PeaceBang

Michelle Kwan is Golden To Me

I would like to say spiritual things about how it’s ridiculous that such a dedicated and talented athelete as Michelle Kwan should not be content to have won a silver and bronze medal at the Olympics, but that’s not the world we live in.

She’s injured herself again, after having received medical clearance to skate in Turin, and she’s taken herself off the team. There will be no more Olympic dreams for Michelle.

This is one classy kid. Hard-working, gracious, out there perfecting her craft at dozens of competitions and providing lots of little girls an athletic icon. She done good.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11302192/

I’m sorry, Michele. I wish you well. I’m not quite ready to get excited about Emily Hughes, ’cause I’m too sad for you.

Second Best UU-Themed Blog!

The winners are in, and that was fun!
http://uupdates.net/uublogawards/votes

Philocrites won Best UU-Themed Blog, and I am very honored to be in second place behind him, barely edging out Left Coast Unitarian and The Chalice Blog — two of my favorites (and they both won other awards).

Congratulations to all the winners, and many thanks to all of you who pay those of us who blog the compliment of reading our thoughtful essays, sermon excerpts, techno-musings, prayerful reflections, cultural snark, and midnight ravings.

PeaceBang GA Dinner Party

I know it’s early, but if I’m going to make reservations for a huge crowd, we need to start early.

Who’s interested in a GA UU Blogger’s gathering?

We’ll have to get the schedule to see what night would be best, but I wanted to generate interest early to see who might be going. Keep in mind that GA starts on Wednesday this year and ends on Sunday evening.

I have my eye on this joint:

http://tinyurl.com/amzkh

One More Hour to Vote!!

This is so cute.

http://uupdates.net/uublogawards.php?step=results

Looks like I’m not going to win any UU Blog Awards, but I was mighty tickled to see that I am tied for second place for “Best UU Themed Blog” as of this writing (10:30 p.m. the last day of voting). That really knocks me out, since I never meant for PeaceBang to be UU themed, but I think it’s cool that it’s perceived that way.

Go ye and vote!

"Frozen" In February

I saw “Frozen” on Wednesday night at the New Rep theatre in Watertown. You can read about it here:

http://www.newrep.org/news/20051229frozen.html

The play had some faults: it’s a bit sentimental and pat, and one of the three characters is far inferior in complexity and nuance to the other two. But the play, dealing as it does with the nature of evil itself, is riveting. Nancy E. Carroll gave a smashing performance as a mother whose 10-year old daughter is abducted and murdered by a pedophile serial killer.

I’ve been pretty blue since I saw it, which doesn’t surprise me. Old Dame Melancholy typically gets a hold of me this time of year after the highs of the holidays and my birthday and vacation are over. We’re coming into Lent, church folk tend to be weary and a bit cranky, and Valentine’s Day reminds me of the way I was cruelly and silently dumped by a lover two years ago and haven’t dated anyone since. I had a really stupid, pointless date last night: it was *way* more fun to go to Barnes & Noble and grade papers.

What if, as “Frozen” posits, evil and sadism are really the results of frontal lobe damage and screwy synapses, and not an incarnation of an ontological evil at all? What if the reason so much sexual perversity and violence are tied together is a purely neurological phenomenon and not due to the human animal’s disturbing capability to invent particularly vile and humiliating forms of physical and psychic harm to commit on the bodies of others?

Does this make me more optimistic, or less? What, then, of the rock-bound Unitarian conviction of the moral improvability of all humans?

Life Is A Cabaret

I’ll be parked in front of the t.v. tonight watching my favorite sycophant, James Lipton, interview Liza Minelli. My inner gay male is going to be in heaven!
The only drawback is that because I just had a crown put on my tooth, no popcorn.

Look, I know many of you think that Liza’s ridiculous. But when you grow up a terribly sensitive, terribly anxious, terribly sad child whose only outlet is the theater, Liza is one of your patron saints. Liza makes being out of control into an art form. Liza makes a show tune into a sacrament. Liza is the child of an alcoholic and pill addict who makes the point that addiction is a disease better than any AMA report could ever do: after seeing what her mother (who had, I think, the greatest singing voice in American popular music) suffered, why and HOW could she have picked up the bottle or the pills? “Because, darling,” as she’ll tell Lipton (I saw the tail end of an earlier broadcast) “It’s a disease.” TELL ‘em, Liza.

I saw her live in Chicago back in the days when Mother of PeaceBang was fresh out of rehab and we were all incredibly hurting and scared and I was in the middle of a two year period of feeling paralyzingly terrified all the time, often walking around campus weeping. Liza was also fresh out of one of her many stints at Betty Ford, and of course she sang her signature song “Cabaret” near the end of the show:

I used to have a girlfriend known as Elsie,
with whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.
She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower.
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour.
The day she died, the neighbors came to snicker,
Well, that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor.
But when I saw her laid out like a queen…
she was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen.

And as for me,
as for me,
I made my mind up back in Chelsea…
when I go, I’m going like Elsie! (and etc.)

That’s how it goes, and it’s a song I’d known and loved for thousands of years (”Cabaret” was the first big production I was ever in — I lied about my age and got into the ensemble when I was 14). But this time, Liza sang,

But as for me
As for me,
I made my mind up back in Chelsea,
when I go…
I’m NOT goin’ like Elsie!!

The crowd went absolutely wild, and I sat there in my box seat and blubbered like an idiot, as I still do when I remember it. It meant more to me than I can ever express, and I realized two things on that night: first, that we were all going to survive the pain of Mom’s getting well, and second, that no matter how cheezy or warbly or histrionic Liza would ever get, she had the magic of a true, eternal star and I would love and worship her all my life.

She’s NOT goin’ like Elsie, and you can see her tonight on Bravo, 8 pm EST.

English Teachers and Papa Hemingway

Hunt’s comment in my Hester Prynne post of yesterday reminded me of something I wanted to share with you all from my recent trip to Spain. While I was there, I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and also his short story collection, Men Without Women.
Can you believe it? I had never read any Hemingway but The Old Man And the Sea before, and I was just flattened by admiration and appreciation.
Couldn’t really tell you why. I guess because his writing is just so clean and macho and honest, and there’s a tender kind of funniness to it all, and he writes characters and doesn’t judge them. He just lets them live there on the page.

There I was loving Salinger so much all along — and all those other cool guys of the mid-20th century– and never knowing that Hemingway started it all. It’s so obvious when you read him that he started it all. It’s like seeing Brando: you say to yourself, “when he started doing that, everyone’s hair caught on fire and they all wanted to do that, and who could blame them?” Raw, real, totally unmannered American male (but yet somehow totally mannered), riveting.

It’s been a long time since I was an English teacher, and as I read and loved The Sun Also Rises I thought to myself, “There was a time when I would have assigned this book, and been marking it up for quizzes and essay assignments. What a pleasure it is to just read it and not have to analyze it even one tiny bit.” I don’t know what you’d do with Lady Brook Ashley anyway. She’s just a rampant slut who’s far too beautiful for her own good, and I adored her. Madly.

(Just being able to read for pleasure makes me look forward to retirement, when I can read, observe or experience meaningful things and not have to think about how to use them in a sermon.)

But please do go and find Men Without Women. “In Another Country” is just the saddest little story about the ways that huge public catastrophes like war aren’t as hard to take as little, personal catastrophes like losing someone you love to a perfectly ordinary disease.
“A Canary For One” isn’t much until the last sentence — the last sentence!! — where your mouth drops open and you go “OH!!” and then laugh and laugh in a bitter way, as though you and Hemingway had a private joke. And “The Killers” is just one of those delicious macho things that reminds you of Dorothy Parker’s ability to bring an era of American life and dialogue so totally alive.
I personally re-read “A Pursuit Race” three times in a row in a hotel room in Barcelona because I was so enchanted by the dialogue — I finally just had to give in and read it aloud. I’ll never sleep in sheets the same way again.
“Now I Lay Me” is something every neurotic spiritual type should commit to memory for those nights spent in the arms of the god Insomnia, and geez, I just plain admire the tight, satin pants off “The Undefeated.” I read that twice in a row, too.

I might even go so far as to say that Gaudi and Hemingway were the two big unexpected inspirations I found in Spain.

He’s hot.

.

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Three Grand Dames

Betty Friedan.

Coretta Scott King.

Wendy Wasserstein.

All of blessed memory now, may they rest in peace.

Three women whose ovarios were always humming in the far background of my girlish youth, making me foolishly believe I could be anyone I wanted to be.

On NPR today a female interviewer spoke to an old friend and political comrade of Friedan’s and stated in almost the first sentence, “She was loud, wasn’t she?” The friend demurred. She wasn’t falling for that. Then, three seconds later, the interviewer tried again: “Some people thought she was abrasive.”

Woman, we’re talking about BETTY FRIEDAN here! BETTY FRIEDAN, who’s so fresh in her grave she can’t even properly spin in it yet, listening to you pull that ole sexist garbage. Hey Lady Interviewer, here’s a little tip from Feminism For Dummies: 21st Century Edition — when women are strong and opinionated, we don’t accuse them of being “loud and abrasive” anymore. We leave that to Ann Coulter.

Ihad the pleasure of seeing the iconic Coretta Scott King speak in Baltimore, MD a few years ago and was blown away by the force of her presence. She was all admirable things, and I haven’t forgotten the experience.

UU Blog Awards

I’ve been nominated for UU blog awards in the following categories, which is just so nice of ya’ll (or just Philocrites). I decided to spend a few minutes scrolling back through this year’s entries to choose a few representative samples, in case you’re being a conscientious voter. I’m sorry I don’t have time to provide links for everything, but my archives section works pretty well and you can just scroll down to find the entry if it doesn’t pop up first. As I said, these are very random and not necessarily my favorites, just representative for the category. So ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration:

Religious Writing or Theological Commentary:

“Spiritual But Not Religious” 1/24/05
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=9873156&postID=110658436470850057

“Oy Vey, Not Again” 2/2/05

“Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down” 2/10/05
http://tinyurl.com/a7pwt

The Little Compton Series, beginning March 2005 with http://tinyurl.com/8ktpl
and culminating with Easter Sunday, “It Matters To This One,” 3/27/05
http://tinyurl.com/exnao

“Are They Worth Praying Over?” 8/20/05

Review or Cultural Commentary:

(I’ve reviewed lots of movies and awards shows, the Brangelina affair, and all kinds of pop culture nonsense but it seems I’ve been nominated for my piece, “And I Am Convicted,” which I wouldn’t have thought of as review or cultural commentary but I appreciate the nod anyway!)

Anecdote or Narrative:

“Redeeming Weddings” 9/24/05 http://tinyurl.com/93da4
“Snake Shooter” 9/5/05
“22 Years Without Him” 4/05/05 http://tinyurl.com/7fjwu

Best Writing

Best UU Themed Blog

“Do We Pray?” 9/11/05
“Squirming on Sunday Mornings” 1/29/06 http://tinyurl.com/bvpkg

(P.S. Love and thanks to Jaume for tuning me into the joys of tinyurl.com!!)