The greatest wealth is health. Virgil

“GROW A PAIR!”

I had forgotten how much I missed ‘shouty.’ The real kind of individual, educated and well informed shouty, and not just the protest chants sung in unison at organized demonstrations. Sure, that’s terrific and there isn’t even enough of that these days, but nothing beats an informed voice—or fifty or more— hollering to a politician and basically saying, “You just listen to me for once!”

There was such a protest in front of Carolyn Maloney’s office on Third Avenue and 93^rd Street this afternoon. She’s my Democratic representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ms. Maloney made only a brief and apologetic appearance, explaining to the protesters that she’d had to be in Washington D.C. for a vote and, in fact, there was a car waiting to whisk her away to the airport. Her assistant appeared without a coat and in the brisk winter sunshine valiantly tried to answer everyone’s very shouty complaints.

I grew up without health insurance. We were a family who lived marginally in a housing project in Astoria, Queens. My father was a self-employed antiques restorer, which meant his income, when it materialized at all, was erratic. His clientele, such as they were, came from the very wealthy avenues in Manhattan and his services, though valuable when a beloved heirloom needed repair, were not often amply rewarded and just as often he was the last person on a long list of creditors to be paid. A rabid Conservative, he was just as cowed by the rich as he was bitter about government. To be on welfare was a disgrace and made you one of ‘them.’ Well, we were ‘them.’ We may have been, as residents of Astoria, considered part of the so-called Silk Stocking District then (I’m not sure where the boundaries lay at that time), just as I am now, being a long time inhabitant of the upper East Side, but we knew who wore the silk stockings and who didn’t.

Our health care needs were seen to only in dire emergencies. Then, when the fever was too high or we were covered in spots, our family doctor would make a house call. It cost money my parents didn’t often have but a doctor’s fee never broke the bank in those days. Visits to the dentist were not regular and I recall only a couple of years when my sister and I saw a dentist with any consistency at all. Nothing sophisticated about his practice, our young teeth were drilled mercilessly, and I came away with a mouth full of mercury and absolutely no real education concerning healthy teeth. It would be many years later that I would find out I had a serious genetic condition that should have been seen to when I was a child.

I married into a wealthy family—the ones who gloried in that ‘Silk Stocking’ appellation—who lived on Park Avenue. While their son’s health care needs were seen to mine were not even discussed. Divorced, I remained an adult without health insurance because my employers did not provide even basic coverage, never mind paid sick days.

I did the best I could on my own and had a few scares that were mitigated by angelic doctors who found a way. One, who I adored and who saw me through a crucial time eventually left the medical profession, undone by it all. In fact, until my early forties when I remarried and The Mister got a job that provided health insurance, I was pretty much winging it. But even now we struggle with inadequate dental insurance, and shudder at the expense of new eyeglasses which are not covered. There is no complimentary medicine that is valued among the medical profession covered under our plan and when I walk into a doctor’s office the first thing he’ll tell me is that at my age I should be on whatever drugs it is that people of ‘my age’ are on. When I saw a dermatologist for what turned out to be a painful case of shingles, her assistant was blatantly shocked that I had not listed even one medication that I took regularly and stopped short of accusing me of not being entirely truthful. A GP I once saw pooh-poohed my resistance to prescription drugs and assured me I would be happier on whatever cholesterol medication she was shilling even though my cholesterol was normal. “You’ll need it eventually, so why not get started,” she sagely advised. When she pretty much sneered at my vegetarian diet and admitted she’d not heard of soy milk I bade her good day and never looked back. I can break a leg though and if it doesn’t mean a starring role on stage for me, at least it means the bones will be repaired and covered by The Mister’s very basic health insurance.

Most of the protesters this afternoon were my age, some years older. And they were pissed! “Call them what they are at this point! Unconcerned. That’s what they are. They are un-American!” “Let them go”, another shouted. “They aren’t even listening to us.” One woman, clearly disgusted suggested in a loud, uncompromising manner that our president should, “…grow a pair!”

That smarmy turncoat Joe Lieberman would have gotten his comeuppance from voters who are damned well fed up with the likes of him. When Maloney’s assistant patiently advised that we might wait and see what Obama’s State of the Union would deliver regarding the issues, I’m afraid the President didn’t fare too well either. “Bring back Howard Dean,” they chanted. “Get rid of Rahm Emanuel!” Music to my ears.

The recently reported dictate by insurance providers that hospitals would have to notify them within the first 24 hours of a patient’s admission or the patient would lose up to 50% of their benefit caused outrage among the protestors. They loudly demanded a public option while a few of the older folks interjected and reminded the crowd that it started out as a campaign promise from Obama—that he would fight for single payer. “That died a pretty quick death.” “Let them filibuster!” another shouted. One woman proposed rather meekly, “I gotta say we should get what we can at this point and then incrementally a bit more at a time.” But she was roundly shot down. Why pay for insurance execs salaries? Why pay for the advertising those companies are already bombarding us with. “Single payer. Single payer,” repeated one man and another a few years younger who had been pressing for the public option agreed he was right. A middle-aged man, perhaps in his fifties, said he worried dreadfully for the Democrats.

But my favorite activist of the day was a white-haired man in an old-fashioned peak cap reminiscent of the men in my father’s time. When one of the organizers of the protest tried gently to shepherd him behind the barriers—that lovely New Age area called a Freedom of Speech zone—he snarled and said, “I don’t like the word ‘barriers’.”

MORE PHOTOS CLICK HERE

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”—Muriel Rukeyser

UNMOVED

Okay so I never would have bothered watching The Golden Globes if it weren’t for the gleeful irreverence I have come to expect from Ricky Gervais. I like to see the pointy bit of snark puncture the inflated, self-generating praise at these award ceremonies. I doubt that we’ll ever see the likes of a Native American woman accept an award as she did for Marlon Brando’s role in The Godfather and excoriate the Hollywood community, at his behest, for their racist portrayal of her people. No simpering squaw she.

There surely wasn’t a sign of that at the Golden Globes among the ribbon-wearing glitterati—even with Ricky’s barbs—in that room full of entitled celebrities who can single handedly turn back time. I mean did anyone catch Cher up on stage? Still, Gervais was chewed up and spit out by critics the next day. Nothing of his ‘schtick’ made them laugh—not the gleeful reference in a crowd of tight smiles to cosmetic surgery (duh), exorbitantly expensive, confidentiality-demanding celebrity divorce (duh), celebrity adoptions (duh), and the hysterically funny introduction to a now not-so-closeted anti-Semite—“I like a drink as much as the next man…unless the next man is Mel Gibson”—tickled those critics (double-duh!). It’s what the Brits delightfully call ‘taking the mickey.’ Married as I am to one of their kind I have been at the mercy of that sport, but when I have tried, in vain, to invoke it myself, well, woe betide to the American who tries that in a roomful of Brits. It’s a distinctly British phenomenon and better left to the well-practiced experts.

This year I actually got to see a few fine films and a few that were crap. Being able to afford a movie is relatively new again, so, “Yay” for the senior discount. The Mister, more than a decade from that dubious milestone, stands aside at the ticket window and, full-bearded, is automatically allowed the discounted price of admission. Who knows where we will be in ten years so get it while we can say I. Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Precious, The White Ribbon, Moon, District 9; all were deeply satisfying film experiences for this moviegoer. Some were hysterically funny, others imaginative on a small budget, politically challenging for our time and deeply moving if not strongly disturbing. What they all had in common was uncommonly good story telling. Other films like Sunshine Cleaning, Crazy Heart and the mostly hauntingly beautiful film, Before Tomorrow, were not entirely brilliant works of art or strong directorial achievements or even significantly great performances but they had more than their share of good moments. Kate and Anna McGarrigle scored the music for the Innuit film, Before Tomorrow, and it is especially poignant in light of the sad passing of Kate McGarrigle. But small as these films are, they gave us a couple of hours of pleasurable escape with—I’ll say it again—good story telling; gentle reminders that not every film has to be great and if I don’t find myself repeating my social security number in my head or thinking about what needs to be done at home or did I leave the oven on, or what hellish kitten chaos will greet me when I return, that’s a plus. Other films I saw, like Up In the Air which pretended to be comedy about people losing their jobs and suicide was only meant to get the preppy head of the firm to rethink his strategy for firing employees; Pirate Radio manipulated (re: watered down) history and which I can’t begin to dislike enough despite brilliant turns by Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; and the even more forgettable, which I can’t remember, were crap.

It was a pleasure to see Mo’Nique glowingly accept her award for an outstanding performance in Precious that must have been brutally hard for her to elicit such soul-searing pain and still create a real human being. The rest of the awards? Not so much. I had not seen most of the films and the television entries escaped my notice for the most part. Medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy are just soaps with blood and gore. I can’t watch House because I have seen too many hysterically funny episodes of Black Adder and Jeeves and Wooster to be able to bear Hugh Laurie’s dour, pill-popping, American persona. I do like Nurse Jackie's dour pill-popping American personality though.

But even before the awards night talk of Avatar had already shifted argument into high gear that sometimes very nearly approached verbal knock down drag out proportions. Basically I would have been happy to ignore yet another over-the-top animated spectacle. 3D glasses that oik up the price of admission are no draw either. As well, James Cameron is a director I avoid, actually run from. The Mister and I were fairly rigid with boredom during the epic-long screening of Titanic and finally bolted over the knees of the audience irritated from their rapture as we made our way to the exit, not really caring how many more times Jack would call shuddering from the freezing ocean: “Rose! Rose!”

It started with me curious as to why certain friends whom I consider to be enlightened ended up raving about it. I read an article condemning it for being a “White Savior” movie and passed that along. Indignation ensued and I was told in no uncertain terms how wrong, how pathetically far reaching the author, an African American woman, was in her misguided criticism of the film. Following the earlier threads on facebook among people I do know, some I hardly know, and some of whom I have never met and now can call “friends” I sensed dissention in the ranks. Some loved it, some didn’t. Those with children had another take, which usually meant, “What can I do? There are so few good kids’ films about?” A few, from abroad, threw in the ‘American schmaltz’ complaint. Some reported it was the best thing they’ve seen since Star Wars. Others claimed it bored them to death or it gave them a migraine.

I decided to see for myself and headed to Times Square for a ridiculously early showing of the film at a humongous theater on 42^nd Street. Ten o’clock in the morning is the time I am usually on the running track at the reservoir in Central Park or if I have had a late night of it, fast asleep under warm kittens that have finally given up trying to tell me when to rise. But the film had already left other theaters around town presumably—in the spirit of the current vampire-y trend—having drawn the last bit of viewers’ blood, and swollen with a take of over a billion dollars would now focus corporate’s insatiable appetite for revenue by re-inventing itself as a DVD with all the requisite extras to further pad the coffers. An unexpected perk was the relatively low admission price of six dollars for any showing before noon. I had my choice of seats, being only one of half a dozen viewers in the cavernous theater. A couple of older men made their way up into the rarified air and I overhead one of them say as he forged past me slightly out of breath: “Look at the size of this. We gotta go higher. The screen is still big.”

I lifted the armrests beside me and settled in for the duration. First I had to sit through half a dozen previews of what looked like the same film. It certainly sounded like the same soundtrack: A Carl Orff chorale extravaganza assaulted my hearing again, and again, and then again. Blood and gore splashed across the screen from one preview to the next until the characters and the over wrought special effects became indistinguishable from each other. I get it: Gary Oldman is evil. Denzel Washington is good. Russell Crowe is, well, Russell Crowe. Titans will clash and Robin Hood will forever be remembered as Gladiator II. None of these films will be on my “must see” list anyway. But I was more than a trifle irked by the preview for some hate-spewing rhetoric by those old reliable liars Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly. Both men are off-putting enough but leering back at me from a huge screen with nostrils the size of moon craters they were positively frightening—and before noon no less. Then there was that patriotic team of propagandists, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, with yet another stirring drama about what war really, really is like. Tucked right in there among all these previews was an ad for some arm of the military and this really, really infuriated me. It was shot like a Wagnerian opera on steroids with—you guessed it—that Orff chorale hammering away at the viewer. The tag line? “A Hero Will Rise.” Because we know what war is like—really, really like—don’t we?

But I was talking about Avatar, the film that won the two highest awards at the Golden Globes of best director and best film and might as well have stuck a gun in Quentin Tarrantino’s back and growled, “You wuz robbed!” From the beginning, like a dog sensing dangerous territory ahead, my (imaginary, yes) hackles were raised. After the opening shot of the Marines being dropped onto the planet Pandora (subtle, not) and the one black actor to fill the screen, the entire cast—apart from one young Asian woman and a male scientist who might have been Indian or Pakistani—was white, white, white—the human cast that is—until one chubby black man suddenly appears with no discernible purpose among the white scientists near the end of the film.

Black actors delivered voices of the main characters of the Na’vi. The gentle natives were all blue, of course. The features of these exquisitely built and incredibly strong inhabitants of Pandora were not those of a thin-lipped, weak-chinned white scientist who had no compunction at all about prodding her Asian assistant to “Chop, chop” to her demands. When that same anthropologist is somehow allowed into their midst, the Na’vi women gather around her cooing stupidly about how pretty she is. Right. One would have thought the director might have gone to a little more trouble in finding an actor who really was prettier than this gorgeous race of females. And a people so evolved as the Na’vi, with their long, deeply rooted history of communing with and respecting Nature can easily be understood, even conquered by a seemingly under educated, white Marine, self-described as a ‘jar head’ in just a few months. Right, again. It’s an old rehashed story that should be put to sleep once and for all. But Cameron seems not to have any compunction about stealing bits from other old, rehashed stories like Kevin Costner’s epic failure, Dancing With Wolves. Resorting to stealing an old engineering joke and calling the precious substance the Marines are sent to kill for ‘unobtainium’ is just lazy. Billion dollar lazy

Any rant about the racist implications is much better served by reading an article by Ezil Danto online. She is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, political and social commentator, author, and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. No shrinking violet, she states categorically that Avatar is indeed a ‘White Savior’ movie and wastes no time with literary special affects in backing that up. Her references to Haiti are eye opening. She aptly quotes Richard Pryor: “Do you have any dreams? They’ll want them too.”

And as for one friend’s stated opinion that Avatar was so brave a film and such a powerful condemnation of the Bush years that she wondered how it ever got made I say there is more bravery and blatant excoriation of our government in any one episode of the former television series Boston Legal or a film like “Three Kings” which, under the guise of comedy, fingered the real criminals of war.

Will kids come away from this extravaganza wanting to change the world, reverse the course of murderous civilizations that exist on our planet today intent on bending nature to its will? Will they go no further than thanking that bit of chopped beef on a bun before devouring it or will they actually see a connection between torturing animals for food and creating even more aggression in the world? Will they grow up to actively resist being drafted to fight unjust wars and bear the punishment that will rain down on them from a government hell bent on ‘civilizing’ the natives of the world who do worship nature? Will they ultimately be depressed to find out that there is no mythical Pandora and shiny, tiny things that alight on the Chosen One will never alight on them? Will they be disappointed to learn that a white man is not the highest order of all beings and must, in most cases, destroy the lives and rituals of others who do not believe as he does, have a darker skin than he does and who aren’t particularly impressed with ‘pretty’ when ‘pretty becomes their jailors. Or will blue skin and snakey dreads become the Halloween costume of choice this year? Maybe the film needed Ricky Gervais in the lead, you know, just to lighten the moment.

To friends who are parents and ask what I think is a good children’s film I am woefully unprepared. I adored Babe and the follow up, much darker story of Babe, Pig in the City. I grew up to Lady and the Tramp and Bambi. Later it was the likes of Old Yeller until as a young woman I discovered foreign films, especially the black and white kitchen sink dramas of British filmmakers. Ken Loach’s 1968 film Poor Cow was my introduction to the genre and I never looked back. Until a saccharine-laced French film called Cousin, Cousine I thought all foreign films were the best. I have just seen the most current kitchen sink from Britain directed by Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank, with a jaw dropping performance by a non-actor named Katie Jarvis.

I left Avatar as soon as the big yellow eyes appeared on the screen and in the elevator I struck up a conversation with a young man who worked there. “Have you seen Avatar?” I asked him. He had. Did he like it? He gave me a non-committal smile and said he did. Sensing some doubt, I asked why he liked it. He smiled again shyly, mumbled something about special effects, and asked if I liked it. “No”, I said quite more determinedly than I had intended. He asked me how come and I replied that I was kinda over the story of the almighty white guy going in and rescuing the natives. His eyes widened. He said, yeah, he knew what I meant. “Did you see Pocahontas?” he asked. When I replied that I had not he said, “Same thing.”

Shrek will be 3D in its next incarnation. Hopefully filmmakers like Werner Herzog and The Coen Brothers will resist the temptation. But as far as Avatar goes, I think children deserve better. I think we all do.

“It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”—Marcel Proust

RESOLUTION NUMBER NINE

It’s the second day of the year. There are a couple of Christmas crackers still to be snapped. The last of the mince pies have been gobbled and very nice they were. Like certain scalloped-shaped cakes, they stir slumbering memory for The Mister. Christmas treats like Malteasers, Cadburys, Walker’s squirrel and stilton crisps, and chocolate tree ornaments have long since been devoured and are already forming unwanted pockets of bodily excess on my person. Requisite holiday alcohol in addition to the red wine staple—like rum for the soy eggnog, bourbon for the organic Christmas pudding from Sainsbury's, gifts of Grey Goose vodka and ruby port—has been drunk. A prettily decorated bottle of sangria mix remains unopened. Directions to just add brandy and fruit make the sangria sound suspiciously like a bottle of red wine and better left for the summer. We managed to resist the annual intake of Stone’s Ginger wine. Champagne at the New Year was not given much thought except to agree that we wouldn’t miss it. Bailey’s only rears its preservative-laden head when we are in Montauk so we avoided that car crash of a hangover this time.

A few nights in a hotel on the ocean at the tip of Long Island has, for the most part, been the preferred setting in which to welcome a New Year. Montauk was not in the cards for us this time. Old cat passing and new kittens’ arrival decided for us and we stayed close to home. We declined invitations to parties and went instead to V&T’s with a good friend on New Year’s Eve and indulged in one or a few slices of their brick oven pizza. Later the Mister and I were watching fireworks shot over the now defunct Tavern On the Green, joined by a couple of our neighbors. It was cold. It was raining. The street-wise ducks made barely a protest and from the looks of it as they sailed around the reservoir they were also enjoying the spectacle of wintry fireworks over the skyline. It was lovely.

Runners thundered past us at a few minutes after midnight on the drive below the bridle path. Some were in costume for the annual Midnight Fun Run, which The Mister and I participated in many years ago. My favorite was the quartet of ver-r-ry happy young women outfitted to represent the numbers 2,0,1,0. They quit the race where we stood at the 97^th street entrance and wobbled themselves into many configurations of those numbers as they made their precarious way on the path to Fifth Avenue. Bewigged in neon-colored afros they giggled and fell all over each other. But they did manage to hail a taxi. The ‘clowns in a car’ reference did not go unnoticed as we watched them drunkenly pile on top of each other in the cab. We went back to our apartment and settled into vicarious party going while watching Tom Jones on Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny and finally drifting to a classic episode of The Honeymooners where Ralph saves the day.

The Mister and I require only one thing regarding the New Year when we have not been able to get to Montauk; that we are near a body of water. Central Park’s reservoir served for the eve and on New Year’s Day we took the long subway ride to Brooklyn, standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Coney Island with a lot of other New Yorkers, and fewer tourists, to watch members of The Coney Island Polar Bears Club lead the rest of a crowd of enthusiasts—or lunatics—into the freezing ocean on the first day of 2010. Unlike the one-time, toe-dipping participants on Friday afternoon, Polar Bear Club members continue their endorphin-raising mad winter bathing every Sunday. For a native New Yorker like me, it was a welcome atmosphere, being surrounded by the generally good nature and sly humor of other New Yorkers who were born here. I can’t explain it any other way than no matter how crappy a childhood or what youthful memories lay best undisturbed, it feels like going home. And The Mister is still a sucker for a twangy New York vernacular.

It wasn’t all funny faces, gooseflesh and deflated beefcake on the beach. The Polar Bear Club sponsors Camp Sunshine in Maine and everyone was encouraged to donate. On the shores of Sebago Lake little kids with big life-threatening illnesses get to spend time with their families; a respite in a beautiful and rustic haven.

I went to a Camp Sunshine when I was a girl. We lived in Astoria, in the borough of Queens. I went away one summer to a place I suspected, even then, was a camp for underprivileged children. My mother saw a listing for the place in the church bulletin. Any cost would have been prohibitive to my parents but the free pass of the righteous had them packing us off straightaway . Our summer camp adventure took my sister and me to the Watchung Hills in New Jersey for two weeks. Uncle Frank drove us there and back. In the car with us was my Aunt Fran and my non-driving parents. Camp Sunshine was less than an hour’s drive from New York City. A nudist camp, en route, with the same name caused Uncle Frank to lose his way every time. The joke never got old. On the weekend they visited and my sister and I would be collected at the camp and we’d drive into the nearest town of Bernardsville. Years later I’d recognize the place as Kennedy-Bouvier stomping grounds and probably a town of horsey polo playing residents who didn’t take kindly to our father and uncle downing beers in the town bar while we kids were left to our mother and aunt in a laundromat on the main street with a weeks’ worth of dirty clothes.

Church deaconesses, called sisters, organized the Christian camp’s activities. Bunk house arrangements based on age kept me relatively free from the unwanted attentions of a younger sister who operated largely on wrath. There was a swimming hole—mud hole more like— that we hiked to; rows of wary urban fledglings trudging under gigantic power lines over scrappy unmarked trails through fields of cow pats . The first tentative dip and the unfamiliar ooze between my toes on the bottom scuttled any further attempts. Blasted from our tiny bunk beds at the crack of dawn by sadistic “Sisters of Mercy” we stumbled in the near dark trying to dress while the badly played trumpet bleated relentless reveille; relieved if we were not the ones chosen to empty the chamber pots of a morning.

Breakfast was a bleak affair and we looked like diminutive prisoners, shadowed under the mildewed rafters of a screened-in shed, seated bleary-eyed at long wooden benches before our bowl of gruel. I am not given to early rising still. A chaperoned field trip to a penny candy store was made bearable for kids with no pocket money when we were told we could ‘sign’ for our sweet purchases. Thereafter we were given a set amount from our visiting parents and told to make do. Fields of corn surrounded the camp and successfully prevented me from venturing too far. I was a project girl. Corn, free standing fields of it in huge numbers, was an unknown not to be traversed. Escape was an overreaching desire

The following summer I wriggled out of the camp experience. Realizing a too small bedroom which had to be shared with an annoying younger sister would be free of said sister if I stayed at home, I hit on some reasonable excuse or other—I can’t remember what—and probably enjoyed blissful solitude for a week or two, not to replicated before I was finally on my own.

Even then I was keeping some kind of record. I had diaries, pink leatherette volumes decorated with a pony-tailed teen in perky attitude and poodle-skirt. A flimsy lock was meant to be broken by a prying younger sister and I didn’t seriously begin to keep a journal until I was in my early 20s. Because I have been writing short stories for the past year I have been mining my journals for details I thought I had forgotten but which come back to me in requited light. It’s a fascinating read for me because I have sometimes forgotten the strength of my youth in order to forget the pain. As compelling, if a little off-putting, is the seeming drive to be morosely honest in my accounts.

I had kept up in my journals with admiral persistence but it became sporadic at best in the last four or five years. The most valuable thing I take away from re-reading my old journals is that writing things down in a kind of honest heart-to-heart with yourself can only be a good thing. I had already resolved to return to journal keeping, apart from the blogging and short story writing, when I was given a journal at the holiday. I considered it to be a sign from the Universe and vowed to make some notation every day that affords a glimpse beneath the surface of events, no matter the difference between that exploration and merely listing what I ate and drank of a day, what the weather was like, who I spoke to and what upset as well as delighted me at any time. The eight other resolutions I made this year can remain private and will only see the pages of my journal. The journal is resolution number nine.