Music in the Wind

At 3 pm on Thursday afternoon, I chased several pieces of sheet music across Amsterdam Avenue, pursued the papers as they flapped and flew in remarkable aerial acrobatic swirls designed to aggravate me and amuse everyone within viewing distance.

Of course I was on my BlackBerry with a client at the time, bounding up the avenue in the sunny – if windy -- afternoon, arms pumping happily in the abundant sunshine...which is likely the reason it happened.

"#$%&*@##$%$&*@%@#&$!" I exclaimed, dashing into the gutter to step on the first page of "Waltz #2," that wafted down on top of a sewer grate. Retrieving it, I saw the entire paper-clipped bunch of "Landslide" fluttering its way across Amsterdam. Bounding into the street, narrowly missing on-coming traffic, I spied "You May be Right" -- flattened against the side of a houseware shop back on the sidewalk.

Hollering and huffing, I grabbed my papers, stuffing them back into the folder.

"#$%&*&$#*&!!" I exclaimed, overcome by a sense of irony for it was this very folder of music that I had lost yesterday evening while shopping at Fairway...and reclaimed just half an hour earlier. What did it all mean -- first to leave the songs of one's heart in a supermarket basket, then to have them scatter to the wind when retrieved?

Were my songs attempting to escape???

Was this a sign to me...that I needed to break free?

Such are the machinations of my mind.

Back on the sidewalk, the spectators saluted me for my adept -- if foolhardy -- rescue of the imperiled papers. I accepted their kudos, thanking them and laughing ruefully.

It was then I remembered that the BlackBerry was still pressed to my ear and my quiet client had overhead the entire escapade.

The backstory on the lost folder of music is that I arrived late to my voice lesson the day before -- breathless, penitent, sheepish -- bursting into Mary's peaceful 9th floor studio like a clamorous, invading army, loudly declaring that, though I was egregiously late, this would be a power lesson.

What I missed in time I would make up in passion.

Ever patient and forgiving, Mary neither reprimanded me nor contradicted me. Brandishing the worn manila file filled with the sheet music I have collected over the past six months, I swept into the piano room. While I stared at my image in the mirror over the piano, Mary went to fetch me a glass of water.

I'm late, but it's okay, I reassured myself anxiously. Examining my reflection, I was visited by a familiar childhood musing: is this really the way I look? Is this the face that others see as well or is it my perception alone?? And just who am I?

The music holds part of the answer: I am the girl/woman who comes once a week to Mary's 72nd Street studio to sing sad and beautiful songs, who nurtures a love for energetic rock. Who dreamed of being David Byrne's girlfriend, who felt her life changed by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and The White Album and wishes she could be as tough and cool as Joan Jett. Who sings My Sharona loudly at home, who introduced Little Babe to Duran Duran, who plays Name that Beatles Lyric -- a made-up game -- with him on long car rides and Shabbat afternoons.

Who cried through Leonard Cohen's last Madison Square Garden concert, sitting next to Big Babe, feverish and forsaken on a Friday night.

This self co-exists with my other selves, the ones who carry out the serious and adult stuff, of course.

In Mary's studio, I am a student singer, dutifully executing my voice exercises, pushed by my teacher to move out of my comfort zone in the bass notes, receiving praise for my lung capacity.

There, the other me -- mother, professional, wife -- retreats for thirty glorious minutes, and I am awash in timeless, universal emotion of the sort that inspires songwriting. Great loss pervades most of my favorite songs. So does the eternal yearning for true love.

“I rarely lose things,” I had told Mary as I prepared to leave, just 20 minutes later, while reflecting on my love of sad songs. “Loss is traumatic for me.”

And then, several hours and appointments later, I lost my sheet music at Fairway as I shopped… while taking a phone call from Middle Babe.

It is now Friday morning, the eve of Shabbat. The manila folder of sheet music rests on the dining room table, smudged with dirt. The papers within are still in disarray. I have not gone through them to check if all are there. The idea of having lost any pages is distressing to me. I don’t yet have the inner fortitude to find out.

Last night I spoke late into the night with an old school acquaintance who reconnected with me on the matter of adoption. We hadn’t spoken in decades – in fact, we barely knew each other -- but she called me to talk about her pervasive sense of loss, her issues with emotional abandonment.

“My life would be so much better if I didn’t have this emotional disposition,” she stated.

But you do, I told her. And I do. And it often blindsides us, making us sad and even dysfunctional for a time. But it also gives us emotional depth and maybe unusual empathy.

Over the past two days my music has been lost, found and nearly lost again.

The curse of multi-tasking, blabbing on my BlackBerry while completing other tasks, takes the metaphysical sting out of the situation, providing a perfectly pragmatic reason for why I first left my folder in the grocery store and loosened my grip on the folder while navigating my way northward on the streets of Manhattan.

And yet.

When I completed my twenty-minute power lesson on Wednesday, Mary praised me for my passionate renditions, the power in my lungs, the vitality in my singing.

My secret is an amped-up state of agitation, I told her, also known as shpilkes --an existential condition.

Not uncommon for people of the Jewish persuasion or creative types.

In fact, as I told HOBB, when I poured out my soul late Wednesday night in a torrent of tears whose catalyst was the pervasive, unyielding sense of loss, such emotional dislocation is the ideal state for creative expression.

The Wayward Wife Comes Home

This is a portrait of obsession.

At the end of a frenetic NYC weekend, it all came down to me 'n Moravia.

And my cool Ricky's reading glasses, which trick me into thinking that they are just a fun fashion accessory and not a visual aid. Then again, their attractiveness is clearly only a matter of opinion. Earlier today, Little Babe told me that they make me look like a demented librarian.

In truth, I rather like that assessment.

Having read through the supply of Alberto Moravia novels and short story collections that is available on bookshelves and through special order at Barnes and Nobles, Book Culture and the Strand, I finally turned to Alibris.com, scooping up five hard-to-find titles in the equivalent number of seconds.

Over this past week, compact Jiffy envelopes arrived for me, bearing my printed paperback treasures. I could not believe the speed with which my desire had been fulfilled; tracking down Moravia's elusive works had become a stalker's pastime for me over the past few months and I had finally caught my prey. Avidly, I tore open the envelopes. The books tumbled out onto my waiting bed, possessed of lurid covers, aged to the point of crumbling.

I smiled at the volumes, welcoming them into the family of rag-tag Moravia editions -- some European, others American – I already possess, noting that my little library looked like a family of multi-racial adopted children who nevertheless all bear the same last name.

Earlier today, coming uptown on the #1 train, I finished the first edition 1950 hardcover copy of Two Adolescents that Big Babe found for me at a second-hand bookshop in Jerusalem over the Passover break. Breathless from Luca's dramatic denouement, I paused briefly for decency's sake, then greedily dove into The Wayward Wife.

The copy I have -- a slim paperback Ace Star Book published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 1960 -- is adorned with a gorgeous, erotic photograph of a nude young woman by the side of the road. The picture is lyrical and candid; because of it, I feel scandalous reading this work in public. And then, there is the suggestive title.

Tonight, when the action moved to my bedroom, I thumbed through the book's credits and was astonished to discover that Philippe Halsman was the photographer.

This discovery brought me a sense of bashert -- the preordained -- for I had recently been obsessed with the Latvian-born Halsman, having seen the dreadful film, Jump, which was written around the true, astonishing and little-known story of his pre-celebrity life in Europe, when, as a young man, he was tried and convicted in Austria by an anti-Semitic court of murdering his father.

Having always admired Halsman’s stylish work, the horrific story of his earlier life consumed me, refusing to let me go. Learning that the Moravia cover was shot by him, my mind turned associative; the teen Halsman, languishing in an Austrian jail, became confused with Moravia’s adolescents Agostino and Luca, bound together by their common doom. Staring at the black and white cover photo on my book, I considered Halsman's ability to reinvent himself from wrongfully convicted killer to American A-lister, Life magazine cover photog, friend to the famous, creator of "jumpology" and the remarkable Jump portraits, one of the Ten Greatest Photographers in the World, according to a 1958 Popular Photography article. But Halman's dramatic denouement was not only the result of his talent and will. His pardon and passage out of Europe came as the result of a campaign by several high-profile individuals including Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Life magazine extended a cross-Atlantic invitation to him. As I pondered the personal and outside factors leading to Philippe Halsman's redemption, I felt a sense of keen regret that I had never met him, nor my beloved latest-favorite author. Yet instantly, that feeling morphed into one of supreme joy for wasn't I sitting in a midnight cafe with him and Alberto Moravia at that very moment?

It is now no longer Sunday night. The act of writing has, once again, burned off my extreme adrenaline-fueled agitation. I am horrified at the hour, noting that in a very short while, I need to jumpstart my professional week.

This Monday will be different from previous Mondays because of one remarkable detail of this past weekend: the two-day Open House I attended at the Columbia School of Journalism, where I am scheduled to begin my Masters program in Art and Culture Writing this fall.

And while I've known for the past month of my acceptance, it was not until this weekend that I actually embraced the fact of my impending studenthood, which brings with it the restructuring of my current professional life. And my personal life, in some ways. Absent for our Shabbat dinner on Friday night, I became a wayward wife, choosing to socialize with my classmates at Havana Central, coming home only after Little Babe had gone to bed and HOBB greeted me with baleful eyes and the rebuke that I might, at least, have come home to light candles and sing Shalom Aleichem.

This process is personal tikkun; long overdue. If there is one affliction I've suffered from over the past sixteen years, it is imbalance. The work I've undertaken has been ubiquitous, overwhelming, consuming. The writing -- my writing -- when it has happened, has felt like a miracle of sorts, the triumph of will over crushing responsibility, fatigue, the demands of family life. It has felt both heroic and woefully inadequate, not in essence but in volume.

My unwritten projects have bonded and formed a fellowship of their own, rag-tag, like my Moravia books. They patiently sit on my pending project bookshelf, feeling the fierce love of my gaze, my stewardship, my determination.

Like Moravia's books, they know they will not be neglected for they are my family. I have waited for them a long time; I am incomplete without them. I find my identity through nurturing these projects. They are mine. They are me.

Swing Dance. Yom HaShoah: Diaspora 2010

Eight years ago, I angered a British friend by referring to New York City as the Diaspora.

I was in London, researching the desecration of a synagogue in Finsbury Park. A hurricane of Jew- hatred had swept through the sanctuary, attended by mostly elderly Jews. Among the insults: a swastika scrawled on the rabbi's shtender, siddurim torn and tossed on the floor, glass broken, kippot and tallitot stewn about.

In the course of my reportage, I made two mistakes. First, I asked about the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in England; secondly, I referred to myself as a Diaspora Jew.

My friend, a native Londoner, firmly set me in my place, telling me that European anti-Semitism has not returned for it never went away, merely hid beneath the surface in that wounded period after World War II.

And then he assured me that, as a resident of that Jerusalem-on-the-Hudson known as the Upper West Side, I had no right to consider myself a resident of the Diaspora.

Though shocked, I instantly knew that he was right.

And yet every now and again, as I navigate my Gotham existence, I find myself firmly implanted in the Diaspora.

For instance, this past Sunday.

Freshly returned from a Passover trip to Israel, sun-kissed and toned from hiking in Eilat, looking more Sabra than city slicker, I found myself possessed of a rare gift -- a free Sunday, due to the last-minute cancellation of a day trip upstate to retrieve our dogs from the friends who watched them in our absence (they decided to drive into the city and drop the doggies off for us), Little Babe's self-imposed study plans and HOBB's announcement that he would be spending the day in his office, catching up on work.

While I had an evening engagement in place -- a Yom HaShoah commemoration on the Upper West Side featuring Frank Blaichman, a partisan fighter and author of the new memoir, Rather Die Fighting, a project for which I am serving as public relations consultant -- several hours opened up to me, filling me with giddy delight and a small measure of panic.

What on earth should I do with my free Sunday??

After perusing the Weekend section of the Times and several NYC events blogs, checking my email, Facebook and MeetUp for invitations and events I had previously ignored and emailing a friend whom I've been trying to see for months, a glorious schedule fell into place: an early morning hike down to the JCC and gym workout, a planning meeting at a friend's place for an upcoming fundraiser, some brief local errands, a three-hour Lindy Hop and Charleston workshop at Dance Manhattan in Chelsea, a kamikaze assault on the H&M on Sixth Avenue, dinner with my friend at the Hummus Place back on the UWS...and the Yom Hashoah program at Ohab Zedek on West 95th Street.


While my day began and ended at Jewish venues -- a community center and synagogue -- it is the substance in between that lends it a distinct Diaspora quality.

Specifically, the swing dance workshop. Three hours of boisterous bopping around, learning ecstatic eight-count dance moves in a relentlessly social atmosphere.

In Israel, on Yom HaShoah, there are no dance classes, no music classes, no lite recreation or frivolous entertainment.

In Israel, on Yom HaShoah, the television stations broadcast programming dealing only with the Holocaust.

In New York, on the Sunday of Yom HaShoah, the city hosted hundreds of commemorations for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Synagogues, museums, schools, institutions and community centers offered lectures, films, exhibitions, book talks, the Reading of the Names and other programs in the spirit of the day.

In tribute to its Jewish populace, the soul of the city observed a palpable moment of solemn silence and then the heart of Manhattan beat on, demanding streets streaming with citizens basking in the post-winter new sunshine, maintaining its staggering array of cultural offerings, adventures, opportunities and experiences, indoor and outdoor, high and low brow; artistic, athletic, educational, ethnic, retail, pricey and free-of-charge, multi-cultural, weird, wild, wonderful.

And when Monday arrived and I opened my reluctant eyes, my body felt the full imprint of the Diaspora -- muscles sore from my swing dance intensive, memories of the extraordinarily moving Yom HaShoah event etched upon my mind: a synagogue filled to capacity with children and adults alike, yahrzeit candles lit in memory of the Six Million, songs mournful and triumphant, the testimony of Frank Blaichman, Holocaust survivor, partisan hero, Jewish grandfather, resident of Manhattan.

A Maus in the House

A paper-mache mask sits drying on my dining room table, painted grey, an art project by Little Babe for his Ninth Grade English class.

The assignment was to reflect upon Art Spiegelman's Maus, which the class had just read. In addition to his essay, comparing Spiegelman's father, Vladek, with Odysseus, Little Babe made a Maus mask, which is taking forever to dry.

I don't remember doing anything remotely as sophisticated in high school, one million years ago.

Little Babe's high school encounter with Spiegelman's masterful work helps to bridge the gap between him and his older brother, Big Babe, a culture writer in Berlin. Indeed, when Big Babe was a student at Columbia, he studied with the Artman himself, taking classes in Spiegelman's studio because the artist liked to smoke while he taught.

My youngest has been the baby of the family for so long that watching him catapult into adolescence is a form of endless entertainment, hinting of science-fiction. Who is this kid studying Latin and Ancient Rome? What's that foliage on his legs? When did the 'stache sprout on his upper lip? When did he take up electric bass? And did he actually inform me that he's starting a rock band called Off-Key??

And while everything he is learning at his excellent school has proved mind-expanding, this particular English assignment forced Little Babe to venture beyond Manga -- one of his obsessions -- and embrace the artistry of graphic novels by the masters.

Next stop: Will Eisner and R. Crumb.

While I am pondering Little Babe's metamorphosis, Middle Babe calls. A junior in college, she switched to a Philosophy major at the end of last year from Music and Theatre after developing polyps on her vocal chords. The transition went seamlessly; my songbird and actress turns out to have a natural ability for philosophical inquiry. While walking to the gym, she talks to me about her upcoming Heidegger paper, her essay contrasting Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, the Logic exam she took this morning. She says this all glibly; I am mindblown, amazed, bursting with admiration and pride.

Spring break starts this weekend; Middle Babe has a ticket for the 11:15 Bolt Bus out of Baltimore tomorrow morning. She tells me that she will call me when her bus approaches Penn Station, asks if I can bring Little Babe, her best friend Rebecca and Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians when I pick her up. She tells me she will text me a list of food to buy in preparation for her return home. I make a mental note to move all of my papers and boxes out of her room.

It is a Thursday morning and my work day is well underway. Reporters call to arrange interviews with clients; I make my pitch calls, draft materials, book appointments. Amazingly, spring is in the air though the sky is overcast and there is a chill. It is visible in the optimistic quality of the light; it is tangible after this severe, entombing winter.

Yesterday evening, HOBB left for his annual journalism trip abroad, taking 16 students with him to the Middle East. In two weeks' time, we will join him in Jerusalem for Passover and a family Bat Mitzvah. I am traveling with my two younger children and Big Babe will join us from Berlin. The prospect of being together serves as a golden carrot at the end of a very short stick, luring me forward through my busy days and action-packed evenings.

The Maus mask gleams at me from across the dining room table. I reach across and touch it, surprised to find the paint nearly dry. Now all that remains to be done is the shading of the inner ears, the snout, the mouth. If he is feeling ambitious, Little Babe can clip a few bristles from our kitchen broom and make whiskers.

Tomorrow morning, the mask will be packed and taken to school but for now, on this late winter morning in March, there is a moment of perfect suspension, the prospect of a Passover together with my family in Jerusalem, a homemade Maus in my house.

Facebook vs. Goldfish

Little Babe finally went to sleep after copyediting his Power Point presentation for Talmud class and synchronizing songs by the Beatles and Green Day with the images.

HOBB returned home after heroically walking Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians in the driving rain. Once he removed his soaking coat and toweled down the miserable pooches, he commenced cleaning the fishtank.

And I, after editing press releases, answering emails and doing my several-times-daily sweep of a dozen or so news sites and blogs, finally turned to Facebook.

Where I read a posting by a friend that made me laugh out loud.

Prompting HOBB to ask what was so funny.

Which prompted me, in turn, to inform him that if he wished to know, he should resubscribe to Facebook.

I was kidding, of course. My husband gave up the Facebook habit after an uneasy year as a subscriber. Too much exposure, he said. Too many old roomates eager to reconnect; too many former students wishing to stay in touch, too many stalkers...or simply people he had no interest in communicating with.

I never argued him out of his decision. Frankly, he's not the Facebook type.

But HOBB took my flippant comment seriously. Watching me avidly click on links to videos and punch in pithy responses, hearing me cackle and talk back to my screen, he informed me that the key choices in life can often be framed as Facebook versus goldfish. I must have looked perplexed, because he rushed to explain:

While he was tending his tank, adding chemicals to the water, scrubbing the sides of glass, moving the gravel around, I was communing with my computer. While he was nurturing another species, I was networking for the sake of...networking.

He didn't begrudge technology or the march of time or our newfangled era of cyber-dependency. But he did choose to be a dissenter every now and then.

To be on Facebook is human, he said.

But to care for goldfish is divine.

Discontinuity

I am a creature of habit, given to extreme product loyalty.

When I like something, I love it. Eventually, I end up obsessed and dependent.

So when a favorite product is discontinued, I have a melt-down.

And when I say discontinued, I mean OVER. Not hard to find; I'm good at that. If it's hidden, I can find it. If you're hidden, I can find you...and I have. No. I mean absolutely gone - history, archives, toast, finito. The End. Zapped. Powed. Banished from the face of Planet Earth. Not available on E-bay. Not to be found through a posting on Craigslist. Not in a forgotten drawer at any store or in a buried box at a warehouse.

And certainly -- puleeze, do not insult me – not housed at Gone but not Forgotten.

Hello. I checked with them, like, two years ago.

I mean totally used-up as in what happened to the stash I scored after the first wave of the Origins Ginger Glimmer crisis was made known to me. Those 14 tubs that I located at the shop at The Westchester last Chanuka after calling every last store in the Northeastern United States once I heard that the company was discontinuing my favorite body cream????

Gone, baby, gone.

Those Mudd calf-high combat boots I bought at Kohl's three years ago and wore to freaking death?????

Well, if you want a left one only in size 9, you should be able to replace your beloved pair by bidding quickly. Only 19 minutes left. Otherwise, this fine footwear is forever lost to humanity.

I did have a recent discontinuity scare with a favorite tea of mine -- the trippy Lapsang Souchong. (There is a sweet little story concerning how I managed to identify and then locate it in NYC after drinking about 20 cups on a damp and chilly Saturday afternoon in Dublin and then departing to the States without asking the name of the phenomenal smoky drink I had been imbibing all day.) I was recently concerned that Twinings had discontinued production based on my failure to find it in the tea section of Fairway at both the Broadway and Harlem locations.

Trepidation seeping into my soul, I researched the matter and found that Twinings was thankfully still smoking its Lapsang Souchong leaves. Fairway simply stopped carrying the product, possibly because my taste is not shared by many residents of the Upper West Side.

Now, in order to avoid the anxiety-producing empty aisle syndrome, I intend to buy the stuff online.

On a far less frivolous note, I went into an actual panic a couple of months ago when it seemed that my natural thyroid medication had been discontinued; a possibility I had never before considered. After pumping my clueless doctor for clues, I took matters into my own hands and discovered an entire community trying to cope with a sudden shortage of this vital medication - the gold standard of treatment before the synthetics were invented. The experience of joining a fellowship of victims of a discontinued product was edifying. Other people -- far more frantic and radicalized than I -- had already bonded and organized, putting together an underground railroad for this excellent stuff as well as a clearinghouse for information.

Sometimes, discontinuity is a very serious matter.

But more often than not, discontinuity simply illuminates a sensual dependency that one develops for a beloved product, an addiction to a smell, a taste, a look. Oh, the time I have invested in trying to locate lost things; the hope I have nurtured that Origins may reverse their fatwa against Ginger Glimmer -- the most awesome skin product ever: gorgeously golden, spicy fragrant and sparkly -- and start up production ASAP; the pathetic hours I have spent trolling hardcore goth fashion sites looking for combat boots that might fill the void left by the demise of my Mudds, my foolish optimism that Steve Madden or Nine West or Harley Davidson or Aldo or Target or someone might steal Mudd's design and reincarnate these cheapo, cool accoutrements.

I think of myself as a serious person, given to spiritual yearnings.

So, why the stalker-like behavior to uncover a lost booty of body lotion, a crate of smoked leaf tea, those kick-ass combat boots?

Why do I care, indeed, why do I experience something akin to grief at the prospect of a perfect product being forever lost???

This is the stuff of my life, a few of my favorite things, the items that keep me anchored to the here and now. Some of them are silly; others essential. Here are the artifacts of my life, my personal expressions of self, islands of comfort and security -- a familiar smell, taste, style of shoe – the things you will know me by, portals to eternal plenty, perhaps an intimation of einsof, providing reassuring proof that I am alive.

Serendipity on a Sunday

What is the soul of Sunday?

Shabbat comes first, to wipe the slate clean. This one was spent, as it often is, in the warm company of friends and family. There was a crowded table alive with conversation and company, overflowing food platters passed one to the other, strong wine, savory courses, chocolate desserts. There was the leisurely reading of the New York Times on the couch the following morning, the cozy cammaraderie of kiddush at our shul, a lazy lunch of leftovers at home, more reading, a high-spirited Scrabble tournament in the afternoon. There was the strenuous shoveling out of our Honda -- barricaded by walls of snow -- Saturday night; the subsequent drive out to Great Neck to visit MOBB and FOBB (mother and father of Bungalow Babe) with Little Babe and HOBB and Little Babe's electric cello and electric bass and cupcakes and noisemakers to celebrate FOBB's birthday.

And suddenly Sunday happened.

Sunday feels completely different from Saturday. Though I've always wondered if my perception of Sunday is linked to my Sabbath observance, it is possible that Sunday's difference is inherent and not relative. I wouldn't know. I've kept Shabbat my entire life and even when I've refrained from perfect observance, the aura of the day's distinctness remains draped over me like a permanent prayershawl -- a temporal tallit.

Shabbat commands you to refrain from creation. Sunday commands you to create.

Sunday instructs you: Go Forth. Shabbat impels you: Go to Sleep.

My preferred Sundays are constructed like totem poles, monumental, boasting a variety of faces, forming a formidable work of art, leaving you exhilirated and giddy and spent, heartbroken by the time night comes around and the scent of the imminent death of the weekend fills your nostrils.

There were several faces to this Sunday: the gift of fragrant roses, the joy of intense exercise, the necessity of work, the thrill of attending a live literary event featuring a beloved writer friend, a visit to the ICP -- the International Center for Photography in midtown http://www.icp.org/-- to see Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris. There was a delicious Middle Eastern dinner, swing dance class with HOBB at night and a candlelit adventure back at the urban bungalow for the two of us.

But this Sunday's totem pole bore a special face -- that of serendipitous discovery. Though we came to the ICP for the Paris exhibit (having dutifully read the listings Friday night in the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker and NY Times) we found ourselves pulled into the poignant art and biography of Miroslav Tichy, a Czech painter and photographer who lives alone in a rat-infested hovel in the woods, homeless by appearance, a crazy, bearded old man, an exacting visionary, an artist mercifully saved from obscurity.

Tichy's grainy, haunting images cover the carefully curated walls of the ICP's main gallery. They form a perfect contrast to the works of the surrealists in Paris one floor below. They hold you captive, draw you into Tichy's world, orderly and disordered, squalid and solitary and beautiful. They reflect magic and madness. They are the essence of rebellion against the rigors of communism. They are draped in a Sunday shawl, their scent is eternal Sunday afternoon, they present a Sunday face to the public.

What is the soul of Sunday?

The soul of Sunday is Miroslav Tichy, driven to build his own cameras out of found objects, to capture small scenes, gestures and details through his lens, to defy a crushing political regime, to foresake normalcy, surrendering entirely to the impulses of his heart, capitulating completely to the commandment to create art as he saw it, imprisoned by his terrible talent, liberated from temporal constraints and social convention, patiently waiting to be discovered by a grateful public.

Double Self

The sculptures of Viola Frey overwhelmed me today, stalking me through Manhattan's Museum of Art and Design in Columbus Circle, surrounding me in their oversized grandeur and gawky majesty.

Frey's glazed ceramic people are the star attraction of this quirky, creative space, accosting visitors, delighting and deluging their senses, demanding that the fullest attention to be paid.

"Have you ever heard of her?" I asked my friend, an artist, astonished that Frey's name and work was unknown to me, abashed at revealing the depth of my ignorance.

Much to my relief, my friend shook her head.

It was a Sunday of extremes -- extreme cold, extreme wind, extreme sunshine, extreme emotion. Early February already. How did that happen?

After a night of dancing, I had been on the go for hours -- from an 8 am meeting, to a 9:30 workout, to an 11 am brunch with friends. Now, it was midday and I was ambling comfortably through this quaint museum with a friend I had known for nearly twenty years. Dinner and family responsibility was three hours away.

My friend and I met nearly two decades earlier when we were living in Westchester County and the mothers of young children. One of those children is lost; two others were since born. One of us is a Manhattanite, the other a Connecticut homeowner. We know the scaffolding of each others' lives but today, endeavored to learn the interior design. To this end, we traded tales, listening, probing, sometimes challenging the other. We spoke about our work and our professional ambitions. We articulated what we sought in our intimate relationships. We pondered the depth of the chasm between men and women.

We mostly walked and sometimes sat. At one point, we watched a short film about Viola Frey. In it, the artist is captured in the act of creating her inimitable art. She addresses the interviewer, answering questions or speaking spontaneously about her work. Her colleagues talk about her. It is important to note that she died in 2004, at the age of 70. Funny, how we nurture the illusion that the entire span of a human life can be condensed into one museum trip, how we gain a glimpse into the creative mind of Viola Frey through some clunky, colorful statues in a Manhattan museum.

Hours later, it is one comment -- captured in the film -- that stays with me. It belongs to a fellow artist, a woman, who recounts how Viola told her not to get married and certainly not to have children. Having relationships distracted one from devoting oneself to making art, she had warned.

I turned to my friend with raised eyebrows. She shrugged. "It's true, of course."

Of course it's true. It's just hard to admit.

We make decisions about the way we lead our lives. Artists or not, we opt for solitary, single-minded purity or for the messy distraction of relationships that are prone to take us miles and centuries away from our work.

We adapt. We struggle. We compromise. We concede. We conspire. We reach for transcendence.

We each have a single self. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we are able to awaken and animate a double self.

A Dream of Nuclear Winter

The dream presented a perfect facsimile of reality.

It was a Sunday afternoon. There was a warning of imminent nuclear attack. Manhattan was the target. There was a chance to flee but it wasn't taken.

A siren went off. We gathered in the dining room to watch the world around us -- Amsterdam Avenue and the Columbia University campus -- disappear inside nuclear winter.

Opaque white air filled our vista. Little particles dotted the air.

I turned to my husband, speechless with panic. "Are we all going to die?"

And then, mercifully, I woke up.

It was early morning, too early for a Sunday, darkish, quiet, save for birdsong.

Beneath the down quilt, I had broken into a sweat. My throat burned with thirst and my eyes burned with fatigue. Next to me, HOBB slept peacefully. Tempted to curl into him for comfort, I resisted. We had come to bed very late the night before. We were guests at a benefit dinner where the wine was delicious. I had three glasses. Now, through half-opened eyes, I saw clothes scattered on the floor.

Despite my thirst, I fell back into troubled sleep, only to enter the dream again...through a different portal.

We were no longer in our apartment, having moved to the Upper East Side. It was shortly after the nuclear attack. Miraculously, we had survived. We were now cramped into a place with several other families. I was aware that we were refugees. I was sitting on a bed with Little Babe and Middle Babe, taking stock of the meager possessions we managed to take with us. From a large picture window, we watched warships sail right up to the FDR Drive, enormous robotic frogmen jump from the deck into the water, swim hurriedly to the shore, then turn into tank-like vehicles, barreling towards us along First Avenue.

Once again, I awoke out of the dream, this time prompted not by terror but by the ringing of my BlackBerry. It was 9:05 a.m. and my sister, visiting from Israel, wanted to make plans for the week.

The day began and the dream retreated, but not really. First, I told HOBB about it, curling into him for comfort as I recounted the terrifying narrative. Sharing it, I felt no lessening of the horror, indeed, found myself getting sucked back in. Rolling out of bed, I recovered my clothing, pulled on shorts and a sweatshirt, padded into the dining room. Turning on my computer, I searched the headlines for news of a nuclear attack, worried that my nightmare had, in fact, been a premonition.

In my family, I'm famous for foreshadowing dreams. There was, for instance, the tsunami dream, two nights before the terrible tsunami hit Southeast Asia. There was the dream encounter with my late mother-in-law, where she told me that I would give birth to a son...three weeks before I gave birth to Little Babe. There was the visitation by my late Grandma Dorothy in a dream, the giving of a quilt I had never seen before but which was given to me shortly thereafter by my mother.

Thankfully, I found nothing on the internet about a nuclear attack.

The day began. The cold was bracing, returning me to the reality of a Manhattan not currently under nuclear attack. I greeted Little Babe's cello teacher, then rode the subway down to the JCC, reading Moravia's The Woman of Rome on the way. I did several miles on the elliptical, pumped iron, worked on my abs, talked to friends, relaxed in the steamroom, showered, returned home, greeted Little Babe's Japanese teacher, ate the fresh cod prepared by HOBB and then we went to the Natural History Museum, where we wandered for hours before ending up at the Silk Road exhibition. Along the way, there were phone conversations and coffee breaks and a delicious banana bread pudding that we shared and a shopping excursion to West Side Market and walks along Columbus Avenue and a marvelous dinner at home with homemade cream of mushroom soup yet somehow, this terrible memory stayed with me -- the terror, the helplessness, the unthinkable, the swirling white, nuclear winter, the end of the world.

Rabbis and Revolution

THE STEPPYs vs The TIPSYs

A Shavout Sermon

Rabbi Jack Riemer

(Printed by permission of the author who sent an advance copy to Bungalow Babe on Wednesday, informing her that her recent article in the Forward on the high cost of Jewish education had inspired this sermon. This subject is one that preoccupies Bungalow Babe, causing her to continually kvetch about it as a way of keeping it on the communal radar screen. As Rabbi Riemer is the quintessential rabbi's rabbi, whose articles and sermons are read and quoted from by an international, interdenominational rabbinate, Bungalow Babe could not be more honored. In addition, she is newly reminded of the role that rabbis and other religious leaders play in fomenting social revolution. Her Forward article, which ran in last week's paper, can be read at http://www.forward.com/articles/123854/)

This is the holiday of the giving of the Torah. And therefore, it ought to be a holiday on which we think honestly and seriously about the state of the Torah in our time, and about what we can do to enhance it.

I want to teach you two new words today, two words that I believe have much to say about the state of Torah in our time. One is the word: “STEPPY”, and the other is the word: “TIPSY”

Does anyone here know what STEPPY and TIPSY mean?

I want to talk about these two words today, because I believe, in all seriousness, that the future of Judaism in our community will depend in good measure on how these two new words relate to each other. And therefore, if you care about the future of the Torah, hear me well:

I learned the meaning of the term: STEPPY from Shira Dicker, who is a prominent publicist and the owner of a communications company, and who is a parent whose child goes to one of the best day schools in New York City.

She says that some time ago she got a call from the parent of a child in the school, reminding her that the school’s annual fund-raising dinner was going to be held soon, and that she had not yet bought a ticket.

Shira Dicker says that a year ago she would have been embarrassed to tell the woman that she could not afford the seven hundred and fifty dollars that the dinner costs, but this year, she found herself feeling sorry for the woman who was calling her, because she was probably getting a lot of turn-downs. In this post-Madoff, recessionary time in which we now find ourselves, there were probably a lot of people in the school who were STEPPYs.

What is a STEPPY?

The word is an acronym.

It stands for: Struggling, Two-income, Educated, Professionals Paying Yeshiva Tuition.

STEPPYs are people who are struggling to make enough to send their children to day school, which is not easy these days. The cost of day school education has climbed from four figures a year to five figures a year. And now that the economy has gone south, parents who are struggling financially have only two choices, neither of which is very pleasant to contemplate. They can either take their children out of day school, or else they can ask for scholarships, which is not easy to do for people who are middle class and not poor, but who find ten or fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year for tuition a big nut to crack.

And I have just used modest figures. There are some day schools that approach tuition figures of forty thousand dollars a year, and some of these schools now find it difficult to give scholarships because their investments have tanked, and some of their donors are no longer able to give as generously as they did before.

Shira Dicker says that nobody talks about this, but the stress of coming up with this kind of money for tuition has permeated the lives of many people. It has impacted marriages, made wives wonder why their husbands can’t earn more, and made husbands wonder why their wives are always so tired and cranky. It has turned Shabbat in many homes into a day for physical recuperation instead of spiritual rest, and it has made the prospect of college tuition seem out of reach,

A STEPPY is any Jewish parent who has changed careers, or taken on additional work, or who forgoes a social life, or who limits the amount of cultural events she goes to, or who lets the cleaning lady go, or who passes on sending a child to summer camp, or who puts off her own continuing education, or who drives a run-down car, in order to be able to keep her children in a Jewish day school.

Sharon Strassfeld once observed that “In her circle of friends, the cost of day school education is the most effective form of birth control”.

And, as Shira Dicker says, all this is without counting in the costs of having a bar or bat mitzvah, or sending your child on an Israel Program, or keeping kosher or belonging to a synagogue.

Who is to blame for this situation?

Or to put it more constructively, what can we do about this situation?

I think that there are two answers.

One of them is the TIPSY solution, which I heard about recently.

Does anyone here know what the TIPSY solution is?

No, it is not to go out and get drunk in order to forget the seriousness of the STEPPY situation.

The TIPSY solution is also an acronym. It comes from the Kohelet Foundation, which has two goals. One is to lower the cost of day school tuition, and the other is to increase the involvement of parents in Jewish education, because they believe that a home in which parents study Torah is a good role model that will encourage children to take their own Torah study seriously.

What does TIPSY stand for?

It stands for “The Tuition Incentive Program for Subsidizing Yiddishkeit”.

The idea is really very simple.

The foundation has worked with four day schools in the Philadelphia area so far.
What they do is first determine the actual cost per child if the school operated at full capacity.

The school then agrees to lower tuition in order to attract more students.

The Kohelet Foundation then agrees to provide funding to make up for any losses incurred if the class does not reach full capacity.

At the Kelman Academy in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for example, they lowered the tuition for the first two classes by four thousand dollars, and they lowered the tuition for the third grade by thirty five hundred dollars. They figure that after the families have become hooked on the day school, they will continue sending their children after the first three years, even if they have to pay the whole tuition themselves.

This is one suggestion. It can only work in those schools that are under capacity. In schools that are full and have waiting lists, some other idea will have to be found. But what the Kohelet Foundation has shown us is that there are innovative ideas that can be found to make day schools better and also more affordable, if only we look.

My second suggestion is a simple one—which is that we get over---once and for all--- the idea that the cost of a Jewish education is the sole responsibility of the parents.

Every one of us pays public school taxes, whether we have children in the public schools or not.

Why?

Because we understand that the entire society depends on raising the next generation to be good citizens, good people, and good workers. In exactly the same way, the members of the Jewish community must learn to accept the concept that Jewish education is the shared and sacred responsibility of the entire Jewish community, whether we have children enrolled in a day school or not.

All of us have to consider it our obligation to support our local day schools, whether it be by purchasing tickets for its annual dinner, or ads for its journal, or by making donations in our lifetimes and in our wills. For it does not matter whether we ourselves have children in the school or not. The future of the Jewish people---nothing less than that---is at stake!

All of you probably know the Midrash about what happened at Sinai on the first Shavout, but let me tell it to you again. I have heard this Midrash ever since I was a child. But do you know what? Now I hear it, not just as a fanciful legend, the way I heard it, when I was a child, but as the simple truth.

The Midrash says that when God gathered the Israelites together at the foot of Mount Sinai, He said to them: “I have a great treasure which I am prepared to give to you. But before I give it to you, what can You give me as a guarantee that you will keep it safe?”

The people offered Moses as a guarantor. But God said: “No, Moses is mortal. And therefore, He cannot be a guarantor that you will always keep this treasure.”

The people offered the Prophets as guarantors. But God said: “No. The Prophets are also mortal. Therefore, they cannot be guarantors that you will always keep this treasure which I am about to give you.”

Finally, the people offered the children as guarantors. And this time God said: “Yes! Your children are the best guarantors. If you promise me that in every generation, your children will guard this treasure, I will give it to you.”

And then God gave the Israelites the Torah.

Now that I am a grown up, I understand this ancient Midrash better than I did when I was a child. Now I understand that what it means is that with serious Jewish education, the Jewish people will live. And that without it, we will not be.

And so, on this, the day when we celebrate the giving of the Torah, let us reaffirm the promise that our ancestors made on Mt. Sinai long ago. Let us---all of us---whether we have children of our own in the school or not---accept upon ourselves the personal responsibility for the Jewish education of the next generation.

And may TIPSY and other ideas like it help the STEPPYS in our midst so that the Torah may live and flourish from generation to generation.

Amen.

Being Present at the Brooklyn Museum

We missed the mega-fabulous New Year's First Night celebration at the Brooklyn Museum because of an equally fabulous yoga/health food/karaoke birthday party, a situation that reminded me of one of my favorite Yiddish expressions – “With one tuchis, you can’t dance at two weddings.”

Thrown together hastily, the birthday party was a perfect combo of holistic healthfulness and drunken revelry. Our adorable British hostess charmed us with "Super Trooper," "Lady Marmalade," "Ebony and Ivory," "We Belong Together," and other songs that I was evidently too plastered to recall, while I held my own with "Centerfold," "Alone Again, Naturally," "Tiny Dancer," and Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," – the last song performed atop HOBB's lap while growling into the mike.

We arrived home after 3 in the morning, exhausted yet exhilarated.

It was great fun, yet with the light of day, I was beset by the hysterical fear that I would miss the photo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum I'd been dying to see for months -- Who Shot Rock & Roll?

You see, I knew that once the holiday ended, my life would take on its usual relentless pace and the chances of getting out to Brooklyn before the exhibition closed were slim. Though it sounds geographically implausible, I knew I had a better chance of making it over to Berlin than Brooklyn.

And indeed, that is exactly what happened. I left for Berlin on January 10th where I saw a great many museum exhibitions, but it was only yesterday that I made it to the Brooklyn Museum to finally see Who Shot Rock & Roll. And though I was gratified, gladdened and greatly relieved to finally be able to scratch this exhibition off my cultural To-Do List, what captured my imagination at the Brooklyn Museum was not this energetic assemblage of photos of rock stars and their performances.

Instead, it was a small black and white watercolor, based on a sculpture made by Harriet Hosmer, a remarkable 19th century artist. Created by Patricia Cronin, a Brooklyn artist of my own vintage, the watercolor depicts the interlocking hands of Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was part of the exhibition closing that day, Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found.

Having completed the rock and roll exhibition (my brain on joyous overload from ingesting pictures of a near-naked, Christ-like Iggy Pop, David Bowie with a red punk-shag 'do from his Ziggy Stardust phase, Elton John in platform boots and humongous glasses, the baby-faced Rolling Stones before they even signed a record contract, the famous Avedon portraits of the Beatles, Madonna in the early ‘80’s when she was a quasi-homeless East Village character, the underfed Talking Heads at CBGB’s and other such delights; my husband humoring me by pretending to be interested) HOBB and I wandered happily through the cavernous and largely empty rooms of the Brooklyn Museum, which recalled Berlin’s sprawling temples of culture.

Recalling a listing in the New York Times that Cronin’s exhibition was about to close, we headed down to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on the third floor.

There, just around the corner from the legendary Judy Chicago work – The Dinner Party -- was Cronin’s exhibition, a tribute to the largely-forgotten art of Harriet Hosmer.

There is nothing quite like stumbling onto the work of a master one has not previously encountered. The joy of this discovery is indeed akin to embarking on a new adventure. And so, in this quiet room, on the last day of the exhibition, I avidly read about Harriet Hosmer’s life, learned that she was born in 1830 and died in 1908, lived in Rome for forty years, becoming part of the expatriate artist community; that she was a lesbian; that she sculpted in marble.

Listening to Cronin’s curate her own work on my cell-phone through some newfangled technical wizardry, I also learned that while in Italy, Hosmer became a close friend of the Brownings, whose literary partnership Cronin discusses briefly in the course of her shpiel. Cronin explains the placement of the hands and their symbolism; what the physical conveyed about the emotional, spiritual and artistic bond shared by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Which stopped me dead in my tracks, making me bookmark the Brownings for an upcoming obsession…when I conclude my current obsession with Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante.

It is now Monday afternoon. Between phone calls and emails, I found myself Googling the Brownings, giving myself a sneak peak at the literary couple who might next consume my imagination. (I like the way that Italy forms a perfect thematic segue between my current crushes and those in line for forthcoming consideration.) I realize that at this time last week, I had just landed in New York, leaving behind a madcap, frenetic weeklong adventure with Big Babe, my expatriate American son. During my time in Berlin, I observed and recorded the scene, as Hosmer did during her time in Rome. And while I was missing from my regularly-scheduled life in New York, the truth of that old Yiddish adage was further underscored.

With my one body, I couldn’t be on two continents at once, a source of frustration to those who wanted me to be on Eastern Standard Time in New York – stationed before a computer and next to a landline -- and not bopping through Berlin, with unreliable internet access.

Here’s the thing about life. You have one tuchis but many weddings to attend. Some are local, some are far-flung. Some are fun and others are obligatory. Some you will blow off; others you might miss due to unforeseen circumstances. Some conflict with each other…or with your happy little habits of living or with life itself.

And here’s a reality check: by choosing to attend one wedding, you choose to miss another. You give up one experience to gain another.

Of course, like most contemporary multi-tasking maniacs, I’ve tried to be at two…or three…or ten weddings with my one tuchis, in fact, this delusional modus operandi has characterized most of my professional adult life over the past eight years. Perhaps yours as well.

I’ve tried to behave as if sleep is optional to human functioning. I’ve tried to keep my BlackBerry activated in countries with ridonculous roaming charges to prove my commitment to those who wish to reach me all the time.

I’ve tried to obliterate boundaries of time and space through constant contact.

But we now know the truth about multi-tasking as a way of life, which is that a wee bit improves our productivity but if multi-tasking becomes standard operating procedure, the integrity of individual actions is severely compromised.

In other words, if we are always here and there, we are not really present anywhere.

So, I’m entering into a new contract with my tuchis because it is related to my heart, mind and soul.

From now on, it dances at one wedding at a time.

Flashback to the New Year's weekend. Initially, I tried to engineer a two-wedding solution to the evening, proposed going to the Brooklyn Museum and our friends’ party, catching two hours at the museum first, then meeting up with our friends at the Korean karaoke joint in midtown Manhattan.

The plan was actually doable – and didn’t entail meshuggeneh multi-tasking -- but HOBB doesn’t roll that way. He's a one-wedding guy.

Besides, he was looking forward to the yoga and health food.

I was frustrated at the time because my plan to dance at two weddings was being thwarted, but looking back, I am glad at the way it worked out.

After all, if we had gone to the Brooklyn Museum for New Year’s First Night, I would have likely missed the chance to discover the art of Harriet Hosmer, as interpreted by Patricia Cronin. Three weeks ago, I would have felt no urgency to see the exhibition, would have arrived with my First Night agenda -- dancing in the great hall with the live orchestra, standing on line to catch a glimpse of Who Shot Rock & Roll?, drinking in the spectacle of thousands of people filling the museum on a Saturday night.

Instead, on a Sunday afternoon in late January, I shared a unexpectedly magical and intimate moment with Patricia Cronin and Harriet Hosmer at the Brooklyn Museum.

Instead, I learned about the interlocking hands of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert Browning, was reminded of their love and literary partnership.

Locking hands with HOBB, my own partner in literature and life, I walked through the rare quiet rooms of the Brooklyn Museum, grateful to be doing just one thing at a time, to be fully present in my life, if only for a single Sunday afternoon in January.

If I Wanted to be on Call 24/7, I'd be in Haiti

Attention Misguided World,

Something has happened to the concept of URGENCY.

Something terrifying.

Blurring important distinctions.

Obliterating boundaries.

Producing dire consequences for our humanity and ability to distinguish between the realms of work and life, between the wish to advance one's agenda and humanitarian crisis.

Here's the thing: from teens texting their friends a million times a day as if rapid thumb movement was vital to respiration, to the expectation that one should be on call around the clock for work matters that are removed from life and death considerations, the modern world has gone gaga, losing its soul or simply its mind.

"I have no choice," a friend recently confided, out of sheer exhaustion. "If I'm not always available to my boss, I'll lose my job. I'll be instantly replaced by someone else who is willing to take calls at midnight or sleep with their BlackBerry under their pillow."

"How can you stand it?" I asked, though I am up against the same expectation all the time.

"Where's the organ transplant?" demanded another friend, at her wit's end. "Whenever I get this urgent message about something completely pedestrian -- from my kids or my boss -- I wonder why we're all living as if we were EMS workers, transporting vital organs. Who will die if we do not return a call or text within seconds???"

It is Friday morning, the eve of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, God's gift to humankind. In His or Her Infinite Wisdom, in His or Her Omniscience, a preview of our present reality was requested and made available and the Sabbath created as an antidote.

But here's the scary reality: Shabbat is not enough. It is not adequate to have one 25 hour black-out zone per week.

We need our mornings.

We need our evenings.

Unless you are transporting vital organs, you should be sleeping or partying or reading or making love at midnight...not sending texts to your staff.

And unless you are down in Haiti, pulling bodies from the rubble, feeding the hungry, transporting goods, rebuilding the devastated country, saving lives, there is simply no excuse for a 24/7 -- or even a 24/6 -- expectation of availablity, built upon a perverted concept of urgency.

Shabbat Shalom

First We Take Manhattan. Then We Take Berlin.

In Berlin, the winter sky is gunmetal grey, the streets are covered with a slushy covering of snow, several inches deep, the cold seeps into your bones, no… deeper. Into your organs.

In Berlin, people ride the U-Bahn with or without the proper tickets. On the train, they sport haircuts like Peter Frampton, like Marilyn Manson, like Billy Idol. Sometimes you see someone who is a dead ringer for Dieter, Mike Myer's West German television host. They wear clothes that are old without being vintage. There is no fashion one-upsmanship, no status-seeking labels to be flaunted, no must-have accessory or pair of jeans. There are only curious gazes at the foreigner wearing the noticeably fashionable clothing, the expensive-looking ring.

In Berlin, there are little bronze plaques on the sidewalks telling you that at this location, in the year such and such, a Jew named so and so was taken to the (fill in the blank) concentration camp. Their family had lived in this city until that very date, was part of the life of Berlin. And then they were never seen again.

In Berlin, the museums are plentiful and palatial, cutting-edge or classical. There are three opera houses. There are symphony halls and theatres. Bars and clubs are everywhere. Everyone is drinking. Everyone is going somewhere, up for a party or celebration. Money is optional. Friendly sex is everywhere. People are welcoming. There are no cliques, no In-Crowd. Everyone is getting a free degree at one of the universities. Many are on welfare. If you don't have money and you want to drink or dance, someone will probably pay for you. The city is sprawling and architecturally discordant. The past is alive everywhere.

In Berlin, you will often feel like you are living in the past. Any moment in the past except for that slew of years in middle of the 20th century, which is a place unlike any other, a destination that is impossible to revisit.

But that slew of years permeates Berlin, giving the wind a special sorrowful sound, providing the reason for the gunmetal grey sky, making the bone-chilling cold a metaphysical matter.

In the winter world of Berlin, your feet are always cold and wet. You will take your boots off in restaurants and massage your toes. Some places you visit will have coal ovens you will need to feed with bricks of coal. Even when the embers are burning brightly and the ceramic tiles are hot to the touch, you will feel chilled, unable to remove your clothes to sleep. You'll wonder how anyone survived even one winter night in a concentration camp.

In Berlin, you will sleep with your street clothes every night -- even your bra -- because your fingers will be stiff with cold and unable to manage the unsnapping procedure. You will put your head under the covers, wear a ski cap one night. You will shower hurriedly in the morning after heating up the water for half an hour, stooping beneath the shower spray to get wet, soaping up briskly, bravely applying shampoo while praying for the water to remain hot long enough to rinse the stuff out, then going out on a limb of faith to apply conditioner or shave your legs and armpits.

Inevitably, the water will turn cold too soon and you will emerge from the tub, shivering, onto a cold-tiled floor, the thin shower curtain sticking to your cold, wet, goose-prickled skin.

In Berlin, the winter Spree will be frozen and black with sheets of ice floating on the surface. Crossing a footbridge slippery with snow, you fear that you will skate, slide under the rail and end up in the terrifying waters.

The Spree seems sadly meager as compared with the Thames, the Siene, the Liffey, the Hudson, the Danube. And then you hear about the bodies that were dumped into it and it becomes something else.

Evil. Complicit.

In Berlin, you have come to be with your oldest child who has chosen this place as his (hopefully temporary) adopted home. You bring him goods from Zabar's, about $150 worth of coffee, smoked salmon, salami, babka and coffee paraphernalia. You infiltrate his life while you are there; shadow him around his Berlin world. Thus, you meet his friends. You got to his haunts, see his operas and films, walk through his museums. Together, you crowd into Humboldt University for a free lecture by Orham Pamuk and sit on the floor with the student revolutionaries who have occupied the school for reasons that elude you.

In the morning and at night, you shovel his coal into the coal oven and brew his Zabar's coffee, the French Italian roast, first grinding the beans, then pouring the powder into the Chemex filter, adding the hot water, measuring out cream. You note the prices, instantly translate them from Euro value to dollar value. Things are cheap, generally.

In Berlin, you interview his expatriate friends, finding out why they are in Berlin, what the lure is. You have too much wine and ask a native German if anyone ever asked her what her grandfather did during the war. She laughs uncertainly. Your son stares at you.

The two of you fight, of course. Over stupid things but also over the division of time; how much you get to attend to your work versus how much time you get to spend together. You spend mostly every waking moment together and come home from clubs at four and five in the morning.

And then, it is time to leave. And then you are back in New York, on American soil.

Berlin is a conundrum, a paradox, a destination. To some it is endlessly problematic, forever desecrated. To others, it is a neverland of cheap, easy living, good times at the ready, a steady stream of people making little or no money. Lacking professional ambition or even the desire for a lasting love relationship. In Berlin, you will never feel like a slacker, a loser, an underachiever.

Because my son has chosen it, Berlin is of endless fascination to me. As a New Yorker, I see the lure of Berlin burning most brightly at this moment in time, offering an alternative to the collapsing American scene.

Who's that Girl? Is She on Facebook?

Why, it's none other than me -- BUNGALOW BABE -- enjoying a glam brunch at the home of James Cunningham, the American Ambassador to Israel last month.

This pic arrived with a bunch of photos yesterday, via email, and is actually a cropped version of a larger, more panoramic shot featuring none other than HOBB, who was the DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN SPEAKER that morning.

An upcoming posting might have the original pic, but I present this artfully-modified photo because it warms me to gaze at my sun-drenched visage, allows me to teleport myself beyond the frigid climes of New York City to a more temperate locale.

I also present this photo because it is the face of someone who is about to hit the 300-Friend mark on Facebook.

And while this number might not be formidable for all those less mature individuals who have been promiscuously acquiring "friends" for years before I even considered going on Facebook, I am proud to say that I am actually real-life friends with all my FB pals.

Mostly.

Not that 300 is the total number of human beings that I have befriended in my two-score and change years on Planet Earth. Oh, no, no, no. Don't be silly. The people I know from the four summer camps I attended total over 300 alone. Had I the time, you'd find me avidly trolling Facebook with the intention of picking up friends of friends (as giddily as Zabar's customers when all the baked goods go to half price) in order to further boost my numbers, because it does become a game or race of sorts, doesn’t it?; a sort of cyber-popularity contest.

Indeed, when I saw that my daughter, Middle Babe’s friend list was over the 1,000 mark, I admit to feeling envious.

But more is not always better and besides, my Facebook Friends list is a work-in-progress.

To my list of 300 – I am moved by the special bond we share. To you, I send a group cyber-hug.

FBFF: Facebook Friends Forever!!!

Waltz #2 @ Starbucks

Last Monday, I camped out at the Starbucks on Broadway and West 75th Street, working on my laptop for hours.

My perch near the window -- a round table small enough for no one else to consider joining me -- was perfect.

Well, it would have been perfect if not for the woman seated inches away from me who was also camped out for hours, variously sleeping, muttering to herself, eating candy bars, refusing to allow elderly people to sit in her extra chair, watching cat videos on her laptop and laughing hysterically, rolling cigarettes and then ambling outside to smoke them just outside my window so that it appeared as if she were deliberately blowing smoke into my face, then returning inside to settle back into her chair, groaning, while feeble senior citizens stared covetously at her chair, piled high with her stuff, and she complained that my power cord was touching her shoe and that the spoiled babies of Upper West Side yuppies were crying too loudly, and that it was frikkin’ freezing outside and that life in general just sucked.

As experienced laptop road warriors know, once you snag a good table near an electrical outlet at Starbucks, you are not moving except in the event of an actual emergency. And once you snag a window seat at a solo table, you are basically prepared to work doggedly sans bathroom visits AND coffee if your absence will imperil your hold on the table.

Fearing that my scary Starbucks neighbor might smash my laptop should I leave my post to order a coffee while sprinting to the potty, I worked in a state of dire discomfort for nearly an entire hour, trying to concentrate on my work and not the candy bar wrappers accumulating on her table or my increasing need to run to the bathroom which seemed paradoxical given my now-unbearable thirst.

At the brink of near-collapse, I finally made a run for it, scoring a restroom with the beautiful word VACANT on the door without as much as a minute's wait, ordering not just coffee but a bottle of that ridiculously overpriced eco-friendly water, a pack of buttery, ridiculously caloric madeleines and a cheese and fruit platter on my way back...as if I were about to hunker down in an underground bunker for the rest of the afternoon.

I practically sacrificed a goat in gratitude when I returned to my table with my loot and everything was just as I left it.

Thus relieved and fortified with sugar, water, caffeine and protein, I was able to work for the next two hours, willing myself to almost ignore crazy lady who must have gone through six candy bars and smoked about as many cigarettes when she was not having crazy conversations on her cellphone, which I suspected of being a toy.

Checking the time, I realized I needed to leave and started shutting down my laptop.

And that's when the unmistakable intro to Elliott Smith's “Waltz #2” began over the Starbucks sound system, the slow rat-a-tat drum beat, the guitar strumming in three-quarter time, the piano joining the party, the crooning John Lennon-like voice finally filling the air with the song’s opening lyrics:

First the mike
Then a half cigarette
Singing "Cathy's Clown,"
That's the man
She's married to now
That's the girl that he takes around town

I sat up straight in my chair, ears straining toward the music. Omigod, I thought. That song. I haven't heard it in such a long time!

I'm never gonna know you now
But I'm gonna love you anyhow

Where had "Waltz #2"gone for so many years? Or was it there all along, living in the musicsphere and I simply didn't have the ears to hear it? Elliott Smith's stubborn sorrow resides in that song, all his pain and longing, his well of loneliness, his broken heart... and I had actually forgotten about it.

Yet now, at this very moment, it came back into my life and demanded that attention be paid. So I did... and the crazy lady, my laptop, my coffee, the other customers, the fact of Monday and my work simply evaporated. For a moment I couldn't even remember where I was headed once I left Starbucks. It was just me and the music, me and Elliott Smith, locked in a courtly embrace, waltzing through time and space. And, was it my imagination or had someone raised the volume on this song? It sounded loud, good loud but much louder than the previous songs, which I barely even heard. Perhaps one of the baristas also loved "Waltz #2" and pumped up the volume. The effect was holistic. I was surrounded by mournful melody, carried in a bubble of sadness that was oddly comforting.

A week has passed since that magical moment and I must have listened to "Waltz #2" seventy or eighty times. I have brooded over the candid disclosure: “Tell mister man with impossible plans/to just leave me alone/in the place where I make no mistakes/in the place where I have what it takes,” and wondered who was being addressed. His famously abusive stepfather? The world at large?

During this time, I also re-read all the newspaper accounts of Elliott Smith’s suicide and the theories behind it. I contemplated his cosmic despair. I wept over his photograph and the statement released by his family. I downloaded "Waltz #2" from Middle Babe's iTunes library, thereby freaking her out. ("What? That's MY favorite Elliott Smith song! You can't have it! You're a grown-up!") I have run on the elliptical trainer to it on an endless loop for 40 minutes, several times. My BlackBerry ring tone is now its chorus. I purchased the sheet music from musicnotes.com and will be singing it this week with Mary Rodgers. And I am learning how to play it on the piano.

Am I obsessed with "Waltz #2?"

No doubt.

Have I indulged in an adolescent-like fixation regarding the artist, his music and its message?

Possibly.

But if "Waltz #2," or any song, can make crazy people disappear, can transport a fortysomething woman from the mundane reality of a Manhattan Monday into a magical realm of transcendent beauty, it is the truest kind of art and will live on forever.

Hook-Up = Heartbreak? Ask George Clooney!

No one dates anymore, I was recently informed by a young woman of college age. They either do casual hook-ups or rush to get married.

Really?

I've been hearing about this dating-free philosophy for some time now, have even seen signs of the fact that we are becoming a Hook-Up Nation but what I want to know is -- beyond a fling or two or three, who actually believes that emotion-less, commitment-free sexual relationships are desirable?

The quick answer, it might appear, is boys and men, but George Clooney recently informed me otherwise. The no-strings-attached fling can be downright demoralizing, he told me during a recent intimate encounter at the Loews Lincoln Square Theatre where he was seen racing to the home of his hook-up to see her between business trips. And why was this? Because, despite his up-in-the-air lifestyle and allergy to coupledom, it turns out that he actually cared about her. Now that I've gotten the Gospel according to George, I'm intent upon spreading the word that men have feelings too, though I'm all-too-aware that the concept of the sheerly recreational sexual encounter (termed famously the Zipless F^*% by Erica Jong in Fear of Flying some thirty years ago) seems tailor-made to the male species, reputed to be sluttish from birth.

But lest I jump to pre-feminist conclusions, said my college campus spy, I should know that girls were fully complicit in perpetuating this dating-free ethic. They have willingly adopted the Hook-Up habit themselves, thereby becoming hookees, or as our mothers might have wisely said - hookers.

It was liberating, she insisted. Why should boys be the only ones to fool around?

Only under strenuous cross-examination did this young lass confess that her female friends frequently ended up getting emotionally screwed because they cannot squelch the secret hope that the boys they jump into bed with might end up liking them. Significantly, my source admitted to being unusual for her generation, craving neither young marriage nor the casual encounter but that obsolete thing called a relationship which involves a prehistoric life form known as a boyfriend.

It's obviously not only college girls who end up disappointed by this decree of divorce between body and soul. I've heard from single men who are in a state of near-despair, longing for an intimate and caring relationship and fearing that most modern women are infected with the wish to only hook up with them. One twentysomething lad reflected on the general state of things with real sadness, bemoaning the loss of sincerity in human interactions, expressing his desire to bond body, heart and soul as possibly old-fashioned and increasingly unrealistic.

True, I know way more women who weep for the lack of a loving partner but the fact that I even know a handful of men who are disappointed in love informs me that the ethic of the Hook-Up as standard operating procedure is an illusion, if not an outright lie.

And though it is considered to be the new, cool way to relate, the habit of hooking up is actually a two-dimensional trap, killing off the possibility of having a truly erotic or romantic experience, both of which form the whipped cream and cherry on the sundae of life.

Which brings me back to George Clooney and two recent films that riff on the limitations of the Hook-Up habit from a male perspective -- Up in the Air and 500 Days of Summer.

If you have seen neither film and wish to do so, please stop reading this post as it contains a plot spoiler in the next paragraph.

Maybe it's because I just saw these films weeks apart (one in the theatre, the other aboard my Continental flight back from Israel) but I found it striking that both Clooney's Ryan Bingham and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom Hansen have their hearts broken by women who treat them all-too-cavalierly.

Who participate avidly in the relationship and then withdraw, revealing themselves to be not the least bit emotionally invested.

Which is striking and kind of Man-Bites-Dog because we know all about women getting screwed over by men. But there is nothing liberating or score-settling about the screw-you shoe being worn by the other foot. Instead, as a filmgoer and fellow human, I felt deep disgust toward Zooey Deschanel's and Vera Farmiga's characters Summer and Alex, indeed, had a fleeting fantasy that I might re-educate them in a Clockwork Orange kind of way, teaching them how to treat the people who care about them with kindness and concern.

And though it is only The Movies, I found this plot twist important and reflective of the way that things really are.

Which is that our hearts are located within our bodies.

And that real people don't come in single-use packaging to be used once or twice and tossed, that is to say, to be treated like hookers.

Feliz Navidad 2009

For those who ride the rails, a familiar sight and sound, this one captured aboard the #1 train heading downtown from W116th Street to W14th Street.

This photograph and post is dedicated to our valiant cleaning woman -- Leidy Dominquez -- who keeps the urban bungalow clean and orderly.

Leidy and thousands of others like her are the unsung heroes of this city, the hard-working people who remain below the radar screen in order to keep this town running.

To Leidy and all her amigos -- Feliz Navidad!!!

From Cosi to Carnegie Hall

At 8:10 in the morning, Cosi was sparsely populated by Upper West Siders who seemed dazed to be awake and out in public at that hour.

Wearing a blazer and pashmina incongruously atop gym clothes, I gulped a Cafe Americano, fortified with an extra shot of espresso, and virtually inhaled a rare chocolate chip muffin in an effort to enter the state of alertness necessary for a brainstorming session followed by a workout at the JCC, just around the corner.

The subject at hand was the normalization of Israeli society in the post-Intifada era. The matter we were discussing was how a people who are accustomed to the adrenaline-rush of crisis deal with life-as-usual. Our focus was the cultural landscape of the country over the past couple of years, the facets of life that were now coming into focus, the new direction of contemporary art, even the welcome proliferation of wine bars...a clear indication of a society that can finally relax.

Not that things are perfect, as we were quick to point out to each other, noting the political and religious issues. But still...for those of us who pop back and forth between New York and Jerusalem as if were a Metro-North commute from midtown to, say, New Rochelle, there has been a profound sea-change.

"I find myself un-obsessed with checking the news from Israel every hour for the first time in over a decade," I confessed.

"Me too!!!" affirmed my breakfast mate, smacking the table in solidarity "It sometimes feels like something is missing without the constant sense of emergency."

"The question is -- can Jews handle calm for long?" I mused aloud. "We're so excitable. Were we born this way or conditioned by our history?"

That question hovered in the air as I took my seat, twelve hours later, for Part II of the Messiah performance last night at Carnegie Hall. Unlike the public sing-ins of the Messiah which I have attended, this performance was dull and pro-forma, kind of like a religious service one was duty-bound to attend or an endless funeral for someone you hardly knew. Sitting between HOBB and a German tourist, I felt trapped, bored and increasingly sleepy.

Indeed, just before everyone rose for the Halleluyah Chorus, HOBB roused me from sleep.

Dazed and somewhat embarrassed, I was also amazed. I had never fallen asleep in public before, rarely slept on planes, had an abnormal ability to endure sleeplessness.

Just before closing my eyes (having tried first to read the novel I lugged with me, yet failing, due to the dim lighting) I remembered thinking that the performance was not just boring, it was truly soporific, should be marketed, indeed, as a sleep-aid. I recalled looking around and taking note of the vast sea of placidity, the calm Christians who had come to hear this, the ultimate Christmas-time cultural offering, realizing that their perception of the performance likely differed dramatically from my own.

I tried to focus on the message of Handel’s Messiah, tried to try on the theological underpinning, share, perhaps, the sanctity of the impending day for those who believe that Jesus was the son of God and that this hugely commercialized holiday marked his miraculous, virginal birth.

Tried and failed miserably. Failed to rustle up even an iota of empathy. Found myself feeling, instead, confrontational towards Christianity for its history of persecution of Jews, found myself sneering as I spotted classically goyish faces or outfits, wondered if I appeared overtly Jewish to those sitting around me with my dark hair and eyes and cynical mien.

As the chorus sang “Glorious,” I longed for the campy, sacrilegious glory of Jesus Christ Superstar instead, for the critical gaze of Constantine’s Sword, for the music of Madonna.

Standing, dazed, during the Halleluyah Chorus, I wondered at my ability to fall asleep when normally I would be beset by that ultimate of Jewish existential modes -- shpilkes -- roughly and inaccurately translated as being on pins and needles, more aptly described as a state of extreme and pervasive agitation.

I thought about the various catalysts of artistic inspiration, wondered which would be proven by history to be the stronger muse -- heartbreak, hysteria or Halleluyah.

Sitting in the balcony of Carnegie Hall last night I felt alienated by my Jewish tendency towards shpilkes, my interpretation of the calm beauty of Handel's Messiah as totally and utterly boring, an assault of normalcy evoking in me the desire to tune out and seek refuge in my haunted dreams.

Morante & Moravia: A Brand New Obsession

I will be brief...as brief as Elsa Morante's outfit in the picture to the left.

Just three books into my love affair with Alberto Moravia (Contempt; Boredom and The Conformist), I learned from my brother-in-law that if I loved Moravia, then I would really, really love his wife, Elsa Morante.

I was vaguely aware of Morante, knew that her novel La Storia (History) is regarded as a 20th century masterpiece. I also knew that both writers were half-Jewish, a fact of great consequence in Europe during the time of the Second World War.

Already, a stack of Moravia's novels awaits me, bedside; to these, I must now add Morante's works. Considering the output of both, I think my literary dance card will be full for a few months. And that's without even consulting the biographical works, which I most certainly will have to, in order to feed my voracious interest in the lives of writers who are married to each other.

I wrote last month about my penchant for burning through the complete works of a single writer, immersing myself in his or her life, supplementing their work with biographical data -- sometimes in the form of books, other times cribbed from cyberspace.

Even more fulfilling, though, is discovering a literary couple, reading him, reading her and reading about their shared life. Over the years, I have become a groupie of Paul and Jane, Diana and Lionel, Sylvia and Ted, Jean Paul and Simone, Dash and Lillian, Vera and Vlad...to name a few. (No matter that Vera didn't write; her partnership with her husband was entirely literary.)

I was even briefly obsessed with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (who committed suicide) and found myself wondering about Stan and Jan Berenstain, authors of the Berenstain Bears series. The teenage Joyce Maynard who lived with the much-older J.D. Salinger for a while in the seventies was fascinating, if disturbing, for me to comtemplate. More recent writing couples, however -- Nicole Kraus and Jonathan Safran Foer; Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, for instance -- evoke not a shred of curiosity in me.

The literary marriage is both a glorious ideal and a total nightmare, dangling the paradoxical promise of soulmate and eternal nemesis. There is shared ambition and deadly competition. There is the clash of ego; the clamoring for all-engulfing attention. There is the desire to serve as The Muse. There is the infantile demand to be read and savored; to be held, to be heard, to be seen as one sees oneself.

And then there are the complicating factors of sex, money, children, family and overlapping circles of friends.

And success coming to one but not the other.

Though I try to enforce strict rules with myself, refraining from reading biographical information until I have completely swallowed the literary ouevre of the respective writer, sometimes I weaken and take a peek.

Usually, this is a deadly mistake as the information I discover proves so enticing that I am in grave danger of abandoning the reading of the work prematurely and diving headlong into the heart of the marriage...where I never wish to leave.

And when a photograph of the couple is glimpsed -- invariably showing them as impossibly glamorous, as in the case of this picture of Morante and Moravia -- it has the same effect as portraits of movie stars have on the young and impressionable, blinding and dazzling me, seizing hold of my imagination, making me lovesick, nearly delusional, providing me with a portal through which I can understand my own life and marriage, a context within which I can view my own life as a great dramatic work.

The Midnight Scream

Exactly 45 minutes ago a bloodcurling scream rang out through the frigid night. Rushing to the window, I saw scores of Columbia students hanging out of their dorm windows, arms flailing, mouths agape. It was a surreal, horrifying spectacle.

Oh yeah, I realized, as the melodramatic keening continued, looping into arias, traumatizing the winter air. The Midnight Scream.

The Midnight Scream, a biannual ritual, typically takes place the night before finals commences but I understand from Jody, Middle Babe's friend who is currently sitting on our dog-chewed red leather couch, that the test schedule got a bit screwed up this semester and the Midnight Scream is towards the end of exams.

No matter. It is a quirky, oddly-reassuring thing to witness: this witty expression of exasperation and panic in the face of finals. This expression of solidarity in the face of stress. This communal ritual of catharsis.

"Today is the greatest day of my life," proclaimed Middle Babe to me last week, the day after her last final. It had been an intense semester for her, having switched in her junior year to a philosophy major. I recall when Big Babe was a Columbia student and participant in the Midnight Scream, not so very long ago. I make a mental note to drop him an email about hearing the scream tonight.

Or perhaps I'll tell him in person when I visit him in Berlin in three weeks' time. I can casually mention it as I unpack the goodies I have brought him from New York, which might include the following items, thoughtfully itemized by him in an email he sent me earlier; the first installment of his annual Berlin Wishlist.

BIG BABE'S BERLIN WISHLIST, 2010, VOLUME I

1. A study, heavy-ish coffee tamper with 49mm (2") diameter (should be easy to find at Zabars) + a thermometer for heating frothing milk (we might have one of these at home, in the drawer with all the non-silverware cutlery stuff)
2. 6 lbs of Zabar's whole bean coffee (3 French-Italian and 3 dark espresso)(I'll write more about food later, but you know the drill - babka, lox, cheddar, melinda's etc...)
3. The myriad dvds that have arrived to dad's office over the past two weeks: feel free to open any and all boxes. The DVDs I'd like to have close by are: Pandora's Box, Le Plaisir, La Ronde, The Earrings of Madame De..., The Seventh Seal and Last Year at Marienbad.

From the couch in the living room, Middle Babe requests a Snapple. She is wrapped in a blanket, Alfie the Pomeranian sleeping happily in her lap. Jody's snowboots are melting onto the wooden floor. Shara, visiting from England, checks information online for a train to Newark.

As for me, I'm frankly falling asleep.

The Midnight Scream, after all, was 45 minutes ago.