The Contagion of Entitlement

My buds, Len Speaks and Mr. Anonymous from the Deluxe Furnished Barbara Judith Apartments hied ourselves to a movie at the Arclight last evening. This movie, about a breakout of a mysterious disease that takes millions of lives worldwide, but most quickly Gwenyth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet, for purposes of the fictional celebrity fatalities, was, how shall I say it, AWFUL. Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+. Oh, well chacon a son gout as the French are wont to say. Miserable script. It was, as Len Speaks pointed out, a kind of revert to the disaster films of yore. Bet you don't remember "The Swarm"? Kinda like that, only lucky for "Contagion" not quite so bad. And what in the world is happening to us in the time passing department when Matt Damon is the father of a teenager. Matt "Good Will Hunting" teenager is now somewhere close to or in his 40s.  And Jude Law, I still don't know if his character was a good guy or a bad guy. In fact, I did not understand his character at all. But believe it or not, this entry is NOT about this movie, which I shall forget forthwith.

It is about another contagion. My comrades and I entered an empty elevator followed by only two other women. Just us four. My friends were talking to me and I was about to respond, when I realized that I had failed to hear one of the women ask me to hit their floor. I mean, I thought they were talking to each other and not to me. I heard the second "request" if that was what it was, which seemed to be more a remonstration for my, what my dad used to refer to as "lese majeste" (which is very very bad behaviot), failure to have acted promptly on the first edict. I now refocused on them and they were clearly, how shall I put it, put out at my failure. I did not realize I had an obligation in the first place. Had I heard I would have pushed the button, promptly and with an appropriate bow, but I did not. I was unnerved that somehow I had committed some kind of faux pas when the button could easily had been pushed by one of them, and blurted out the apology and explanation. "Oh, I'm sorry, I did not hear you" to a kind of noblesse oblige that they would let it go "this time" attitude. I now cannot remember what exactly they said in reply but it was a kind of "don't worry about it" which implied that there had been an obligation missed and they were kindly not going to banish me from further ventures to the Arclight. Had I been alone, I would have mulled this small event over in my mind, and not been sure whether I was the culprit, an uncivil boor who did not keep her ears wide open for requests for floors. But both my companions were taken aback by the interchange.
I mean, ok, nobody died here, but I agree with Len Speaks, that occasions like this make me feel inclined toward a life of the hermit.

Now, I go all Christian on you, and point out, mostly to myself, that this of course is the opposite of what I must do. I must somehow see Christ behind the mask of these souls out on a Saturday night and expecting the world to be their butlers and maids. I will say this much. Lord, it is very very hard.

I guess the last thing I have to say to my elevator companions who were so very disappointed in me, a stranger who failed to hear "Four please" on the first iteration and to myself as well, "The first shall be last and the last first".

I swear, if I had heard you ladies the first time, I would have immediately pushed the button. But maybe your expectations of others--unreasonable. How's about that?  But alas, not in this world of entitlement. Talk about something that will kill a society.

A Short Reflection Ten Years On

It is about to be at end, this decade anniversary of the worst attack on the United States in its history. It is nearly midnight in New York as I begin writing, where it all happened, where 3,000 people were eradicated by two planes deliberately smashed into the World Trade Center and nearly 9 p.m. here in Los Angeles where I write.

I was almost inclined to write nothing in this forum. Has not everything been said?
Indeed, probably there is nothing useful to add, certainly nothing novel. But I guess I want to record for my personal posterity that I was one of those many who never forgot. It is not likely worth much, but it is my small offering.

I was waking far earlier than is my wont that morning. I turned on the radio. I think both towers had been struck. I rolled over in my bed to turn up the sound. There could be no imagining this.  As a New Yorker, I knew those buildings well. I worked mere blocks away as a college student, on John Street. I recall the day Phillipe Petit walked between them. When I was a college student and post college student, those buildings were still new and talked about as a new image of New York. I only went inside a couple of times over the years. I have to admit I never liked the height (110 stories), just like I am not much fond of flying.  I did have one occasion to go to Windows on the World on the very top and I recall the massive high speed elevator shaking all the way up to a wind chorus. It was an overcast day so I never got the view of the city and the harbor, but it did feel that I was truly in the clouds, not unlike Olympus itself. I was happy to be on the ground floor again at the end of the festivities and remember that I was not inclined to a another visit to the top. I also recall that I wondered how someone could get out of the building quickly in the case of fire. I knew they could not.

Two planes? That cannot have been an accident. Quickly terrorism became our primary (it had been out there but not like this before) watchword. And then the North Tower came down. How could a building of that height come down at all let alone that quickly? The people waving white handkerchiefs out the floors above the inferno--some of them jumped to a certain death and the majority were pulverized into the white and gray ash that were the remains of the entire structure. People just like us.  People just like me. People who minutes before were considering a break from their desks. People who had been at the beach a day or two before for a last bit of summer. People who had plans. People who had a right to their lives.

I did not lose any family or friends in that destructive evil act by people for whom we simply should not make any excuse (although for the last ten years that is what we have done as a society in a political correct stupor) but I know that the stories of lives cut off unnecessarily have been repeated this weekend among those families that did.  Good thing. We want to circumvent the growth of a generation that finds this horrific event a boring piece of history that has no significance for them. It might be, with Grace, that generation that brings us back to the founding values of our socieity. I defer to Dennis Prager on what these three are, E Pluribus Unum, In God we Trust and Liberty. By refusing to embrace our values and to promote them, even to the point of being forbidden to do so, we continue to cooperate in the destruction of the American Experiment.

There is nothing that can justify the vile acts on September 11, 2001. It remains the acts we must condemn, regardless of who perpetrated them. And then, there are the acts of those who tried to save others, fireman, police, the clergyman, Fr. Michael Judge who was the first known death of the attack and many unknown heroes. Their acts of goodness give us hope that we can retrieve our natrional soul..

In February 2002, only five months after the attack I went with a friend back to my hometown. We visited the site. By then it was mostly clear of the building and human dust aftermath. But it was still very fresh. You had to walk on wooden planks to get around. There were construction vans gathered in spaces that used to be where the buildings stood. A couple of initial memorials, like the workers on a beam, reminding us that something would rise there again, were up.

On this piece of wood:  As we walked through the Valley of Death We Feared no evil.

There were the makeshift memorials, sheets on which you could write your message, and pleas about loved ones still lingering. They are not the best pictures, but they are ones reflecting my visit which I still remember as poignant.

Pray for all those who died, and those first responders who have suffered physically and psychologically, since. Pray that our nation will remember its roots, its Creator centered roots.

A Short Tale of Irk, and Grudging Repentance.

Ok, there is no such word as "irk". That is there is no noun "irk". You can be "irked". Or someone you know can be "irksome". I don't care. I want to tell you about my being "irked" and it is a tale of being so, so I have created a noun.

I live in most assuredly urban surroundings in Los Angeles. To me, though, coming from where I do, as you know I do, where I live manages to have a suburban element that no similar neighborhood in New York could achieve. In the middle of several thoroughfares, at night, and even in the day, it is fairly quiet. There are hummingbirds, and doves, and sparrows. You hear crows here like you might in some idyllic country setting early in a morning.

So, for me that little gazebo my neighbors of old built in the mostly parking space back yard, to which I added jasmine and bouganvilla, and the little strip of grass that only recently began to grow in the hard dusty ground on which dogs and cats used to pee and poop, has become something of a cause celebre for me. I want it protected.

Let me back up. I like my neighbors very much. I even went to the wedding of one who still lives in our building and one who is now residing in a small house not far from here. I won't say that I am perfect, or that I never leave a mess anywhere, but I do try not to disturb my neighbors with my stuff. To the extent that I ever have, and recently by the way, you should see how quick they are to remonstrate with me. So, for example, last week I finally had the time to do a garage sale and I had moved some stuff into the gazebo for placement the next morning in the front. Pretty quickly I was asked if it were staying there, as in laws were visiting the next day and they were hoping it would be clean. It would be. It was.

One of my cats, Bleu, likes to run into the common hallway and sit upstairs. He has never disturbed anything. One night I did not realize he was out there, as usually I do, and he was out there, all night. You guessed it. He pooped. He had no choice. He could not knock at the door. I found him out there the next morning. I did not realize there was poop or I would have cleaned it up immediately. Instead of coming to me about it, another neighbor, again someone I like, complained to the landlord.

Meanwhile, I have one neighbor whose several projects over the years have rendered the back yard a frequent junk shop complete with greasy pavement (he does use product to clean it off), and throws his dirty clothes in a bucket in some major cleaning chemicals on our porch. I have two others who smoke and then throw the remains of the cigarette over their upstairs bannisters where I run into them.  Back in the day of my former neighbor, essentially a florist shop was run out of our back yard. She was getting started, and is doing deservedly well, but geez. Oh, and the big one that has happened for all the years I have lived here?: Whenever one of my neighbors has a visitor, they don't park on the street, but squish into our back yard. I have never done this. Never. If anything, I'd give up my space so that my visitor can park there. I have never complained, and certainly never to our landlord. I used to figure that I would buy some good will for one of my quirks, like for example, the accident of Bleu being outside in the hallway all night. Or my shoes outside the door. Oh, and  on those occasions when someone picks me up for some social gathering, maybe they'd be a little more patient before honking. After all, their friends have been known to park there and leave the car.

So much for that. Not enough good will, it appears. So, back to the strip of grass. I have more time, as I am in and out on various projects during the day, to water and to coax that intransigent patch to a true green. I fertilized. I plucked. And I figured that seeing this my neighbors would not need to be told that parking a car on it was well, discourteous. No. So I got  some pliable fencing at the 99c store and fenced in the little space. I even wrote a note explaining without rancor that I was trying to nurture the space of our little backyard retreat, and there was fencing to do that, and I want you to know.

The other day I came out and found that the fencing had mostly been removed. The next night someone was on the grass again, someone who did not live here. That really went well. I tried to be nice. Explain. Request.
And dismissed out of hand. 

Well, those little fencing things will now retire to my garage as I surely cannot enforce it. I could be a snitch and go to my landlord, but really, do I want to escalate over grass? And really it is about not being valued by the world at large.  I haven't had great luck with that lately, being fired and all  (with other good people) after 25 years of service, reaching management, doing well there, at least according to all those evaluations, so that the organization could go in a "different direction" which still has not come to fruition as far as I have heard from the survivors. So, in this very very small thing, I asked for something, and I was ignored.

Well I am still watering the grass, expecting it to be decimiated, but I am trying to look at and tame this need to be seen and heard and respected. Or wanting the rest of the world to conform to my memory of long dead days of civility.

I have to repent of my need to be, what did the Lord say, to be first at the table, and accept a smallness from which I do believe we not only achieve humility that draws us closer to God, but also brings peace.

Bet you did not see that coming? It is my repentence I seek, not theirs.

I have to stop being irked. These things are passing. There is much more, above the things of earth, with which to contend while I have the chance. Good luck to me.  I am very fond of my irk.

Strange (but Pleasant) Final Night (for me) at the Hollywood Bowl

The offerings this season were overall much more enjoyable than last year's--in no small measure perhaps due to the guest reappearance of the wonderful John Mauceri for the Fantasia presentation with the Orchestra.

But our last appearance at the Bowl, me, Len, of Len Speaks, Mr. Anonymous of the Deluxe Furnished Barbara Judith Apartments, and guest attendees Leo and Connie, was by far the best in my humble blogging view. Courtesy of uncharacteristic weather patterns for southern California, it also had a mysterious and rather symbolic cast.

We started off the evening with a soujourn for dinner at the Rooftop Grill. That is always a treat. And it seemed, perhaps because I was especially hungry, but still, this meal was exceptional. A discrete cloud cover had been with us all day, making the temperature rather pleasant, though you could feel the moisture in the air. And a particular white sun kissed billow hung over the mountains, you know, the kind that you feel you can scoop up when you fly over them on some trip cross country. And then, there was this full size, right out of the movies (this being Hollywood apropos) rainbow for the diners to consume visually. Actually, there was a double rainbow, the second not quite so spectacular, but clearly there. I have seen other partial rainbows in my life, including some in Hawaii, that tropical locale, but never have a seen the kind where you could believe that you might find a pot of gold at the end thereof. It created a stir in the crowd, cell cameras flashing. I had forgotten mine and I was regretful of my inability to immediately post on Facebook, but there were plenty of such posts no doubt around me!

Given the unsettled nature of my life seeing a rainbow was a particularly good sign, and for me, it had a lovely Providential cast. It was, as well, a reminder of the glory of Creation. I couldn't have felt more at peace and enjoying this spectacle in the place that, during the summer, is one of my absolute favorite locales, as readers of this blog know.

The rainbow lasted a long time and by the time it faded, we were off for our musical offering, hosted by Alex Trebek, questions about film clips that we were offered that we answered using complimentary phosphorus sticks, blue, green and red.

As the sun was going down, the still present clouds and those moving in with the actual threat of rain were tinged a miraculous red. More pictures were snapped. At one point, as we moved from one spot to another, the micro-climate that is LA became manifest. In steps you went from needing a sweater to needing to doff it. A little eerie actually. . . .

And then there were the clips, and the music, from Big Country, Singin' in the Rain, To Kill a Mockingbird., High Noon.  The films were mostly old ones, except for Sleepless in Seattle, and something about the fact of the voices of long dead stars echoing in the canyon that is the Bowl, along with the music, made me wistful about the fast passing of life and the good fortune I have had in seeing these performances, in the past, and at that moment. During the theme from To Kill a Mockingbird I thought of my dad. I thought of the clarity of honor and the obligation to carry it on that seems to have been lost to us. I cried a little in honor of a world of heroes now mostly gone.

But continuing in the strangeness of the evening was the clip from The Bride of Frankenstein, you know, the lightning created wife for Boris Karloff--Elsa Lanchester. As the lightening was crackling on the screen, "It's alive! It's alive!", so was the lightening by the hills just beyond us sparking. And as the wind on the screen increased a significant blast touched us. Leo said he really liked these special effects.  And it sure smacked of traditional Hollywood magic, courtesy, however, of that major director, Mother Nature.

I cannot wait to see what next season has in store for us!

Waking Up From a Dream

You remember the last episode of the second Bob Newhart series? Probably it was one of the most ingenious bits of writing in comedy television history. After spending years as the owner of an Inn in New England, with an oddball cast of characters that included Daryl and the other Daryl, the tag was Bob waking up, calling to someone next to him in bed, and finding out that it was the wife from his first series! In fact, the second series had only been a dream!

I have noticed now nearly two months into my involuntary separation from my job (along with several others) so that they could go "in a different direction", that when I wake up in the morning, it almost seems precisely like Bob's experience--that the entirety of 25 years in which I lived and breathed legal ethics prosecutions, never happened. That it too was a dream! I seem to remember coming during a crises of the organization and living through multiple crises rising in the "ranks" from a trial deputy to a manager of several units, transferred into and out of them constantly. I seem to remember obsessive preparations and concerns and distress over any number of issues in which I was intimately involved, some to which I even provided solutions and balance. I seem to remember thinking it was all very important and that I was contributing to some overall good, even when there were frustrations. But then, it is all gone.

Something happened during all those years, career wise. I know it must have, as I am no longer the 30 something year old that began there but a woman nearly qualifying for senior citizen discounts. I certainly earned a living as I seem to have some monetary showing from it. I have friends from that locale, which clearly I could not have made but for having been there. And yet, it feels ephemeral at best.

This experience of a long part of my past is both liberating, and frightening in a way. I am starting over, but that from which I am starting over, is vaguely unreal and I while I suppose I can be grateful for experience and skills, I wonder what was the point if it could so easily dissipate. 

Did I leave my identity in that dream, or has it come with me? Or have I awakened a different person in some way? Is that difference a good one? Was the real me there in that dream state? Or now, embarking in a kind of several pronged approach toward that which seems enormously vague as first becoming a lawyer did not.

Some days I am ebullient. Others I am slightly anxious and annoyed to have been awakened. Mostly though there is this odd ease, and ease has never characterized me in any endeavor, as if I am sort of floating down a river. Every so often I stop at a lovely place and look around, and then move on to see what else is out there. I like it as long as I don't fall into some trap of "shoulds" and "oughts" about what is next.  I can do that to myself and others, well intentioned, sometimes contribute.  "You SHOULD open your own practice".  "You SHOULD consider outsourcing the areas of your expertise". 

I grew up on an endless stream of "shoulds".  I am not resentful of it, not even slightly as it turns out, but the only "should" for me henceforward is that (if I am listening) which comes from the lips of God--and I always fear He might ask more of me than that of which I am capable.  While I try to hear the Small Still Voice I intend otherwise to live in the the moments of each day, without getting caught up in the future, or encumbered by whatever that 25 years was, reality or dream. It's over, whatever it was. There is only now.

The Djinn Aspires--To Be a Voice Over Artist

When I was in college, I almost diverted from my long held plan on being a lawyer. I mean, I had announced to family and friends at 14 that I would become a lawyer. I wish I knew why I settled on that profession so early on in my life, as there were no other lawyers in the family. I guess it just seemed like one of the logical choices for someone who was verbal, and yes, I was of the innocent opinion that the law was a calling of sorts, not just a job. Therein lies another tale for anothe blog.

The near diversion was college radio. I can't remember if I have described how it all happened in these pages.  No matter. A repeat then, if I did. One of my girlfriends, Ginny, had a crush on one of the guys who worked at the student station. They had a corridor of their own, capped at both ends by doors, and if I remember, a sign that suggested non-radio types must not traverse. She did not want to go up there alone, and she needed a pretense.  The pretense was that we were going to try out to be classical music announcers for which they were auditioning. So off we went. Ginny spent her time talking to the young man. I auditioned. And I got accepted.  For one year, all I did was to do the station break, "This is WFUV, radio voice of Fordham University" and then after persistence, and a broken tape that required me to cover and be on air in doing so, my equity increased and I became a full on member of the staff. Ginny did not get that guy, but she did end up working with us on a situation comedy about college life.

That several years' experience interjected another desire in my heart, and caused me to double major in communications as well as political science. I got an internship at WOR television, and I was hoping as some of my other friends did to get inside one of these stations. I did not get that, but another friend who was music director of 99X (Then WXLO) hired me as the Assistant Music Director. What I realized was that it was nearly impossible to get on the air and the money for the average DJ (not in a major market) was little and less for someone behind the scenes. And when I nearly caused my dad to hyperventilate upon announcing I might take a rip and read job (in those days you would on some stations literally rip the copy off the AP or UP machines and read to the public) in some little station in Lakewood, New Jersey I was offered, I decided that my original plan for law school just made more sense.

It turned out not to be easy to get that job after law school in New York. And I used that as an opportunity to make my one and only adventurous life move (so far) cross country to the fair climes of California. And here I made my legal career and obtained my long time job, which, if you have been reading this blog, you know became ephemera in July as a result of an organizational shake up.

And so, merely days after my late severance from my prosecution career, I decided that it was now or never to look into those things that I had to leave behind, all for good reason, but with a reluctance, all those years ago.  And add them back into the repetoire.

I went to a well recommended (by other aspirants and practitioners) place, Kalmenson and Kalmenson, or rather, I AM going to this place. And let me tell you folks.  As much as I hope to break into this business of voice over acting, and it is every bit an actor's job, let me tell you, the amount of enjoyment I am getting almost is enough. Almost, I admit, but it is a large almost.

I have always had boundless energy and it clearly allowed me to move up in ranks as an attorney. But it was all focused in my head and it could not be nearly as freewheeling a creative act as using one's voice to convey things about a product, commercial or so social. I find myself opening up physically and emotionally in a way that always seemed (perhaps my own doing, but so be it) impossible in the formal, although confrontative area of the law. Yes, I am seriously seeking to learn this field. But I can enjoy the learning in a way that frankly I never did as a law student and even, when I studied it, psychology. I am not sorry about those experiences, never never never!  But, it almost seems that all that work, all that development, was intended in some odd way to bring me, here, back to the creative things that I had to forego in order to make a living (or so I thought). It is as if I am again at the fork in the road, a little older, a little battered, but a lote wiser, and now I get to go down that other road. Whether it is days, or months or years, I am blessed. 

And there are other things I am getting to do as well, to write, so many types of things, as well as keeping in the legal field.  I have been a secretary, a lawyer, a prosecutor, a trainee therapist (for two years while I studied psychology which I left "all but dissertation" and orals), and now, a voice over artist!

Will I succeed? I don't know. But it does not matter.  I am doing it.  I am multi-tassking. I am going down that road of discovery.

Must It Be "Books v. The Internet"?

I forgot.  I actually completed another book this month, before I completed "The Journal Keeper". And it was a goodie, too, except where the author, Gaty Ulin, an LA Times columnist, felt the need to make some right versus left commentary in his discussion of politically manipulative narrative. Naturally, it is the right leaning that is empty and callow in that regard. I just never understand why EVERYTHING has to have such interjection, like at rock concerts. Be that as it may, I otherwise loved this book, which points out the dangers of a connected, yet disengaged world of technology and invites us (in my view) not to let go of the tactile (emotionally as well as physically) world of books.

It is not, however, an attempt to say that technology is bad; perhaps it is only to suggest that the difference between reading and immersing oneself in books is such that we do not necessarily want to jettison books because technology allows us to read on a screen. Perhaps, and I am not sure he said this, he might have, though, entirely different parts of the brain are at work when one is reading a paper book, than when reading on the various sizes of screens now available to us. He does ask the question of whether what we do on a screen really is reading at all, at least in the traditional sense.

In the fictional 23rd century of Star Trek, you may or may not recall, which was really a prescient 1960's group of television writers under the aegis of producer and writer Gene Roddenberry, there was a lawyer played by Elisha Cook, Jr. who refused to rely on technology in his defense of Captain Kirk from a crime he did not commit. Even before we ever thought of Kindles, or Nooks, or cell phones for that matter (our 20th and 21st version of the "communicator"), somebody out there was already aware that technology was a double edged sword. I always loved that episode of TOS ("the Original Series") because I could never imagine that books, the printed on paper ones, would be properly allowed to become extinct. I was committed, even at age 11 or 12, that I would always have books around me, as I had growing up, shelves and shelves of them. There is something distinctly less satisfying, even as much as I love the computer, and the amazing surfeit of material it contains, going to the screen rather than into my makeshift physical library (really a converted closet) and searching through my books, scanning not only the title but the book itself, for something that I have suddenly gotten the desire to read again.
Somehow it is harder to get into a screen than it is to get into a book. You touch past, present, future, your own life and the life, fictional or otherwise, of the hero or heroine of the book.  Here is just one paragraph from Mr. Ulin in speaking about a Signet paperback "Three by Flannery O'Connor" he first read when he was 19:  Why does (it) continue to resonate even after Wise Blood emptied out for me? Because of how the book, the object, recalls my experience of reading it, nineteen years old, as lonely and alienated as Hazel Motes, waiting in a Flagstaff, Arizona hotel for daybreak, when I would board an Amtrak train bound for Chicago and then Massachusetts, to see my family for the first time in nearly a year."  A book he posits represents not only where we have been but where we wish to go. A library represents our imagination, in three dimensions, he says, which a screen, I have decided, can never do, no matter how much information is crammed within it.

Still, I don't think it is a competition between book and internet, if we really work at it--it can be a partnership. I do not intend to give up one in favor of the others; surely our pluralistic America can accommodate both. Both can integrate into our essences, without sacrifice of any. For my money, reading will never be a lost art.