Archive | May, 2012

Warren Zevon

28 May

I am in the process of getting divorced. I will say only this: marriage to me is very much like quickly getting your head stuck between two wooden balusters to peer down at some mythical ideal. Divorce is like it taking 1000 times longer to get your head from between those spindles, and 10 people to do it. You look like an ass with your head between two balusters, turned wood laying impressions in your neck. You can’t help wondering if every person you know well, or not, is thinking in their head about either the divorce or the marriage, “what the hell did you do that for?”, especially the ones who say you are brave to want to be happy. This sentiment, somehow, makes it all immensely worse. It reminds you of your obvious selfishness and disregard for the order and rules of a society that you never got a say in designing. Because really…who the fuck am I to be happy? I am THE last girl on Earth who’d read Eat, Pray, Love. I’d arm-wrestle that woman author for Oprah, whether or not she wanted me to.

The only solace that I have, that doesn’t read denial or vice for me in these bittersweet times, is music. Beautiful music. Loud with the windows down music. Soft and low music. Hug your pillow and cry music. Get down and dance in your room music. Wishing some dreamy guy would fix your record player that just broke music. Beauties like Fleetwood Mac’s album “Mystery to Me”. That is what I was listening to today. It reminded me of an old friend who was a sound guy at the TLA, a concert venue on South St. in Philadelphia around the turn of the century. That was when he landed me employment there, as a concession stand mistress selling popcorn and candy during concerts.

This is a story about Warren Zevon and fear.

I love uniforms. But this concession job hadn’t found itself important enough to demand one. So I decided that I would create my own, having a fetish for the order of a uniform. I wore a white, short-sleeve, cotton peasant-top, as crisp as I could iron it, and black twill double button slacks that bordered between flares and bell bottoms. I was working on South St. and, because of union rules, every show ended at 11 pm. By the time I got out it was midnight. I had to trek my way back north to my apartment in Olde City. To do this I had to get through Society Hill.

If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia then you know that, night or day, it isn’t exactly clear if anybody actually lives in Society Hill. It is a strange ghost neighborhood. At midnight, it’s a little scary. I never knew who, or what, I was frightened of; maybe just the rich people who bought these places, homes that clearly had no heartbeats inside. I didn’t want to blow what dough I made in tips on a taxi, so I wore a pair of Nikes every night and ran at top speed home through that deserted neighborhood.

Working a concession stand in a concert venue is like being a bartender in the way that a pattern became clear: the lonesome would wander while the show went on. Often, I would be engaged in a conversation where I found myself asking personal questions and then saying “Oh too bad, I’m sorry, I’m certain that will pass.” Lonely people are everywhere.

I always found the main act’s rider as fascinating as the “Lonely’s” stories I’d hear. A rider is a set of requests or demands that a performer sets as criteria for performance. They are most often ridiculous. I must say that Warren Zevon had a curious rider: a steak directly after he played; and while onstage he needed four one liter Diet Mountain Dews. This is not an easy drink to find, the size being the problem. When he was presented with four 20 oz bottles he demanded they be replaced with one liter bottles. I was sent in a taxi to a gas station, on Delaware and Spring Garden, to fetch him those four Diet Mountain Dews in the one liter bottle, this being the only place that sold them. I was happy to do it, but having had to leave my popcorn machine (from which I had just cleaned flax-seed shaped mouse poop) to get this ridiculous drink impressed on me that this man had terrible beverage taste. This sort of thing, for me, was unforgivable. I didn’t care what he wrote lyrically. What sort of person would put so much of something so gross in their body? Ew…

Any time you work with any sort of important person, there is a level of stress and anxiety in pleasing them, as if the world will fall apart and explode if their stupid wish is not granted by mere mortal hands. The ones in charge at the TLA waited, hands wrung, breath held, for four one liter Diet Mountain Dews to arrive. I returned, drink in hand, saving the day.

The show began, and so did my selling of soft drinks to the AAers and lightweights. I often didn’t care for the act, so only hearing a muffled version wasn’t a big deal. If it was slow I would sit on my stool, cross-legged, back straight, pouting, slowly turning my chin to meet my rising shoulder, pretending I’m a 40′s movie star. Crushed behind the back-lit glass counter of over-priced candy, I’d work on my long list of impressions I do for the sole purpose of entertaining myself (in case you are interested, I have been working on an impression of Larry David’s gait for like ten years, this one is all about pulling my shoulders down to weigh on my hips, long arms swinging).

As I sat there pouting, a fluffy dark-haired shapeless middle-aged woman wearing a drab raincoat wandered over and started to tell me about her decades long relationship, or “deep connection”, she had with Warren Zevon who was playing “Werewolves of London” at that very moment. It became clear that she was obsessed and delusional about her feelings but seemed, in appearance anyway, harmless.

She had a letter for him she clutched to her chest. I smiled persuasively and asked to see it. She refused. I could tell she loved my interest and hated me for being invasive, all at the same time.

I told her about the one liter Diet Mountain Dews and how that fact alone should be enough to inspire her to question this man’s greatness. I went on to explain that I, myself, practiced a beverage theory which was black coffee, water and red wine only (white wine was ok for parties but should be regarded pretty much as a pussy of a drink, like coffee with sugar and cream).

She wouldn’t hear it about the drink. She was obsessed with Warren Zevon. There was no reaching her. Her reaction was identical to when I tried to talk reason to a man (my own stalker) who was calling me every morning panting, asking me what I was wearing. I would try to tell him that these morning phone calls were no way to meet people. And…please stop the heavy breathing and panting. It’s simply impolite. He would always reply with “whatever…what are you wearing?” in this sweaty breathy whisper. Before hanging up each morning, my final reply was, slightly offended, “This is about me with clothes ON?”

I thanked her for sharing with me and said I had to go now, to grab Mr. Zevon’s steak. I turned my popcorn light off, stuffed my tips in my pocket and walked out the front door turning right onto South St. By the time I returned, the show was over and the lights were on. Warren Zevon was still on the side of the stage with his manager talking while the roadies packed up. Now, I am not shy, so I just walked up on stage and handed him the aluminum swan holding his requested steak.

I was about to turn and walk off stage when I overheard them anxiously speaking about a woman who could only be the letter-clutching, deep connection, fluffy-haired Angela I had met 30 minutes prior. I quickly understood that Warren and his manager were talking about the stalker and I said “Angela?” With lightning speed, Warren’s head turned to face mine, his eyes bulging, probably hopped up on all that fluorescent yellow caffeine. He looked terrified. “You know her?” I looked into the audience which was 90% gone. I saw her fluffy shapeless form, like a huge cloud of slow-moving black gnats and pointed to her. “She’s right there.”

Warren Zevon jumped, and screamed like a girl, looking very much like a cartoon. He ran back stage. His manager all but strangled me. Also looking like a cartoon he shouted “How could you! I’ve been hiding her from him for years! You ruined everything!” Apparently, this guy’s job as Warren Zevon’s manager also included hiding the physical identity of Angela, the letter writing long-time stalker, from Warren. I assumed this was to make her no more real for him than her words did.

Then he ran after Warren. I stood there on stage, bright lights above me, waved at Angela and smiled to myself thinking “well why the hell are you both still standing on stage then, dumb-ass?”

I was too lost in thought to run home that night. I was thinking about Warren Zevon’s fear of Angela and my own fear of the neighborhood I was walking through. Were either worthy of the stress they produced? Angela seemed as harmless as this ghostly neighborhood. Maybe he should have been more worried about the chemicals in all that Diet Mountain Dew?

Walking home, I thought about the ridiculous things my dad worried about for me. He’d often holler at me before I left his house, saying “Girl, somebody’s gonna pick you up and throw you in a van!” It never mattered how many times I tried to point out that I am almost six feet tall. “Dad, nobody is going to pick me up.” Or this gem he’d warn me about, “Somebody is going to take your picture, then put your head on a picture of a naked woman in a dirty magazine in Saudi Arabia!” These words chained together and the image they provided, along with his primitive cut and paste photoshopish knowledge, made me desperate to know what information or magazine formed this fear.

Do we all worry about the wrong thing? Is this why humanity doesn’t seem to advance that positively? Fear is a very powerful motivator. It may, unfortunately, be more powerful than love.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year questioning my own fears, stuck in the spindles, piecing stories like these together in my crappy time-line, trying to understand how I ended up here. Should I open my eyes wide-shut, turn the TV off, demand to feel something out of life and ask myself if the fear of hurting the people I love is really an expression of love at all? Seems like that’s the other side of the “Who the fuck am I to be happy?” coin…both sides self-important. Much like a rider at a concert venue.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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On Being a Girl

25 May

MQA on being a girl. Or, now that I’ll turn three dozen tomorrow, I guess I should start to call myself a woman. Damn it.

I have always found it frustrating to have to be defined as female. (Have you met them? They’re everywhere.) Not because I am confused about my sexual orientation or even want to be a man. On one occasion, I told a therapist “Let me make this crystal clear so we can stop wasting my one lousy hour I can’t afford in the first place; no, I am not interested in women as lovers. It is essential that a dick be present for me to want to have sex with someone. [Or if you prefer in less colorful language, I believe myself to be heterosexual without a doubt.] AND, after all these months together, is it not obvious that I’d be a dyke if that’s what I was into??”

I hate how shrinkie dinks turn off the path, end up in the area of sexuality and think they’ve cleverly switched the topic. As someone finely tuned to detect nuance, to pick up on the most subtle of body language and verbal cues, I choose to match it by saying exactly what I think and feel. Therapists do not like that, or maybe they thought I was hiding something. The few I saw in my 20s always seemed frustrated, and it felt more like we were in a chess match or, worse, like I was paying them for the pleasure of asking me what my fantasies were. Seems like I should be getting the $100 bill for that exchange.

Now that I’ve made it clear that this isn’t specifically about sex, the thing about being a girl is that guys get to goof off and have a type of fun that looks like greener grass than what my lady peers are up to. I never want to be at a shower of any sort and watch the bride or breeder open gifts for two hours and smile politely. I never want to do that.

I’m like the girl in a group of girls who is like the guy whose wife makes him wear ties that match her dress.

What fun are guys having that I watch and wish I could be included in? Well for instance, when do you see a bunch of females sitting around a park playing chess or female bike messengers standing in a circle laughing, joking and philosophizing? When was the last time you saw a man driving, bawling his eyes out to Rod Stewart’s Forever Young? This actually happened to me once. I caught myself, knowing that song is not my speed and thought “Aw man, it’s my damn period again! Son-of-a-bitch!!” as I pounded my fist on my steering wheel through my tears.

Now, about that period psychosis; that is some tricky shit. I’m left confused about the reality of my feelings at some points during each month, because I am a girl and bleed, not because I am human. I don’t think men have mood swings the way women do. Some men are more sensitive, sure. I personally love a Beta man and hope my next boyfriend is one, to obviously temper my Alpha ways. It just doesn’t seem all that fair that I have to cry listening to Rod Stewart songs once a month when most guys get to sit around unwounded and laugh at Rod Stewart songs. (BTW – I’m not dissing his whole catalog, I like the early stuff.)

Men will ultimately always have more power than women because of this. And when an accusation is made that I’m female and that it may be in the middle of “that time of the month” based on my irrational behavior, I can’t really respond, “no, it’s not” in self-assured security. It just may well be true.

Once at a Whole Foods, I became enraged at the sight of “fusion salt” and its new kiosk-type table it sat on. I hate expensive food novelty, it is like a slap in my face of just how much people avoid having any real feelings and think about food instead of humanity. I was also really sad and confused about something else and the perfect storm of a fusion salt sighting, confusion and my period made an expression appear on my face, one that made the deli guy ask “what’s wrong sweetheart?” Fearing I’d start to cry, I just shrugged my shoulders and said “I have my period.”

That being said, that I believe men will always be more powerful than women, I don’t actually like the idea of feminism. It pins men against women and what I am really saying here is that I wish the lines weren’t marked so clearly or bitterly, deservedly or not. Why can’t I be macho, pretty, tough, aggressive, sweet, tender, sensitive, goofy, a laser sharp multi-tasker who, at the end of the day, sits, watches TV with a beer (glass of dry red wine) and scratches her crotch? Why can’t we be a whole lot of both stereotypes?

I thought about all this after one of my oldest friends took me to lunch yesterday. I let him order for me and pay for lunch. We cracked vulgar, dirty jokes back and forth. We looked at women and men that passed our table and objectified them and we never talked about marriage, baby showers or what the kids did that was cute. For that hour, I didn’t feel like my tie had to match his dress. I didn’t have to play by the rules and behave. I didn’t have to make dull small-talk, and I didn’t have to listen to a conversation about cute shoes; but I also wore makeup, had a skirt on, even wore a pretty bracelet about which I didn’t care and which he didn’t notice. I was still very much a girl, even with my filthy mouth, mind and jokes.

After he and I parted ways, I bought a small black coffee at the basement Belgian waffle place. I walked two blocks in the delicate pretty rain to Rittenhouse Square to watch the bike messengers and chess players I wish I could fit in with. The boys with bikes were under the awning of Barnes and Noble and nobody was playing chess. The heavy rain from 15 minutes before had cleared the park out. As I hopped over puddles, smiled kindly at the crazy guy on the bench, and stopped to stare in holy awe at the huge plane trees’ wet bark, I decided I didn’t give a shit one way or the other. Call me whatever you want.

I know what I am and I’m not taking sides; I’m human and relate to both men and women for different reasons. Maybe turning 36 tomorrow comes with a crack of wisdom to feel that any sort of frustration over being labeled is a waste of time when there are puddles to jump over, trees to marvel at and sweet dirty jokes to make.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

PS – Thank you Kelly for the less colorful language hook.

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The Weird and The Wonderful

23 May IMG_6206

This is Mad Question Asking’s show and tell on Taxidermy.

I crystal clearly remember having this dream from way before I was three, of my crib floating out to the giant elk that hung 14′ up a stone fireplace in my childhood home’s living room, which very much looked like a lodge. This elk carried the weight of a six-foot wide rack. In my dream, while my crib levitated in front of the elk, I was petting and hugging the elk’s neck, and he was nuzzling me back. We were talking or communicating, which since I couldn’t speak yet was me baby cooing and him making that noise that animals like him make out of their nose. He was very gentle with me, and I think this memory dream tells me that I am still that child. I really want to talk to and befriend all things, especially the weird and wonderful ones.

My Old Friend

Last week, my friend John and I drove up to George Dante’s amazing taxidermy studio, Wildlife Preservations, to drop off an antique piece that I’m getting restored.

George told us about coming off of a year-long job at The American Museum of Natural History in New York and all the cool places his work takes him. I asked if he got invited to parties at those places and he said he did but didn’t usually go. “What? You gotta go!” I replied, wishing that I got invited to parties at The Natural History Museum, imagining a real life man with the yellow hat or some other interesting character there. I asked if I could walk around and take pictures and peek in the storage space upstairs and swore I would be very careful. He kindly said yes. He has a pretty interesting life as a taxidermy artist, filled with fascinating stories plus he is a really nice guy.

This was our second visit to his shop and these are photos I took from both visits. Enjoy.

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Norwegian Legacy Beehive

21 May IMG_6089 - Version 3

This is my legacy. My Norwegian legacy beehive. My mom (a sweetheart and a good sport who has let me be a knuckle-head my whole life) has been wearing her hair like this for as long as anyone can remember. I decided that maybe now, on my most recent visit to her childhood home in Norway, would be a good time to have her pass down the comb and show me how to put my hair up the way she does.

Before beehive or what I think of as B.B.

After Beehive or A.B.

I set up the camera in what is now a hallway but was my mom’s bedroom, where she started making her hair so high all those years ago and my sister Chris managed the filming. (Thank you Chris and nice job.) You will see a painting of my mom at 17, that my dad had a portrait studio in Cherry Hill NJ paint of her, his sweetheart, that hangs in her home that she left 46 years ago. Oh, and that good-looking guy at the end is my cousin Anita’s husband Chriss. (Thank you Chriss.) And, of course thank you Lisa for your wonderful editing!

Let me tell you how I came to be, how my mom ended up leaving Norway to live in NJ. My dad at 26, while eating a can of Norwegian sardines, decided to ship his Cadillac to Norway and ride around the countryside. This was 1964, before Norway was rich with oil and according to him, his was the first Cadillac to touch pavement there. His Pan Am ticket’s flight and seat information was filled in with pencil. He met my mom on a tourist boat, the Skibladner, that traveled up the fjord lake Mjøsa. She was selling candy and was 17. He came to visit her once more and then came back a third time and they were married where the painting now hangs. I am the product of my father eating sardines on his lunch break, daydreaming and staring at the picture on the can of sardines and how dreams and motivations can come out of anything and anywhere. I like that.

If you live in the Philadelphia area and like to film and edit and enjoy MQA, please contact me. I’m eternally trying to assemble a crew for this project that resembles the kids from Goonies. And I have a zillion more three-minute films, more than a cat lady’s coin purse of pennies, that are waiting in my mind to be made. All are welcome.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Swedish Meatballs

18 May

In case I haven’t made it incredibly clear that I am such a hybrid of a Jersey-Scandinavian girl (I agree it is too much to combine) I went to the Bergen County Ikea to meet four cars filled with family to celebrate my sister’s birthday today.

When my youngest bounded into my bed this morning and asked where we were celebrating her aunt’s birthday, which coincides with Norway’s May 17th celebration of their independence (think born on the 4th of July Norway style) and I told her Ikea…she laughed like, “What? This makes no sense? These nutty adults are insane!” and repeated back to me “Ikea? What?”

This child has such an incredible amount of natural logic, you can not explain senseless ideas into her. I like to think that I am the squishy toy dinosaur that if you place in water, when it becomes a hundred times its original size, that size is my daughter. She kept asking me Why? Why Ikea? I told her that when she grows up and understands how people live really far away from each other, they meet in the middle to eat Swedish meatballs. Especially on the day Norway gained its independence from Sweden.

Not only was I at an Ikea cafeteria for five hours today, while I was there I got an email newsletter from Lefse Time, and we concurred, sweet Lord above, I really am one hell of a first generation Norwegian-American.

While there, I talked to my brother-in-law about MQA for a little while and told him my dilemma about posting a story on Mary Richardson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. estranged wife, that I wrote the day before she died, which was yesterday. (When I told my friend Bob about it last night at a PTA meeting, how it was so weird that I wrote something about someone so obscure and then they died the next day, he said in perfect flat dry delivery, “You killed her.”) I told my brother-in-law I have been warned to not write about all the rich and powerful people I have met in my life and all their stories I carry beautiful ugly details of. And that I don’t really see what can happen to me if I tell true tales of the 1%. Who reads MQA anyway, certainly not anyone that, that bobblehead Nancy Kissenger knows? He said I needed a mentor or a role-model to guide me. I thought I need a lawyer, because I should be able to say whatever I want. I paid a heavy price for all of this freedom.

I have nobody that keeps me quiet. No parents or family, no husband’s job, no job that I need to shut my mouth at myself, none of that…that would keep me quiet. I can say and write whatever I want. Can’t I?

I didn’t start MQA to write. I never kept a journal, I never wrote anything down, ever. Me writing stories on this site is like I’m standing on a stage nervously cracking jokes to stall the audience until the main act appears. I’m looking stage left waiting for a giant cane to pull me safely off stage. This project is about having parties for books I want to eat like soup or roundtables to talk about uncomfortable topics that I am curious about or interviewing a priest or a morbidly obese person just to ask “Why are you so fat?” But that requires a whole lot of organizing and I, as one person who is lost thinking most of the time can’t possibly have enough parties to produce enough material for consistent postings to a blog. So I figured I’d better just start sharing some stories in-between parties.

Along with never writing before, I never followed blogs before either or had any interest in them. Lo and behold, Mad Question Asking is a blog where I mostly write.

We left Ikea and I spent the drive home thinking about how funny the PTA meeting was the night before because a “county” PTA representative was there. She kept interrupting the meeting to throw her county weight around and ended the night with a speech about how important the PTA is and said these exact words, “The PTA touches children and it is really important to touch children.” I laughed so hard, and thanked the universe for giving me the foresight to attend a meeting where a speech was made with those words in that combination and spoken by such a self-important woman. I also thought about how I didn’t add any of the songs from The Kinks Arthur to my mix tape yesterday and that was a shame but I could never pick just one or two from that record. Mostly I thought about freedom and how I know that the cost for freedom can be so high, especially when it feels like you are in a two foot by two foot room with four doors and no matter which door you open you will hurt someone you love or who loves you or if you say something honest, you’ll have to suffer the consquences. I feel grateful I don’t carry that burden anymore but have a deep understanding and sincere compassion for those who do.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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High School Mistakes and Murder

15 May High School Ingrid 1994

My history, as far as formal education goes, is pretty bent. In my adolescence I attended many different public and private schools, some that required blazers and bobby socks. I was pulled out of school for a year, to travel abroad with my family of six, and participated in a correspondence school that functioned out of Baltimore. My sister Chris, nine years my senior, acted as my teacher and her own, she lost her senior year to this trip. A gigantic brown leather briefcase carried our books, pencil sharpeners and envelopes for mailing tests. That was the best school year I ever had. Reading Robinson Crusoe sitting in grand hotels in Europe and learning about Greek mythology while touring every marble quarry in Italy as your dad shops for 16 tons of marble is a pretty stimulating way to learn. On that trip, I also learned things like asking “where is the bathroom?” would lead you to a room with a bath, not a toilet.

By the time I got to high school, I was dark and angst-filled. I was (am) a Wednesday’s child, watching River’s Edge and Heathers too many times. Nobody was paying attention to me by then. Nobody really had in the past in my pirate-like family but now that I was grown, I think my parents figured I could manage my education on my own.

I was enrolled in a Catholic high school, and rather quickly became a very poor student. If nobody was going to look at my report card, what then was the point in working towards a top-shelf slip of paper?

I had this Italian language teacher, Mr. Semptinfelter, and when I begged him to pass me for freshman year, trying my best to charm the life out of him to avoid summer school, he put his left hand on my right shoulder (I can feel that hand resting there now as I write) and he paused, tucked his chin in, looked deeply in my eyes and said so kindly that yes, he’d pass me but I had to start to take my own life seriously.

I drove my nails into my dewy palms and bit the tip of my tongue hard enough to bleed to stop my eyes that were glued to his from crying. My being, body and muscles made tense under his compassionate hand on my shoulder. The kindness of strangers, or in this case a teacher, is a tenderness that will bring me to my knees weak as a kitten, strip me of my fuck-it attitude that is my flippant coping mechanism. I came from a rough tribe of people who, clear to me, descended directly from savage Romans and Vikings. My people would cut your heart out in seven seconds flat to toughen you up, especially if all you needed was a hug. I’ve always thought this could’ve been a reflex of thousands of years of hereditary cruelty, one that I planned to unlearn.

Mr. Semptinfelter was gay with colorful v-neck sweaters that I want to remember being soft, pure Scottish cashmere but doubt that on his salary they were, and had a partial 80s new waveish mullet. He would try to engage me in class, asking me if I liked The Smiths in Italian. “Ti piace il Smiths?” “Si.” I identified how it was personalized and sweet of him trying to reach me but I had enough trouble with English, I wasn’t interested in learning another language. I simply lack a phonetic toolbox in my brain and often think this is why I lean so hard on what I see and feel. I found out too late, well into my twenties I was or am dyslexic, this accounting for some of my rotten school struggle I guess. I failed Spelling in the second grade, and remember wondering why nobody was helping me as much as I remember feeling shame. I very often pronounce words wrong but luckily I don’t give a shit and say them anyway, because the way I see, hear and store words in my vocab cabinet is elusive and messy and often I’m not sure how I end up stringing words together or how they even got in the cabinet in the first place. (art-ant-ica instead of Antarctica or arc-annie for anarchy are two common examples of how I turn words around. Oh, but how I wish that anarcho- primitivism could just roll off my tongue but it’s much too hard for me to say so I just read about it instead.)

I promised Mr. Semp I’d work super hard as his hand rested on my shoulder and catch up that summer so that in the Fall I’d be ready for Italian II. I was in Norway that August trying to work on my promise when my brother phoned and told my mom that Mr. Semptinfelter wasn’t coming back to school that September. Well fuck him, I kept my promise and he upped and abandoned me? Adults, you just can’t trust them! I stopped catching up and went back to poorly imitating the girls in Heathers, picking a different color to wear each week.

My next Italian teacher was Mr. Pisani. He was a sweetheart too, new to this country. He would look at us in such seriousness, with those huge ancient Italian eyes and tell us we needed to focus. But when he said it in his heavy accent, it came out “You need to fuc-kus!” We’d all giggle, me howling, almost rolling on the floor, him not getting why his words poured like diamond rain from heaven, to a room of 25 16-year-olds.

High School Ingrid 1994

One day after school that Fall, I walked into my house to find my HS principal, sister Mary, sitting across from my dad in the kitchen (HQ) and to my eyebrow lifting surprise he told her that “Sure, I’ll make a sizable donation to your school, on one condition, my daughter needs to learn Italian and speak it fluently to get my money.” This was so important to my dad, for all of us part-Italian kids of his to speak this language, two of us already did by that point. She promised that Mr. Pisani would do as he wished. I smiled to myself and left the room. I had everyone under my thumb now, blackmail in my future.

I didn’t need to do shit. She wanted his money, which I knew he’d never give her. My dad hated nuns, and loved to walk right up to them and tell them three inches from their face how they’d wasted their lives, marrying Jesus, when they should have been making babies instead. I’ve never seen someone so actively advocate for a non-religious world. If he passed a car full of Hasidic Jews, he’d coast right next to them, honk and look at them and laugh hysterically pulling on his own imaginary earring curls.

My Italian class happened to be the last period which made this even better, I just stopped showing up, had my boyfriend pick me up before school ended and we’d go see movies and make-out in empty theaters at the now gone Pennsauken Mart movie theatre or go fishing in the Pine Barrens. I liked that he always hooked the worms on for me. When Mr. Pisani questioned my absence, I told him to go talk to sister Mary, knowing she’d tell him to pass me. I was given straight A’s that year, and never picked up a finger to earn it. Disgraceful, that woman nun.

The only steady interaction I had with Mr. Pisani was when I started to sell cigarettes that I stole from Wawas and 7-11s for a dollar a pack, he was one of the half a dozen teachers who became regular customers, selling them to him in his classroom’s closet with a closed-door. Talk about fundraising.

My friend, who was old enough to drive, and I would circle convenience stores from Pemberton to Cherry Hill and fill her Honda Accord’s trunk with stolen cigarettes. Cartons cost $24 back then and would be right out on the floor of the store. I’d quickly stash the cartons in my leather bottom navy L.L. Bean book bag that I used for six straight years, trying to grab favorites of our customers. I’d dash out of the store fueled on adrenaline to my very funny friend sitting in her running get-away car, smoking, laughing and blaring My Bloody Valentine. We never got caught.

Well, in the next school year, something terrible happened. Mr. Semptinfelter, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, a man who didn’t ignore me, or sell me out and bestowed a kindness that I can still feel, was murdered.

He went to one of those cheap sex shops out in Bordentown up Route 130 and met some 19-year-old male prostitute and took him back to his house. The whole story was not known for weeks, because the prostitute, on strangling him to his death during asphyxiation from behind, decided to stuff Mr. Semp’s naked dead body into a closet in his attic and push a desk in front of it. He stole his car and split. His defense had something about him being partially retarded and this caused him to not know what to do about his client dying.

As you can imagine this was a tragic scandal of the highest suburban proportion. This man taught children, he was a catholic. I went to his funeral with a band of friends all sitting in our wool pleated skirts, burgundy v-neck sweaters and grey knee socks. We were so sad, it didn’t matter how he died. He was dead. And to this day I can’t hear a Squeeze song and not feel choked up that I’m still breathing and my ears get to hear a song he loved but can no longer hear. “I bought a novel, some perfume, a fortune all for you…” sinks my heart every time. Rest in eternal peace Mr. Semptinfelter, you were a very kind man.

I hate that we live in a culture where sex is so puritanically misunderstood, laced with cheesy taboo and controlled by cultural shame. We don’t stop ourselves or others from pissing and breathing? Yet the very basis of being human, an animal who thinks (about sex), is crushed under the weight of this perverse denial, far more controlling then any government or religion.

Dude died during I’m guessing one hell of an orgasm. Or he was violently murdered. We will never know. Sure it’s a messy story but why is there so much shame in sex, desire? Maybe Mr. Semptinfelter would still be alive if he could’ve just been accepted in his Catholic Italian culture as an asphyxiation-loving gay guy?

At 17 I didn’t think what he did was wrong or gross, it just made me sad. I think my education being sold out by a nun (a confirmed lesbian that dated my chubby cat-loving senior year religion teacher for years) and being able to sell stolen cigarettes to my teachers in closets at 16 was way more disgraceful. And now looking back, maybe all that Heathers and River’s Edge watching was just a precursor to my own twisted end of adolescence. Art imitating life from behind?

I will always miss Mr. Semptinfelter. I think he taught me a couple of things in this life. One is that you can reach people through kindness and direct eye contact and the other is that I should never deny my own desire and sexuality so that it leads me to be stuffed naked and dead in a closet, metaphorically or literally. To never be the oppressed or repressed and to have sympathy and kindness for those who are.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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It’s Father’s Day and Everybody’s Wounded

13 May

Last night I hosted a film screening for a documentary about female genital mutilation, Mrs. Gundo’s Daughter and it was ultimately more upsetting then I was prepared for.

I went into this thinking, “Ok, I think male circumcision is wrong, this will feel like that. I will accept and respect this practice yet be personally against it.” No. No.

FGM is so wrong, such a crime against humanity. It is performed to control a woman’s sexual urges and pleasure. It varies in how much is cut, and in some cases everything is removed, making carrying a child full term impossible for some.

What the fuck is wrong with us? Why is it that we are born complete and then our human minds turn around and go, “you know what, let’s chop off the fruit of small females, let’s put implants in our breasts and make billions selling breast cancer, let’s make men with hair on their backs think they are apes and unfuckable, let’s say it’s sinful for one man to fuck another man in the ass when it’s just another hole, let’s make women cover every part of themselves except their eyes because they are all whores baiting men’s desires, and while we are at it let’s culturally enforce heterosexual marriage and monogamy as the white picket fence that I’m guessing half of all married people are drying up and rotting behind and then needing the food channel, porn, pills, and yoga to get through the day because it is also really unnatural.

“Sorry Sally, you are all I think about, but Jane and I have a mortgage and Kevin won’t do well in college if I do the one thing I want more than anything and touch you. But on my death-bed I will still be dreaming of you and wondering how your tender lips would feel on the base of my neck.” (This is a version of what I think goes through a lot of people’s minds.)

Whew. Too much??

My point is, that to have human sexuality oppressed by an idea is so very sick. I just simply can’t believe how much we are willing to inflict control on others through FGM, laws of gay matrimony, or how men and women buy into the insecurity of their bodies imperfections and then force one another to feel badly about saggy boobs or back hair.

The night ended with me being upset and asking where all the baby twats got thrown, “did they flick them like boogies into the field?” and an hour-long Q & A where an MQA newcomer (who I really was happy to befriend) awesomely interjected this:

“What about Santa? What about lying to our kids about him? How do you all feel about that!?”

Then it came out, that for her on Christmas growing up, she and her siblings had to stand in front of a cardboard fireplace and say the pledge of allegiance.

We all laughed and worked out this woman’s misdirected anger towards the fatso from the north and all was right with the world again. Shiny, heartbreaking, ridiculous and bright.

For me, to be told of the patriotic ridiculousness inflicted on this woman and her siblings in the middle of a painful discussion on the violent ridiculousness of FGM, balanced it all out. Not because I wanted an escape from my anger or feelings at that moment. But I realized, we all suffer from all sorts of idea-based nonsense, be it tradition or religious in origination, and it is all ridiculous and painfully relative, isn’t it?

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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MQA Presents its Parenting Style

10 May IMG_1586

Parenting is instinct for me, but it appears that for some of my peers this is just not so.

The parents who waited until the biology almost came to pass. The threshold of high-risk, the fear-inducing forced marker where they were “ready” to start a family, or, when it must have finally sunk in that they weren’t actually going to set the world on fire so their mind twisted its self-absorbed direction and like a Phoenix rising in their womb, the most perfect human to ever live was made. And then the rest of us have to suffer the existence of every embarrassing mommy blog that results from these perfect births. These people have zero instinct, it was taught out of them, replaced with the insecure entitlement of having many masters degrees that never even got them a job they’d actually want. They know diddly squat shit about Character Strengths and Virtues (look it up) and will make a generation of people who are Frankenstein versions of themselves, licking every imagined tiny wound or slight they receive, all the while forgetting about the seven billion other humans here on Earth. Well not me, and not my kids.

What kind of radical crazy-ass mother am I, you ask?

I don’t care where my kids go to school. Blasphemy! I don’t, or I don’t right now. They’ll learn how to read and write just fine and if they have any of me in them, they’ll be freaky good at math. The things I want them to know I have to teach them myself.

MQA presents its parenting style or what would Pippi Longstocking would have wished her mother could have taught her if she hadn’t died.

Lesson One: Tell it like it is. When my six-year-old asked me in a small voice if ghosts were real, I replied, “How should I know? I don’t even know what the hell we are doing here.” She slapped me on the back, laughed and ran off, fear removed.

Lesson Two: (this is huge) Just because somebody said something, that doesn’t make it true. There are no words that will empower my kids more than these when their friend or classmate hurts their feelings. “Your shirt is ugly” or “so and so doesn’t like you.” It works like a light switch, power restored.

Lesson Three: What you believe is your business. My four-year-old is a self-confessed child of science, she doesn’t believe in God or Santa. This brought my six-year-old to tears, fearing something bad would happen to her sister. I told her to mind her own damn business. They are both entitled to process what they are told and see with their own eyes and form their own beliefs. This goes for everyone, they better respect other people’s beliefs, for it is none of their business what somebody else thinks, especially on the other side of the world.

Lesson Four: Don’t listen to the guy whose voice you hear above you in CVS, he’s trying to trick you. Especially when he says on Veteran’s Day, “Support the troops today and get your flu shot!” After I loudly said, “Jesus fucking Christ!?!” in disbelief, wondering who exactly was cashing in on that one or was it a splitzy, I bent down and looked at my girls, pointed up to his voice and told them he was a liar, and don’t ever let anybody make money off of you by pulling your heart-strings. And… just get the flu.

Lesson Four. On the playground look around, if one kid is being left out or shy, include him if you feel like you can. Never join a group of people and pick on somebody, and if you see it happening and feel brave enough, bust it up and always stick up for the weak or outnumbered. (This is the most important lesson of all.)

Lesson Five. When my daughter came home from kindergarten and said a kid tried to cut her arm with those puny little kid scissors two days in a row, I thought good, and told her to speak up for herself. “Tomorrow, look him in the eye and tell him he’s not allowed to do that to you and then tell your teacher.” I’d rather her learn how to defend and stick up for herself at 5 then 25. Plus, something’s always bugging a bugger, ask him what’s making him so angry if he’s your friend.

Lesson Six: Eat what is put in front of you, don’t complain and say thank you. If somebody took the time to buy and cook food for you, learn to be grateful and have respect. This is perhaps the toughest one to enforce.

Lesson Seven: Magazines are stupid.

Lesson Eight: Don’t steal someone’s thunder. Jealousy is ugly. Be happy for other people when they get a compliment or achieve something. Compliments are not passed around like Halloween candy. When it’s your turn, you’ll want your friends to be happy for you.

Lesson Nine: Buy them and their friends candy and chocolate and tell them to scram regardless of the other parent’s rules about sugar. The coolest adults when I was growing up handed you dollar bills and candy and told you to scram. They didn’t discuss how to deal with getting hit by a ball for two hours.

Lesson Ten: This is for the parents out there who forgot they are adults with beautiful, glorious minds… find an interest other than your kid. All this attention you are giving them, either because you wish you got this kind of attention or feel so pressured to parent like every other dip-shit who obsesses over their kid’s happiness, is going to cause your kid to grow up and be really disappointed that the world doesn’t find them nearly as fascinating as you do. They will end up hating you for it. Back off, step away from your kid, and get a grown-ass hobby. Let them figure out how to entertain themselves with their own beautiful, glorious minds.

For us, most of this works out. Of course they fight me and don’t always understand, but it’ll all stick at some point. I want my kids to question everything and be brave enough to be kind, always think of others, and learn how to do the hardest thing of all, forgive. I hope one day they will forgive me for failing them, because I have and I will, and grow up to forgive themselves for not being perfect either.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Mushroom Hunting

8 May

There is a place on my favorite island in Maine where I go mushroom hunting. Hunting for me, means looking, not touching. This place is dark and dewy with beds of moss, pine needles and fallen leaves. It sits in the fold where two mountains meet, and nobody really goes there, just me. I like to go far off the path and remember to not pay too much attention to how I will get back, hoping that if I turn off the neat and tidy order of a modern mind that maybe, maybe then I will find magic.

I came across this little queen last August, hidden deep in the woods.

 

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter

5 May

On Saturday May 12 at 6 pm, MQA will host a film screening of Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter. The film was produced by humanist filmmakers Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater of Attie & Goldwater Productions.

Following the screening, MQA will host a Q & A with our friend Sandeep, who works with International Planned Parenthood and worked on this film.

The following is the film’s description which I pulled from here at Attie & Goldwater Productions.

MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER is the story of a young mother’s quest to keep her baby daughter healthy and whole. It is also the story of the African tradition of female genital cutting, which dates back thousands of years—and how it affects people’s lives in just two of the many places where the practice is being debated today.

Mrs. Goundo’s husband fled drought and ethnic conflict in his native Mali, West Africa sixteen years ago. Mrs. Goundo came to the United States in 1999. Together, they are raising three young children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

To stay in the U.S., Mrs. Goundo must persuade an immigration judge that her two-year old daughter Djenebou, born in the U.S., will almost certainly suffer clitoral excision if Goundo is deported. In Mali, where up to 85% of women and girls are excised, Mrs. Goundo and her husband are convinced they would be powerless to protect their daughter from her well-intentioned grandparents, who believe all girls should be excised.

MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER bridges Mrs. Goundo’s two worlds. In a Malian village, we see 62 girls, six months to ten years old, preparing to be excised just as their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers were before them. The girls are warned they must be brave and not cry, although, as one mother tells us: “The pain is very deep. There is nothing we can do to lessen it.” We hear Malian activists fighting to end the practice, and traditionalists who defend it. We see its deep roots in the largely Islamic culture.

 4,500 miles away in Philadelphia, we hear Mrs. Goundo’s friends from West Africa tell how, even though they themselves were excised, they are determined to save their daughters from the pain and the sometimes horrific health consequences of ritual cutting. Mrs. Goundo is the first of her community to seek asylum on these grounds, and in MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER we join her friends’ anxious vigil as they await the outcome of her asylum hearing.

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Her Whiteness

3 May Nordicism, bottled and sold.

Being in Scandinavia last week and being intentionally conscious of my white skin was different from past visits when I was not paying attention to it. During the two days I was bathing in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, I only saw one black woman, two black men and maybe half a dozen Indian men. I was at the airport in Reykjavik three times in eight days and it was a busy sea of very tall white people. I am 5′ 10″ and was average height in this crowd, I’ll admit it made me feel something I wasn’t expecting, to not be the tallest gal in the room.

It’s really white in Iceland. If you’re paying attention to your whiteness, it’s weird. Or not, I know not every developed spot on Earth is going to be a kaleidoscope of color, and probably not this isolated northern island that doesn’t even have trees. But I truly wonder who besides the minority in the room or the ones filled with hate are paying attention to it? Are you paying attention to how racially mixed your surroundings are? Does it matter or mean anything to you?

Two summers ago I started to pay a lot of attention to it. I realized that every summer I’d spent in Mt. Desert Island ME for the bulk of my life, was a place with mostly white tourists or visitors. That summer, the same summer the Obama family came for holiday, I started to look around and spotted almost no nonwhite people. Except the very dark Caribbean workers shipped up from Florida hotels to work in Maine hotels in the summer. I started a head count at every regular spot I frequent that summer, from the Opera House Cafe where I drink bad coffee and check my email, to Sherman’s where I buy books and counted almost no nonwhite people. Millions of people descend on this island every summer, but according to the statistics running in Ingrid’s mind, the guests were 95% white.

Besides fairly regular incidents of stereotyping (the bitchy cousin of racism) for being part Italian, I had been living a white life for so long I didn’t consciously even think about it, thinking that because I am not racist that I got a pass but what the hell? Part of my life is spent in all white places? What does that mean? Is it like the pat-yourself-on-the-back wealthy liberal towns with great schools and picturesque holiday parades that only have mostly white residents? These places are everywhere, in every state, I live next to two such towns. It’s plain exclusionary and full of intentional, silent or unconscious racism.

Why do we want so badly to be with look-a-likes? Does it feel like something, is the difference in our skin tone filled with fear? Fear of what? Is it a conscious thought? Is it biology? Is there nature involved? Jesus, that sounds creepy and hitleresque even to write down. But for all the colonialism, genocide, racial superiority and skin lightening cremes I just want to really fucking understand why it’s all so. Why do hate and racism exist?

It was a bit frustrating to be in Norway last week and not be able to watch the Breivik trial because the news is in Norwegian, a language I don’t speak. (Norwegian is just not a language that you hear spoken in NJ, perhaps if I’d grown up in parts of Brooklyn or Minnesota I’d be fluent.) There was also no wi-fi at my grandmom’s house, so I just did a lot of question asking instead, and this is what I gathered. But I need to give you some back story.

So Norway is a rich (like crazy fourth richest country in the world rich) socialist country. Their money coming from owning a lion’s share of the world’s oil, every citizen a trust-fund kid to one of the richest parents on Earth. They believe in equal, for the most part, distribution of wealth. It’s frowned upon and also hard to become that much wealthier than your neighbor. This of course works really well if your population is small, for them five million people. The average income is 55k a year, everybody has an education and fab healthcare. Every citizen is taken care of very well.

I think in this environment the Norwegians have set up a sort of utopia or experiment by way of ideals. I think that Norway and its ideals vs. Breivik (his trial, its outcome and the whole story) may be a case of chicken/ egg. Norway is a non-violent, very intellectual place and he could just be a one-off, or did these utopian ideals of equality create a monster of such freakish proportions? One who killed 77 people, mostly children?

Most interesting, true to the non-violent and intellectual beliefs of Norway’s people, from what I gathered, Breivik is getting some public sympathy. For being human. It was explained to me like this. The Norwegian news has been reporting and watching his every move. Questioning what it means if his left hand touches the right side of his nose. And I was told that all this minute detail is forcing some Norwegians to see him in a humanistic way and creating sympathy for him. This feeling is not about his crime. For some people this may be impossible to understand, in particular Americans. But with Norway’s commitment to non-violence and humanitarianism I can see how they’d feel this, the ones who do. He is a human being, a terrible one, but human none the less. I found this so fascinating, like being in the future, or in a book. His sentence and trial an experiment, so different from the barbaric way the rest of the world would deal with a barbaric criminal of this type. But I wonder, when it comes down to basic human nature, is this utopian country a model that would even work anywhere else, will it work in Norway? Or is Breivik showing the very hidden extreme side of nationalistic nordicism, possibly a feeling many have?

Nordicism, bottled and sold.

There’s more.

I started to think about love when I was rolling the idea of hating a person based solely on their skin color, religion or origin around in my mind. (When I don’t understand a perspective, I try with all my might to wrap my head around it, get deep inside it, usually sitting in a chair lost for an hour.) Maybe hate works just like love? Maybe the mechanics are the same. It’s easy to love your family, children or friends. You have a history with them, it grew. Same way hate for family and friends can show up, history. But to love or hate a person (with little or no history present), type of person or group of people is maybe the same too. Love gets a lot of attention in its mystery, um like every song ever written amount of attention. To fall in love with someone you barely know, there is no logic in it, no reason. But still it exists quite powerfully in you, physically visible to the outside world, even glowing off of you, and that power of deep feelings overrides reason and logic. Maybe feeling hate is the same? Maybe the feeling is as powerful and mysterious as falling in love? Maybe it swells inside of you with no logic present and forces you to behave irrationally. Just like the fool in love?

I may never understand what I believe is the complex stupidity that is hate and racism but I want to. My good friend Anjali and I talk about this topic all the time. We even joke that it’s an awesome hobby we have, albeit strange.

I wish more people would want to understand racism, really deeply think about it. I think the hoodie nonsense in FL was a perfect example of just how unwilling we are, as a society, to talk about what’s really happening. The moronic hoodie sound bite told me a couple of things. One was that as a society, the level of critical thinking is startlingly shallow and in this kids case, life-cheapening. I kept wondering if he had his pants below his ass, instead of a hoodie over his head, if celebrities would have been photographed like that or would society have silently agreed he had it coming to him? And to be just so plain dumb to get swept up in a story about a hoodie, and talk about that, because it is just to uncomfortable to address what really lurks in our minds. If we did talk about racism, maybe than we could get past it. Maybe.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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