That's Empress to You

Thank you AP Chemistry

If you ever leave your hummingbird nectar - because you are the queen of hummingbirds, to whose feeder hummingbirds flock like pilgrims - boiling for like two hours while you sit in your office doing heinous work which you are professional enough not to name, and the alarm company calls to see if you are being consumed in a house fire, and the hummingbird nectar is now a hardened lava mass in your expensive saucepan, do not fear. Scrape out most of it, and then boil a mixture of baking soda and water. You will watch as the hopelessly hardened tar-like mass flakes off as if by magic.You will watch the black flakes form the image of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Lance Armstrong, one after the other. And you will thank your kid who told you to try this rather than to follow the bad Google advice which says to boil hydrogen peroxide, because while it may work, it may also explode, or catch on fire. You only have to nod and smile when the kid starts talking about carbon and oxygen and so on.

Plan B. Thanks but no thanks.

Yesterday the New York Times ran an Op-ed piece, entitled Plan B: Skip College, revisiting (regurgitating?) the idea that some people just aren’t built for college.  Jacques Steinberg presents the argument that there is an imbalance in the labor force, illustrated by the generation of lots of future titans of industry but no stock clerks, too many doctors (except general practitioners, but that’s another story) and no health aides.  The odious, libertarian, zombie-undead Charles Murray and his spawn are once again pronouncing that “college isn’t for everyone,” and advocating Vo-Tech programs for the losers among us.

They argue that, based on projections from the Department of Education, “[p]erhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years.”  Presumably those who failed to complete their degrees in four years have wasted valuable public or private resources and their own personal time, which they could have spent learning to assemble engines or empty bedpans.  

I am one of those losers.  I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College a month or so into my Junior year, electing to move to New York City to become a dancer instead of getting my degree.  

Now, having just turned 50, after a long career as a modern dancer in New York and San Francisco, an ongoing attempt at writing, work in development and PR for arts organizations, and best of all, a permanent job as the mother of a wonderful kid – I am finally getting my BA.  St. Mary’s College of California offers a degree program for professional dancers – similar to a few offered around the country, including the one at Fordham University favored by NYCB dancers – whereby students receive college credit for their past and current professional experiences, and otherwise gain a quality liberal arts education.   

There is a pragmatic reason for dancers to have college degrees, but an even better reason for us to have college educations.  Professor Richard Vedder, of Ohio University, wonders why 15% of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees.  He says, “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education.”  Well, Professor Vedder, maybe because there are those among the 15%, like the mail carrier who delivered my mail when I first moved to San Francisco, who like to sit on the curb and read Homer.  This didn’t do much to speed mail delivery, but the idea that education is wasted on some and not others is absurd and offensive.

Even if I had never gone back to school, I would never have regretted my two years at Sarah Lawrence.  It was there that I – a lower-middle class kid with a well-meant but totally ineffectual alternative high school education – learned that when writing a literary essay one doesn’t refer to an author as (for example) “Mr. Hawthorne.” I learned to speak French, and that there was this thing called the Magna Carta, that not everyone calls Israel  “The Holy Land,” or the “birthplace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and how to eat a lobster.   

I don’t think the answer to whatever problems these people purport to solve is to select our future leaders and throw the weaker students under the bus. College doesn’t have to guarantee a surgeon’s salary or a Senate seat, but it can and does afford a richer life for anyone who wants one.  In fact, the biggest problem isn’t that college offers false promise  but that many US high schools don’t prepare students for anything but failure.  

Part of the reason I left Sarah Lawrence was to pursue my career, but I also dropped out because I was woefully unprepared to succeed at a Seven Sisters college.  I didn’t know how to critically analyze text, or write a paper; I didn’t even know what a thesis sentence was.  Neither my hippie school nor many of the other traditional public schools offered anything but the most rudimentary math and science.  And forget about the classics, or a decent foundation in history. 

It’s a tired argument, based largely on antiquated, class- and race-driven ideas that allow these people to advocate this kind of redlining in 2010 in the United States of America, which supposedly offers a democratic education to anyone who seeks one.  Sure, not everyone will get a college degree.  Not everyone needs one.  Some will take a long time, like, say, 32 years.  Others will never fully appreciate anything they’ve learned. 

But everyone should have the chance to read Plato, whether it’s at 18 or 45.    Even if I never wore a mortarboard, I’d still be glad I did.  Plus, Jackson has the unique opportunity to attend prom one week and his mom’s graduation the next.  And I get to wear fabulous shoes with my cap and gown. 

 

 

Remedial Dance Instruction for 15-Year-Old White Boys

Listen up guys.  It’s the 21st century. You now have permission to cast off the shackles of your whiteness and your straightness.  And if you’re gay, you no longer have to pretend to be straight by dancing like these other doofuses.  Ditto being a person of color, Barack Obama.  I saw you at those inaugural balls.

First things first.  Please stop standing on the side of the dance floor moving only from the neck up and the knees down.  Girls hate that.  They only put up with it when they grow up because they have your babies.

Do you think that if you move your hips it might give girls ideas, like: “Hey, they have hips.  Maybe they should walk around looking sexy and getting me coffee, and I should run the SEC.”  No, it will make them think… never mind, you’re only 15.  Anyway forget about it, we’ll be running the SEC before you register for “Gender Paradigms 101,” in your Freshman year at Brown.

Anyway, your hips are the center of your body.  If while dancing you move the other parts of your body by themselves you look like you’re trying to flag down a police officer or scrape dog shit off your foot.

Okay, so don’t panic, no one’s laughing at you yet.  Stand quietly, without pushing any of your male friends or making a series of retarded jokes about calculus or someone’s boobs.  Listen to the music and find the beat.  You’ve done this before, in Western Civ.  Okay, so it was Hildegard of Bingham, but still, rhythm is rhythm.  If the song is in 4/4, which is almost always will be at any dance you’re likely to be invited to, emphasize the 2 and the 4.  If you emphasize 1 and 3 you will look like Bon Jovi.

Ask a girl to dance.  If she says no, don’t start saying mean things about her to your friends.  Say, “Maybe later,” and know that when she sees you dancing she will flog herself for saying no.  If she says yes, put your hand gently on her shoulder and move into the center of the room.

Then comes the dancing part.

When moving the hips we talked about earlier, remember, they can move not just forward and backward, or side to side.  Think of the circle of life you learned about in the “Lion King.”  Dancing is circular, as is life.  While dancing your hips should have access to all 360 degrees of this circle. 

STOP BOBBING YOUR HEAD.

Your feet can move too.  The psychological superglue that has cemented your feet to the floor has been blasted to smithereens, like the enemies in Call of Duty 4.  Girls like it when you move your feet.  You won’t step on their toes, and if you do, they’d much prefer that than to watch some kind of sea anemone creature all stuck in one place.

Breathe. Relax the facial muscles.  You look like you’re being poked in the ass, and not in a good way.  In case you forgot: 2 and 4.  Not 1 and 3.

Watch what your partner is doing.  Do not ignore her.  If she moves left you don’t necessarily have to mirror her movement by moving right but in any case, she is surely a better dancer, and you could do worse than to try to imitate her.   If possible look into her eyes.  If you do this she might not notice anything else.

Key Points:
1.    Stop and actually listen to the music before you think about how much shit you’re going to get on Monday.
2.    Know that you do have rhythm in that body, even underneath the plaid shirt. In fact, imagine that you are not really wearing that plaid shirt.
3.    Know that anyone who is making value judgments about your sexuality or ethnicity based on how well you dance is fucked up.  (Except me, and I am only trying to remedy the situation)
4.    Relax.  Don’t panic.  It’s the panicky ones that look like dorks.  Music is king.  If you listen to the music, and give all your body parts permission to move, in all directions, you’re going to be fine.  Or you’ll be a lot better off than you are now.
5.    Listen to different types of music, not just Rancid.  You never know what you’ll run into at a dance, but I guarantee it won’t be Rancid. 

Love, Mom

Spoiler alert: parental bragging

Yesterday Jackson finished the last final of his freshman year.  I feel a wave, a tsunami, actually, of empathetic relief.  This year was tough.  He struggled with AP French Literature.  They placed all the kids who’d attended French middle schools into this class, even though the likelihood that ninth-graders will understand the subtleties of Voltaire and Marguerite Duras is less than zero.  Their ability to write coherently about these texts – in French – is surely less than zero to the 10th power.

His history class was, quote, bogus, end quote.  No comment.  Biology, Chemistry.  No problem.  English: fine except for the visit to the dean’s office.  He talked his way out of the problem by explaining that the Oedipus complex means wanting to, you know, have sex with your mom.  Don’t ask.

I am most proud of him for making it through Chinese 2.  This is a class in which he understood maybe 50% of what was being said at any given moment.  This is not a good arrangement for a control freak.  He wanted to quit after the first semester, but agreed to stick it out through the end of the year.  Now he says he wants to take it again next year, even though studying this incredibly difficult language, at a level that is well beyond his current capabilities has been humiliating and terrifying.  And has lowered his GPA.  When I was a freshman I thought GPA had something to do with golf, but it means a lot to him.

No one volunteers to struggle.  Doing something you suck at basically sucks.  But Jackson did it.  He worked so hard it practically broke my heart.  And in doing so, he learned how to take imperfection in stride, or at least to know that today’s less than triumphant outcome isn’t the last word on the subject. Not bad for a year’s work.

Inspirational Thought of the Day

Waldorf Grand Theft Auto 4

Down at the neighborhood Waldorf School, little children carjack wooden cars and blast the bejesus out of hookers dressed in organic Alpaca wool hot pants and platform shoes made of bark.  Using only hand-carved projectiles shot from catapults.

I love my dorm, now please go away please...

College freshmen everywhere are nervously arriving in dorms bearing armloads of big white bags from Bed Bath and Beyond, a prejudicial assessment of their roommate culled from hours spent examining every facet of his or her Facebook profile, and the fervent wish that both parents would fall into a large pit on the edge of the quad the minute the Ikea bookshelf has been successfully assembled. 

As I hear my friends’ tales of the UC drop, the Stanford debarkation, or the Wellesley brush-off, I recall making my entrance into the ivied portals of higher education 30 years ago.  But unlike most of the kids I know, instead of arriving in a Volvo station wagon, accompanied by two embarrassing adults wearing Tod’s loafers, I pulled up in a Drive-Away car with my 26-year-old boyfriend.  Together we hauled out of a stranger’s battered 1969 Buick Regal a threadbare rug we’d found on the street, a garbage bag filled with animal print bed linens I’d gotten at K-Mart and which I thought were sophisticated beyond imagining, a typewriter given to me at age 12 by my schizophrenic father so I could write letters to the editor warning them of impending nuclear attack, two battered suitcases, one of which contained my prized possession: a yellow Ralph Lauren button-down shirt I was sure would make me look rich like the rest of the Sarah Lawrence girls, and a gratitude bordering on religious that no blood or foster family member was fewer than 1500 miles away. 

It didn’t register until much later that Caryn Rosenthal’s parents were giving me the evil eye as they unloaded five Hartman suitcases, plus a Louis Vuitton trunk from the matching Mercedes they’d driven down from Boston.  It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I found out Jennifer Stone’s Connecticut Yankee parents said I looked like a Vietnamese refugee. 

I was just happy that my foster mother wasn’t stomping into my dorm room with a Lovely Quilt stitched by Calvary Baptist Church deaconesses.  Or that my devil-channeling father hadn’t appeared in Bronxville wearing camouflage and foaming at the mouth. 

I now know that parents – my friends – whom I think are pretty hip, with their well-articulated political views and unassailable aesthetic sensibilities, are as horrifying to their children as Caryn’s parents were to her when they took the RA aside to make sure Caryn’s private phone line would be installed properly and that the Boston Globe would arrive at her doorstep, not just in her mailbox which was all the way down the hill.  Or Jennifer’s mom, who – in those pre-Facebook days – decided she simply had to go to the registrar to make sure Jennifer’s roommate came from a good family.  Despite the nasty looks, I was the lucky one.  My foster mother was nowhere near me, and couldn't therefore have humiliated me with dishtowels tucked into her bra straps to protect her arms from the sun or with a murmured closed-eyes prayer over hot dogs at our Freshman Welcome barbecue.

The uber-cool parents I know are shocked to find that their children are begging them not to bother with the Ikea shelf, and apologizing to their prize-winning community organizer roommate that their clueless mom forced them to buy halogen lamps even though they’re an environmental disaster.  Between empty-nest melancholia, and ego-bursting rejection, being the parent of a freshman is a sorrowful thing.  But being a freshman and having parents who are so... ew... right in front of everyone, is much, much worse.

Volunteer Opportunities for Teens

Jackson is volunteering at the San Francisco Zoo this summer.  He is a ZTA, or a Zoo Teacher Assistant.  Basically this means keeping 13 Pre-K and Kindergarten children from jumping into Otter River, or filling up their zoo buddy’s lunchbox with goat poop, so that the Zoo Camp teachers can teach them about Animals That Dig, or Mammals, or whatever. 

Jack tells me after his first day that he’s learned how to keep the kids “in front of the wagon,” – which means herding them and not letting them fall behind the red wagon that the ZTA’s have to pull around all day, and which contain backpacks, snacks, sunscreen, and presumably the occasional exhausted child.  “I just tell them it’s a tank, and they’re going to get blown to smithereens if they don’t stay far ahead enough.  Or that it’s a monster that’s going to eat them.”  

T. Barry Brazelton, eat your heart out. 

He also says, “I hate crafts.  Oh my God, crafts is so boring.  ZTA’s don’t do anything, except look at the stuff they make and say, ‘Wow, that looks like a green kangaroo with boils.’”

Sounds like a rewarding, educational, empowering week with ZTA Jackson.  These poor children are probably thinking that the zoo's late lamented man-eating tiger wasn’t so bad after all.

Leaving Middle School

Jackson graduated last night.  The ceremony was the usual cocktail of long-winded, sometimes entertaining speeches; awards; girls in fancy dresses and wearing high heels for the first time, those in the first row struggling to remember to keep their knees together; Queen’s “We Are the Champions” as recession march; and the surprisingly tear-inducing sight of all our children accepting their diplomas and shaking hands like the adults they are becoming.

As I contemplated what I should wear over my head so my disintegrating face wouldn’t embarrass him, I also had time to look through the pile of school ID cards I’ve kept since he was four and first started attending the French American International School.   This released a flood of memories accrued over these last 10 years.

There were good times and bad, wonderful things and awful, truly inspired teachers and those who should have been writing grants or doing modern dance or something pointless that had nothing to do with children.  Jackson speaks beautiful French without an accent; can tell someone he has three brothers and a sister in Mandarin even though it’s not true; can do differential equations; and knows how to find Monaco on a map, although it still hasn’t been decided what they do there.  He has wonderful friends whose gifts – from playing amazing classical guitar to being totally excellent at Mario Kart – are collectively appreciated.

Like every kid, he has had some incompetent, officious, mean-spirited teachers, along with the occasional Evil Lunch Lady.  But then there was his Pre-K English teacher, Ellie Fienglass, or Ellie Belly Purple Jelly, as she was universally known before she went off to get a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Harvard.  He named our late beloved kitty after her.  And in first grade he had Marie-Pierre Carlotti, who has shepherded thousands of scared, rambunctious, excited, curious, angry, sweet first graders through addition, and getting along with others, and the first stages of reading and writing in two languages.  Every one of them adored her.  He was fortunate enough to have been taught by Pascal Vallet the cute French world-class body surfer, who brought world-class mathematics into his fourth grade classroom.  And this year, Netta Maclean, the Russian math teacher, who was tough and demanding, but who reignited an excitement about math that these kids haven’t felt since, well, fourth grade.  

It’s been a good run.  The place is not perfect, but I’m very grateful to this school for everything it has given Jackson, and all its students.  And I am so proud of my wonderful son.

Summertime and the Living’s Easy.

Waiting for Chinese delivery on a night when all of San Francisco lies sprawled on its collective kitchen floor fanning itself and croaking, “Cannot cook, cannot cook.  Too hot.  Cannot cook,” I drink my beer and feel grateful for this lovely, unusually hot summer night.  And also that I do not have to cook.

Earlier today I sat in a sweatbox at Jackson’s school witnessing the Power Point research paper presentations of 19 eighth-grade English students.  The highlight for me was the one whose premise held that the Italian Mafia may have been involved in JFK’s assassination and that therefore we need to “get a hold of our country,” and limit immigration.  The other highlight was the statement that, unlike earlier times when immigration to this country was as easy as “hopping on a boat,” the government now makes the process unnecessarily cumbersome, except for “refugees, who have it easy.”   This to me did not seem like a good example of the Critical Thinking about which the school congratulates itself at every opportunity.

Of course, I was extremely proud of Jackson, because his presentation was in every way perfect, ie: not patently moronic, and not mumbled into his sleeve like the frantic garbled excuses of a drunk Congressman just caught with a transvestite hooker.  This good result did not come about by accident, however.  This result required propping my eyes open with the DVD cases of Battlestar Galactica that we did NOT get to watch at 10:45 last night while he practiced enunciating and I harangued him about indefinite nouns.

So tonight, despite a tres importante exam tomorrow we said Frak ‘em all, and with great guilty pleasure, watched Episode 2, Season 2 of BG.  Starbuck is so totally butch. 

Generic Student Roster 1978-2006

Major Suck-up: Chews pen thoughtfully. Always saying stuff like, “Isn’t the difference between Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A-minor and Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique the difference in instruments? I'm sure it’s obvious to everyone that the industrial revolution changed the piano and thus the piano sonata altogether.”

Straight White Guy: Never opens textbook but is unafraid to deliver lengthy dissertations on any aspect of the subject at hand while leaning back in his chair, tasseled loafers/topsiders resting on the table. Likely to explore at length the transportation methods commonly used in 19th century Vienna, concluding that Haydn would’ve preferred the horse-drawn carriage over horseback since let's face it, most of these composer guys were a little fruity, just look at the wigs.

Big Extravagant Queen: Glares at straight white man. Thinks to himself that if he were Madonna he would kick the guy’s ass. Wonders if he can write his paper on Hairspray.

Stealth Brain: Sits quietly in halter top and glitter eyeshadow saying nothing until week four when she opens her mouth. Says something about the dialectic of nihilism that no one else understands. Looks down and continues chewing gum.

Student for Whom English is a Second Language: Mostly looks glum. Mouths words like "recapitulate" 7-8 times, then dives into Spanish-English dictionary. Emerges smiling to tell class that the “Surprise Symphony” is a good name for a piece about decapitation. Looks glum again when professor explains the difference.

Dumbest Person in the Universe: Treats entire class to ticker-tape display of minimal thought processes. Arrested in infantile cognitive stage which leads her to believe that if she can’t personally comprehend something it can’t exist. Also thinks her opinion might have changed the course of history if only they’d bothered to ask.

Good-natured Wise-acre: Shares Starbucks pastries with neighbors. Talks to professor in exaggerated Woody Allen whine. Writes funny comments and passes them to neighbors. Makes suicide seem like a choice not an imperative.

Thank you Joe.