INCIDENT IN MARSEILLE

From today’s on-line edition of the Jerusalem Post:

A 22-year-old Jewish woman suffered a vicious anti-Semitic attack by two men of Middle Eastern appearance in a train station in Marseille, France on Thursday night.

The attackers tore the Star of David chain from around the young woman's neck, lifted up her shirt, painted a swastika on her stomach and then fled the scene.

Local police opened an investigation into the attack but had not yet found the assailants.
Head of the Jewish Agency delegation in France, David Roche, said the incident was the most severe anti-Semitic attack in France since the murder of the young Jewish male Ilan Halimi by a gang of Muslim youths in February 2006.

In response to the attack, Jewish Agency Chairman Ze'ev Bielski released a statement saying that specifically during the course of the largest display of democracy France has known in many years "this barbaric act" is carried out.

"We are doing our utmost so that the issue of the fight against anti-Semitism will top the agenda of the candidates for the presidency and of the candidate who is elected," continued the statement.

That is where the dispatch ends and yet this is where the story only begins. To understand what is so horrific about this news story -- which is shocking but certainly not the most egregious anti-Semitic attack in Europe as of late -- read the comments of Jew-haters which appear interspersed in the comments section below the story. (visit www.jpost.com)

From my point of view, it is the ordinary, passive anti-Semitism of the international public that poses as big a threat to us as the vicious acts of Jew-hating hoodlums the world over.

Evil does not have a supernatural component. It happens because of mankind's sins of omission.

SMASH MY FAT!!!!

I walked into Barnes and Noble yesterday to pick up a book for Little Babe and walked out with Dr. Ian Smith's Extreme Fat Smash Diet, tucked inside my handbag so no one could see my purchase.

With red print across the top screaming, When You Need to Lose it Fast, and the endorsement on the bottom: As Seen on VH1's Celebrity Fit Club, this book was simply irresistible.

Especially as I put on a few pounds this winter and want to Lose it Fast.

Especially as the non-stop pace of my workdays (which typically begin at 6 am and conclude past midnight with brief breaks to awaken and prepare Little Babe for school, speak to Middle and Big Babe by phone, attend meetings, prepare and have dinner with HOBB and Little Babe and then put Little Babe to sleep) result in NEVER leaving my computer for more than quick sprints to the bathroom...often undertaken with cellphone and office phone in hand...which obviously means that it is a rare thing for me to get to the gym these days.

This work-without-end routine is nuts, I know, and not at all healthy. You would not believe the amount of conference calls I've conducted while in the bathroom.

Yesterday, I interrupted a shower to answer my Crackberry and stood shivering, with conditioner in my wet hair, peppermint body wash drying to a frosting-like veneer on my naked skin, while I talked about an inane project for 10 minutes, trying to control the chattering of my teeth.

And speaking of teeth... I've even talked on the phone while brushing my teeth, making the other person wonder if I am on drugs, no doubt.

Things are utterly out of balance for all of us, I know, but for some, worse than others. During the past three days of abundant sunshine, I never made it outdoors for even a brief recess on the steps of Low Library, on the Columbia campus or anything more than a dash across campus towards the subway. Looking through my 4th floor windows, which overlook the university, I saw throngs of happy college students and families with young children cavorting happily in the sun. Alas, not I.

Regarding the winter weight...I haven't put it on from scarfing down vast quantities of food. That's not my style. I'm a grazer, not a vacuum cleaner.

The additional poundage comes from a sudden and new desire to eat only foods in the Chocolate food group (cookies, cake, ice cream, scones, and dark with salted almonds) or the Salty Snack group (cheddar cheese and beer potato chips, Roberts Pirate Booty or anything crunchy with a cheddar cheese flavor). It comes from stress and being sedentary and maybe not even eating enough (with such busy days, who can find the time to eat??), which lowers metabolism, leading to weight gain.

If you saw me holding this book you might think that something is cuckoo in my head because I hardly look like smashing fat should be my number one concern. If you saw me at the gym when I do manage to escape my work, you'd think I was trying to conquer the treadmill with my determined stride and penchant for working out until my shirt is soaked and my hair is wet. If you saw me walking across 59th Street yesterday, reading and answering e-mails on my Crackberry for the entire 20-minutes it took me to get from Park Avenue to Broadway, barely glancing at cars as I crossed streets, barely managing to avoid bumping into people with my heavy backpack which included my laptop, papers and workout clothes (not that I even put them on yesterday), you might think I was involved in work that involved state secrets.

This new diet book...well on its way to mega-bestsellerdom...and its henchbooks are not really being purchased by people who want to lose weight. They are being purchased by those who are desperate to change their lives.

AM YISRAEL CHAI

In the waning moments of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel Independence Day, I wanted to pause from the relentless pace of being Bungalow Babe and send out a CHAG SAMEACH -- Happy Holiday -- to my peeps around the world.

And to Israel, that marvelous and messy miracle in the Middle East:

Happy 59th Birthday!

Though my feet are in the West...specifically, the Upper West (Side)...my heart and soul are rooted firmly in the East.

Forever one with you,

Bungalow Babe

Photo taken on April 23, 2007 at the Dor Chadash Kick-Ass Yom Ha'atzmaut Party at Capitale, NYC. Credit: Jason Gardner

AL QAEDA COMES TO VIRGINIA

Make no mistake about it.

With the emergence of the sickening video that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC in an unbelievably calculated move, mailing it between his first murder and the second rampage, it is clear that he deserves to be remembers not as a pathetic loner but as a terrorist, driven by ideology to inflict maximum suffering upon the "guilty."

And the guilty in Cho's world were kids he perceived as rich or spoiled. Kids he saw as filled with debauchery.

His hatred is breathtaking, almost as breathtaking as his actions.

For those who have seen the snippets of Cho's videotaped manifesto, now filling the airwaves, there is a striking similarity to so-called "martyr" tapes made by Palestinian murderers or members of Al Qaeda. There is the same warped sense of religious purpose, the serving of a deity who desires the murder of innocents.

There is the aggrieved sense of some sin committed by the victims, the delusion that the impending act of suicide/murder will have a cleansing effect, restore some cosmic balance.

Was Cho victimized? Picked on as a kid? Subjected to racist comments? Abused even by the stepfather he eludes to?

The answer is who the hell cares.

With information slowly emerging about the victims of his hatred, one thing we know is that his own suffering or hardship as a young boy could not compare with that one of his victims: Professor Liviu Librescu, the Romanian Holocaust survivor.

Professor Librescu's suffering did not turn him into a suicide killer, even against the Nazis who imprisoned his family. His suffering inspired him to rise above adversity. His final act was a heroic act, sacrificing himself to allow his beloved students to escape.

He stands now, I am convinced, in the center of the great quadrangle of heaven, comforting the spirits of the students who were not so fortunate to have him as their protector.

As Cho's video makes its way through the internet and airwaves, let us not fall into the trap of viewing him as a victim driven to a desperate act. When all else is taken from us, we still have free will.

Cho freely chose the path of death and destruction, plotting his spectacular act of terrorism in a manner that has earned him a permanent place in Hell.

EL MALEH RACHAMIM

We know this truth to be self-evident: life is not fair.

Some of us waltz through, relatively or exceedingly blessed.

Others get zapped by illness, by violence, by misfortune. Sometimes once, sometimes repeatedly.

Moreover, we know that lightening does strike twice.

The Holocaust survivor who gets murdered in a bloodbath in Virginia several decades later...on Yom Hashoah.

The college dean who loses her son and husband to unrelated causes within a six-month period.

The couple who endure the ordeal of a severely premature birth only to have a second child die in infancy.

The events of the past week have left me saddened, perched on my observation post, watching a maelstrom of misfortune rage past me.

The nightmares are local, national, international and personal.

A student at the school where HOBB teaches is raped, brutalized and left to die in a fire, tied to her bed. The attacker then goes on to use her bank card to empty her account at a nearby bodega.

A disturbed loner with animosity towards his peers goes on a massacre at Virginia Tech, scaring and scarring the nation, leaving hundreds grieving, striking fear in the heart of every parent in America.

A courageous 21-year-old in our community, born with a multitude of disabilities, succumbs to his illness, leaving behind a shattered family.

Innocents in Iraq are murdered every day by suicide bombers, going to the market, to school, to vote, to work.

I don't know which nightmares are easier to bear: the ones caused by mankind or the ones brought about by "acts of God," -- illness, natural disaster, freak accidents.

Not that I believe that God has anything to do with orchestrating human suffering.

Yet I have caught myself wondering about relative suffering, asking myself if it is "better" or "worse" to be the parents of the young woman attacked in her Hamilton Heights apartment or the parents of the sickly young man, whether it is "better" for the friends and relatives of those who died at Virginia Tech because of the magnitude of the tragedy, the possibility of drawing comfort from others who are enduring the same nightmare.

Of course these are ridiculous wonderings.

Suffering is suffering is suffering.

Pain is pain is pain.

Hearts have been shattered and some may never heal.

Leaving the rest of us to look on with compassion, as God does on high, God full of mercy, el maleh rachamim.

"HORSE-FACED" JEWISH WOMEN ARE THE NEW "NAPPY-HEADED HO'S"

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My Daughter, My Self

My beautiful daughter, Middle Babe, leaves for Israel this evening, returning for the final two-month stretch of her academic year program in the Holy Land.

Thinking of her imminent departure, I am sad, even though I know that she is nearing the end of her adventure and we will have her in our midst for the entire summer before she goes off to her college in Baltimore.

And I know that she, too, is sad to be leaving us again, but not sad to be returning to Israel.

When you are a child, the most unbearable separation is from your parents.

When you have a child, their departures are the most searing episodes in your life, the leave-taking, the saying good-bye, the adjustment to the sound and sight of your home without them.

In those first moments that you note their absence, a feeling akin to tragedy descends. I have talked myself out of panic, at times, making the transition from child-here to child-not here, whether for a month or a summer or, this time, a year-long course of study in Israel.

It is something you never get used to.

And it puts me in mind of parents faced, God Forbid, with actual tragedy. I am still haunted by the testimony of the mother of an only child whose daughter was killed in the crash of Pan Am Flight 103...or perhaps it was TWA Flight 800. Her future was taken from her, said the grieving mother, in the course of hearings held after the tragedy. Without her child, she had no horizons.

But banishing all morose thoughts...Middle Babe (who returned from the movies while I wrote these lines) is now tearing apart her room searching for her wallet. She emerged only to note, rightly, that it would be easier to move through her room without Little Babe's clothes and a treadmill in the midst of her floor.

True, I agreed, promising to move these offending items out to prepare her room for her arrival this summer, squelching a smile for losing objects is a habit that Middle Babe has had since, well, forever.

There is so much to say about the deliciousness of having a daughter. A daughter is nature's improvement upon your own design. A daughter is a hint of yourself, sometimes magnified flatteringly...or to frightening effect.

There is so much to say about the deliciousness of my particular daughter. She is so fully herself, so free, so relaxed in her personality and quirks. I marvel at her great insight and wit and delight in her friendships, especially her friendship with Reeb, who is Middle Babe's virtual twin, my other daughter, and BOMB, her boyfriend of over a year.

As she sprawled on my bed this morning, inches away from that slapdash space I call my office, I asked her if she felt nineteen...her impending age.

"Are you kidding?" she asked, ruefully. "I still feel like I'm twelve."

"Good," I replied. "Because I still think of you as twelve."

And I do. Not in a bad way, at all. Just in a "my little girl" way. Forever.

This subject is a bittersweet one for me because of my struggles with my own mother and the often-alienated existence I had as a teen, living at home. One of the quests of my adult life is to try to figure out to what extent my own adoption played in these feelings or whether such dissonance also occurs often in homes of biological mothers and daughters.

And there is still a sadness I have at the not-really-myself role I occupy in relationship with my mother. I have longed, my entire life, to be utterly myself, without apology, without preamble, without preconditions.

It is only with my children that I am utterly at home with myself.

Middle Babe has just gone into her room, stopping by my computer (perched atop a stool in the dining room) to kiss me goodnight and tell me to go to sleep. It is insanely late. I am insanely tired. But I am also kept awake, motivated by sadness and a myriad of other thoughts arising from this moment of transition in my life.

There is music drifting out of her room, reminding me that she is still a teen. I'm fairly certain that she still hasn't found that missing wallet.

My daughter, despite feeling twelve, is about to turn nineteen in the next few months. Despite being in my middle forties, I still feel nineteen, waiting for my adult life to begin.

So, we're a good match, my daughter and I, forever young, sisters of a kind.

WORST NIGHT OUT...EVER

Tonight, in an honest attempt to tap into the rich cultural smorgasbord Manhattan has to offer, HOBB treated the family -- okay, Little Babe and me -- to tix to the Dance Theatre Workshop's program by John Jasperse Company entitled Becky, Jodi and John (Check it out at http://www.dtw.org/dy_eventDetails.cfm?ID=174.) dedicated to a long-standing friendship between the three dancers.

Having read an intriguing write-up in the New Yorker, the performance seemed like a reasonable choice for a New York family seeking cult-cha off the beaten track. Why go to a Broadway show (so obvious) or Lincoln Center (so elderly) or even Carnegie Hall (so five minutes ago) when the mysteries of Modern Dance beckoned...and only a subway ride down 7th Avenue?

Leaving aside the fact that we arrived 15 minutes late (by cab and not by train) and the usher-Nazi made us stand in the back the entire performace so we would not disturb the patrons seated in the "intimate" space....leaving aside the fact that the set was a naked stage with the cleverest device being a little remote-control toy truck that delivered a laptop to the dancers, which they would then read some inane passage from....leaving aside the fact that we had to endure the sight of John's uncut shlong and Becky's droopy boobs as she traipsed around in green tights....this boring-ass performance sucked so bad that I never want to leave the Urban Bungalow again, except to go to the gym and Fairway and the new Loehmann's which opened on Broadway and 74th. (It rocks!!! I had my maiden trip with Middle Babe yesterday.)

Yet if Carnegie Hall is five minutes ago, Dance Theatre Workshop is thirty years ago. I swear I was having a flashback to the flashdance era when Modern Dance consisted of people wearing monochromatic loose attire, refusing make-up, letting their invariably unlovely bodies take on spastic and jerky movements on stage to atonal music with no narrative, no scenery and no technical skill or even talent.

The difference is that thirty years ago the tickets cost $5 and I didn't have kids, hence, no free time to spend on stupid culture. And besides, all this nonsense actually looked cool back then.

Even Little Babe thought the performance sucked. He was so bored that the potentially shocking nudity didn't catch his attention. He was so disgusted that the only part that held his interest was when smoke began mysteriously appearing out of John's body. Leaning next to me in the back of the theatre, he looked like an 11-year-old on Death Row. Right after the show, Little Babe's review could be summed up as follows: "My favorite part was when it ended."

Out of the mouth of babes.

We have all experienced the perverse joy of laughing one's head off at a totally unfunny performance bec it is simply so bad. I have disgraced myself at concerts in Budapest, Hungary and Greenwich, CT alike, laughing inappropriately during serious yet bad programs.

Tonight, however, I could not laugh, mostly because I was so dismayed. Alarmingly, many of the audience members seemed to find the show enchanting and gave that throaty New York laugh of wry recognition at especially unfunny lines spoken by the cast. I hate that laugh. It means "I'm-in-the-know;" it is validation that the person making this annoying chortle is the exact audience member that this elevated art has been created for.

I did bond, however, with a cranky 70-something lady who irritably told her 50-something pedantic daughter (who was hilariously attempting to deconstruct the bulls&^t as we were walking out of the "intimate" theatre) that the performance was just not her cup of tea.

Amen to that, sistah!!!! It was more like a cup of arsenic tea. I was positive that had I stayed one more minute I would have keeled over dead from an overdose of pointlessness masquerading as profundity...or art.

Sitting on the uptown #1 train across from two beefy German guys who looked like they had questionable pasts if not futures, I sank into an evil mood. It pissed me off that we had:

• Hauled our collective Bungalow Butt down to Chelsea in an (expensive) cab
• Screwed ourselves out of the opportunity for real culture
• Spent money on tickets for this retarded performance
• And had to stand like rejects in the back of the "intimate" theatre for such a piece of doo-doo dance performance

And so, when the train reached 72nd Street, I did the only logical thing. I jumped off and ran into Fairway to erase the memories of bad New York culture and touch honest produce, sincere dry goods and real meat from (formerly) living creatures who did not imagine that their aimless amblings made them members of an elite known as Artists.

Isaac Babel in SoHo, Passover 2007

I lost my new copy of the Collected Works of Isaac Babel on Erev Pesach, this past Monday, the eve of Passover…one of the most ludicrous days I have had in recent memory.

At an hour when every sane Jew is grating horseradish for their first seder, I was rushing through the streets of SoHo, from the subway station at Houston Street down Spring Street to Broadway for my months-overdue annual gynecological appointment.

And now, I was officially four months and 15 minutes late for this important medical visit.

Basically, I had forgotten to change trains at Times Square because I was chattering incessantly about the evils of consumerist culture with someone I knew only nominally and who was nodding at everything I said either because they wanted to validate my brilliant observations or pacify my lunatic tendencies.

And I was chattering incessantly to burn off the nervous energy that came from the aggravating and utterly ridiculous stress I had been sustaining for several hours – a level of stress familiar to every professional woman who is also an observant Jew and who therefore spends the eves of every Jewish holiday (and Shabbat) in a state of multitasking madness – which was augmented by stresses unique to my own work and personal life.

For instance, rushing out of the Urban Bungalow en route to my appointment, I realized I had likely rendered the ratatouille I had cooked while on a conference call totally treif by inadvertently adding an ingredient that only Sephardic Jews would consume on Passover.

When I discovered the offending item in the ratatouille -- contained in a curry sauce from France -- I almost died. This dish and homemade brownies, which I just baked, were part of our contribution to the seder, scheduled to take place within a few hours at our friends’ house.

Passover observance is a serious matter. How could I bring a dish that had a questionable ingredient, yet how was I to make my gynecological appointment if I had to create another ratatouille from scratch…and with no eggplant, to boot???

Locking the apartment door, I placed a frantic call to my husband imploring him to fess up to our host, a rabbi, and ask if the dish – suitable for Sephardic Jews -- could be served at his Ashkenazic seder.

With the ratatouille fiasco being merely the latest in a series of logistical potholes wrecking my day, I lost my legendary sense of direction in the joy of ranting to a virtual stranger on the #1 train. When I realized my mistake at 28th Street, my heart sank and I assumed I had blown the appointment. Then, as the train passed 18th Street, I realized I could alight at Houston Street and grab a cab and just make it in time.

I bolted out of the train on Houston Street, fled up the steps and optimistically scanned the horizon for available cabs. Weirdly, there were no cabs to be had. Or, to be accurate…there were cabs, but I seemed to have morphed into the Invisible Woman and no fewer than three available yellow cabs totally passed me by, picking up passengers standing mere feet beyond me.

I am not kidding. This really did happen. And at that point, I knew that I was under some weird spell or something.

So I had to hoof it over several avenue blocks to the east. By my estimation, the shlep was nearly three-quarters of a mile. Midway along my frantic journey, I stopped to retrieve my Crackberry from my monstrously oversized Target designer mock-croc bag in order to call Downtown Women Ob-Gyn and make sure that my exertions would not be in vain and I would, indeed, be able to keep my appointment with Nancy the Midwife, my trusted well-woman health care provider for more than ten years.

I felt my day utterly change when the honeyed voice of the receptionist assured me that Nancy would be able to see me if I arrived within the next ten minutes or so. Yes! I agreed with renewed vigor. Yes! I will be there within ten minutes, I said, tucking my Crackberry into my coat pocket before sprinting down Spring Street.

The problem was, in order to retrieve my phone device from my bag, I had placed my (not slender) volume of Isaac Babel (of which about five sentences were read on the subway between Penn Station and Houston Street) on the edge of one of those fancy-shmancy trash can containers.

At least that is what I think I did, because when I arrived at the gyno’s office ten minutes later, the book was missing and I had not stopped anywhere else en route from the subway to the office.

And after I had checked every inch of the gyno’s office suite and even ran down the three flights of stairs to make sure I hadn’t left the book at the hostile security guard’s desk in the lobby (okay, isn’t it time to question the efficacy of having people sign in and out of buildings under no terrorist threat whatsoever??) I had to burst out laughing at the somehow fitting coda to this day of mishaps and bureaucratic nightmares.

The friendly receptionist at Downtown Women offered me a piece of peppermint gum. Shortly, I was given a cup to pee into and a gown to change into and I sat on the examination table happily, waiting for Nancy, reading Us Weekly.

The actual physical exam took less than 10 minutes. But the torrent of words that rushed out of me -- a rant about my day, my life, my stress, my angst – dominated my visit.

Nancy suggested many things. One of them was changing my life. Dramatically. Immediately. I had to agree that she was onto something.

When I sashayed out of Downtown Women Ob-Gyn, I was a changed woman. The spell I was under seemed to have lifted. I ran through the turnstiles at the Prince Street station and directly onto a waiting uptown R train. At Times Square, an uptown #2 train was lingering on the platform when I ran down the stairs. And when I dashed up the stairs at 96th Street, a cab had not only magically materialized before my eyes, but the cabbie gave me a friendly smile when I plopped down in the backseat.

Oh, snap! The spell had broken.

And in case you’re wondering, I made it home in time to change for the seder at my friend’s house, and our host had called to say that I hadn’t rendered the ratatouille unkosher after all, and to please bring it along.

So, HOBB packed up the ratatouille and took it to go…together with my walnut-rich brownies, which turned out pretty damn good despite having been invented out of thin air... and the hostess gift I had selected at the JCC giftshop earlier in the day -- a hand-painted Miriam’s tambourine and gummy frogs that lit up when clunked on the head.

HOBB was less psychotic than I thought he would be in the face of my gynecologist’s appointment on the eve of Passover and my culinary near-disaster. We arrived at our host’s home nearly on time – certainly not egregiously late – and were met by Big Babe who had cut out of one of his Columbia classes early in order to make the seder.

The seder was fabulous, filled with great people and delicious food and exotic wine and traditional and wacky elements alike. As we moved to take our places around the beautifully adorned seder table, I felt a gulf open as wide as the Red Sea between me and my insane day.

It was magical to sit around the seder table and feel myself a descendent of those Hebrew slaves who had the audacity to envision an alternative to Egypt. And though I always find great meaning in the interactive theatre of the Passover seder, this particular night was truly different from all other nights.

And somewhere in SoHo, perched on the top of that fancy-shmancy garbage can, Isaac Babel is busily taking notes, composing a tale about a Jewish woman far from his native Odessa, enslaved by invisible forces, in search of her own liberation.

HORMONAL HONESTY

I'm puzzling over a particular question which brings my feminist self into conflict with my candid observer self.

The question is as follows:

Is it okay to talk about the fact that (many/most/all) women get utterly deranged just before their periods?

Anyone who is a woman or who has ever known a woman can report that significant changes in mood and behavior (if not skin quality and weight) often occur in menstruating women in that period of time just before the arrival of their, er, periods.

These "significant changes" often include incessant crying, heightened hatred of one's husband, increased argumentative behavior, reduced threshold for frustration, increased memory of all horrible and hurtful experiences, reduced memory of anything positive that happened in one's life, feelings of deep depression, feels of utter disatisfaction with one's life, increased fantasies of one's husband suddenly dying, etc...

The existence of a Pre-Menstrual Syndrome is such a self-evident truth that I cannot believe it took scientists until the last decades of the 20th Century to figure this out. Still I send out a hearty Yasher Koach* to them for identifying this.....thing.

I remember exhaling in great relief when the syndrome was so named. Finally, I thought, validation from science for the misery that has consumed about a quarter of my life from the age of 12!

Finally, I had an ready-to-wear defense prepared for me in case I killed my boyfriend, say, during that time of month that my jeans won't close and my face looks like a pizza.

And as I move closer to the big Five-O, each cycle brings me closer to becoming Norman Bates. In my freelance interviews with other women of my age, most report a dramatically heightened state of sheer lunacy...sometimes lasting for as long as three weeks at a time.

Especially when one's monthly visitor decides to be MIA or shows up three weeks late, bringing on its own unique derangment, not to mention loss as funds as it becomes necessary to purchase do-it-yourself pregnancy tests, which always turn out negative, causing great relief because you were truly convinced you were pregnant due to the fact that you suddenly put on ten pounds and felt exhausted all the time.

And I'm not mentioning any names, but having been acquainted with teenage girls, I would liken the approach of their periods to a Jekyll and Hyde experience wherein sweet and obedient young women suddenly turn into Elsa Koch.

Who among us would deny that pre-menstrual women are completely nuts?

Yeah, it sounds unfeminist and it's bad for Hillary's campaign but isn't it the God's honest truth?

In this post-post-feminist era, when womyn are doing all kinds of weird stuff like pole dancing, engaging in wild promiscuity and blogging about it, and having orgasms online (www.beautifulagony.com), I think it is time to reclaim a truth about womanhood:

We spend a quarter of our lives in a hormonally-induced form of insanity. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

It's empowering, even.

Moreover, it's the bloody truth.

_____________

*Hebrew for Way to Go!

THE KAFKAESQUE QUEST

*edited 3/28

Nora Ephron feels bad about her neck.

What makes me feel bad is that I do not have a graduate degree.

I graduated college in 1982. Due to a variety of circumstances, I never made it through graduate school and the lack of a graduate degree has stalked me through the better part of the intervening two and a half decades.

At times, the quest for this degree has felt almost Kafkaesque.

Not that I needed the degree to be what I wanted to be, namely a writer...or even, what I became professionally, namely a publicist.

However, a graduate degree (from the university of my choice) is something that I wanted to have for its own sake, a trophy of my academic achievement, yes, but really a memento of my triumphant ability to rectify a ruined chapter in my personal history.

Yet 25 years have passed since college and I still haven't gotten it.

So, today, I undertook to drive up to Yale in order to talk to the head of the Graduate Program in American Studies. In truth, I have spoken to an endless stream of people -- both at Yale and outside of the university -- about this program since the early 1990's when I first heard about it while researching a story for the New York Times.

(Somewhere in the American Studies office -- if not at the FBI -- there is a fat file with my name on it and a record of my numerous queries. There is also probably a letter from a mental health specialist who was contacted at the time of my fourth query by a concerned administrator.)

Of all the graduate programs that I have not attended (over the past 25 years, I have had also similarly badgered other universities around the country) Yale's American Studies is the one I'm most fixated on attending.

Both for its content and for its very Yaleness.

As a university, Yale looms large in my imagination. It is exactly the kind of college I had dreamed of attending. Because of that, it possesses the power to counteract the negative effects of being forced to attend a school for which there was not even an admissions process, let alone noble architecture and a rarified academic environment.

And today, even after the director kindly gave me a reality check on the likelihood of someone who has been out of the academy for so long being accepted into a doctoral program (though journalists were indeed accepted into the Masters program in American Studies), I was hardly deterred from my ambition.

Putting aside the inherent worth of the course of study itself or the myriad ways in which my studies would inform my writing, I feel that getting this degree would be my personal tikkun, a way of healing a longstanding hurt in my life.

(Recently, I wrote a short story that centers around a Jewish girl in Queens in the 1970's, locked in a battle with her parents over her right to tap into that American rite of passage called "going away to school." Needless to say, that pretty much forms the backdrop to my own story.

As an adult, I do understand that in my parents' eyes "going away to school" was synonymous with doing drugs, sleeping around, getting pregnant, dating non-Jews, breaking Shabbat, getting tattoos, eating non-kosher, joining Jews for Jesus, joining the Hare Krishna, running off with the Maharishi and other activities I was dying to do.

My dad, who had been a congregational rabbi during the sixties and seventies formed this opinion after counseling to the parents of such wayward teens. Thereafter, he vowed to avoid their fate by keeping us close to home.)

The experience I was deprived of as a teen has become fetishized in my mind, tinged with longing and unattainability. Driving through New Haven today, I was adrift in a reverie, seeing myself in every passing undergraduate.

Working on my laptop at the internet cafe on York Street after my interview, I allowed myself to pretend that I was a card-carrying member of the Yale community. I had my Cafe Americano, my wireless hook-up and my paperback of Isaac Babel on the tabletop. Though feverishly engaged in sending and answering e-mails and speaking to clients on my Blackberry, I might have just as well been doing school work.

I was busy -- if not busier -- than the Yalies around me.

Even dressed in Manhattan all-black, I felt utterly at home in this Connecticut college setting.

So I feel in most college towns in America.

I am pulled to academic environments in a spirit that is drenched in the quest to belong.

Those close to me know that, even thirty years later, I feel cheated out of the undergraduate experience I dearly wanted and deserved, I might add, by virtue of having been a well-rounded and high-performing high school student at an elite NYC high school.

Yet, in their fear for our future, my parents decreed that the local branch of city college was the only college option available to their children.

And so...if I have looked towards graduate school as a chance to set everything right, restore things to the way I wanted them to be, give myself a shot at the opportunity that was denied to me when I was 17, why have I failed to actually attend graduate school?

Oh, a complex of reasons...financial mostly, but also relating to the business of not being able to juggle motherhood and graduate work...which seemed infintely more tricky than juggling career and motherhood. Jobs happen during the day when kids are school. Studying, doing research and writing papers often take place at night and on weekends and that would have meant no time with my children.

Even if I had figured how to finance the degree and prevent my family from starving while I took a break from wage-earning, I could not fathom finding this time or having the space to be a student.

I was fairly certain that I would have to drop out due to the sheer impossibility of doing my course work, indeed, I did start one program while nursing a baby, raising two elementary school-age kids and working full-time, only to drop out after six weeks due to the ridiculousness of the undertaking.

The logistical obstacles were real, yet there is another, deeper, more intrinsic reason for the Kafkaesque nature of my journey to grad school.

I hadn't really given myself permission to pursue this dream. On some level, I didn't quite believe that I deserved it.

Now, as I watch my children navigate their way through their respective academic and life journeys, I am filled with pride and excitement, for them and for myself.

I do not seek to control the variables in their lives. I don't wish to shelter them from threats to life values I hold dear. I don't necessarily want their lives to mirror my own. I honor their experimentation. I believe in their intelligence and their character.

And I am thrilled by the opportunities that come their way, the horizons that are opening up to them.

By giving my children permission to grow independent of my constant supervision, I reach back through time and give permission to my adolescent self, encouraging her to pursue her dearest dream.

It is a pleasure to reacquaint myself with my inner adolescent. For someone who was stashed away in storage for 25 years, she looks pretty good and her mind is every bit as sharp as I recall. Energetic and inquisitive, she is caught in that glorious moment of teetering on the threshold of transition; the door to her future is swinging wide open and she is trembling with excitement and apprehension.

What is most pronounced about her, my adolescent self, is the bright flame of her personal intellectual ambition. In the dark of the intervening decades, it has grown even brighter. At night, when the light of this computer screen illuminates my dark apartment, it glows with sheer brilliance.

My mothering is not complete, nor have golden coins begun to rain down from heaven. Middle Babe's college tuition will need to be paid for the next four years and Little Babe's high school and college career looms in the distance. Big Babe may need some financial assistance. The piles of unpaid bills persist. There are no winning lotto tickets on our kitchen counter.

Still, the Three Babes are older, which means that I have a shot at being able to disappear into libraries on weekends and evenings to complete my course work.

It might not be next year and it might not be New Haven (hey, Columbia also has a really good American Studies program...and it's right across the street from the Urban Bungalow), but the feisty woman-child who is my inner and my eternal self has informed me that the journey I have branded as Kafkaesque is about to take a page out of sci-fi, traveling into the future in order to heal the ruptured past.

*Original post read as too long and maudlin. Two days after the visit to Yale, I'm able to get a better grip on the experience. Thanks for living through the (public) rewrites. BB

MOM ON A LEASH

With HOBB’s arrival home from India (if ya haven’t already done so, check out the action on http://www.coveringreligion.org/), my resolve to flee to a sanatorium in Switzerland was sidetracked when he showed up sick...so sick that he slept for two days straight, emerging from the bedroom only to stagger through the Urban Bungalow in a state of complete and utter disorientation.

As Alfie the Pomeranian (http://alfie-pomeranian.blogspot.com/) had failed to learn how to keep house -- and as HOBB looked like he might die without someone to tend to him -- I cancelled my Swiss Miss adventure and turned into Bungalow Nursebabe.

Bereft of my relaxing retreat, I drowned my sorrows in Low-Carb Mini Bundt Cakes instead, courtesy of a home-delivery from the Fat Free Experience. You can read about it two posts back or visit www.fatfreeny.com.

But as HOBB’s illness receded, I began harboring escape fantasies once again. Not that I’m keeping count or anything, but after a week of driving Little Babe to school twice, attending Parent-Teacher conferences by myself, parking the car and doing massive food shopping and shlepping all the bags upstairs myself, I did feel entitled to a vacation…if only for one night.

HOBB good-naturedly agreed, assuring me that I should take off while he retrieved Little Babe from his after school class and spent the evening in a special Dad ‘n Son-a-thon. In his e-mail to me of 5:25 today, he wrote (and I quote): “Make sure you go to the gym tonight! I want a happy [embarrassing term of endearment deleted] on my hands.”

Well…here is how my “happy” night turned out.

5:45: Leave the Urban Bungalow with Katie the Intern for the ATM at Lerner Hall. Pay her, chuck plan to take subway down to gym and opt to walk in unseasonable warm weather.

6:00: Call from Little Babe, expressing surprise that I did not pick him up. I reassure him that he will have a great night with Dad and I’ll be home to say sh’ma with him.

6:10: Stop in to peruse cute yet shockingly expensive frocks at Liberty House. Flee store and find solace at Steps, where entire outfits can be had for $15.

6:15: Enjoy walk down Broadway though the sidewalks seem covered in smeary dog poop, the gutters are filled with filthy slush and the corners are populated by screaming bands of high school kids.

6:30: Opt for manicure at under-populated salon where staff wear red satin Chinese tunics. Two seconds into manicure, I ask for 10-minute backrub.

6:35: HOBB calls. Wants to know how I am. Wants to know where I am. Wants to know what time I’ll be home. I pretend I can barely hear him and hang up.

6:45: Backrub commences. Joy, joy, joy.

6:47: Cellphone rings. Two feet away from me. Chatter commences. I am relaxed, taking in the sound as ambience. No stress.

6:50: The bitch is still at it. I lift my head suddenly and demand that she shut the $%^ up. I ask her if she has failed to see me having a backrub about 24 inches from her blabbering mouth. She looks shocked. Then she retaliates, telling her caller that she is being “accosted” by a customer. (I will skip over the particulars of this fight. It is very depressing that the concept of consideration needs to be disputed. Readers, weigh in on this issue, please.)

7:00: I leave the salon feeling furious, upset, shaken, disappointed, confused and agitated. I run into two cops on the beat, a guy and a woman. I ask them about indoor cellphone usage laws or regulations. They report that there are none; that it is up to the proprietor of the business. I tell them the story of what just went down in the nail salon. They express shock at the behavior of inconsiderate cellphone gal. Their empathy actually makes me feel a heck of a lot better.

7:10: I start composing an Op-Ed in my head about indoor cellphone use being a lot more dangerous than in-car cellphone use because it leads people like me to thoughts of murder, whereas in-car cellphone use might only result in a car accident. I decide to take up arms against the sea of cellphone talkers invading these bastions of R and R. I reflect upon the feasibility of petitioning nail salon owners to enforce cellphone restriction rules…and then abide by them. I recall another incident in the not-so-recent past, where another nail salon visit was utterly ruined by another yapper…and where the owner of the salon was similarly passive. (You can read about it in a previous post).

7:18: I stop at a Starbucks and order a Grande Americano. I ask the barista about obnoxious cellphone users. She tells me she wants to write a book about being a barista in NYC. She said that most of her customers are major a-holes.

7:20: I realize I ought to high-tail it to the gym, which I haven’t visited since earlier in the week if I want to have a good workout, a steam room visit and a shower. After all, I have to be home in two hours.

7:30: I stop in at the Gap on 86th Street. I try on four pair of knee-length shorts, all of which make me look like a middle-aged camp counselor.

7:40: I stop in at Origins and buy some products. I ask the cashier if the store has a cellphone use policy. She tells me that there is no such policy but she is amazed by how loud and inconsiderate many of the customers are. I find solace in this and tell her my story. She nods in grave commiseration.

8:00: I stop in at Filene’s and use the bathroom. I meander through the store and then leave, realizing I will have less than an hour at the gym. Nearly everyone at Filene's is yapping on their cellphones.

8:10: I get to the gym. While I am changing, I realize that I smell of stress sweat.

8:15: I wash my pits and spritz myself with perfume.

8:17: I climb aboard a treadmill and tune in to Law and Order. Bliss.

8:20: My cellphone rings. It is Little Babe. He is tearful. I whisper to him that I cannot talk; I’m on a treadmill. It’s not nice to talk inside the gym. He is upset. His mouth hurts. He’s tired. He wants to go to sleep. When will I be home?

I tell him to brush his teeth and call me when he’s in bed and ready to say sh'ma.

8:30: Little Babe calls. He’s in bed. I whisper sh'ma to him over my cellphone. I am gasping from the effort of walking at 4 miles an hour and climbing at an incline of 7 while singing in Hebrew. I tell him not to wait up for me.

8:45: Little Babe calls. He cannot fall asleep. What time will I be home?

8:50: Little Babe calls. He’s not sure his friend should come for the weekend. What time will I be home?

9:00: Two and a quarter miles on the treadmill; three-quarters of a mile to go. I run to the bathroom. My phone rings. It is HOBB. “What time will you be home?” he asks. I remind him that I have been on home duty for two solid weeks and deserve a bit of a break.

9:03: I forget about finishing my treadmill workout. Instead, I do three sets on the pull-down machine. I vow to finish my weights at home. I vow to do my abs at home. I vow to go to the gym the next day. I vow to leave for Switzerland after Shabbat.

9:10: I shower hurriedly.

9:13: I duck into the steam room for an un-relaxing two minutes.

9:15: I shower and hurriedly slather lotion on myself.

9:17: I throw on clothes, while talking a mile a minute to a friend (mostly about how much in a hurry I am), put a baseball cap over my wet hair, grab all my stuff together and run out of the locker room.

9:23: Hail a cab. Think about stuff I might have left in the locker room. Call HOBB en route. Find out I need to repark the car.

9:36: Arrive home. Find the car. Drive around a few million blocks. Find a spot. Call my mother as I am walking down Morningside Drive to find out about her latest injury. She's semi-hysterical that I'm walking along Morningside Drive by myself at night. In the middle of the conversation with my mother, Little Babe calls.

I thought he was asleep. He is not. He is in tears. He is in pain from the sores in his mouth.

What he wants to know is, when will I be home?

THE SECRET TO LINDSAY'S DISTRESS: MAMA DINA.

Who is the most retarded Stage Mom in America?

No, not Kathy Hilton. (I didn’t ask who the mom of the most retarded celebrity in America is.)

The most retarded Stage Mom in America is none other than Dina Lohan, mother of Lindsay, profiled here in today’s venerable New York Post. Check it out at: http://www.nypost.com/seven/03212007/news/nationalnews/lohan_moms_pain_nationalnews_todd_venezia.htm.

After reading the entertainingly snide write-up, I just had to send a shout-out to Dina, Kathy, Lynne Spears, Jarnette Olsen (the twins’ mom)…and all the other mothers who pushed their babies into the limelight and then stood on the side, clapping delightedly as their lives turned into public nightmares:

You guys have screwed up.

In a major way.

In a way that cannot be blamed on poverty and lack of opportunity.

In a way that will be hard to undo.

Hey Deens, when the world looks at your daughter and “trashes” her, calling her a slut or drunk or bimbo, you might wanna stop and consider the validity of these charges and whether it is time to assess the role your own parenting (or lack thereof) has played in turning that adorable and gifted star of The Parent Trap into an utter train wreck.

As mothers, we have a daunting responsibility to nurture and protect and guide our children. Therefore, it is not in the best interest of your daughter when you act as her pimp. It is not in her best interest when you act like her best friend, going clubbing with her, drinking or hooking up, or even tottering around in her Jimmy Choos.

It is not in her best interest when you are such a media whore that you grab every opportunity to vogue for the cameras, flaunting some adolescent version of the Good Life as if you have discovered the meaning of life.

Tell me, Dina...do you really think that sipping champagne in a limo is such a big freaking deal? Don't you think that at 44, it's more than a bit pathetic that you are so dazzled by the glitz and glitter of Hollywood? Don't you realize that we're all laughing at you?

It seems that as long as Linds is in the headlines – whether for flashing her privates or falling down drunk or getting into car crashes or showing up late and hung over to film sets – you believe that she is living – as you claim – the American Dream.

Wake up, Dinaleh.

DEALING ON AMSTERDAM

Whilst driving up to Little Babe's school tonight, half an hour late for parent-teacher conferences (yeah, the thing I hadda register for online last week...and, oh, btw, HOBB is in bed, sick after returning from India. Poor little poopsie.) I got a furtive call on my Blackberry.

"Hey, I'm on Amsterdam and 116th," said a voice over the crackling phone line. "I've got your stuff. Roz said I might catch you."

My heart leapt with joy. Earlier, while racing from a meeting on East 59th Street via cab, Roz called and apologized for not delivering my Fat Free Experience Mini Bundt Cakes earlier in the day.

I'm positively addicted to these things but they are hard to find, flying off the shelves at Fairway within minutes of landing. Just yesterday I noticed a phone number on the wrapper of the coffee cake confection I had just scarfed down and called. The friendly Roz told me that I could arrange weekly deliveries...to my home!!!!

Somehow, the morning delivery got off-track, but now Mitch the driver was in my nabe, having just delivered a batch to Garden of Eden.

"Great!" I barked over the phone. "I'll meet him while I'm digging out my van in about 5 minutes." As I clicked the call off, I quelled the inner voice that I was already late for the parent-teacher conferences and a quick transaction on the street would not delay me any more.

Well...five minutes came and went as the cab deposited me next to my snowed-in van. No sign of Mitch. Getting into the minivan, however, I met Little Babe who was walking Alfie the Pomeranian (http://alfie-pomeranian.blogspot.com/) and who watched in shock and awe as I drove my way out of the snowbank, lurching forward and backward, weaving, pitching, nearly killing half the faculty of Columbia University.

Amazingly, I got the minivan out, shouted goodbye to Little Babe through the open window and started burning rubber to make it the second half of the parent-teacher conferences. As I was humming along Amsterdam Avenue, Mitch called to say he was on my corner.

Oy. Dilemma. I deliberated for about, oh, half a second before executing a quick Youeee and screeching down Amsterdam. Parked in front of Camille's, there was Mitch, holding two cake boxes with my muffins. I pulled up alongside him, smiled winningly, handed him the cash and drove off with my fix.

Fresh from their Bronx bakery, the little low-carb bundt cakes are pretty close to heaven. And almost guilt-free. Especially if you forget about parent-teacher conferences.

So, here's Bungalow Babe's hot tip for the week. Visit http://www.fatfreeny.com/ to arrange for a home -- or curbside -- delivery of these goodies.

YES, MAUREEN. MEN ARE NECESSARY*

*to take out the garbage, walk the dog, do the dishes, move the car, replace light bulbs, change the toilet paper, figure out online Parent-Teacher conference sign-up forms, etc…

This evening, at approximately 5 p.m., a momentous event will take place in the life of Bungalow Babe.

HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) and Big Babe, who have been traipsing through India for the past 12 days, will return to the bosom of their family. (To see what they have been doing in India, visit www.coveringreligion.org)

In their absence, this particular bosom has sagged. So much so that major reconstructive work is called for.

And while the mental recovery will take some time (experts estimate that twelve days in a sanatorium should just about do it. See the previous Bungalow Babe posting, Woman on the Verge), the physical effort will commence in about five minutes.

Starting in about five minutes, all evidence that the Urban Bungalow has been inhabited by a Woman on the Verge (plus a delighted Little Babe who had a “sleepover” in his mom’s room with Alfie the Pomeranian every single night and missed a total of FIVE school days during this 12 day period due to sickness AND a snow day last Friday. Thanks a whole lot, Hashem. You’re a real pal) will be obliterated as Bungalow Babe (together with her dedicated cleaning Lady, Lady [her real name]) springs into action.

Some of the reconstructive efforts entail:

*Tossing out the piles of newspaper which have accumulated around the apartment (largely unread) like so many Stonehenge monuments

*Putting away the piles of clothes that lie draped over the office chair in the bedroom, a testament to the fits of sartorial decision-itis that have only increased in the absence of the menfolk. These piles have migrated from the master bed, where they lay for at least four days, making a pleasant nest for Alfie the Pomeranian, until Little Babe complained that he didn’t like sleeping next to suits. Bungalow Babe actually got used to it

*Removing the challah-crumb-infested Shabbat tablecloth from the table, putting away the challah tray and washing the wine-stained kiddush cups

*Finding the various unread mail deposit sites around the apartment and gathering all the important looking stuff into one pile to place on the dining room table, now cleared of the Shabbat tablecloth

*Finding the missing New Yorker with the great cartoon of the writer on deadline plus the issue of the Forward that had an opera review written by Big Babe

*Washing the fleishig dishes in the sink; removing the clean milchig dishes from the dishwasher

*Throwing out the used fish pan that has lived on the fire escape for the last twelve days because it is truly disgusting now that it has been snowed and rained and hailed on. (But the spatula inside of it with the plastic yellow fish head can prob. be saved.)

*Finding the missing phone receiver (where the *&*^ is it????)

*Pouring the sour milk down the drain once the fleishig dishes are done

*Throwing out the empty bags of chips and boxes of crackers that populate the shelves. Somehow, it seemed like too much effort to discard these over the past twelve days

*Getting rid of the abundant evidence of takeout food

*Putting new toilet paper rolls on the toilet paper holders. Right now, they are resting on the bathroom floor, to be perfectly truthful. Bungalow Babe considers herself virtuous to have risked her life by climbing atop a kitchen counter yesterday and successfully retrieving the bag of new rolls by batting at it wildly with a broom until it came flying off the top of the kitchen shelves while Little Babe ducked for cover.

*Relocating the recycling material to the basement. As of this morning, there are enough empty Poland Spring bottles in the Urban Bungalow to make a homeless person rich

…and various and sundry other tasks that will remove the illusion that, in his absence, the Urban Bungalow has been inhabited by a grunge band .

Meanwhile, there are a whole host of tasks that Bungalow Babe will not even attempt, i.e. – replacing the light bulbs, digging the minivan out of its icy snow bank, replacing the steering wheel fluid, for starters. Bungalow Babe is hopeful that the mere sight of these tasks will ignite compassion in HOBB’s heart for her ordeal of having to run the Urban Bungalow in his absence.

Of course, the return of HOBB and Big Babe will also be celebrated by the requisite balloons and Welcome Back signs, provided that Bungalow Babe finishes the project she was supposed to do over the weekend but frankly blew off for the pleasure of going out with a friend to Makor on Saturday night, attending a Congressional Breakfast on Sunday morning and taking Little Babe to a production of Di Yam Gazlonim, the Yiddish version of The Pirates of Penzance on Sunday evening (visit www.jccmanhattan.org. It’s playing for two weeks only. See it! You’ll plotz!)

In other words, having a life.

It is now 9:15 am. The new workday and workweek has begun. Lady has arrived, thank God. Little Babe went to school, undeterred by illness or weather. Bungalow Babe’s professional Inbox is pinging, signaling the arrival of work-related e-mails. Alfie the Pomeranian is snoozing happily on the master bed, curled up next to the outfit that Bungalow Babe wore to yesterday morning’s Congressional breakfast and might likely recycle for today's 1 pm meeting.

Get those happy zzz’s in now, my little furry friend, because once HOBB returns home, the honeymoon is over.

WOMAN ON THE VERGE

MEMORANDUM

TO: HOBB*
FROM: Your Wife, Bungalow Babe


The purpose of this memo is to inform you of my intention to leave the country the very minute you arrive home from your 12-day trip to India, which commenced last Wednesday and will conclude this upcoming Monday.

I anticipate being gone the same amount of time as the duration of your trip, most of which will likely be spent at a sanatorium, if such places still exist.

(In fact, the minute I finish this memo, I will start Googling sanatoriums – sanatoria?? It is possible that I might even find a discount package through Expedia or Orbitz. But why am I even thinking about the cost?? I will be billing it back to you, dear HOBB.)

Do not misunderstand. I am not leaving in a fit of rage, rather in a blur of exhaustion.

Mental, physical and spiritual.

I simply need time away from my life, which has begun to feel like a horror film directed by John Waters.

I think it was while I was cleaning up dog poop at three in the morning that I realized I need to distance myself from the ordeal of nearly two weeks of unrelenting duty on the domestic front, a tour which included:

• Alternate side of the street parking nightmares, complete with interminable – and fruitless -- late-night searches for a good parking spot for the following day, ticket-happy traffic cops and sociopathic parking spot thieves


• Dog walking adventures featuring a constipated Pomeranian who decided to turn into a prolific pooper on Day Five


• Four consecutive sick days for Little Babe and then reams of catch-up schoolwork and homework; wasted time waiting for late school buses on most mornings and then a frantic flight down West End Avenue in hot pursuit of the school bus on the only morning that the driver was on time and we were late; indignant calls to the company when the driver yelled at Little Babe for failing to get off the bus “fast enough,” causing him to fall down the steps and the other kids to laugh


• Life-threatening efforts to retrieve the toilet paper from the top of the kitchen cabinets where you stored them for some sadistic reason


• Heart-stopping attempts to replace the four light bulbs that decided to blow in your absence


• A couple of hours spent researching and ordering party supplies for Little Babe’s Luau party from Oriental Trading Company


• An anxious hour spent figuring how to fill out parent-teacher conference forms on line (WTF!)


• Back and forth e-mails with Middle Babe’s doctor in Jerusalem over the best way to have funds wired to her for Middle Babe’s treatments


• Plaintive requests for Richard the Super to come and fix the bathtub when the drain stopped draining


• Conversations with John the Contractor about the renovations we requested for the summer


• Supervising the nameless plumber on the replacement of the broken faucets in the kitchen and bathroom


• Mad dashes through Fairway to stock up on food


• The preparation of nutritious breakfasts and dinners for Little Babe


• The sacrificing of all of my extracurricular activities in order to take care of Little Babe and make sure he practices his cello….not to mention the regular stress and work of running my own business or the looming and often converging deadlines or the fact that I haven’t made it to gym this week – or (most pathetically) even onto our home treadmill, located in Middle Babe’s bedroom – or the paltry quota of two to four hours’ sleep I allow myself in an effort to finish my work commitments.
  
  In other words, I have had it.
  
  I’ve been there.
  
  I’ve done that.
  
  I’m outta here.
  
  The sanatorium room I will request should have a view of snow-capped mountains, or the ocean or perhaps an enchanted forest. As this sanatorium will likely be in Switzerland, I intend to spend my days with tall, healthy, non-neurotic Swiss people who will administer massages, manicures and pedicures, take me on restorative hikes through the Alps, protect me from visitors, administer medicinal doses of chocolate several times a day, smile a lot and agree with everything I say.
  
  While away, I also plan to have some advanced facial treatments that will obliterate the telltale signs of stress and sleeplessness. And perhaps I’ll have my hair professionally colored instead of the over-the-bathroom sink production I undergo once every five weeks. I’ll make my hair the color of bittersweet chocolate. Perhaps actual chocolate can even be used in the process. And I'll have a chocolate massage to go with that.
  
  During the day, when I am not having treatments or hiking through the Alps, I will sit in a cozy theatre, watching DVDs of every great movie I’ve ever wanted to see…and missed. Or watch the film versions of every great book I had hoped to read…but haven’t. And eat Caesar Salad the entire time. Without croutons and anchovies but with extra cheese.
  
  The cost of my stay will include daily sessions with a world-renowned psychologist (or even psychiatrist…what’s not to like about drugs?) from Vienna. In our daily therapeutic hikes, my new shrink will enable me to achieve profound insights into my psyche. The mysteries of my life will finally be revealed, in fact, I will realize that it all makes for a great (and marketable) screenplay. Together, we will have transference and counter-transference and when I am ready to return home, I will be tranquil, wise and fully-evolved.
  
  I’m sending out this memo to you, dear HOBB so you don’t wonder where I am when you return home. Out of the deepest sense of compassion for you, I have decided to leave before you return because I honestly think I might kill you if our paths cross on my way to the sanatorium.
  
  Your loving wife,
  
  Bungalow Babe
  
  PS: I’m putting Alfie the Pomeranian in charge of Little Babe until you get home. Later tonight, I plan to teach him how to pick up the mail, make dinner and lock the door.
  
  PPS: Don’t try to call or e-mail me. I am giving my Blackberry to our cleaning lady.

PPPS: Did I mention that I'm writing this memo in the Jury Selection room of 111 Centre Street? Yeah, I have Jury Duty today and tomorrow. Did you contact the New York State Court system and set this up in advance???

PPPPS: I will be staying in the most sun-drenched room at the sanatorium to make up for the twelve days of living in darkness. Little Babe has been doing his homework and practicing cello by candlelight. My attempts to replace the four broken lightbulbs in our apartment have all failed.

________________________________________________________

*Husband of Bungalow Babe, in case ya haven't figured it out by now.

CELLPHONES, DRUGS AND ROCK-HARD ABS Part Three

(NOTE TO READERS: Since posting this entry last night, I had a personal realization and have updated the post as a result. If you saw this post anytime before 11:30 pm on 3/14, you haven't seen the latest version.)

Last week, I was really burning to write about anorexic women at the gym and how upsetting it is to watch them wander listlessly through the workout floor, barely managing to lift weights, traipsing feebly on the treadmills, drowning in overlarge clothes, staggering through workout class, publicly engaged in a war against their bodies.
I wanted to communicate the horror of seeing these women naked in the locker room – stripped of buttocks and breasts, skin invariably turned a waxy yellow, Auschwitz-like victims of their own internal concentration camp transplanted onto the pleasure-oriented landscape of 21st century Manhattan.
I wanted to write about the complex reaction they evoke in me – a mixture of pity, worry and outrage. Like coming upon a homeless child on a street corner or walking through a cancer ward, my soul contracts at the sight of these skeletal gym rats. They are pathetic, these dying women on the workout floor, come to absolve themselves of the sin of imaginary fat.
I have spent entire workouts covertly monitoring them as I sweat my way through 45 minutes of Law and Order-fueled treadmill torture, worried that they might drop dead any second. I have been disturbed by the failure of fitness trainers to remove these women from harm’s way with a gentle intervention…and quick call to 911.

I have pondered the responsibility of fitness clubs towards anorexics and concluded that any facility dedicated to health and exercise needs to install vigilant monitors who might offer intervention in the same way that restaurant managers would be compelled to administer a quick Heimlich maneuver to a patron who has started to choke.

It is not, as the director of the Dodge Fitness Center at Columbia University once told me when I voiced my alarm at the growing number of anorexic students at his facility, an invasion of privacy to intervene. That is utter bulls#*t.

Intervening when you witness a suicide-in-progress is a moral imperative.

And while I fear for my starving sisters, I admit that I also experience anger at them for failing to overcome the habit of denying their bodies’ basic needs, a habit popularized by adolescent girls running from their sexuality, their mothers, the encroachment of adulthood, their emerging selves.

Rather than embrace the often-fattening pleasures of life, adult anorexics are stuck in a romance with the concept of self-abnegation, they practice masochism every minute, feeling purified by their hunger, strengthened by their resolve to forego pleasure.

Spiritual purists, they disavow interest in their corporeal existence. And though they intend to make themselves holy, they inadvertently sin, dishonoring God by tampering with God’s most glorious design – the human body – desecrating it through deprivation.

So, this is what I was burning to write about last week, this and the fact that, lately, as I observe these bony, brittle women at my beloved gym, I am aware that my extra winter poundage has necessitated the addition of cellulite-control leggings beneath my little black running shorts.

However, as this week dawned, the issue began to recede from my radar screen. Feeling duty bound to tackle the matter (having referenced it in the past post) I began writing but the prose didn't flow out of my fingertips. I found the going difficult, the subject eluded me, seemed foreign, barely held my interest.

Still, I soldiered on, determined to make good on my promise, choosing to segue from the scenario of starving women to my own winter weight gain. Here is the rest of what I wrote:

It is also impossible to ignore the fact that my abs are hardly rock-hard due to my winter penchant for eating pretty much whatever I like, including the vanilla Haagen Dazs I am currently inhaling…straight from the half-gallon container, I might add…with little spoonfuls tossed to Alfie the Pomeranian who has magically appeared computer-side, lured, no doubt by the scent of vanilla wafting through the apartment.

Yes, it is weird writing about anorexics while eating ice cream at midnight. Weird and ironic... or weird and appropriate.

Life affirming, even.

Haagen Dazs at midnight is the opposite of anorexia. (Unless you go and throw it up afterwards, but that is really bulimia.)

Indeed, I am feeling elated as this creamy confection melts on my tongue even if my belly is not bikini-ready and my thighs and butt need to be encased in slimming black spandex before I’ll appear in public. I am feeling elated even while acknowledging that I'll need to wear those leggings a little while longer before my inner fitness dominatrix prevails and chains me to an elliptical trainer and carb-free regime.

HOBB is away in India with Big Babe, Middle Babe is studying in Israel and Little Babe is asleep in my bed next to the pile of clothes I’ve neglected to put away since HOBB left the country last week.

Like amassing piles of clothes, eating ice cream at midnight is one of the pleasures and privileges of adulthood.

That, and watching late night television, perhaps an episode of Law and Order, until I wrest myself from the couch to return to the deadline project due at 10 am tomorrow morning. And that is where the original post ended.

But readers, as I read and re-read the post obsessively, I felt agitated. Yes, I had written about my honest reaction to starving women at the gym, revealing myself to be less than, or more than simply compassionate towards them in their plight. However, there was something else going on, something I was afraid to touch. Something that was at the core of my annoyance with anorexic adults, something that explained just why I felt compelled to dive into a half-gallon of Haagen Dazs to make it through the writing.

It had to do with my adult self confronting my starving teenage self, seeing myself in the extreme waif-like women, averting my gaze from the reminder of what it was like to be obsessed with overcoming my appetite, being unable to bear what I might have become.

It had to do with standing inside and outside the mind of the anorexic, feeling the draw of denial as a sham way of gaining some control over my life. It zapped me back to a nightmarish time of being forced to inhabit a role I did not choose, of feeling like a prisoner in my own life.

And though I have moved beyond that time, travelled light years out of that hell, the default mode for the stress and disequilibrium in my life is still the mode of self-denial.

So, what was left unstated in the original post is that I see myself as I was in the desperate dieters at the gym. And because of that close identification, I want to yell at them, shake them out of the hell they are in, move them into adulthood where autonomy generally allows us to create our own reality, rewrite our destiny, even.

In my life, I have slain the false god of self-destruction, refusing to capitulate to his decree.

The midnight Haagen Dazs is therefore my trophy, elixir of sticky delight and sweet dreams, the essence of my healing.

CELLPHONES, DRUGS AND ROCK-HARD ABS Part Two

It has often been stated that youth is wasted on the young.

How true.

But infinitely truer…and hardly ever stated…is the fact that drugs are wasted on the young.

Remember back to your high school and college days? As much fun as it was to get totally wasted then, it is infinitely better to get trashed with the brain and body that you have now.

After all, there is so much more to escape when you are an adult.

Two nights ago, I found myself at an Oscars party on the Upper West Side. Minutes after the arrival of a giant hero sandwich stuffed with (kosher) cold cuts, the host pulled me aside.

“You seem of the generation that would be cool if I asked you something,” he said in subdued -- if ungrammatical -- tones.

“Yeah?” I was suspicious and curious all at once. Every babe in the big city knows to be on guard for pervy questions at parties.

“I have some pot-laced cookies. Would you like one?”

I must issue the following disclaimer: I am against the use of illegal substances. I have told Big Babe and Middle Babe (Little Babe is too innocent to even contemplate doing drugs…or even talking back to his teachers) that I would be most unsympathetic if they were ever busted for possession of drugs.

The only time in recent memory I smoked dope was three years ago in Amsterdam where it is illegal NOT to smoke dope. I did it more for the experience than the buzz. The truth of the matter is that, debauched youth aside, I never really liked pot. It made me feel dumbed down, like my mind was trying to run in a swimming pool.

But being offered a marijuana snack on the Upper West Side was an irresistible offer.

“Sure!” I agreed, looking towards the couch where HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) was cramped uncomfortably, watching the early, irrelevant Oscar nominations and winners. The confection would not be up his alley.

“Have you eaten anything?” my host suddenly asked.

“Uh, yeah…apple slices and peanut butter before I came here,” I offered. He looked relieved.

“I meant, you didn’t have any of the meat sub, right?” he explained, “because the cookies are milchig. They're made with butter.”

I laughed. Where else in the world – outside of the Anglo-populated neighborhoods of South Jerusalem – would anyone be simultaneously concerned about his guests getting high and inadvertantly mixing milk and meat?

My host handed me a baggie filled with biscotti-shaped blondies.

“How much?” I inquired.

“I ate two before the party and I’m totally wasted,” he said, looking totally wasted. “It’ll take about an hour to kick in.”

I didn’t want to stagger home to Little Babe through the snow in a state of utter intoxication. “I’ll have one,” I said.

The blondie tasted surprisingly hearty, made evidently with whole grains, real creamery butter and actual pot. I was envious of the baker: I personally had no idea how to bake such treats, or to bake in general. Finishing the snack, I wove through the crowd, found HOBB and squeezed in next to him on the couch.

“I just ate a pot-laced cookie,” I told him. “In case I start to act weird or anything.”

HOBB looked at me like I was a teenager who had just broken curfew...again.

“Do you want one?” I asked, uselessly.

The party wore on. The Oscars unfolded. Ellen changed her outfit three times. The winners staggered to the stage, grateful, astounded, triumphant. The montages were cool…especially the one of the foreign films. Everytime the camera landed on Jack Nicholson, I suppressed the urge to leap through the television set and smash him on his billiard ball head with a golf club. Our host devised a plan whereby he would lower the TV volume and play Zydeco music during the commercials, which was clever, if a bit annoying.

Around 10 pm, HOBB stood up, stretched and announced his intention to go home. I stated my intention to stay. We arranged for me to call home at 10:30 to say sh’ma (Jewish bedtime prayer) with Little Babe. Guests came and went. I called home at 10:40 to say sh’ma with Little Babe and sent kisses over the phone. HOBB told me that Big Babe was coming to the party. I looked up and there was Big Babe, standing in our host’s bedroom.

This was the second party he had come to in search of his parents. We had left the first one, hours ago, it turned out, but he didn’t know that. He had left several messages on my Blackberry but I hadn't checked it for hours. He looked chilled and annoyed from shlepping through the snow.

Suddenly, the dope took effect.

Here’s the thing about being a parent: you have to maintain a semblance of responsible adulthood at all times. Even if your kid is 22. Even if they have probably done harder drugs than you. Even if you are at a party.

“Hey, your mom’s cool!” one cute girl told Big Babe, as we stood near the food table. She had just come over to talk to us and perhaps pick up Big Babe. I don't know what I said, or if I even said anything at all but she thought I was cool. Maybe it was the red velvet jacket I wore or my long strand of black beads from Paris or my four-inch high Isaac Mizrahi boots or my H&M black dress. Whatever. It was cool to be cool.

The dope made me dopey. I started laughing at things that might not have been remotedly funny. I cannot remember exactly what they were except for one thing, when Big Babe was leaving the party. The host stood by the elevator and it seemed like his 5 o’clock shadow had deepened appreciably over the past hour. I shared my observation and the two of us fell over laughing hysterically.

“Hey, your mom’s a real party animal,” said the host.

Big Babe left with an inscrutable look on his face.

Fast forward to later in the evening, after I arrived home to catch the final awards. HOBB was sitting on the couch, annoyed (it turns out) that I had not left the party with him. Little Babe was snuggled next to him, upset to have awakened and find his mother still not home. He had been wrested out of sleep, he reported, by the theme song to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which played during the Lifetime Achievement Award segment for composer Ennio Morricone.

(Little Babe had recently discovered this theme and had been humming if for the entirety of the previous week – one night, when I asked him to cease and desist, he claimed he was unable to get it out of his head! -- and then, on another night we had both burst out laughing when our cabbie’s cellphone rang with that very melody.)

Imagining Little Babe lying in bed, lured to the living room by that iconic cowboy movie theme, I laughed. It was funny, after all, that Little Babe was being stalked by the theme to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

Then I noticed Big Babe, sitting on the other side of his dad and little brother, looking at me with disgust.

As best as I can remember, my behavior at the party earlier that evening was unremarkable. I didn’t dance on the tabletop, say anything off-color, behave in an undignified manner. Nor was I completely wasted, just loosened to the point where everything in the world seemed funny to me.

And I had returned, after all, to the bosom of my family. It was not even midnight. Soon I would be walking through our overheated apartment decked out in a t-shirt and shorts. Because he was still awake, I would shortly tuck Little Babe into bed. The next morning, I would be hauling his little butt out of bed to get him ready for school. And after the bus left, my work day would kick into motion.

It sure was great to escape the deadlines, demanding clients, difficult decisions, family responsibilities and general sense that the world sucks at the Oscars party. It was great to not think about our financial woes, upcoming meetings and programs and the terrifying To-Do list that crowns every day of my work life.

One little pot-laced cookie at an Upper West Side Oscars party. It was a milder high than two glasses of red wine. It was soothing and fun. It was unexpected.

It was great and all, yet a mom is a mom is a mom, even if she is a Bungalow Babe.

And the message I got loud and clear was that there is a motherly code of behavior that precludes the ingestion of certain substances when the kids – even if they are the same age that you were when you got married to their father – are present.

Next Up: Rock-Hard Abs

To hide her winter weight gain, Bungalow Babe opts for cellulite-control leggings at the gym while worrying obsessively about the anorexic women...and whether they will die during their workout.

Moral dilemma of the day: Do gyms have a responsibility towards their obviously anorexic clients...the ones who look like Auschwitz survivors? Should they continue to let them work out or intervene?

Personal ethical dilemma of the day: Why, when faced with these sick -- if not dying -- women, does Bungalow Babe experience more anger than compassion?

Stay tuned for the final installment of Cellphones, Drugs and Rock-Hard Abs