Libidinous and Licentious

The lusty month of May has brought us two textbook examples of libido run amok--Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund head's alleged sexual attack, and former California governor and so-called actor Arnold Schwarzenegger's fling with a member of his household staff, resulting in a love child. Freud asked What Do Women Want? I'm wondering Why Can't Men Stop? In the first case we have a sixtyish Frenchman emerging from the shower buck naked purportedly trying to live out a fantasy of sex with the maid. The second affair was consensual but resulted in more visible collateral damage: noble Maria Shriver exiting the mansion and the couple's four children's discovery of a half-sibling they didn't know existed. As their seventeen-year-old son tweeted, "some days you want to quit and just be normal for a bit."

Supposedly, testosterone is to blame in both instances, along with the aphrodisiacal effect of power and entitlement both men enjoyed in their respective professional lives. A New York Times reporter based in France was seen on MSNBC's Martin Bashir show yesterday, informing us that the French expect their politicians to be "sexually vigorous," while Arnold's 2003 gubernatorial bid unearthed several women claiming he'd groped or otherwise sexually harassed them. Both men acted in direct opposition to their own self-interests. Strauss-Kahn was widely believed to be making a run against Sarkozy for president of his country. Arnold jeopardized his 25-year marriage and the relationships with his four, uh, I mean five kids. All because of unbridled libido and colossal errors in judgment. What is it with men?

Leaving aside the issue of the Frenchman's presumed innocence, news of his previous sexual exploits surfaced as soon as the current charges appeared. He's a.k.a. "the great seducer," yet his American-born wife, Anne Sinclair, is standing by her man, coughing up a million in bail money. As for Arnold, his pending plans to return to movies and show biz are alive and well. It would seem that in a post-Charlie Sheen world, knocking up the family housekeeper is no big deal. Have we really grown so accustomed to grown men acting like hormone-crazed teenage boys that we give them a free pass on attempted rape and flagrant infidelity? Not from where I'm standing. Both scumbags deserve to be booted to the curb. In the case of the French Flasher we'll have to see what the trial brings and hope that justice for an immigrant hotel maid is served. But Maria should terminate Conan the Barbarian, revive her career as a journalist and focus on helping her brood heal their shattered lives. Even though she hardly needs the money, she should sue for the heftiest sum possible. With the Kennedy name and friends like Oprah she can bounce back, leaving that sorry slimeball in the dust.

In the meantime, I hope male movers and shakers will heed these cautionary tales and keep their pants zipped. Is it too much to ask for men to be faithful to their wives, behave like gentlemen, refrain from pawing and humiliating every female in their midst? I hope not. My husband and I have been married as long as Maria and Arnold. I trust my hubby 100% but I can't help thinking it's a good thing we've never been able to afford domestic help.

Old Boyfriends

I was working on my novel today and got distracted. This is nothing new. It's my modus operandi. I often listen to YouTube clips while writing. Stuff from the 60's and 70's usually. Or 80's New Wave and punk. The years before I turned thirty. Everything recorded after that lost a bit of charm. I surfed through solo John Lennon and Paul McCartney, circa '73, early Elvis Costello and vintage Otis Redding. Then I decided to indulge myself and watch a few musicians I've known personally. This can be a dangerous exercise, depending on the quality of the video. There's the garage band rocker who was a fellow actor in the ensemble cast of Hamlet. A long-haired folkie covering James Taylor and Cat Stevens in some coffeehouse. A wired performance artist heavily influenced by David Byrne. Eventually, I took a peek at the oldest in a long line of old boyfriends who's in an active, in demand quartet. Their music is a kitchen sink of styles and the man in question plays lead guitar. I send a link to my sister, sigh and return to the page.

Like a faded, frayed pair of jeans that feels like a second skin, old boyfriends are unavoidable. They don't often show up in Real Life, but they exist forever in the imagination. They co-authored the romance novel you can't put down. They turned you on to music you hadn't thought to listen to, or to Boone's Farm or recreational drugs. They turned you on. Joni Mitchell sang, "songs are like tattoos," and with her history she should know: old boyfriends are indelible graffiti. Whether or not they dumped you or you dumped them, their epilogues occupy an inordinate number of pages in your journals. Admit it: you still have traces of them, tucked into books, mementos buried under bad poetry you wrote your freshman year in college. You have pictures where you are eternally eighteen or twenty-three. An arm flung around your shoulder, the knowing glance, a kiss snapped by someone's Instamatic. Yeah, we're talking pre-digital days.

The best part about old flames is that the fire is out. That painful longing is over, the obsessive-compulsive disorder of the heart has healed. Sure, you still have the photo albums, but the prints have aged so much they stick to the backing under plastic. They're cardboard cut-outs who no longer haunt your every move or dictate your wardrobe choices. Now you have a longtime companion called a husband. Unlike most ex-boyfriends he's seen you with unwashed hair and the stomach flu. You wear a shabby pair of sweatpants and the same shirt three days in a row, around the house where the two of you live. If he doesn't return your phone calls you don't lose sleep. You have a normal appetite and can snarf down half a dozen cookies in front of him. You don't attach deep significance to every offhand remark he makes. He's seen your crow's feet multiply and has watched you give birth.

There are times when I'd like to take a lover. Board a jet and fly abroad to meet some clandestine suitor in Paris. Sometimes old boyfriends look promising during Facebook chats and in those quickly deleted emails. But invariably, like the hubby, they're twenty pounds heavier and/or have gone bald. I count my blessings--mine looks reasonably close to the original version. The trick with former flings is to use their staying power to your advantage. Like I said, I was working on my novel today...

The King's Speech

My mother used to complain about people who butchered the "king's English." Proper use of language was of paramount importance to Mom, and her daughters were roundly chastised for poor elocution. I remember slaps on the wrist when I committed grammatical errors. Like any child, I detested such corrections and wondered why she made a federal case out of every slip. Years later, I'm grateful for her high standards. Everywhere we turn in today's media-saturated, info-overload world we see and hear unforgivable fracturing of our native tongue. From print to broadcast to the average Joe's daily dish, we sound like blithering ignoramuses. The atmosphere is replete with examples but I'll focus on just a few linguistic sins.

It really chaps my butt to hear people misuse "I" and "me." How many times must we endure guests on talk shows say "It was really painful for my wife and I to put our son in rehab." Omitting the spouse from the sentence it reads, "It was really painful for I to put my son in rehab." It's like music: you hear a flat note, it stands out, it doesn't ring, it's obvious. Not to scores of interview subjects, who would routinely add, "Me and my husband wanted to kick Junior to the curb." News anchors, clergymen, sports commentators--they're all guilty.

Another glaring pet peeve: "is" versus "are." The politician will opine, "This is just the facts the American people are dealing with." Memo to members of Congress: These are the facts, etc. or It's just a fact Americans are dealing with every day. Invented words are an odious verbal assault we're subjected to in current discourse. Words that your grandfather wouldn't recognize. I'm talking about relatable. One can relate to the aggrieved parent who had to confiscate Johnny's twelve-pack and knock some sense into him. But I don't find said parent relatable because it just doesn't sound right. In fact, as I'm typing this, relatable is highlighted in red by the spell check feature. Yes, the online dictionary claims incentivize is a word but I'd just as soon hear the comment "we need to provide incentives." The spell checker lit up on that one too. Also, technically speaking, impacts should not be used as a verb. It's what happens when you're rear-ended in rush hour traffic. Or "my stickler of a mother had an impact on my blog post today."

So what are we to do with a nation of grammatically-challenged nincompoops? Good conversation, like charity, begins at home. If we want our children to retain any vestige of the king's speech we need to converse ably ourselves. To wit, my youngest son once reported to me that a friend of his didn't like being in our house "because [we] used big words." My answer? Book a different playdate. The bar has been substantially lowered, folks. Let's try some old Henry Higgins-style education. The next time you hear a talking head on TV screw up his syntax, fire off an email. Text or Twitter about it. Arrest the prevailing downward trend in the world of letters, lest we be left in tatters. Bring back the Noel Coward bon mot! Dare to dust up your diction! That way we can all be as pithy as Colin Firth accepting his Oscar.

Loose Ends

"Graduation Day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising they are unemployed." Erma Bombeck

My child-rearing days are numbered. My oldest is in a doctoral program in the Northeast, my middle son turns twenty-one this week, and my youngest will be a high school senior next year. I'm not an empty-nester yet, but the chicks have definitely begun to fly the coop. I'm left stranded, my job description reduced from commanding officer to part-time consultant. Once my days and nights were dictated by sports, music lessons, parent-teacher conferences, PTA meetings and endless hours spent in a pediatrician's office. Now, I'm nearly a lone wolf, without the pack. This transition does not sit well with me. I'm accustomed to presiding over a trio of loud, overactive boys charging through my house like a herd of buffalo. The hours tick by relatively quietly, with only an occasional skirmish when all three happen to be home simultaneously.

It's become, dare I say it, far too predictable and sedate. The opportunity to jump-start my previously sidelined projects has arrived and I'm ill-equipped to exercise it. What, no last-minute science projects? No cupcakes for tomorrow's preschool holiday party? Batting bags are hanging on hooks in the basement, the baseball gloves nowhere in sight. Swim team bathing suits and goggles are packed away. Runs to Walgreens for poster board are nonexistent. Two decades of constant supervision has come to an end, and I still imagine someone needs a batch of cookies, some play-doh or a homemade Halloween costume. I'm no longer fully operational. My brood is on auto-pilot.

Now there's no excuse not to finish my novel, fine-tune my poetry, go to more auditions. I suddenly have all this time, in charge of me, not the crew. They've mutinied. The ship has sailed into another port and I'm left standing on the dock, waving. I have at least one of those books for middle-aged women in mid-life crisis, a Reinvent Yourself, How-To book. But I'm having trouble getting a fix on who I want to be now, if not "just" Somebody's Mom. Sure, I'm still an actor, writer and sometime-singer, but at the moment I find myself wandering around an empty house, waiting for a biological imperative or a fire to put out. I suppose it's getting closer to the time when grandchildren will enter the picture. Ouch.

Perhaps it's the very notion of freedom that's vexing me. Freedom to pursue my goals, to travel, take a class in faux painting decor, garden. Hell, I have to start all over again from scratch, not unlike the feeling I once had gazing at a helpless infant in a crib, knowing I was his primary source of safety and sustenance. This is the moment where the camera zooms in as I sail into the locker room with the Superbowl win under my belt and say, "I'm going to Disney World!" Which feels like a highly ironic contradiction in terms. Oh, well, it must be "Eat, Pray, Love" time, minus the divorce. Bring on the pasta, meditation beads and yoga mat. And while we're at it God, can I have Elizabeth Glibert's career?

On Gender and Reading

A couple of items in a recent edition of Salon magazine caught my eye. One was a story on how underrepresented women are in literary publishing (both books by women and women writing about books). The other was about a blogger whose therapist suggested that the blogger's daily online journal was an attempt to recreate the [childhood] experience of being unheard. The therapist, a woman, thinks the blogger is "retraumatizing" his or her self. My guess is that the blogger is female. I doubt if Tucker Max's therapist raises this question in their sessions. If you haven't heard of Tucker Max, he's a self-proclaimed sot whose sexual escapades and other inebriated encounters have made him a best-selling author. Chelsea Handler is probably the female equivalent of Max. Handler sells a lot of books too, but apparently, she'd sell more if she were a guy.

The data collected in the article about women in publishing reinforced conventional wisdom that men prefer to read books written by men about men. Whereas, generally speaking, women read books written by and about both sexes. If I look back on the required reading of my grade school days, I can think of only two female authors represented: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harper Lee. If little boys were required to read Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion along with Melville and Hawthorne, perhaps they'd grow up to be similarly inclined in their reading choices. It's somewhat reassuring that my sons' language arts classes introduced them to Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. But the vast majority of writers on their reading lists were white men.

My husband is a classic example of "gender-based" reading. He loves formulaic thrillers by Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlum and Daniel Silva. He would never read an Oprah Selection book. He'll likely go to his grave without unlocking the secrets of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Fortunately, his "sexist" reading habits don't extend to our marital status quo or shared parenting. But it wouldn't hurt him to spend a weekend locked in a library with Willa Cather, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.

When I first started going to writers workshops it was accepted gospel that 80% of the reading public is female. Who's reading all that Nora Roberts and Mary Higgins Clark anyway? Not men. So it stands to reason that so-called "women's novels," which deal with female issues, would sell the most books. Nowadays it seems you can scarcely get published without a vampire in your story. Thus, we have at least one woman racking up big numbers--Stephanie Meyers, the Mormon mother of three who created the "Twilight" books. Regardless of our natural inclinations when it comes to reading, one should strive to expand one's repertoire; in short, read outside the box.

About Tucson

Two of my close friends live in Tucson. It's a good thing they weren't grocery shopping at the Safeway this past Saturday morning. Or gathering in a parking lot to meet their Congresswoman. What happened to Gabrielle Giffords and her innocent constituents won't dissuade most people from their entrenched positions on gun control. (Now it's being referred to as "gun safety," lest we rankle those who see any reduction in the amount of proliferating killing machines as robbing us of our rights.) In the wake of the tragedy the media poses the same questions that arise every time a deranged nutcase goes on a killing spree: With all the warning signs, how did this happen?

We can be sure, whenever a crazed psycho pulls out an automatic and mows down as many as a dozen people in one clip, that the hallowed second amendment will be invoked. Politicians, including the President, are not about to challenge its sanctity to so many American gun owners. Instead we'll engage in attempts to make sense of a "senseless" atrocity, while dancing around the fact that our nation leads the world in senseless deaths as the result of easy access to guns. The few in Congress who moved this week to legislate limits on assault weapons and/or the ammunition that accompanies them, (e.g., a magazine that makes it possible to fire up to thirty shots without reloading) will likely get no traction, thanks to the most powerful lobby in Washington, the National Rifle Association. Our society lives in a state of denial on this contentious subject. People are so afraid of losing their constitutional right to bear arms, they seem to accept atrocities such as the Tucson shootings as the price that goes along with keeping it.

Our track record on handling mental illness is equally dismal. Those who knew Jared Lee Loughner thought he was "creepy" and clearly disturbed. He got kicked out of the community college he attended for classroom disruptions and bizarre behavior. Neighbors of the Loughners were wary of the family in general and Jared in particular. It's always after the fact that people who were familiar with the killer tell the media they had a gut instinct that something like this could happen. Had any one of these concerned people reported their suspicions, anonymously, to an agency equipped to intervene, perhaps the latest carnage could have been averted.

The Tucson Tragedy will become just another in a long list of shooting massacres. Whether it's an army base, a school campus, post office, beer plant or grocery store parking lot, we all react with shock and despair, then go on as before. Until another dozen or so human beings get shot by a lone slayer, at which point we'll talk about it again. The conversation will fade away and nothing substantive will change. And so goes the scenario in perpetuity.

Loving Lennon

This week brought an outpouring of remembrances of John Lennon on the thirtieth anniversary of his murder in New York City in 1980. It's close to impossible to measure the influence of the man, in musical history, in our culture, on a generation of adoring fans and on the world at large. All the paeans and tributes have said most of what there is to say about his enduring legacy. But I can add a few memories of my own.

When the Beatles first appeared on American television in February 1964 I was eight years old. Like millions of kids, I sat cross-legged on the floor close to the TV and witnessed the birth of something revolutionary in every sense of the word. Of course we didn't know that at the time. What we saw and most importantly, what we heard, was a riotous liberating awakening in pop music. I had already logged many hours dulling the grooves in my 45 RPM single of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." But nothing could prepare me for what I saw when they came crashing into our collective consciousness: sheer unadulterated joy. The lingering malaise of John F. Kennedy's assassination lifted. The four lads from Liverpool were about to rock our world...for the next six years and beyond.

Anna Quindlen wrote a column years ago about how women are defined by their favorite Beatle. She admitted that she was "a Paul girl." While Paul, George and Ringo were deliriously cute, my eyes fixed on Lennon--his sexy stance and raw, dangerous swagger. When the words "Sorry, girls, he's married" flashed beneath his picture, it made him all the more beguiling. Later I recognized John was the funniest of the the quartet, the cheekiest, and ultimately, the bravest. He combined a rare mix of cynicism and hope, of rebellion and affability.

In 1980 I was working in "A Christmas Carol" at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. It was my first Equity job. Monday, December 8th was a much-needed day off. The cast was in final runthroughs and technical rehearsals, leading up to our first dress on Tuesday. I went to bed without watching my team, the Miami Dolphins, on Monday Night Football. The next morning my sister, sobbing and angry, broke the horrible news to me. Before going to the Playhouse I stopped at the mall to buy Double Fantasy. When I arrived at the theater the green room was full of actors who looked as if Doomsday had come. Wise-cracking techies were sullen. It was a walking nightmare trying to get through the show. The director couldn't grasp why his cast was in a deep funk. People were dropping lines, blowing entrances, fighting back tears.

On Sunday, December 14, honoring Yoko Ono's call for worldwide silence in memory of John, we held curtain on the matinee until 2:10. That night, having put in one of the toughest opening weeks of our lives, we gathered in the stage manager's apartment and methodically played every Beatles album in the catalog, one after another, in a state of drunken grief. Yet at the same time we were celebratory: no one could take the music away from us.

John Lennon dared to be achingly honest and vulnerable. He and the Beatles created art that will stand the test of time. The irony is that when they burst on the music scene many highbrow critics scoffed at their work. Talk to an musical "expert" now and they'll likely place the Fab Four's contributions on the same par as Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, and certainly Gershwin, Porter and Berlin. They were the minstrels of the twentieth century, cultural touchstones, the defining trailblazers we all followed as faithful acolytes. A few years ago I was driving one of my kids somewhere with a CD playing "Abbey Road." I realized why I drift back to their songs after tiring of current tunesmiths. "They make me happy, " I told my son, and that, in essence, is what makes them a lasting treasure.