PeaceBang

Did I Already Tell You This?

MenDon’tLeave
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I recently caught part of “Men Don’t Leave” on the television a few weeks ago and remembered why it is one of my all-time favorites. Starring Jessica Lange, Arliss Howard, Chris O’Donnell and Joan Cusack, this is a cinematic antidote to those gruesome Julie Roberts flicks where mothers overcome adversity by lip-syncing Aretha Franklin tunes into their hairbrushes while their progeny dance around the bedroom in fits of faux glee.

This movie is about real pain following the death of a daddy, and starkly reveals the awkwardness and depression that come with not dealing with grief in a perky cinematic li’l way.

Watch for the scene where Jessica Lange kisses Arliss Howard on one of their first dates and her nose starts to bleed(ohmigod! humiliation!) or when her emotionally neglected son (heart-wrenchingly played by little Charlie Korsmo)prefers to spend the night at his friend’s house rather than come home to mama. Watch Jessica’s very body communicate her sense of maternal failure and shame.

Joan Cusack, who should have been nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar for this work, is nothing short of brilliant as a comfortably eccentric, dumb-as-a-fox nurse who initiates a sexual relationship with the teenaged Chris O’Donnell. Brazilliant comic work grounded in truth and a wonderful grasp of a complex character.

I dare you not to cry your eyes out when Jessica says, “Matty, you don’t always have to be so GOOD.”

It’s not out on DVD, get your VHS players ready and put the Kleenex nearby.

"Bewitched?"

scarynicole
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I had to clip this photo from a very nasty celeb gossip blog, PageSixSixSix.
Photoshop or no photoshop, this is what botox hath wrought. And it’s sad.

Remember the sleestaks from “Land of the Lost?” Did this just take you back to Saturday morning, circa 1973?

Twenty Two Years Without Him

My father Carl has been dead 22 years today.

He was 50 years old and had already had a few heart attacks before this final, fatal one. You’ll appreciate this: he suffered this last heart attack while addressing a conference of his professional peers. When he felt the familiar chest pains he coolly stepped away from the podium, beckoned his secretary Mona Kay from the wings, told her to call an ambulance, and stepped back to finish his address. I imagine he was as nattily dressed as ever in one of his impeccable suits, smashing ties and soft leather Bally loafers. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a handsome beak of a nose. He had a full ’stache and piercing chocolate chip eyes behind glasses. He was short, and he walked like he knew it. Lots of short man attitude, but never Napoleonic. He had a commanding presence and a wonderful deep voice which was perfect for singing fake opera, which he did often at home in the bathroom.
He did not suffer fools easily. This was said of him at his funeral, and hundreds of people exploded with laughter. Oh yea, they murmured.
It was also said of him that if you ran into him in the hall at the end of the work day, you would look at your watch at the end of the conversation and realize you had missed two trains. He was an extroverted gabber.

I am very much his child.

His last words were, “Take care of my babies.” He had three: 19, 17 and 14 years old. Such a domineering Jewish papa he was. Difficult, demanding, volatile. He wrote to me in a Valentine’s Day card one year that he was so proud of me his heart swelled (”a sometimes unhealthy thing to do”). I think too much love and passion to achieve and feeling killed him.

I am very much his child.

About a year before he died, we were driving home from dinner at my Uncle Marvin’s, chatting with great intensity and mutual admiration as we always did, and my dad pulled into a little parking lot about ten minutes from home. All the stores were closed so I asked him why we had stopped. He was holding onto the steering wheel of his chocolate brown Mercedez-Benz and weeping.

“You’re going to be such a great woman and I’m not going to live to see it,” he said. He knew “his ticker,” as he called it, was likely to give out. All at the ripe old age of 50. Because he was one of those type A+ guys who just couldn’t quit.

When I came home from school one evening less than a year later and Mom said those fateful three words, “Honey, Daddy died,” it smashed something in my insides that has never knit back together. I don’t think it ever does. (Dena, this is for you, whose so-called “friends” expect that you’ll be done grieving your grandmother’s death in a few months).

I was in the grocery store this past Saturday afternoon when I heard a song that used to play right after he died that used to just flatten me with grief. I don’t remember all the lyrics but the singer asks, “Is everything alright? I just called to tell the world how I miss you” and “Is everything okay…?”

Hearts can break
and never mend together
Love can fade away

Hearts can cry
when love won’t stay forever
Hearts can be that way.

Something like that. I never did ever memorize the song. I think it’s called “Hearts.” I can’t really stand to hear it or “Claire de Lune” by Debussy, which was the last song played at his memorial service. Yet I always seem to hear one or the other song at moments I most crave his presence, even when I’m not aware of it.

So I was standing in the Stop & Shop and a wave of grief and longing hit me so hard I actually could not move. I stood there glued to the floor in front of the pharmacist’s counter remembering that spring 22 years ago when I was a teenaged girl and I had just learned that I would never hear my father’s voice again, never hug him again, never cuddle on the couch next to him to spend an evening lulled by the sound of his voice hollering bloody murder at the NY Giants.

That T.S. Eliot knew what he was talking about.

April is the cruelest month, and I sure do miss you, CDW.

The Other John Stewart

The Other John Stewart
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

S.O.P.B. (Sister of Peacebang) had an unfortunate Accidental Folk Music Experience the other night. She and a group of friends thought they were getting tickets to see brilliant lefty political commentator/comedian Jon Stewart (as in “The Jon Stewart Daily Show”). When they got to the venue, they sat down at a table, ordered some food and drinks, and discovered that they were in for an evening of John Stewart of the Kingston Trio.

We are not Kingston Trio fans, to put it kindly.

To add to an already very bad situation, the entire joint was filled with reverent Boomers and Eldsters who made not so much as a peep (”They weren’t even CHEWING!”) while Mr. Stewart played, causing S.O.P.B and her hapless friends a terrific case of church giggles.

As they escaped after the first set, tiptoeing out like the Von Trapp family past the Nazis, they could hear two similarly-confused twenty-something guys just getting into the theatre late and saying “What the HELL…?”

The Book Meme

Perigrinato “memed” me on his blog. I don’t know what the hell a “meme” really is, but I know when I been double-dog dared. And then Chalice Chick did the same thing. Awright then, here we go.
It’s… THE BOOK THING!

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Given my lame memorization skills, it would have to be something that lends itself to drama, like the Viking Library’s The Portable Dorothy Parker collection. Which I adore. Madly. Damn Miss Rose. In a world where books have been outlawed, I would be happy to risk my life to bring Miss Parker to a hungering and thirsting citizenry.

The last book you read is…?

I just read the novel Gilead, given me by a colleague. It was sweet and pastoral and featured some lovely writing and a wonderful narrator. Also an extended meditation by Margaret Wheatley called Turning To One Another, which basically suggests in the nicest way that we are totally destroying the planet and we’d better straighten up and fly right or DIE and take Mother Earth with us. Nice with morning coffee.

What are you currently reading?

Currently stacked around the house in strategic reading areas:
On the stairs to be taken up to bed: The John Adams biography by David McCullough.
William Ellery Channing essays and sermons on the kitchen table. Marked to “Self-Denial” (try that with chocolate!).
In the living room, the sermons of John Emery Abbott (not touched since Christmastide, I’m sorry to say).
Conde Nast Traveler magazine, and Shambahla Sun (Pema Chodron on the cover, something about anger which I’m too irritated to read — please give me my Entertainment Weekly now, mummy, I was good all day).
I am reading the brochure of the life story of a woman who lived in the Kalaupapa leper colony in Hawaii. A congregant just gave it to me.
Also, and finally, The Worship of the American Puritans by Horton Davies.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

To remind me of what I hated and shall never miss about the civilization I left behind:
something by Anne Coulter, something that celebrates the life and presidency of George W. Bush, something by Jack Welch, something from the Left Behind series, and then the Book of Common Prayer so I can read my own funeral service before I take my cyanide capsule and die. I do get a cyanide capsule, right? A blunt instrument? A sharp coconut shard?

Something about “have you ever had a crush on a character from a book:”
Well, I always swoon with adoration for John Adams whenever I read about him (sorry, Abby). Likewise, when I read Mr. Emerson’s journals I just want to go on a long, holding-hands walk with him. I don’t think he’d want to make out with me, though. For hot, brooding, dysfunctional Scandanavian romance, there are the protagonists of Knut Hamsun’s novels Pan and Victoria. I loved Dr. Larch (Larch, was it? I can’t quite recall the name) from The Cider House Rules. And I mean, who didn’t have a crush on Almanzo Wilder and Pa in the Little House series? (I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no Michael Landon, either). Or Cap Garland? Wasn’t he the Little Hottie on the Prairie!

And no one asked, but…

Some best literary girlfriends and idols: Harriet M. Welch, Melanie Wilkes, Mame Dennis, Cathy Trask (deliciously evil!), Medea (girl, I feel you), Liesl from The Deptford Trilogy, Michael Mouse from Tales of the City, both Kit and Hannah from The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Who are you going to pass this baton to (three persons)? And why?

If I pass this baton I’m likely to accidentally hit someone on the head with it. I never was the best marathon runner or twirler. If you’d like to grab this baton, by all means…

R.I.P.

The Pope
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I kind of like the idea of John Paul hanging out in heaven with Jerry Orbach.

My friend Scott (Boy In The Bands) once said that he believed we would see each other in heaven, and that we would know each other there.

The idea of being expected in someone else’s heaven was all I needed to comfort me forever. I’m still very afraid of dying, but not of Death. Because I have at least one friend expecting to see me on the other side. We will blog for all eternity.

I Just Thought You Should Know

Patriot Squirrel!
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

this courtesy of Planet Dan, one of my favorite blogs.

If you’re pretending to be working while reading this, I would not recomend that you look at the rest of the images.

http://www.sugarbushsquirrel.com/index.html

Squirrels and rampant militarism disguised as cute kitsch. Two of my favorite things.

Peacebang is Deliriously Happy

Well, I’ll be. I am just now picking my jaw up off the floor after reading a smashing, challenging, throw-down-the-gauntlet sermon composed by Funky Ethan and given at a recent gathering at the Unitarian Universalist staff at 25 Beacon Street.

Ethan’s sermon reads like something out of my own journal and basically begs the question: “Hey ya’ll, um, why can’t we consider ourselves a Christian denomination, and why should we let the skeevy right-wing hypocritical bastids who make Jesus cry and bite his nails claim the ‘Christian’ title when we’re historically and culturally Christian, and plenty of us are Christians theologically and spiritually, too!? Just not in the orthodox sense!”

Ethan’s low christology may cause some of my more Christ-centered UU comrades to wince (I hope not), and he’s not as clear on Unitarian christological tradition as I’m sure he will be, but by gum, the kid’s got at least half a dozen breathtakingly intelligent points, and he makes them with affection and panache, and best of all… he’s a life-long UU, so he’s got that particular street cred.

Could this be the beginning of the real revolution in UUism, when the next generation doesn’t break out into hives every time we crack a Bible of mention Mr. Jesus of the Christ family?

Go ahead and read what he said, won’t you?

http://www.fuuse.com/article.php?story=20050330080559463

And read the comments of the kids afterward. It will warm the cockles of ye heart; if you have cockles. I’m not sure I do.

Peacebang to Ethan: “Holy Ghost power! Holy Ghost power!” (a la Robert Duvall in “The Apostle“)