed away just when we needed her, and I have advised Maggie to perhaps get herself some younger clients.

And then we had Barbara, for two years. Barbara IS a party — she was perfect for my parents. I called up last New Years Eve, imagining how bleak it must be over there, and Barbara was getting them drunk, making the festive mood happen all around her like she always does.

“Your mother is singing, your dad is telling jokes, and I am dancing,” she said, in a Manischewitz-infused Patois.

Barbara adopted my mother and pronounced herself our little sister. In April, when I thanked her for helping us, she said it was we who she needed to thank: She’d learned a lot from my mother. I said, “Yes, my mother has a lot of compassion.” Barbara said, “Compassion doesn’t cover half of it! I learned everything from your mother. When I was afraid to go to school to be certified, she said, “You can do it.” Every day she said to me, “You can do it.” I wouldn’t have accomplished anything without your mother.”

My mom’s beloved hairdresser, Margie, told me the same thing when she came by to find out how my mom was in April. Our former next-door neighbor, Debbie, told my sister, “I was like a third daughter to her,” and my sister had to say, “You’d better get in line.”

Selma identified with women who worked hard. For years, the high point of her week was when she and Rita Lubatkin would go to the beauty parlor on Fridays. Margie lived through everything with my mother, but was still grateful for what she had learned from her. Last night, when I spoke to my cousin Anita in St. Louis about her mother — my mother’s dear sister Mildred, who passed away last year — she said exactly the same thing about her mother. “Everyone said they’d learned so much from her. People keep telling me how grateful they are to have known my mother.”

My mother was such a fighter. She was in the hospital nine times before she finally let go. She even beat the last infection, with a stroke, because down to every cell, she was a fighter, my mother.

Daddy, every time I talked to Mom the last 2 years while she was sick, she told me about how much she loved you and how much she appreciated you and how well you took care of her. You took care of her her whole life, you were her mother and her father, her brother and her lover. You were the sun and the moon and the stars to Mom. And you always left her laughing.

It is true my father made one or two jokes at her expense…but always lovingly. A few years ago he dropped her off in front of Barnes and Noble in Bay Terrace to go pick out a book. He waited in the car. When she came out and got back in the car she told him excitedly, “There was a man in there chatting with me and trying to pick me up! He was handsome, too. He couldn’t have been past 60!!”

My dad paused to take the toothpick out of his mouth, looked at her and replied: “Did he see you walk?”

In her last year, I would put my mother to bed when I visited, lying down in bed next to her and handing her her pills one by one, helping her choke them down, and talking about everything under the sun. I could tell her anything; there was a casualness about my mother she had never had. She could let her hair down and relax. I think in those last weeks and months she learned to accept herself more. She was totally coherent and smart. And funny and sarcastic. She told me stories about The Home and good times before and after meeting my dad, and what it was like to be a young couple raising a family in Bell Park. I know she had had a blast.

My mother was preparing to leave us for a while. I told her it was OK if what she said about where she was didn’t sound true to other people. I told her that this was her reality, and I wasn’t going to argue with her. She was loosening her grip on this world, and it was heartbreaking. I’d cry after I talked to her on the telephone because I missed how she used to be. I avoided calling because I didn’t have time to cry. But I was with her on and off for many weeks, for two years. And I was here with her this last week of course, and it was excruciating, because we hated to see her go. I watched my father say goodbye. I watched my sister fall apart over a box of Mallomars she’d planned to buy her, but hadn’t. My heart had a big empty hole in it.

But when my mother left, I noticed my heart didn’t feel empty any more — it felt full. Full of her. Since she left, memories of my mother have come flooding back. She’s as clear as day, waving to me like the Queen from the little stairway elevator, singing Sunrise, Sunset to my friends in the hall at my wedding, showing interest in a Cristo installation I was explaining to her at the Whitney Museum. She is now a part of me, and my heart is bigger for it, and I will never be the same. I am at peace with myself in a new way, and I can feel at home anywhere now, because my mother is home, right here with me. At home in my heart.

A reporter I know, Janis Mara, sent me this question today, and I just had to respond.

Yes! I live in the Inner Mission, off Valencia Street, which happens to be the Hipness Epicenter of the hippest city in the hippest country in the hippest planet in the hippest galaxy in the universe. For those of you who aren’t so hip, this means a whole lot of bars and art galleries and restaurants. I just happened to find an apartment here. Within a 1-mile radius, my block is the only one that doesn’t require a parking permit to park over an hour, or doesn’t have 2-hour parking due to being close to a BART station.

Not long ago, I had so many tickets I was finally booted. True, it beat being towed, and it had a faint European air. But it still sucked. I had intended to go down and fight several of my tickets because they were so ridiculous. I had already paid for many of them, and the sticker, and the smog certificate, but still hadn’t paid enough to actually get a registration sticker, because every time I went down to pay they added on more penalties, and I had no more money. It was Catch 22, because I was getting many of these tickets simply for having “out-of-date tags.” And for every ticket I got, I got two, because of the tags. It was, for the meterpeople, as though I had a sign on my car that said, “Two for the price of one.” So they could take their donut break sooner.

One ticket was for not having my wheels curbed on my block, which IS on a hill, but not an insanely steep hill, as San Francisco standards go. That one was particularly nasty, because all that time I was home with a migraine, and I was very careful about making sure my car was parked legally over a period of a few agonizing days…and when I finally came out of my migraine-induced minicoma, I was stunned to discover a ticket on my car. I was certain it was a Chinese menu, but no, it was in fact a ticket, and a painful insult to my already-debilitating neurological injury.

I was also angry about a ticket I received when my car apparently violated the handcrafted painted curb around a residential driveway on Guerrero Street, which was clearly just selfishness on their part, because the painted curb far outsized their actual driveway. I parked there because I’d literally looked everywhere else in the neighborhood and found nothing better, and I was not overhanging their actual driveway at all. I took pictures with my phone (Can you imagine anyone saying that 20 years ago: “I called them right away with my camera …”), but felt so powerless, I let the complaint go. I was too busy trying to make more money.

A friend who visits quite often from San Mateo, who is always very careful about where he puts his vehicle, got four tickets in a row recently, one for not curbing his wheels. He sent in a complaint about that one, since he is not from SF, but his plea was turned down. I doubt if they even looked at it. He is the most upright citizen in the world, in utter dire straits, constantly on the verge of losing his house, and working very hard to make ends meet. It was pathetic, and I don’t currently have the money to help him out, either.

Each time this happens, I feel like I, a long-time resident, a resident who has made numerous cultural and financial contributions to this City, am being pushed out, and I vow to move to Fairfax or Grass Valley or a tiny hamlet in Southern France, where I can pretty much park wherever I want. I even asked about obtaining a handicapped parking permit due to my chronic migraines (so I could park in handicapped spots), but they scoffed at me like I was nuts, because I was under 90 and not in a wheelchair. I told them I felt like I was 90 and momentarily considered obtaining a wheelchair or at least some crutches, and limped away from the counter.

A dear friend who lives in the Castro drove over one evening for a visit. Instead of engaging in this cat-and-mouse game, she just decided to pay to park in the neighborhood City Lot, which has always been very reasonable. Later, I was horrified to hear that just a few hours at my house had cost her eight bucks! She posted this on Facebook when she returned home:

“Parking in a city lot in the Mission: $8. Spending the evening with Caryn Leschen, one of the funniest women in the world: Priceless.”

I wish The City of Hipness felt the same way.

I found out today that my friend Sue in England died.

The details are not yet in, but from what I know it goes something like this: It’s a Tuesday early in June, and at 6 AM the edges of the green green grassy hills of Kent are lit with chartreuse morning light. A big, old stone house sits in the middle of a pasture, in a little valley, and as we peer inside, a pleasant-looking fiftyish schoolteacher is just waking up. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt with a red and blue media company logo on it, and tries to gather her wits about her. She winds bundles of mahogany hair around her fingertips as wakefulness takes hold, and then stretches as she yawns.

Her husband Ian snuggles up closer to her, snoring lightly. He has a great head of gray curls. She shoves him playfully and he rolls away. She tosses a pillow onto his head. He grabs the pillow and relishes the feeling of his head sandwiched between the crisp, cool linens. He’s a video engineer who works long shifts half the week and is off the other half, so Tuesday morning Sue lets him sleep.

She relaxes for awhile in her quiet married king-sized bed with a cup of coffee made fresh from a bedside alarm clock/coffee maker; there’s even a small fridge below, in the nightstand, so she’s got milk without going downstairs. Ian has always loved installing convenient gadgets and filling their house with comfortable toys. Wishing as always that she could go back to sleep, she suddenly remembers that a friend is coming to visit the school today with her daughter. That’s better, she thinks; something special to look forward to today.

Soon, Sue is up and dressed in a sleeveless red cotton frock with light blue flowers. Clip-clopping around the house in stylish, low-heeled gladiator sandals, she’s preparing her own children, Rupert, 13, and Phoebe, 10, for school. A flurry of clothes and books and cereal bowls later, they’re all outside, sliding open the squeaky doors of their navy blue Land Rover, then slamming them shut. She winds her way east down a country lane, and as they rise up out of the trees, the sun finally makes it over the horizon. Sue’s heavy-lidded brown eyes are squinting now; her unusually tapered, impeccably manicured fingers adjust the visor so she can see.

Sue teaches kindergarten in a nearby school. She’s always been energetic. Tall and tan, with a low center of gravity, she moves with a bounce that belies middle age. She’s got a classic adenoidal East End accent full of dropped aitches; final consonants all become effs, and she’s even prone to rhyming slang. She’s got big teeth and full lips and everything she says sounds like a joke, even if it’s not intended to. This imbues her with a misleading air of ditziness. She’s oddly demonstrative for an Englishwoman—this is why the kids love her. She also has a keen interest in sharing the physical properties of the world with little kids: how fast an “ice-lolly” stick hits the floor; what happens when you mix up a couple of household powders.

At around ten, Sue collapses in front of a classroom full of young children, just as she’s about to lead them out to the old slate courtyard for morning tea (or whatever they call their mid-morning snack). All the children are wriggling to the front to see what’s happened to Ms. Mullings, who seems to have fainted.

From what the email from Laura—Ian’s sister—said, Sue died soon after, and they still don’t know why, though heart trouble is suspected.

I was just gearing myself up to work on a couple of logos that are overdue; I have trouble keeping up some days, and it’s just been busy lately. People add on endless additional tasks, and it is up to me to schedule them somewhere. I have allowed one incredibly needy client to take up time that should have been spent on other jobs, and my other clients are starting to notice. I want very much to learn new ways to make my client’s websites, and there’s so much to see online. So I sign up for a new Adobe color service, Kuler, and try to figure out how it works. This will help me pick a palette for the next logo, I think, but it requires a newer version of Flash, of course. Doesn’t everything? How much newer a version of Flash can it require? My computer is only four months old.

In the middle of it I get an email from my sister in New York about how we need to talk about my parents’ finances. Then she says, and of course it was so awful to get that horrible email with the news from Laura. That’s all she said.

Oh my God, I think, what news? I think, oh God, something’s happened to one of Laura and Roger’s kids, or Ian and Sue’s kids. Or someone has cancer. It’s probably nothing, whispers the voice in my head that always says it’s probably nothing. I think, someone’s been in a terrible auto accident, or Laura’s got breast cancer. It’s probably nothing, goes the voice that always says that. Ian once had Guillaume-Barré Syndrome, I remember vaguely, and that was pretty weird, but it’s history now. Maybe it was really Lou Gherig’s Disease after all. Maybe it’s something that I have too. It’s probably nothing, goes the voice.

What does this remind me of? Well of course there was the morning of September 11th, when my sister called from New York to tell me the World Trade Center had fallen down. It’s probably nothing, said the voice that says, It’s probably nothing.

“It’s probably nothing.” I said, having just arisen on another peculiar Tuesday, at 8AM Pacific Time.
“No, I’m not kidding, the entire World Trade Center doesn’t exist any more…” said my sister, and so on.

You know the rest of that story, of course. I didn’t believe her; if I thought about all the awful things my sister tells me, I’d probably have to be hospitalized. She sees people get killed in the street; she steps on rusty nails and breaks her feet for no reason and has to go to weird emergency rooms. She sits in parking lots with my crazy 88-year-old parents in bad neighborhoods in Queens at 3AM while my parents are freaking out and explains to them that my mother’s pain medication won’t be ready for an hour. She is a bearer of bad tidings, and I hate her for it. My feet are planted over here, fresh mist curled around my ankles like I’m the Jolly Green Giant, surrounded by artichoke fields and brussels sprouts, redwoods and walnut orchards, leaning over the Pacific Ocean like italics, going It’s probably nothing.

I did my job, I procreated. What more do they want from me? Now I have a son, who brings me and my family cute stories that entertain and enliven the party. Even September 11th brought fourth a cute story from California: After my sister called, I summoned my ex-husband to my apartment; I was shaking like a leaf, and completely unable to make Liam’s egg salad sandwich. When we finally sat Liam between us on the couch, it was obvious something was up. Then I said Honey, some people sometimes do bad things and blow things up; then his dad said, Sit still, Honey, you don’t need to get dressed, there’s no school today. My adorable son, who was eight and in the third week of third grade, looked from one to the other of us incredulously. “They blew up my school?” he asked, with a widening grin.

Always, with a story.

What email from Laura? Somehow I’d missed it.

I met Ian when I was 18 years old, and he was a counselor for a program called Camp America. He worked at the same summer camp as me, Camp Delaware. I remember little about it, except that I met Ian, who was the first real English Person I ever knew, and I thought he sounded like George Harrison, which was really naive because George was from Liverpool and Ian’s from Bexley. I felt like the coolest counselor at camp with my English boyfriend, though he acted inscrutably restrained. All summer long Ian kept reciting Monty Python routines: Nudge, nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? I didn’t, but I laughed anyway, as if I did.

The following year when my friend Wendy and I made our debut trip to Europe, we stayed with Ian and Laura’s family. Ian and Wendy and I were hippies, unlike Disco Queen Laura, who preferred the The Hughes Corporation to Joni Mitchell, out in the back garden in Bexley sunning herself on a chaise lounge with one of those metallic cardboard sun reflectors. We thought everything was terribly charming and their family was so nice to us; after that we sent people to them and they sent people to us on a regular basis.

Since that first visit, I visited many times, with my husband and subsequent boyfriend, and sometimes alone. Laura married Roger and Ian married Sue and we all had children and Laura grew out of her disco stage, though she’s still quite the party girl. I first met Sue in 1983 when she and Ian were living together with a house full of roommates in Chiswick. This time Ian was going on and on about The Young Ones, and I got it. I was there through Thanksgiving, and they’d requested Mexican food, so I looked all over London for tortillas to make turkey tostadas. I had to make do with papadams.

I’ve taken snapshots of them that I cherish, and I’ve done paintings and pastels from these pictures. They are my British family, and I will always be here to welcome them and their friends and family. This brings me a sense of peace and connection, and rounds out who I am. I am a person with just a few very special friends and relatives fanning out around the globe. I have fun with them when we’re together. They are gracious hosts. We will always be there for one another.

Until today, when I found out that Sue died.

I can’t concentrate on logos. I went into a vacuuming—Hoovering?—mania and ingeniously cleaned out the vacuum’s filter with a plastic fork; then I vacuumed my heart out, with my iPod on. When I heard “The Things We Do For Love” by 10cc, sobs burst out of me, like in a soap opera. I’d been thinking about how we all sent telegrams when Ian and Sue got married, because that’s what you did. For their wedding I sent a reproduction vegetable-serving dish from the Santa Fe Railway china that I love, very American. And when they had their babies, we sent baby clothes or fuzzy toys. They have sent us my favorite clock, Noddy, Postman Pat, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Absolutely Fabulous. Now I guess I’m supposed to send flowers. Just like, that’s the next thing you do? Telegrams, baby clothes, cool media, flowers. Next! Is this just the first of a lengthening chain of funerals, now that I’m middle-aged? They’ll snowball for awhile, the chain of funerals, and then they’ll stop?

I must call Ian tomorrow and break the chain. I must bring meaning to the chain; I must honor Sue by making the rest of my life count, and do all my logos on time so I can make my life better, and go to England and cheer up my friends and not just send flowers.

I ended up digging out a digital file of an old pastel painting I did of Sue and me in their garden when they lived in Greenwich, and fixing it up. The original is huge, like a mural; pastel dust caked on brown paper, rolled up in my closet. I’m wondering if it’d be okay to send the digital image to England, since it’s not really that flattering, and doesn’t really resemble her. But it reflects, to me, the sunniness of Sue’s personality. All day I can hear her distinctive voice clanging “don’t get your knickers in a twist,” followed by her nasal, maniacal laugh, as if, somehow, if I fill my head up with all of her chattering, it will somehow balance out the horrible silence of her absence.

I recently returned from New York where I was trying to help out my parents, who have been married for 63 years are both pushing 88. They still live in the apartment I grew up in, in Bell Park, which is a post-war (that would be World War Two) housing development of approximately one square mile, encompassing about 1000 “garden apartments.” The apartments are what I think are now referred to as “town homes,” and many of them (like my parents’) have front and back doors and a little postage stamp of grass in front and back. Most of them have red brick on the bottom and white clapboard on the top, or just red brick all over, with traditional grey tar-shingled roofs and lots of fenced-in “drying areas,” playgrounds, benches and laundry rooms scattered about. And trees, lots and lots of trees. This one used to be a tree nursery before it was built around 1950, so it’s full of perfect lollypop maples and less refined, scraggly old oaks and aloof birches and weeping willows and fat, jolly old chestnut trees.

The first time I went to Liverpool and saw Paul McCartney’s house I was astounded to see how much Abbey Road was like Union Turnpike, and Paul’s house in Allerton is a garden apartment — just like the house I grew up in! We thought the Beatles were so exotic; no one in Bell Park wore Beatle boots until the Beatles actually wore them. I often wonder if this is why I’ve always identified more with working-class British movies and novels than the [Fun with] Dick and Jane and Baby Sally of traditional America. My grandmother didn’t live on a farm with cute baby chicks; she lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn that reeked of a thousand pots of chicken soup.

Anyway, my mother came down with shingles, not the tar kind, and she really sounded horrible. Now, she’s not exactly the type to suffer in silence, but really, everyone says shingles is unbearably painful, and the more I heard from my sister and my dad the more concerned I got.

For those of you not hanging with the Swinging Shingles crowd, shingles is a kind of Second Coming of chicken pox, speaking of chickens, and it’s caused by a crappy immune system. The kind you might have, say, if you were almost 88 and kind of depressed, and all your friends and contemporaries were dying or dead, and you were obsessed with your bowels and your aches and your pains, and grieving because your husband who used to run a restaurant and build furniture and totally took care of you your whole life is no longer smart enough to make dinner or even figure out the remote control.

Being Little Sister, they usually try to protect me from such unpleasantries, and treat me like I’m about six years old and will only get in the way. That’s why I was surprised when my mother actually welcomed the idea of my coming out to help. She welcomed it almost as a little girl would, too: “Really?’ she said. “You’d come? That would be so nice.” I was honored she was going to let me take care of her. Well, I thought, I have a fourteen-year-old, maybe she finally trusts me.

She’s obviously not in her right mind, thought I, because usually she gets all stressed out about how she’s going to have enough in the Meat Tray, and where I’m going to sleep and whether she’ll be able to make it to the beauty parlor in time. But this time she seemed like she wanted me to come. In a way, I was moved.

I waited a few days to make sure she was serious, and my sister, who is eight years older than me, agreed that it would be helpful, especially because we’d been trying to get my mother to take an anti-depressant for about ten years and it seemed like finally she was ready. Besides, nortryptaline, the one I thought she should take, happened to be listed as one of the things people take for something icky called Pain After Shingles. So we could actually tell her it was for pain, as opposed to just her being unbelievably annoying, which she probably knows is why we wanted her to take antidepressants all along.

I actually used to wish my mother was an alcoholic like my ex-boyfriend Jim’s bitter, sarcastic-but-adorable mother Dotty, because Dotty was Catholic and Suffered in Silence while she smoked cigarettes and knocked back Manhattans. But then Dotty only lived ’til she was about 74.

So off I went. To treat myself, I made a reservation on Virgin America. I thought I could pretend I was going to England. Anglophile that I am, I actually checked to see if I could extend my trip to England for a few days; what the hell, I’ll be halfway to England anyway, and I have friends there. But apparently Virgin America only identifies itself with Virgin Atlantic to get you interested in flying on it. As soon as you book the reservation the mystique disappears. I got a little suspicious, actually, when I watched the fancy Flash movie, and a fridge full of glossy bottles of spring water was the only image accompanying the word “snacks.”

“I was wondering,” I inquired, by telephone, “If there was some way of extending this trip to include a little side trip to England? Maybe make New York a kind of stopover?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am” said the customer service representative. “Wha-ir not really associated with Virgin Atlantic in any way.”
“You mean, I can’t tack this mileage onto my Virgin Atlantic miles?” I asked, horrified.
“No ahm afraid you cain’t” she said, in a very distinctly non-English accent. I was a little crushed.
“I’m surprised. I mean, it’s Virgin and everything.”
“Yes, ma’am, many people make that mistake, but ah don’t know wha-ir they get that ah-dea,” said the CSR.

Maybe because of the advertising, I thought. Maybe using the same logo? Maybe that it’s owned by the same company?

It reminded me of when in the old days we used to get our photos on paper from the drugstore, and they had finally put a “24 Hour Photo” sign in Walgreens’ window, and when I brought my pictures in, the guy said, “That’ll be ready Wednesday” and it was Monday.
“I thought it was 24 Hours? ” I said, with obvious disappointment.
“That’s just a logo,” said the clerk, the one with the bushy eyebrows who always looks at me like he remembers the nude pictures of me from when I was pregnant. Probably because they decorate his bedroom mirror.

It was just a logo.

Well, I knew I wasn’t going to get fed, and I knew I wasn’t going to England, but Virgin Atlantic gave out cool yellow cotton eyeshades with provocative little words printed on them, and made playful references to the Mile High Club in their onboard magazine. As soon as you were on the plane you knew you were in swingin’ England. As soon as I was booked on this plane I knew I was, uh, not in England. Very not.

Incidentally, I had actually thought I might be going to England this fall, when for about an instant I thought I had a little extra cashflow, the instant right before I found out that the high-pitched screech coming from my front left wheel meant I needed a new hub. A hub! Not a hubcap, a hub. I had no idea you could actually mess up your hub. I thought the most expensive thing your car could need was a new clutch. Turns out, a hub costs just as much. So much for the extra cashflow; a bientot, Angleterre.

So one of my wacky but lovable clients gave me a ride to the airport, and I boarded the plane, knowing that probably the most fun part of my trip was going to actually be the plane itself, which is a pretty depressing thought, but sleeping on my parents’ couch wearing my old Virgin Atlantic eyeshades and earplugs and having to face the fact that my mother really was miserably sick and that they were so damned old and would never be the way I think of them in my head didn’t sound like all that much fun. I closed my eyes and tried to think about sex.

[to be continued]

I love Burning Man.

The best thing about it is that there are so many parking spaces in my neighborhood this weekend.

As my son Liam and I were returning from a party this evening, a charming couple of women from Canada and London happened by, and we chatted in front of my building in the misty San Francisco night air.

“Oh, there are plenty of spaces this weekend on my block,” I gushed. “It’s Burning Man.”

I babbled on. “Actually you can block that driveway across the street, as my neighbor isn’t there on weekends, and there are only workmen during the week.” I was divulging classified information I wouldn’t share with my grandmother. “The City lot’s on 21st Street, Gramma,” I’d say. “Vat?” she’d answer, if she were alive and didn’t live on Ocean Parkway and drove a car. “You vant I should park dare? In dat doity LOT? Oy, Jul-is, vere goink.”

Well, back to the party I was returning from. Instead of Burning Man, I went to Burning Chicken Thighs, but unfortunately, when I requested a breast, I was given one with yellow, goose-pimply flesh. The Burning Thighs looked much better. When they make a movie of this post, the chicken thigh shot will symbolize guileless yet wanton lust. There were also Burning Sausages, and some Burning Corn-on-the-Cob, which I saw birthed from the grill and swaddled in aluminum foil, but they were whisked away like they were struggling for life and I never saw them again.

The best thing was this salad that had Wasabi peas (is Wasabi an ethnicity? a geographic location in Japan?) and fresh white corn and limp lettuce leaves and mozzerella cubes we mistook for jicama until we realized they weren’t crunchy. The salad was provided by an elegantly-dressed German woman who I noticed immediately looked sort of like me: tall, blonde, she wore big white sunglasses like mine, the kind that should be worn under a silk scarf knotted at the chin and over a 1964 Peugeot convertible. I wondered if I was as scary-looking as she was. She looked so sophisticated, in that Eurohip kind of way, like a woman who designed BMWs or curated for the Secession Gallery in Vienna. I thought about getting a haircut like hers. My hair was flying all over the place like when I was 14. I needed a silk scarf knotted at the chin. I ate a little Burning Tri-Tip.

“How did you think to put Wasabi peas in there? I asked, eloquently. “What a fantastic combination of flavors!” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I don’t know, I was looking around the kitchen for some nuts, and all I had was Wasabi peas.” Sure, I know the feeling, I thought. I like to put ‘em on my Cheerios. They’re awesome on pizza. It’s fusion-style cooking, yes? My friend Marty recently told me he made Potato Salad Mole. I thought that was more like confusion-style cooking. Do they have mayonnaise in Mexico? You never see it in your burrito. Marty’s very friendly; he could’ve loosened up Fraulein Wasabi Peas considerably. We could’ve shaken her down about whatever else she liked to throw into her eclectic salads: scarlet Italian anchovies, Eritrian sourdough starter, grubs.

I was looking for Intelligent Life at the 50th birthday party of a pleasant-looking stranger named Matt. But most of the Intelligent Life there was married. If they weren’t married, they were 13 and playing video games. I love married people. Married people are great—hey, I was married for a couple of decades myself. But why do I often feel these days like the only divorced person on earth? All these married people look so goddamned happy. A few years ago, when I had a boyfriend, the Universe was full of divorced people. Divorced men. A few straight men, even. And now I’m the Last Divorced Lady on Earth.

One guy made eye-contact with me as soon as I arrived. Then he stood next to me and I just knew I wasn’t very excited about it. His eyebrows were knitting furiously, as if he was suffering from intestinal pain. He told me he met all his dates at AA meetings. This made me want to drink. I was more excited about wooing the Wasabi Pea lady.

Then I spotted him: a guy who looked just like my cute ex-boyfriend, One-eff Geof, but not as crazy-looking. I walked up to him and said, “You look just like my ex-boyfriend, One-eff Geof.” He was very pleasant, an architect, friendly, and even laughed at my jokes, and then he introduced me to his brilliant gorgeous daughter who is just graduating from Lowell (San Francisco’s version of the Bronx High School of Science) and his good-looking wife, and left. I started worrying about whether or not I should be worrying about whether or not Liam will get into Lowell.

Finally I relaxed a little. I ate some cake. Then I ate some more cake. I talked to a couple who knew my friend Lisa. (Everyone knows my friend Lisa. Haven’t you ever heard of the game, “Six Degrees from Lisa Gross?”) The female half of the couple liked my button jewelry. We talked about having pubescent children. She was a Corporate Executive and Baby Masseuse, and he was a Landscaper. She made Martha Stewart seem a little lazy. They’d brought some drink involving vodka and cucumber slices; a recipe she’d found on the Schweppes website. OK, hands up— who has time to be a corporate executive, massage babies professionally and surf soft drink websites? I gave this perfect, gorgeous couple my card in case they wanted to buy any button jewelry. Then, just as Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC came on, we had to go home.

I thought about last year, when the people in New Orleans were suffering so, and the people at Burning Man had no idea about that until they came home. I thought about how, as each year passes, I become less and less interested in Burning Man. I still don’t get it; it still doesn’t get me. If I had all the time and money and energy it would take me to go to Burning Man, I thought, I’d go to Paris, or Prague. I’d rather go to the fucking moon. I’d rather sit in my car in a great big parking space right here on my block in a silk scarf and white sunglasses and just savor the experience.

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet

For ten years I’ve been a member of a group of women — 1/5th of them men — that are involved in some way with the Web. It began as “webgrrls SF,” but within a couple of years became San Francisco Women on the Web. I am on a few professional lists from which I get a ton of email, but this list is the one I’ve been on the longest, and in many ways it is closest to my heart. I even attend a live event once in a while. A fellow early participant in these events was this sweet, nutty guy named Craig who had this weird idea about doing some kind of web listings bulletin board. As the Web has grown up, so has Craig’s list, and so has Women on the Web San Francisco. There are writers, coders and other technical geeks, designers, marketing people, project managers, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, caterers and many more talented people on this list. I know that if I need something: advice on who should host my blog, suggestions for a spa to take my squeamish East Coast relatives, or just to process an unpleasant business experience, I can write to sfWoW and get what I need. I give back to it too, when I can. For example, I happen to have the address of the very best inexpensive but very comfortable small hotel in Paris. And, no, I’m not telling just anybody. But I owe it to sfWoW, because they’ ve always been there for me.

So recently there have been some sfWoW postings about blogs, and I wrote that it was hard to keep up with because, aside from my business, I had middle school homework to do. Then a couple of very nice, well-meaning fellow “Wowsers” who do not currently have middle-schoolers under their roofs wrote in wondering why that was, and whether it was the right thing to do or not. “No one ever helped me do my homework in middle school!” they claimed, in that “When I was a boy…” tone, like Michael Palin going, “We dreamed of living in a cor-ri-dor!”

Which forced me to write a Middle School Parent Rant. I started a riff which got into a groove which took me on a trajectory that went off like, like something that takes off really really fast.

I had something to say to those non-middle-school-parents who think it’s wrong for parents to help kids do their homework. I didn’t think it was right either, when my kid was little, attending the smallest alternative public elementary school in the SF school district, in the Haight, with about 15 kids per class. Back then, I also had a quasi-stepdaughter in middle school who I thought should be allowed to sink or swim on her own, too, and I complained often that he was doing too much of her homework. But now I know why.

Now my son goes to the second-highest ranking Middle School in the SF School District. I am glad he didn’t end up going to the number one Middle School because I hear they give “too much homework.” I can’t even imagine what that’s like. I was initially all for it, but now I know what “too much homework” really means.

There are 38 kids in each of Liam’s classes. This means that each teacher cannot make sure each kid understands the homework assignment, or even what is going on in class from minute to minute. One of Liam’s teachers is is rather soft-spoken and likes things done a very particular way — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but Liam was spacing out on him totally from day one, from the first row. So, being in Early Seventh Grade and still a little Unclear On The Concept of homework generally, he gave up paying attention to Social Studies altogether for several weeks, because he kind of felt it was hopeless. My 12-year-old son didn’t know what to do and just decided to pretend Social Studies didn’t exist, something I remember doing in college…well, all of college, one particularly hazy semester. So being that Liam couldn’t drop out of Seventh Grade like I dropped out of SUNY Buffalo, he sort of shoved it under the table.

Then his Social Studies teacher called me, which was considerate of him. I had trouble hearing him on the cell, as I was in the doctor’s office doing something demeaning, like wearing a backless paper dress while begging for an extra month of klonopin in case of a natural disaster. Liam was terrified when I found out about the Social Studies problem. But I know I have a good kid, and my first response was, what on earth is going on that would freak him out so much that he would do this? Liam is by nature a rule-follower; I knew he must be pretty freaked out. He was having a little Management Skills problem.

In Middle School, boys have a lot going on: they’re growing like weeds, their bodies are doing weird things, their friends are forming rock bands, their voices are changing. They are being flirted with by cute girls from all over the globe and don’t know how to feel or act, they’re really, really disorganized, and their #1 priority is not to look like a dweeb. Boys generally are a couple of years (like, 25) behind girls in maturity. Girls tend to be more organized. And somewhat artsy boys with some attention issues (like my son) zone out easily: he didn’t have strong enough glasses and he was living in a fuzzy world and he liked it that way. During Fourth Period, Liam liked being an impressionist. Social Studies was situated between Gym and Lunch and it’s hard to focus right after working out, when you’re hungry. He was granted permission to eat a piece of fruit or liquid yogurt in Social Studies, but this offer was recently rescinded by his teacher, who said he was abusing the privilege by moving on to his salami sandwich and even a slive of pie. I personally think he was trying to work up the nerve to order a pizza to be delivered to his desk like Spiccoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Liam also lives in two households that are sometimes not communicating optimally.

So Liam’s parents were told by his teachers to keep track of his notebooks and his papers and his projects and especially to keep on top of what he needs to do for homework. This is the first time he’s got all different teachers for different subjects, and it’s a challenge; it’s not like he needs to sink or swim just yet. For heaven’s sake, he’s twelve. He gets to wear training wheels. He’s a baby adult.

Another reason kids need help with their homework is that all those “cool” teachers who like to assign “creative” ( 3D or Powerpoint presentations or audio-enhanced) projects often underestimate the time required for kids to do these projects. There is no law that says they need to test-drive them on real 12-year-olds. They have no time to cook them up themselves in a test kitchen. They just assign them and guess how long the should take.

Recently Liam was asked to do a 6-panel comic for Social Studies about the Muslim faith. The teacher told me we’d love this assignment, because he knows I am a cartoonist. Initially I was enthusiastic, but soon I was appalled, as he gave only 3 days to pencil, ink, write, and letter a 6-panel comic. I am a professional and this process takes me a week! I suggested Liam use stick-figures due to the time crunch, which made the stick figures look kind of tribal-postmodern. Anyway, the “comic” was rejected because Mr. K said it was “offensive to Muslims.” None of us has been able to figure out why it was offensive, but he was asked to do the whole thing all over again. Maybe I can post it and you can tell ME how it was offensive, but I’m still trying to figure it out.

I called the teacher and said that professional cartoonists need to edit sometimes, but you are permitted to do your edits over the art by witing-out or pasting paper over the original, so Liam shouldn’t have to do the whole thing over. This of course leads to another much more interesting topic, which was whether it’s okay for a teacher to “reject” an assignment because he disagrees with a student’s point of view, and this is indeed an issue. Had I gone down that path I would still be in the Principal’s Office arguing about the First Amendment, which reminds me of the Billy Bragg album called Talking to the Taxman about Poetry. It just seemed futile. So I decided to pretend Mr. K was Liam’s finicky editor and to have him make the changes and hand the damned thing in and get it over with.

Since Liam’s stepmom (let’s call her “Martha”) and I are both artists and of course wildly creative, and his dad’s also a writer, we all work together on ideas for these “creative projects” and help bring Liam the materials to build stuff. One project that worked out very well was his Labor Day project for English. I suggested Liam research the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on the internet which is gory and fascinating and great Labor History and my grandmother’s friends died in it, and I didn’t even know about it ’til Ken Burns’ documentary on New York City, in my forties, which is ridiculous since I grew up there. Liam learned all about Labor Day in a very riveting, memorable way. (This Cornell Web Exhibit is fascinating). I did go from store to store on 24th Street to buy a bunch of those tiny Guatamalan dolls to use as people to jump out the windows, because none of us — even ambitious Martha — had the time to make them. (Here is a photo of Liam’s project. I am particularly fond of the squished shopgirls on the map of NYC. They are made of Halloween blood.)

The point of school is LEARNING about the world, and I had to ask myself: did Liam learn from this? Of course he did. I don’t want it to be about learning that you are bad if you want to spend the evening talking with amusing houseguests or shelling peas or snuggling with mom reading a book rather than doing oodles of homework. Homework should be manageable: it should fit into an ordinary workday, i.e. there shouldn’t be more than 2 hours of homework a night. Generally. With a few book reports and tests to study for, this should be enough. Some kids are set up better to do homework than others: they are genetically predisposed to doing things more efficiently, or have faster web connections, or have a nicer space to do homework, more or fewer siblings, fewer chores, or don’t have to worry about which house they left which books in. I try to do my best.

I object to the fact that it is quality family time that is impinged upon by the school system’s inability to take proper care of our kids’ education during the time allotted. I think a GOOD school that is run well doesn’t have to have so much homework, as the children are working hard and are focussed during the school day.

I don’t DO his homework, but I make sure he knows what he’s supposed to do, and listen to him say “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom…” every 5 minutes while he’s doing it, because he’s excited about what he’s doing and wants to show me. It’s hard for ME to focus on MY work or write my blog while this is going on. And, being a City parent, I want him to do well enough so that he goes to a decent high school and not the one in my neighborhood, which I hear isn’t very good, and if he winds up there I’ll have to shoo away visions of Columbine and worry that kids he plays with after school might have guns in their houses. [I am exercising enormous restraint here because I would like to fly off into a tangent about how if all our neighborhood schools were good, and government subsidies were going to public schools rather than K-Mart, children would be able to walk to school, and not have to have their moms or dads waste petroleum products and precious blogging time by driving across town twice a day to drop them off and pick them up.]

Still, there is nothing like The Arts to get across the essence of the thing, so at the risk of having written the world’s longest sfWoW post I wrote a short playlet of what life is like here at home between 5:30 and 7 PM on a typical weekday middle-school family night. I don’t think the folks at sfWoW liked it much because, so far, almost everyone’s ignored it, but maybe since you already like my writing you’ll enjoy it. It may sound familliar to you, and I would love to learn how you manage this delicate time. In any case, thank you for reading this.

Homework

Liam (doing English homework at diningroom table): Mom, how do you spell “interspersed?”
Mom (trying to work on other side of room while burning dinner): Look it up, honey, the dictionary’s right over here.
Liam: But it’s not IN the dictionary, I tried looking it up in class. Just tell me how to spell it.
Mom: No, Liam, it is in the dictionary and you just have to walk across the room and get the dictionary, which is next to my desk under the little green table, and look it up yourself.
Liam: Is it i-n-t-e-r-s-p-i-r-s-e-d?
Mom: No, Liam I don’t think so. Go get the dictionary.
Liam: Is it i-n-t-e-r-s-p-e-r-s-e-d?
Mom: Yes, ok, yes, I think so. Liam will you check on that rice over there please?
Liam: What does it mean? I have to write the definition.
Mom: Get the dictionary.
Liam: Does it mean, like, spread out all over the place?
Mom: (sigh) Yes, Liam, that’s what it means!
Liam: OK, I’ll put that.
Mom: Are you supposed to write the dictionary definition or define it in your own words?
Liam: Um…The dictionary…no, in my own words is ok….uh… (trailing off)
Mom: Are you sure? What is the assignment? [Mom gets up from desk, sniffs, goes over and sees that the bottom half of the Trad'r Joe's Instant Risotto has become a black frisbee stuck to the bottom of the pan] Oh shit, I have to deal with this…
Liam: I have to use it in a sentence.
Mom: So use it in a sen—wait! OW! Ow! WAIT LIAM! I JUST BURNT MY — [phone rings, it's a client who owes me $1500] A sentence, yeah. Liam, I have to get this [puts up special hand-signal we have for when Liam shouldn't talk to me because it's a business call.]
[pause]
Liam: I can’t use it in a sentence. I don’t know what to write.
Mom: [hanging up] What have you written so far? [goes over to table which is near the kitchen, sees Liam's loose-leaf page with some sloppy scribbling-out and several Manga-style pictures of warriors and various Japanese instruments of torture drawn around it] Liam! This is a mess! You can’t turn this in!
Liam: Oh, she said it’s ok.
Mom: No, it’s not ok, I want you to do that page over. Where’s your sentence?
Liam: Well, I couldn’t really think of anything so…
Mom: Well, think of something.
Liam: I need HELLLLPPPP!!!
Mom: [trying to figure out whether Blackened Risotto might not be all that bad...] Interspersed. Think of a sentence using interspersed.
Liam: Mom—!
Mom: Liam! I am not speaking to you any more. You do your own homework, and if you can’t, fine. Suffer the consequences. I don’t care if you flunk out of middle school. But let me tell you, if you do really badly they’ll kick you out of the GATE (gifted) program, and you’ll have to go to a crappy high school, and crappy high schools have tough kids that often aren’t very nice to skinny kids with glasses, and they’ll eat you for breakfast. So if you don’t want your life to totally, totally suck, I would (comes over and lovingly pulls Liam’s head and neck out of the socket between his shoulders, pushes his shoulders down off his ears, straightens his chair) SIT UP STRAIGHT AND TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND START A NEW PAGE AND GET THIS STUPID THING OVER WITH! YOU’RE UP TO THE JOB!! Sit up! Put your butt in the chair!! Face forward!!
Liam: (whining) I’m hungry. Is dinner ready yet? (pauses; looks wryly at the contents of the pot in Mom’s hand; smirks) How about “There are a few little yellow grains of rice interspersed between the burnt ones?”
Mom: Yes, Liam, that’s excellent. Among the burnt ones. That’s fine.

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet

An early gig at the famous Mather Club, right.

My girlfriend Catherine and I have started a rock band. It’s all pinched-looking moms with glasses — well, so far we’ve been lucky — and we’re called The Carefuls. True, we don’t have as many lower-back tattoos as some other girl bands, but we make up for it with our vast experience doing middle-school homework. Having a kid in middle school isn’t absolutely required — but it helps.

Our first release will be two songs (we just can’t get over that old-fashioned “A” side “B” side thing). The “A” side is “You’ll Put Your Eye Out With That,” and side “B” is “When Peter Gets a Job.” We have a few other songs in the works: a spirited cover of the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting,” and others: “I Ovulate for Tim Robbins,” “Ask Me if I Give a Shit” and “I Googled your Mom for her Cranberry Mold Recipe.”

We’re looking for gigs — after the holidays, of course, when we have a little extra time, all those pesky crafts projects are off the dining-room table, and the kids are back in middle school. Anyone interested in talking to us, especially on the air, especially Terry Gross, can contact us here.

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet

Yes, I admit it. I write for money. Sometimes I have to write a certain way, and when I do this, it’s usually for money. For instance, I liked this restaurant a lot — but there are less than flattering things I could have said also. I just left them out. I still want to go there again, especially for their “Chef’s Night,” and the people there were quite charming. But, truth be told, it was a little hokey on the artsy-squiggles-from-mustard-squeezebottles side. And some of the food was just plain…silly. But, hey, I’m a professional.

So I am posting this piece as a sample food review. If anyone reading this wants me to write about their restaurant or travel business, please feel free to contact me. Oh, and yeah, I apologize for the punny title. I couldn’t help it.

Nouvelle Comfort Food: The Beet Generation
by Violetta Dei’Contorni

“It’s like…a work of art…but it also tastes delicious, like someone was really paying attention, orchestrating the flavors.”

“Yes” said my equally-satisfied dining companion. “It’s like…you know, Nouvelle Comfort Food.”

She’d nailed it. That was exactly what it was. I was dreading knocking back another disappointing, bland Stacked Food Extravaganza, and this was precisely NOT what Rogue Chefs was. It was different. Like everything had been newly conceptualized not only from the plate upwards, but from the back door to the table.

We oriented ourselves in their beautiful new digs, ordered the special wine-tasting sampler, sat back and sharpened our palettes.

Rogue Chefs is part of an expanding culinary movement in the food service business that supports what is increasingly being referred to as a “sustainable lifestyle.” Think seasonally-appropriate, local, organic hand-picked fruits and vegetables — from the neighborhood if possible (and in Half Moon Bay, that’s very possible) — in concert with hormone-free and antibiotic-free meats, and seafood from local fishermen. Heirloom varieties of produce are nurtured back into the food supply, and food that is locally grown is always favored over food that requires petroleum products to show up on your table. Cumbersome packaging is also no longer necessary, and the food industry’s tendency to breed crops for easy shipping and storage rather than flavor and texture is eschewed. This is all good news, and the good news is Rogue Chefs does it beautifully.

In addition, Rogue Chefs has re-conceptualized the whole idea of a restaurant; this isn’t just a restaurant: it’s a “culinary.” According to founder Kevin Koebel, the Rogue Chefs seed was planted in his head while enjoying farmer-to-farmtable home cooking in his native British Columbia. This seed kept germinating throughout a successful international chef’s career in North America and Europe, where he repeatedly was dismayed by the widening gap between fresh, just-plucked treasures from the orchard or garden and star-counting restaurant patrons. According to their website:

“The Rogue Chefs Culinary is a place where chefs can cook with fresh product [pulled] directly from the dirt for the person standing right in front of them. There are no buffers. There are no recipes. There are only classically trained chefs who use their five senses every day with … passion and inspiration…”

The night we were there, Kevin was cooking. He came out to answer our questions about the food; I could tell my dinner was safe in his hands, and he and the rest of the staff had good listening skills and took a real interest in our suggestions. The dining room, at [address here], is gleaming and new, and in a separate location from their mouthwatering take-out counter down the street. In the dining room, the physical and psychological wall between kitchen and dining room is broken; Kevin cooked for us in plain view, as if on a stage, with a keen willingness to share his love of ingredients and artful presentation. This theatricality only made more true what Shakespeare said: all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely chefs. Or something like that.

But back to our sumptuous dinner.

I always enjoy the experience of tasting familiar foods in a new context. For example, the general paucity of good British restaurants encouraged me years ago to seek out their excellent health-food establishments. With their original interpretations of, say, salads, these places were years ahead of American sprout-and-lentil joints. A chilly land that had only recently become able to depend on a full spectrum of fresh international produce was having a quiet food revolution, setting the stage for unusual but heady combinations: a salad of radishes, walnuts and chickpeas; a “beetroot” mélange with tangerines and pinto beans. These eateries, often tucked away in odd corners of museums and dead-end cobblestone streets, were not bogged down by our generations of customary American vegetable combinations (coleslaw, carrot and raisin salad, three-bean salad). The witty Brits applied themselves to their expanded palette with the playfulness of a kid with a new box of crayons. I adore a good fresh coleslaw, but there were times when eating a “Beetroot Salad” at the overcrowded, subterranean Food for Thought in Neal’s Yard was positively exhilarating.

Which is where I am going with the Marinated Local Beet Salad at Rogue Chefs. The warm, bright aroma and flavor of the locally-grown beets just leapt out at us. The accompanying celeriac-mint coulis, or fruit purée, was carefully chosen for its contrasting coolness, soft texture and contribution to the complementary color scheme of the canvas (in this case, a square white plate). We also ordered the Crisp Seared Ahi Sticks. The rare, lightly pan-seared ahi — a favorite dish of my companion — was also a knockout, even for a seasoned pan-seared ahi connoisseur. Lightly battered and fried rolls of seaweed wrapped around toothsome tuna tidbits are bias-cut and displayed artfully on a plate of perky, clover-like frisée greens — but this dish is more than just a pretty plate. It offers up such sparkling-clean chords of flavor — think the first few chords of, say, Pinball Wizard the first time you heard them — we didn’t know whether to ogle the presentation, listen to what our awakened taste buds were telling us, or take pictures. We did all three.

Although there are no “recipes” per se, there are guidelines, of course, so that the food does come out looking and tasting like the food described on the menu, and of course the ingredients list needs to be consistent with its billing. I wanted to order everything on the menu, but I had to control myself and just go with one more appetizer. The words “Portobello” and “Napoleon” appeared together on this menu for the first time in my vast reading history, so I decided to have them bring it on. To be honest, I’ll order anything that involves the name of any petite French dictator: appetizer, dessert, whatever. This was my least favorite of the three, but only because it was on the small side, and I wanted more. (Next time I’m getting the Truffle Flan).

So I was delighted with the main course: Pan-Seared Australian Beef Filet Mignon Medallions with Truffle Risotto and Spinach. Local is best, of course, but it’s also good to throw in a bit of the exotic. Frankly, the fact that Rogue Chefs isn’t too terribly politically correct is part of its charm. It was a hearty plateful, and it tasted spectacular. It was Vertical Food, all right, but each story stood up on its own, especially the deeply-flavored greens, sandwiched between the meat and the risotto. Each layer contributed to the layer beneath it so there was more than just “presentation” going on here, there was richness of content.

We also enjoyed a similar dish made with chicken and herbs, which would be a welcome alternate choice for those not wishing to be too politically incorrect. There are also vegetarian and seafood choices available on the menu, which reads as lyrically as a love poem from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood.

We were sharing, Chinese-food-style, and my companion was intending to bring some of our leftovers to her significant other, but that was becoming increasingly less likely. Reluctantly, I allowed them to take the entrées away, only to have them replaced by a large, lavender-infused Crème Brulée with two spoons, reassuring her that I was finally finished. In my book, there’s always room for anything-infused Crème Brulée.

Rogue Chefs’ crew are chefs and other restaurant personnel who have come there on a quest to reconnect the earth, the food, the five senses, the people and the community. You can dine at their restaurant and wine bar Tuesday through Sunday, or eat lunch there on Saturday. In addition to having restaurant hours, Rogue Chefs provide private food services to peoples’ homes, especially those who are too busy to cook every night. They also host wine tastings, and, of course, cater special events.

Wonderful prepared food is available at the Rogue Chefs Catering Company deli counter. They also run classes and workshops for beginners to more advanced cooks in basic cooking, baking, sauces, soups, cake decoration and so on. You can sign-up for special 6-8 course dinners on Friday and Saturday evenings for 15 or less people and enjoy direct interaction with the chef. These meals also offer wine pairing from different regions, including information about wine makers and farmers. They also bring in chefs from different parts of the globe for special evenings that spotlight various cultural dining experiences. For more information or to sign up for one of these events, please phone 650.712.2000 or visit their comprehensive, well-designed and easy-to-navigate website at http://www.roguechefs.com.

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet

OK, it’s true that I have never been to Burning Man.

When I first heard of Burning Man, I thought, “Jeez, that sounds great—the Be-In is back!” I was all for the Be-In. I was just a bit too young to participate in the original Be-In. I was offered tickets to join a bunch of cute teenage boys I knew who were going to a rock festival at Woodstock when I was 14, but my mother “wouldn’t let me,” a consideration that didn’t stop me from doing whatever I wanted a year later. Burning Man? A big Rave out in the desert, or something? Is it, like, Guy Fawkes Day? It sounded suspiciously Klannish. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was invited. I thought I might be too old; I was worried about all that Ecstasy antidoting my homeopathic remedy, or that I’d be too uptight or grossed out to use the bathrooms, and that it wouldn’t be any fun to do Ecstasy while I was constipated.

Also, I am not a big Camping Person. Have I mentioned that? Camping in my family was when my mother had a beauty parlor appointment and my father and sister and I had to fend for ourselves, as in, “Well I’ve got a Beauty Parlor appointment this afternoon, you’ll have to fend for yourselves and eat COLD FOOD.” Having her family eat cold food made my mother feel like she’d walked out on us; how could we possibly survive merely on cold beet borscht with a chilled boiled potato in it smothered in sour cream, with a side of fresh blueberries or bananas in more sour cream sprinkled with sugar, fresh rye bread, and maybe some cold cuts? Another time we went camping was when my family took a gamble and stayed at a pastoral goyishe resort in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country where you weren’t surrounded by a swarm of relatives or my parents’ friends, and nobody played Mah-Jong.*

Anyway, back to Burning Man. I’ve met a lot of nice people that are “Burners,” really a lot of nice folks. Did I menton how nice they are? They are warm as can be. They like to play dress-up, eat fire, and wear tattoos. Some of them are polyamorous. I have no problem with that. But I just cannot see myself driving 300 miles to camp out in the middle of the Nevada desert where it’s 105˚ to “do art” or “look at art” or even have an Art Appreciation Party. I do art right here. I can be found appreciating art 24/7. If I want to see more art, I can go to the museum, or a gallery. I can also walk around the corner and see many pyramids of video monitors, doll head installations and painful-looking scarification and piercings — any time I want. I go to San Francisco Open Studios every weekend in October. If I want to spend the money and time to see even more art, I go to Paris or London. Or Cleveland.

I guess that’s not true for everybody, so Burning Man appeals to them.

Not too long after I started hanging out with some Burning Man people, I had a date with one of them. I don’t know what I did wrong (could he somehow tell that I was a born non-Burner?), but as the evening progressed it became apparent that he wasn’t attracted to me, which put me in kind of bad mood, so up came an anti-Burning Man comment, a comment that had been bubbling just under the surface anyway. I just tossed caution to the wind and used the line about the doll heads and the TV sets, and he laughed half-heartedly, the way people laugh when you know you’ll never see them again. Shortly thereafter, a hilarious anti-Burning Man spam appeared in my email called “How to enjoy Burning Man from the comfort of your own home.” It pretty well summed up what I thought about Burning Man. I felt vindicated; you can read this brilliant spam here.

I must admit, I did consider Burning Man again briefly last spring, when I started dating a polyamorous (aka “Poly”) Jack Mormon Burner — that’s when you stop being a Mormon so you can drink alcohol, but you retain your idyllic childhood and vestiges of the traditional Mormon marriage, i.e. you get to have multiple lovers, and, of course, you go to Burning Man. You don’t have to wear the funny underwear* anymore, though, unless you want to. I was booked an entire season — every other Thursday — as this P.J.M.B.’s lover. Every few weeks he would go down to Santa Cruz and camp out with his actual wife and a bunch of other Polyamorous Burners, and swallow fire. I know this because he complained about having sore gums from time to time. One time he took me to a Polyamorous Burner party where there was a big machine that did some awesome party tricks with fire. Aside from ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the fire-spitting machine — which, I was informed, is an object typical of, and created for, the Burning Man Festival — I didn’t know what to say to anybody at the party, especially his wife.

Let’s just say, I didn’t have to play with fire to be playing with fire.

I understand that some people need extra stimulation to feel anything. It’s like their systems are undersensitive; they need anti-antidepressants; depressants, tattoos, inconvenient plumbing facilities. My P.J.M.B. was obviously way, way too happy. He had to eat fire and pass his wife around (she was also Poly) to feel stuff. I feel enough already.

Way enough. So much that all week I’ve been bursting into tears watching all these miserable, pissed-off people in Louisiana and Mississippi. I’m pissed off too. I have been to enough poorly-organized rock festivals to know only a little bit what they might feel like. Imagine, say, having to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers at a crowded rock festival for 3 days with your dead aunt sitting in a wheelchair next to you covered with a blanket, because she couldn’t get to her medicine, knowing you don’t even have your own bathroom to go back to. With hungry, crying children hanging off your arm, and no way to explain this to them. Of course, The Horrors. I somehow can’t turn it off in my mind. I don’t think I should turn it off, either. So I went to Craig’s List and read the New Orleans Missed Connections postings and cried. I had to do something. But I have to stay here and make a living by creating a dancing toothbrush, so how can I possibly help?

That’s when it occcurred to me.

Operation Storm Desert

A whole lotta mostly white, middle-class folks that appreciate art and sacred places are, right at this minute, voluntarily rolling around in the Nevada desert sand and dirt and mud in unbelievably hot weather. They’ve constructed a huge, portable Art Capitol comprised of every imaginable type of shelter and tent and portable toilet, not to mention innumerable “Theme Camps” with, admittedly, spectacular art that, unfortunately, is scheduled to come down in a few days because everyone has to go back to their job as a dotcom geek or a lawyer in Portland and Marin and Boulder. But here’s an opportunity to have the show get held over! An opportunity for thousands to see these amazing displays of light, fire, mechanical playfulness and hot music! As it happens, down in New Orleans there are a whole lotta poor and working-class black folks in desperate need of shelter and toilets, who’ve had it up to here with mud; what harm could a little sand do? A little flaming art and perhaps a fire-eater or a drag queen thrown in could go a long way to help cheer them up. Plus, black people from New Orleans are world-famous for their music. The Burning Man site is a perfect place for these people to dry out — it’s 105˚ in both places, but, you know, it’s the Nevada desert — it’s a dry heat.

What George should have done with his military planes and helicopters — WOW, more machinery in the desert! Cool! — was airlift all the desperate New Orleanians (New Orleaños? New Orleansiennes? Orleanaisses? ) to the Burning Man site in Nevada, and airlift the many, no doubt liberal, more-than-willing-to-do-their-part, art-appreciating Burners down to the Delta. After all, New Orleans is a sacred place, too, sportin’ a bitchin’ exhibition staged by none other than that mindblowin’ woman artist, Hurricaine Katrina, with accomodations provided by our very own priority-challenged, imperialistic right wing government. It’s an awe-inspiring, interactive installation that can put them in touch with Mother Earth like nobody’s business. Forget Christo, forget Andy Goldsworthy; forget those other clever and talented Burning Man sculptors — every Burner will want to come down and see what Katrina and the waves — aided by the Bush Administration’s awesome cluelessness — hath wrought.

In addition, this would also have put an end to the problem of looting, since, apparently, only people of color loot — white people, what was it, “find provisions?” It would have been a perfect solution.

*My mother didn’t play it either, but at a Jewish Bungalow Colony you were supposed to have fat ladies hanging around playing it. One time a bunch of such ladies, at Teamster’s Local 805 Candy and Tobacco Wholesalers’ Bungalow Colony in Wurtzboro, New York, played Mah-Jong in the sauna and their plastic Mah-Jong tiles melted. Everyone came running over to see.

**Funny underwear? What funny underwear? you say. Well, Mormons wear this silky long underwear between their squishy body parts and their clothing. They are called Garments. Garments are kind of like God’s Post-it Notes. My P.J.M. lover explained it to me this way: “When you’re making out in the car with Marie Osmond and you start taking her clothes off, and you get down to the Garments, it’s a reminder: [smacking self in head] Whoa! Right! I can’t do this. I’m a Mormon!”

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet

One fine day in April, my 11-year-old son, who I’ll call, say, “Liam,” and I, were heading toward the Bay Bridge in my spiffy 1995 Seafoam MomMobile to see The Homeopathy God. The Homeopathy God is this amazing world-renowned Homeopathic MD that I’ve been seeing for years in Point Richmond, in the East Bay, for my unique set of physical symptoms. The Homeopathy God only has an appointment available about every 4 months to hear my bubbele-meinzes (that’s “grandma stories” in Yiddish, aka “complaints,” like as if that’s all Jewish grandmas can tell stories about). No one understands my bubbele-meinzes better than The Homeopathy God, except maybe a real bubbele. In this particular case, Liam had some bubbele-meinzes, too.

The winter had been, for us, a bumper-crop year for flus and their ilk. Liam and I were still suffering from the tail end of a flu that had wrecked my already iffy nervous system so thoroughly that walking into my studio (next door to my bedroom) felt like an expedition to the South Pole. Panting, shivering, I’d sit down at my Mac and be jolted clear across the room by Brian Eno’s perky bonggg; then I’d squint at my computer’s unforgiving, nonsensical shaft of rectangular light before turning the darned thing off and shuffling back to my blankies. Liam missed a lot of school, and when he wasn’t missing school entirely, he was calling me from school to get picked up because he was sicker than we thought he was. It seemed like it would never end. Every day I had a fever. A friend of mine who’s a lawyer had fallen victim to this same awful fate, and for what seemed like centuries he and I exchanged brown paper bags full of books and videos and vitamins. I was horrified that he was working in his office and driving his car and actually appearing in court on behalf of his clients in this condition, because for me, heating up canned chicken noodle soup in a little pot was about all I could manage.

Anyway, this went on for quite some time, and I remember it had some gruesome effect on the tummy, too, which is gone now but kina hora, you can just imagine. What’s that disease that’s supposed to make all your organs decompose while you’re still alive? I am not going there on the internet. Well, anyway, for the first three months of 2005, Liam and I wrestled with this abomination of the flesh, and by the first week of April we were well enough to trundle off to The Homeopathy God in search of some immune-system-sustaining homeopathic support.

We were late for our appointment, so naturally our freeway entrance was closed. I drove around the block several times, saying things I’m not particularly proud of saying in front of a child. Down Market Street to Eighth we went, turning right, moving over to the left, signaling all the way, eager to drive onto the freeway. Then I became aware of the flashing red and yellow lights and the siren and the speaker saying “pull over to your left…don’t get out of the car.” Surely this was not intended for me, as I had been extra-careful to drive perfectly; I had recently been towed unexpectedly (anyone here ever expect to get towed? hands?) for outstanding parking tickets, an experience I vowed never to repeat. I thought this special attention was intended for someone else, certainly not a busy mom in her MomMobile heading purposefully to the doctor with her son. Perhaps there was some poor soul nearby who really needed the help of a friendly California Highway Patrolman?

Perhaps not.

I pulled neatly over to the left, right across Eighth Street from the Holiday Inn, where I could see the helpful California Highway Patrolman unmount his motorcycle and head right over to my car, obviously eagerly anticipating a personal consultation with me.

As it happens, he was distressed by the fact that I didn’t have a current California registration sticker on the rear bumper of my car.

“Yes, officer, I can explain that” I said, pulling out my current drivers license, my current insurance statement and my current registration payment receipt. “You see, it’s all paid for; I registered the car and paid the full amount, $285 and my firstborn son, but I still needed the Smog Certificate,*” and, smiling triumphantly, I proudly presented my current Smog Certificate, which I had finally managed to pull together the previous week, thank God. “Here’s the Smog Certificate,” I said, helpfully. “I’ve just been sick, you see, and hadn’t gotten a chance to go b…”

The officer was nonplussed. “You were supposed to have your sticker by now. You applied for it —” He lifted his darkly-tinted motorcycle goggles to examine his UPS-style electronic clipboard. “Last November. That was six months ago.”

I can’t believe I fell for that. It was five months ago, actually. Four and a half, really. Four, if you take off for Christmas and, well, Chanukah came early last year. I think it was Thanksgiving Weekend, in fact, which was absurd. So it was really three months.

“It’s PAID, Officer. I just don’t have the little bitty sticker.”

“Yes, but even if you did pay for it, the rule is that if you’re driving around without a sticker for six months, I have to have you t—”

My doctor’s appointment was just being frittered away, and it was making me crazy. It was at this point that I became a bit overwrought, causing me to revert to my native speech pattern, that of Queens, New York, where I’m originally from. Occasionally I find that Californians aren’t so fond of my speech pattern. It is best exemplified by those old screwball comedies where Eastern City Women are trying to explain things to Cowboys. The City Woman, played by a fuel-injected, fast-talking blonde like Judy Holiday — who died tragically of cancer at 43 and, incidentally, is reputed to have had an IQ of 170 — babbles, in a squeaky voice, something like, “I nevah shoulda come heah in tha foist place; whaddid you say yaw name was? I sweah, someone has gotta get me outta this joint.”

“The END of November, yes, officer, but you see, then there was Christmas, and since New Year’s my son and I have been ill constantly. In fact (bringing my voice up an octave here) we are right now going to the doctor because, (another octave up, and a little faster because I had the sense that he was getting a little impatient) because we are sick and have had the flu for weeks and please officer please let us go, it takes months to get an appointment (a few coughs here I think) with The Homeopathy God and my son here needs to use a bathroom and so do I and please officer I already paid the registration and you can see I have everything here, I just haven’t had time to go back to the DMV and get the actual sticker because we’ve been sick. Isn’t that in there somewhere?” I pointed to his clipboard.

Then Gary Cooper pauses, takes the weed out of his mouth and goes, “huh-yup.”

“Please step out of the vehicle” said the Helpful Policeman.

We were beginning to create a bit of a scene.

Liam started to panic.

“Officer, I can’t step out of the car, I have to get my son and me to the doctor. We’re already late for our appointment.” I waved my cell phone at him and indicated that I had finally reached The Homeopathy God’s Receptionist, who was comforting me as best she could by suggesting we do the appointment right then, over the phone. I had become quite distraught, and I couldn’t find my Rescue Remedy.

Liam said, “Mom, I’ve gotta puke.”

We got out of the car so Liam could puke.

“You are a very, very bad man.” I said, like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, except under my breath. Go Dorothy!

We were detained for an eternity. This guy was one of these guys that actually gets off on watching women and children suffer. I think they’re called “Sadists” or “Nazis” or something; he was one of those sick people. I was gobsmacked to be having an interaction with such pure, crystal-clear Evil. When Liam told him he needed to use the bathroom, the officer said, “You can go to the hotel across the street.” My jaw dropped. We were not even at a crosswalk.

“My son is not crossing this street by himself and going to a public restroom in this neighborhood without me,” I asserted. “Mooom” said my son, desperately. “Sir!” I pleaded. “Please let me and my son cross the street and let me take him to the bathroom!” Liam and I started to cry.

“Ma’am, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to have to call my Supervisor.” Well, all right! I can really wield my power over a hysterical woman thought the Policeman. She probably deserves it. Hell, they all deserve it. Women, bah.

“Call your Supervisor! Please call your Supervisor!” I bellowed, clutching my child. I had trouble imagining one person this nasty; it was impossible to envision another. I was certain I could convince this Supervisor that this was just a terrible mistake, an intrusion into the everyday business of a workaday mother, PTA member, university instructor, art director, published writer, upright contributer to the community — and her sweet, innocent — sickly even, as he is quite slender — little boy, and that he would admonish his subordinate for being needlessly cruel, snatching away his badge, cartoon beads of sweat popping off his demoted forehead as he pleaded for mercy.

As Liam says so often and so eloquently: “Ri-i-i-i-ght.”

Suddenly I had two motorcycle cops on my hands, as well as two large motorcycles and a small but colorful group of onlookers. As The Supervisor unmounted his horse, I mean bike, I started explaining the details of how I was being detained unnecessarily to the point of abuse.

There was a long pause as The Supervisor lifted off his helmet, revealing an unusually large head. He took out his clipboard.

“It appears you also had a fix-it ticket for a broken tail light,” observed The Supervisorator.

“I had it fixed,” I said, pointing out my fixed tail light. I started jumping up and down, shaking my hands from my wrists like a teenager doing the Frug.

“But you didn’t send in the fix-it ticket with the $10, saying you’d fixed it.”

Yeah, fine, make a federal case out of it.

“I had no idea. I got a fix-it ticket, so I fixed it. I never got one before. I thought I just had to fix it, not show it to anybody.”

I had not previously even heard of a fix-it ticket. I had gotten a fix-it ticket the week before, but I was drunk. Fortunately, I was not driving; my date, the Designated Driver, was driving. The cop that escorted us off the Bay Bridge that night gave the Designated Driver a sobriety test, and he passed; then he gave him a fix-it ticket and mentioned that I should get the car smogged, which I did, the next day. But I was drunk, so I don’t remember the rules regarding the fix-it ticket; it’s not against the law to be drunk in a car you own as long as you’re not driving it, right? And by the time I sobered up and got the damned Smog Certificate, I’d been dumped by the Designated Driver. Even now, he won’t take my calls.

“Look, I don’t want to get back together with you,” I could have said; “I just want to know, do you know what I’m supposed to do with that fix-it ticket?”

“Boy, that chick was really needy” my ex-Designated Driver would have commented astutely.

I looked up and saw a tow truck backing up to the front of my car.

“Lady, we have to tow you,” said The Evil CHP Supervisor-dude.

“What?! You’re not serious. You’re kidding, right?” I searched the windows to the souls of both California Highway Patrolmen, but didn’t find any. I looked around wildly for help. The crowd had dispersed by then; even the vagrants in the Tenderloin had more important things to do. So I got in my car.

“I’m not moving” I said. “Liam, get in the car.”

“Mom, I have to use the bathroom!” said Liam.

“Get in the car! I yelled like a crazy person. “I am not going anywhere.” I said emphatically, to everyone, even the people who weren’t there anymore.

Liam got in the car.

“Ma’am, I don’t want to have to take you down to the station house,” said Sadistic Highway Cop #1.

I sat stonily, facing forward, arms crossed. “We’re not getting out of the car.”

The tow truck driver started feeling up my front bumper. I felt violated.

“Leave my car alone!” I shouted.

A woman pulled up next to me and rolled down her window. Liam unrolled the passenger window.

She leaned out of the window. “Are you getting out?” she hollered.

“What?! Am I getting out? You’re kidding, right? I’m in the middle of getting arrested. Yeah, I’m getting out,” I cackled insanely. “In five years, with good behavior!”

I settled back down. “I do not believe this” I said to Liam, while a part of me totally believed it and was stowing it away for a screenplay, a comic, a column. Something. I was increasingly floored by how difficult life had become in this town, and I was, and still am, considering a flight to the suburbs. I considered Fairfax for a minute. Then I dialed my Lawyer Friend, the one who had been sick with me, whose office was nearby. I had no idea what he could do, as he’s not a Registration Sticker Lawyer, but he’s always worth a try. He does have his own kindly way of helping, even if it’s just standing by, looking tall and blonde and dapper in a pressed suit, letting me blow my nose on his crisp sleeve.

The last time I called my Lawyer Friend in a Time of Need it went something like this:

Violet (on the phone): They turned off my electricity! Those bastards! Can’t you do something?
LF: Um, yes, I’ll call you right back.
He calls me right back.
LF: Well, I fixed it, you’re ok now.
Violet: Really? What’d you do?
LF: I paid the bill.
Violet: Paid my bill!? Oh, come on. You can’t have paid my bill!
LF: Yes, well, I find that the easiest way to get people like PG&E to cooperate is by giving them money, so I gave them some.

So my Lawyer Friend came by, and advised me to get out of the car and to let them tow it. Then he tells me that cops hate lawyers; who knew? I never watch TV. He thought it best just to go along with it and deal with it later. (Stop the presses, he’s a lawyer.) I took a few things out of my car and clasped his starched arm while he walked us three blocks over to the AAA office, where I didn’t even have to wait in line to get my sticker. Before dashing off, he threw us a few extra bucks for a taxi down to the Courthouse, where I was charged $600 and directed to go even further down, to the Pits of Hell, to be exact, to get my car.

I enlisted my friend Lisa to help us with that part. She met us while we were sipping expensive, frosty, rejuvenating shakes in front of a Jamba Juice at the Potrero Shopping Center, and drove us down there. As it happens, it was the day (of the month? of the year??) that they auction off the unclaimed vehicles at the Pits of Hell, so it was teeming with sweaty men of just about every description, some of them women. I was trying to get my car back before they auctioned it off. I had to beg and plead and cry for them to pay any attention to me at the creepy trailer office parked at the bottom of the Pits of Hell. I felt extremely prim and delicate. Getting my car back was like having to step through the Hell Panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights in a white linen suit. Without the good sex.

I was a nervous wreck because Lisa was with Liam in her car, and had to drive over to UC Berkeley and teach that evening, and had I not made a big fuss, all three of us would still be there right now. I was SO happy to drive up the long ramp out of the Pits of Hell, pick up my son, bid adieu to Lisa and drive off, it felt like I was being brought back to life on the emergency room table.

“Mom,” says Liam on the way home. “You know what was the funniest thing? You know that lady that wanted our parking spot? On the way to AAA I noticed she’d just waited behind us, and when they towed our car, she actually took our spot!”

“You’re kidding!” I grimaced, unable to actually smile quite yet, but telling myself there would be a time in my life that I would in fact smile again. It was hard to fathom.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I was in an accident on the Grand Central Parkway, near Grandma and Grandpa’s house in New York, with my boyfriend Jonathan Wallace when I was 19?”

“Yes.”

“We were in his mother’s big, fancy Citröen, driving past Creedmoor State Mental Hospital, and there was a ten-car-pileup, and we were in the middle of it. Lots of people got hurt; ambulances and fire trucks rushed to the scene. But the car was so well-appointed and plush, all we did was bash our lips on the dashboard, so we both had blood dripping from our mouths, but we weren’t badly hurt.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Anyway, ambulances arrived, there were stretchers and tow trucks everywhere, and while we were stumbling around with blood-soaked Kleenex hanging from our chins trying to figure out what to do next, a woman driving along the Parkway pulls up next to me, rolls down her window and says, “Is this the way to the Cross-Island Expressway?”

That’s the New York version of THAT story.

“I know, Mom. You told me.”

And so, you might ask, why do I bring this up now?

Well, subsequently, I got two additional bills from the Department of Parking and Traffic regarding my driving without a sticker and having not reported fixing my tail light. For a total of over $2000! No way was I going to pay that. So I went to court Monday. I brought all kinds of documentation, medical records, papers from my glove compartment. Waiting in line for the doors to open, I shared my story with a young Realtor who had gotten in trouble for not knowing what to do with a fix-it ticket for a broken tail light. Ten minutes later, we were both dismissed, and I was ordered to go downstairs to the cashier and pay $20. No one had the faintest idea of how to file a report against having been abused by a California Highway Patrolman. They said it wasn’t their department.

*For those of you who live in states without compulsory Smog Certification (are there any? West Virginia? Montana? The Bronx??), you should know that this is — quelle suprise! — a total Racket. If you have a car that’s such an old shitbox that you know it can’t possibly pass certification, you are exempt and you can just go without it. If you have a modern car that can pass certification, you have to pay $95 and show the DMV a certificate. For an explanation of why this is weird, Google B.F. Skinner.

“What do YOU want?” -Aunt Violet