My book came out last Thursday on the full moon in Taurus, an auspicious day.   Taurean energy is both creative and possessive and my book, two and a half years in the writing, is all about me.   A memoir is not history.  I didn’t pretend to set out facts.  I wrote as I remembered but my memory is colored by my personality, my vulnerabilities, such self-image as I try to prop up, and by perspective that came after the events related in the book.  The frame of memory tilts this way and that, it’s constantly in motion, and it cuts through the layers of life.

The book design was a Taurean business as well.  Vladimer Verano at Third Place Press designed a splendid book and we had a jolly collaboration around the images on the front cover.  The zucchini was his idea.  You’ll have to read the book to find out what it’s doing there.  On the back cover is an image by my compatriot in watercolor, Madelaine Ramey, who signs her cartoons Hilaire Squelette.

Back cover design by Hilaire Squelette

I did not wait for this book publication with grace or patience.  My Gemini energy raced around inside of me, demanding to know what was taking so long, culminating last week in my yelling at the sopranos in The OK Chorale.  Exactly a week after that regrettable incident, Vlad told me the paperwork was waiting to be signed and the books were ready to go on sale. The earliest he could see me was 11:00 the next day.  It was a date.

I woke up at 3:00 that morning remembering that I had a chiropractic appointment at 10:30.  I lay there and fussed for three hours.  By 8:00, I had gotten the chiropractic appointment changed to 9:30 so I was reasonably certain I could make it out to Third Place Press without having an accident.  Even so, I took surface streets to get there.  Nobody needed me driving on the freeway in my state of mind.

I chose to self-publish after a year of cruising the current publishing scene.  Several editors and agents on both coasts saw my manuscript and said lovely things about it but stopped short of committing to anything.  I started hearing things like: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind 38 times.  Some of my informants put a one in front of those numbers.  Have you any idea how much I did not want to get 138 rejections? It’s not in my nature to sit around waiting for the phone to ring. It’s that Gemini thing again.  So I looked for alternatives.

Three years ago I thought of self-publishing as not quite legitimate.  But I could see with my own eyes that books published in the traditional way were not necessarily well-written.  I learned that writers are expected to bring an audience with them which is rather a neat trick for a new author.  The Internet has thrown both the publishing business and bookselling into confusion.

Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington

Third Place Books has been a Seattle area institution for as long as I can remember.  The main store is in Lake Forest Park, a community north of Seattle which fronts Lake Washington and backs the woods.  It bustles with the large bookstore, a commons with a food court, the wonderful Honey Bear Bakery, and a stage on which The OK Chorale has performed several times. The calendar is scheduled three months out for readings and musical performances. In one corner of the commons is Third Place Press, run pretty much single-handedly by Vlad and featuring Ginger, the Espresso book machine.

Third Place Books

99 Girdles on the Wall is on the shelves at Third Place Books and they will ship anywhere in the world.  It’s also available at The Secret Garden Book Shop in my Seattle neighborhood of Ballard.  It’s not currently available through Amazon and this was the trade-off for collaborating with Vlad and getting to be involved in the process from start to finish at a small independent book store and publishing house — except I wasn’t there when the books were actually printed.  That’s probably a good thing, my energy has been known to short circuit small appliances.

Occupy the publishing and bookselling business.  Buy from a small independent bookseller.  Buy my book!  http://www.thirdplacebooks.com/99-girdles-wall-memoir-elena-louise-richmond

Third Place Press

I was hoping I could come up with something more interesting, certainly more laudatory, than today’s topic but since I haven’t: I yelled at the sopranos the other night.  I was appalled.  I am not in the habit of yelling at my singers.  But after having succumbed to the impulse, what came out of me wasn’t even a decent yell.  It was more of a whine two octaves above my speaking voice.

Since I, myself, am the most prima donna of singers, a coloratura, I can say this: sopranos tend to be a supercilious bunch, only responsible for holding down the tune, the part everyone knows, the part everyone sings in the shower.  I’m not entirely sure what the sopranos in the OK Chorale do over there in their gated community when I am plunking out the other parts; it’s only when they get to chatting rather too enthusiastically that I notice them at all.  I’ve been especially neglectful this quarter because the basses are my problem children in that they are mostly tenors who are attempting to make a home on the baritone range.

Last week we were working on a Chanukah song called “Light the Legend.”  I’d been hammering out parts for an hour (or so it seemed, it probably had only been five minutes) and was already regretting pulling this song out.  In 20 years of directing the Chorale, I’ve been inspired by only two Chanukah songs and these I alternate one year to the next, occasionally throwing in a song from the second tier.  “Light the Legend” is one of these.

My (limp) affection for it has mostly to do with what a good time we had the first year we sang it.  Some of the women did a funny stylized Las Vegas routine at rehearsals and their joyousness permeated the performance.  But it was the tenors who inadvertently made an indelible mark on Chorale history.  We had a very loud tenor with no discernible head voice who was in the habit of singing as high as he needed to go in full chest voice.  On the phrase “Maccabeans went to battle” he positively screeched.  We got to where we looked forward to the line every time it came around and in subsequent quarters the piece became known as the “Legend of the Screaming Maccabeans.”

The ending had always demanded more rehearsal time than it was worth so for this quarter I had re-written it.   Instead of the Cecil B. DeMille ending with every part running off, circling around and meeting the rest like water in a gigantic fountain, all the parts sang in unison until the last two counts where they moved into a simple harmony to end the piece.  The only complicated thing about this was that the sopranos had to move off melody for 2/3 of a triplet.

I rehearsed the other three parts for two hours, maybe three.  Finally I said to the sopranos, “You’re fine, right?  You don’t need me to play anything.” I didn’t wait for them to answer. “Ok, let’s run this thing.”  I wanted to get through it and move on to something else.

We went along reasonably well until the triplet at the end.  The other parts finished smoothly but out of the corner of my eye I saw the sopranos flailing around like a bunch of windmills.  I was still holding the last chord on the piano.  I wiggled my hand in the air, “Ok, sopranos at the next to last measure, 3 and 4 and—”

But the sopranos were laughing, pointing to their music and chatting like girls at camp.

“Sopranos, c’mon let’s go. ‘Golden arabesques of.  .  .’  Sopranos! What the hell?”

They looked up.

“What is it with you?” I shrieky whined. “It’s two notes and you all fall apart, c’mon!”

They laughed.  They laughed.

What I wanted to say was this: “My god, it’s two fucking notes and now it’s going to take five minutes to get you organized and I wish we had never started this piece, you aren’t going to laugh when you tank in front of all your friends, and I just want to go home and everything is taking too long and I wish my book was published and on sale right now, right now!”

I took a deep breath through my teeth. I can remember a few other times that I wanted to scream at the Chorale or at particular individuals.  I have had 10 Xanax quarters where I obsessed about being ready for a performance.  But I usually manage to contain these regrettable flights of narcissism.  People don’t look forward to rehearsals if they anticipate yelling. People don’t sing well in performance if they haven’t enjoyed the rehearsals. Including me.

The Chorale always pulls it off at the end.  It doesn’t mean that our rhythm is pristine or our intonation perfect.  We get the unplanned solo work in a rest and the crucial entrance that doesn’t materialize.  But music is alive.  It sings for its short life and that’s it.  I don’t want to be the person who hooks us up to life support. So note to self: no yelling or shrieking (whining is ok) in rehearsals.

If you live in Seattle, you can hear us lighting the legend at the Green Lake Luminaria.  And maybe I’ll be signing copies of my book.

Waiting.  I’ve never been good at it.   When I was a girl and Halloween fell on a school night, the school day lasted a week, no, a year.  Waiting for this book to be published is like waiting for that moment when I would step out the door in my gypsy costume (scarf tied backward on my head, all my mother’s strings of beads around my neck, lipstick all over my face) and begin to relieve all the neighborhood moms of their candy.

I’ve been working with book designer, Vladimer Verano, at Third Place Press which is connected to Third Place Books, a local independent bookstore in Seattle. I chose to publish with them after meeting Vlad and being impressed with his professionalism and craft.  At our first meeting, he outlined the steps that produce a book, calling me back to earth when I said things like, “What if I get 500 orders the first week?” or “What about my blog readers in Germany?”

“Let’s start with you sending me your draft so I can give you an estimate,” he said calmly.

After I signed the estimate, I checked in with him once a month –or so I imagine.  I had only a vague notion that he had other clients and I had entered at the bottom of the list.  It took me a while to get used to his style and pacing which he maintains with admirable unflappability.   When I made it to the top of the list, things– including my anticipatory mechanisms–accelerated.

The “interiors” came and I saw what the pages would look like.  I posted my excitement on Facebook.   I went into a flurry over the size of the book and the font.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t look like a real book,” I fussed.

“It looks just right,” Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, assured me. “It’s what I expect when I open a book.”

“It’s the size of a trade paperback,” said Joan, my friend with the theological chops.

When it came time to choose the book cover,  I showed the mock-ups to far too many people, weakening my decision making ability.  I usually don’t vacillate.  I make quick decisions and then live with them.  But I was so confused by the time everyone had weighed in that my friend Nancy’s voice scarcely penetrated:

“Whatever you decide will be right,” she said.

I chose the basic concept for the cover and sent Vlad some images from what he referred to as my “archives,” but what is essentially several disorganized boxes of photos.  We finalized the book cover.

“It’s time to start telling everyone that the book is coming out soon,” Vlad said.

This was rather an unfortunate way to put it.  It was a Monday.  I thought he meant I had until Wednesday.  I immediately posted on Facebook, put my webmaster on alert and called Danielle who does all my print work at Office Depot to talk about making postcards.

The next day Vlad emailed me to say that the proof was ready, I could pick it up at the bookstore which closed at 10:00, and he was “calling out sick” the next day but he would talk to me on Thursday.  Again, unfortunate language although I was halted briefly in my flights of unreality to wonder what part of the country nurtures the expression “calling out sick” instead of “calling in sick.”  I raced out after choir practice that very night and picked up my proof which I am thrilled to report looks just like a real book.  When I didn’t hear from Vlad on Thursday, I knew he had died and Third Place Press had closed its doors for good.

The weekend came.  Weekends weren’t so bad because I knew there was no chance of hearing that the book was published and on sale.  So I used my considerable fidget units to hem some pants, iron a skirt too wrinkled to wear since last spring, re-arrange one piece of music to accommodate this quarter’s OK Chorale’s diminished bass section and another to bring down the stratospheric soprano part for the church choir; and rub Goo-Gone over half a dozen bottles that have been cluttering up my kitchen for months.

A week ago Monday, I e-mailed Vlad to ask if it’s too late to order more books as I have some book readings coming up.  No, not too late, I am next in the print run, and give him a few more days to get all the paperwork together.

A few days.  That’s maybe two, four at the most.  But by last Friday, I had heard exactly nothing.  Last weekend I might have finally started a mailing list, something I have superstitiously put off for months.  Now I feel justified in having not wasted my time because clearly the book is never going to be published.

Yesterday rolls around.  I send a “check-in” e-mail.  Vlad responds, detailing the next few steps, and ending with “I understand that you’re eager, but please be patient as we move through the final process a step at a time.”

I show the e-mail to Nina (rhymes with Dinah).  “Do you think I’m being a nuisance?” I ask.

She laughs.  Her laugh is infectious. “Maybe you don’t need to e-mail him again,” she says indulgently.

I forward the e-mail exchange to Nancy, who has a Libra sun, and ask her what she thinks.

“I think,” she responds. “You’re in Narnia. He’s in the big old world outside the wardrobe.”

Nicely put, I thought.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I am right now.  That I have been able to sit in a chair and write 998 words, some of them formed into complete sentences, is a good sign that a foot is protruding from the wardrobe. I expect the book will be published before too long.

Awaiting imminent publication of my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall, a memoir about holding in, letting go, and coming to grips.  Meanwhile, life goes on.  Here’s the latest:

My church choir has started up after the summer hiatus. For some unaccountable reason, it has swelled to twice what it had been.  New people usually mean new energy but the group on Tuesday looked more than tired because it was a work night.  They looked stunned from having managed to do one more thing that day.

We dirged through the Sunday anthem, a piece called “Sing Out, Earth and Skies” by Marty Haugen.  (For those of you who recognize this name, yes, I am robbing the Catholic hymnal).  The tempo was marked “light and dancing.”   But the choir was a row of basset hounds like NoMo, the dog that sat in front of the camera and did exactly nothing for 18 seasons of the old Stan Boreson show.  I leashed the choir together and pulled.

“OK,” I said.  “Hold your music in one hand and hold the pointer finger of the other hand in the air.  While you sing, move your finger.  It doesn’t matter what you do, just keep it moving.  Dance it.  Direct with it.”

This perked everyone up a little, if grudgingly, and we got through the Tuesday night rehearsal.

Sunday morning, choir members came straggling in, looking like Tuesday night but with different excuses.  We were out an alto and two tenors due to sickness and because Chris, the inexplicable or rather unclassifiable, has not been to any rehearsals yet this year.  Marvin the Magnificent hasn’t been either, primarily because he doesn’t come without Karen, who has the dog biscuits.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/choir-dogs/.  Maxine, the Feng Shui goddess, was there to sing alto and Ruth, a soprano, graciously agreed to sing alto so the parts balanced.  Dennis, the last tenor standing, was picking up an elderly church member so he missed the practice.  We only have the one bass, Dan, who balances out the other three parts easily. Everyone faced the piano to warm up.

And now I will drop all mention of names in order to protect the innocent choir director.  To the best of my retentive (and elaborative) abilities, this is what the next ten minutes were like:

“Which song are we singing?”

(While this is a timeless question, the timing was off.  The time to ask a choir director “which song are we singing?” is when the choir stands up in the service to sing.  We love that.)

“We’re singing “‘Sing Out, Earth and Skies.’”

“Oh, I thought we were doing ‘Sing!’  I brought the wrong music.”

“‘Sing Out, Earth and Skies’—here’s a spare copy.  OK everyone, here’s the introduction.”

“Wait. Are we singing it like this?”

They were grouped around the piano, backs to the sanctuary.  I looked over the tops of my glasses.  Then I looked through my glasses.  Were we going to sing with our backs to the congregation?

I wanted to be sarcastic, but resisted. I didn’t think it would serve my purposes.  “I thought we’d just sing it once to warm up.”

“I want to practice how we are singing it.”

“Then let’s get into formation.”

They all turned their backs on me.

A soprano turned around to inquire of me, “Which hand did you want in the air?”

“Come again?”

“Didn’t you want us to wave our fingers around when we sang?”

“Oh, you mean like we did in rehearsal?  No actually I want you to put your fingers in your noses for the service.”  Resistance shot.  “Can we just get through this once and see where we are?”

We sang through the anthem.  This is where we were:

“It’s going too fast.”

“We can slow down.”

“No, I don’t want to do that.”

“This d is too high because I had oatmeal for breakfast.”

“Don’t sing it then.”

“No, I can sing it.”

(These were the kinds of conversations I had with my mother when she was sliding into senility.)

“Let’s try it once more.   We’re singing the chorus twice at the end so don’t slow down until we’ve repeated it.”

We barged through it again.  We were waking up, the music was starting to dance.  It’s a wonderful song.  At the end, misunderstood directions collided so the soprano finished first, the altos came in last, the lone tenor still hadn’t arrived for rehearsal and the single bass had left the stage to help someone in a wheelchair.

You know what? It’s good to be back.

At a demonstration at Daniel Smith’s Artist Materials, I watched the watercolorist finish a painting in a 45 min demo.   Some cretin in the audience asked the price of her painting.  She said she would ask her full price, something like $300.

“For a painting that took you 45 minutes?” he sneered.

She was more gracious than I would have been.  “Actually,” she said, “This painting took 63 years and 45 minutes to paint.”

Now that my book is about to be published (and for sale exclusively at Third Place Books, including mail order, domestic and international), I’ve been thinking about all the steps that got me to this point.   I had been a secret writer all my life because as a music student, I felt brutalized by some of my teachers.  I chose to protect my writing from the kind of criticism that had made learning to sing a source of as much anxiety as joy.

In a journal begun when I was 18, I experimented with writing.  I developed an ear for conversations and could do up a credible anecdote.  I explored metaphor, and indulged my sense of humor and turn of sarcastic phrase.  I reflected on the writing of others and noticed what appealed to me.

I learned to trust myself to write without editing. (“You can’t say that!”  “Why not?”)  I learned to sing when I stopped worrying about what sounds I was making and began making sounds simply because they were the sounds that came out.  In both singing and writing, the voice is richer when it sings all the different ways it wants to.

I wanted to write a grand story, but aside from small vignettes, I couldn’t think of a plot.  Then my mother and our torturous relationship died.  Her death ended a sentence, pun intended.  There was such a stark sense of something being finished that it made the concept of plot pop into focus.  My life was a plot.   It had begun, there was this awful middle period and now something had definitely ended.

A year after my mother died, I read a (badly written) memoir by someone who had a religious upbringing similar to mine.  When I came to the end, I closed the book and sat thinking.  “I could write a memoir,” I said out loud.  People who live alone talk aloud to themselves all the time –in case you didn’t know.

I went to the computer, pulled up the free word processing program I had because I was too cheap to buy Word, and wrote, “I was born to be middle-aged.” That is still the first line of my book.  The memories began to pour themselves out of me.  For two months I wrote for five hours a day.   I wrote past my (sacrosanct) bed-time night after night.  I wrote without editing, not stopping to consider whether anyone in the world needed to know how much I weighed when I was at my heaviest.

I had nearly 500 pages of material when I finally stopped.  I spent a year working with editors (principally the extraordinary Thomas Orton) and fussing over the book.  I played both characters in a New Yorker cartoon: a woman standing at the top of the stairs looks at her husband who sits in the basement at a table with a typewriter (remember those?) surrounded by piles of paper.

“Finish it?” the caption reads. “Why would I want to finish it?”

I did decide that no one needed to know how much I weighed when I was at my heaviest, but there were plenty of other exposures I chose to retain.  My mantra was:  If I don’t tell the truth, it’s not worth doing at all.  Even so, every time I let a friend read what I had written, I went through days of feeling a little sick, a little frightened.

There’s a conventional notion that it’s helpful to tell a person with depression to think about other people who are worse off.   When I was suffering from depression, anyone who said something that asinine to me was never invited to say it again.   While counting our blessings has its place, it’s a reductive idea that doesn’t begin to embrace the complexities of what it means to feel our own lives within us.

We all have stories to tell.  In the grand scheme, my story is a small one.  But our lives are big to us.  Whether we live alone or live with others, our lives are the only things that belong purely to us.  We all have the same terrifying and magnificent freedom to desire and to choose.

We all have stories to tell and our stories deserve to be heard.  I wrote a memoir because I happen to like to write and because maybe I got a little alarmed at how much I talk to myself.

I love being middle-aged, although my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) tells me I am only middle-aged if I expect to live 115 years.   I’ll put it like this: the joys of being 57 out-weigh the nuisance of it.  The biggest nuisance is the squadron of odd body parts that twinge and whinge with no predictability, and over which I have no control.

It’s driven me to try something I haven’t tried in 25 years. Yoga.  Down the street from me is a lovely place called Whole Life Yoga.  They have a class called Yoga for Real People which says a lot about the flavor of this studio.  The last time I did yoga, the studios seemed to be mostly for Un-Real People.

I’ve been attending the mild, hour-long Yoga For Over 50 on Mondays but I missed it the other week because of an appointment with my *book designer.*   So I upped and decided I would go to Yoga with Core Focus on Friday which on top of not being the least bit mild, was an hour and fifteen minutes, the last 15 minutes of which was quite unforgiving.

At the time I didn’t think I was doing all that badly.  It’s just that in Yoga for Over 50, we never do downward dog and we never squeeze bricks between our legs to enhance our attention to the pelvic floor.   I am new enough to yoga that the bricks have a kind of mystique, kind of like the black keys to a piano beginner and that tic-tac-toe looking thing next to a note.  So I might have used my brick rather too enthusiastically.

The stretches certainly knocked out the sciatic pain I’d been having but on Saturday morning I found that a lot of my muscles had rather enjoyed the fresh air and didn’t want to go back inside.  They had a list of complaints, had organized a hearing, and expected their demands to be addressed. All weekend, I crept around trying to accommodate everybody.   Every move required thinking, planning and the juggling of conflicting needs.

By Monday my various precincts were reasonably happy.  I would have gone to Yoga for Over 50 except it had been canceled. I fussed over the weekly class schedule.  I didn’t want to lose what small in-roads I had made. There was a Mom and Baby class.  I thought perhaps I could go as the baby.

I finally decided it was going to be Yoga with Core Focus again.  Since I knew what was on offer, I planned to modify the poses somewhat.  But there was a different teacher and she had a whole different regime.  I tried taking extra breaths between the movements so I wouldn’t overdo and the teacher kept checking to see if I had passed out.  I swear that last 15 minutes went on for an extra hour.  I didn’t dare watch an advanced student for fear I would start trying to keep up with her.  She stayed after and did extra stretches –that’s so annoying.

I went from yoga to meet my friend Nancy who is so much more than someone who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, at Green Lake.  If you aren’t familiar with Seattle, Green Lake is encircled by a walking path that is just shy of three miles long.  It’s a great favorite of walkers, with or without dogs; strollers, bicyclers, and roller bladers.  I like it because it’s finite.  No one says, “Do you want to go a bit further?”  You go around it and you’re done.  Except maybe that advanced student might go around it twice.

There was a cold wind coming off the lake.

“Let’s walk briskly,” Nancy said.

This was a terrible suggestion.  When Nancy and I meet every Friday afternoon at Green Lake, we do the Walk for Over 50 so we can talk.  If we can’t walk and chat, I’d rather have a conversation over a latte at Peets.

We did do about 25 yards at a faster pace but then dropped into a rhythm that invited catch-up news, gossip and philosophical musing. I started feeling stiff when we were exactly halfway around.  Like Life: it’s finite, you get stiff halfway around and there’s no advantage to turning back.

I was walking like Frankenstein by the time I got home and fell into an Epsom salt bath.  Well, actually I fed the cats first.  Otherwise they might  have tried to drown me in the tub.  I sank into the warm water with a Jameson and my Boden catalog.  Boden is a British fashion company that I originally got interested in purely because when you register on-line, you get a drop-down menu with twenty titles to choose from: the usual Mrs., Ms., and Mr.  But then it goes on to Princess, Wing Commander, Lady, The Hon, The Duke of, Viscountess.

Since there was no option for Queen—and I suspect one would have to be British to fully appreciate why–I chose Squadron Leader.  All my Boden catalogs come addressed to Squadron Leader Elena Louise Richmond.  My friend Chris, the unclassifiable except she was in the Army, is the only person who occasionally acknowledges my title. I wish it were more widely appreciated.  It would be so great if I could use it to command muscles and joints to be At Ease.

This is a companion to my previous post illustrating how much I am benefiting from having no television. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/10/going-to-the-dogs/ .  It stars that well known personage, Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything.

Gwen used to be the head designer Opus 204, an exclusive Seattle boutique from 1968 to 2009.  By day she came up with haute couture, and in off hours, she dismantled and rebuilt computers and Volkswagens.  She still does the latter.  And she still looks at all the fashion advertisements in Vanity Fair rather than rip them out so it’s easier to hold the magazine. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/the-life-of-a-curmudgeon/.

Gwen is the person I go to when I think it matters how I am dressed.  Like when I am out of my milieu– weddings and fine dining– and I don’t want to look like I was raised by wolves.  I walk across the street in my black handkerchief dress with black tights– so far so good– and clogs.

She sighs because she knows me so well, and says, “You can’t suck it up for a few hours and wear real shoes?”

“Nope.”

“Then wear sandals and go bare-legged.”

Gwen reviewed the jaunty, nautical-looking jacket I bought for my Alaska trip of last summer.

“It looks all right on you.”  Slight, but suspicious emphasis.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it’s fine.”

“Meaning you wouldn’t wear it.”

“Right.”

Gwen is only this brutally honest when it comes to clothes. Ordinarily she would rather set herself on fire than say anything even borderline impolite.  She’s from Wisconsin.

Evenings at The Gwen began nearly a year ago, just before I let go of cable-TV. Gwen and I spent a week racing through the three Stieg Larsson books, followed by a fest of the three movies.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/01/tattooed-ladies-on-fire-reading/

We carried on with weekly foreign films. Up until then I hadn’t watched a movie with sub-titles since Babette’s Feast showed up at the Crest in the late 80’s and I saw it three times.  I’ve always liked foreign films.  My mother used to say that unlike in an American movie, when someone gets up from a chair in a foreign film, her clothes are wrinkled. The actors seem like “real” people who just happened to stray in front of the camera.  I get tired of American actors’ gleaming white teeth and movie endings that balk at reality. But after I reached a certain age, it was just too much trouble to read the sub-titles in foreign movies, cue the violins.

There’s something about the set-up at The Gwen that invites one to enjoy a foreign film.  For one thing, there’s the Plaid Room where the flat screen commands two thirds of the wall, and where Lucy, the black and brown tabby with the smudge on her nose, snoozes on her heating pad.  There’s a large ottoman which Gwen generously shares with me and a selection of wool blankets which make it unnecessary for me to wear a parka, Uggs, and wool mittens when I spend the evening.

The Drink’s Tray has been a recent innovation and I don’t know what we did without it.  We keep it stocked with mini bottles of Jameson and Bushmills, and a sampling of bourbon: Crown Royal, Woodford Reserve, George Dickels. Once in a while, I’ll bring my Laphroaig and Gwen will share her Maker’s Mark.  There’s a tiny water pitcher should we need to dilute.  The pitcher is a piece of whimsical Bayreuth porcelain.  Gwen thinks it’s a Pierrot figure.  I think it looks like a roguish Pan presenting.  In any case, you pour the water through the top of his hat.

Our on-going foreign film fest began with the Stieg Larsson trilogy, then a string of ones we had both enjoyed years ago like The King of Hearts and Le Cage Aux Folles.  I was afraid to re-watch Jean de Florette/Manon of the Springs since I saw it in the 80’s and was stunned for days.  But after twenty five years and a few shots of Jamesons I coped with equanimity.

Moving on to new ones, we both loved Så som i himmelen (As It is in Heaven), not the least because it starred the engaging Michael Nyqvist who played Mikael Blomkvist in the Stieg Larsson movies.  We loved Antonia (Antonia’s Line).

Blessures Assasins was a little too grim.  Europa Europa was a little too stark.  Recently we’ve been watching WW II British propaganda films: Cottage to Let and Millions Like Us.  They’re wizard!

It’s great to be able to slouch across the street in my jammies, and enjoy an evening with my wonderful neighbor in the Plaid Room at The Gwen.  When I leave, the street is peaceful except for the insistent little meow of Freud come to meet me (American version) or to demand why I have to spend my time away from him (foreign version).

There’s an old Sylvia cartoon in the “The Devil Talks About Hell” series.  The devil says that some of us will feel like we had never left home.  Then there’s a roll call of people to report to the backyard for violent misunderstandings with their neighbors.  I know what that’s like.  But I never expect to find Gwen there.  She’s from Wisconsin.

On my current austerity budget, I don’t have cable television.  In addition I don’t have a digital receiver since I did not have the foresight to avail myself of one back when the city was handing them out.  Because of the aforementioned budget, I won’t buy one.  Gwen my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, insists we can rig up an antenna with an angel food cake pan but so far that hasn’t happened.  Hence for the past year, I have had no TV.  It’s turned out to be a good thing.

For one, I don’t miss the News Torture Networks, and their mechanisms whereby one is swollen into a ball of fury that bounces from floor to ceiling because of something a congressional prick blabbed over national TV, and then is suddenly deflated a day later when the story dissipates.  Repeat.

I get a lot of news from my friend Nancy who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, and hates it that I continue to use that tag-line because she thinks it makes her sound one dimensional which she assuredly is not.  We walk around Green Lake every week and if something critical (or juicy) is going on, Nancy tells me about it.  I would like to say that I rush home and read about it in the New York Times on-line but that would be misleading.  What my Aunt Frances would call A Lie.

While I am not a bit adverse to misleading you (or lying) for literary reasons, I can’t write this blog without revealing that I still watch TV.  I just don’t do it at home.  Once a week I spend the evening watching TV with my multi-dimensional friends Chris and Dee and their three Chinooks.  Chris, my unclassifiable friend recently proof-read and justified all the margins of my book that is currently at the publishers (yay!) Dee always misses church because she is continually out practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.

Chinooks look kind of like German Shepherds but they are sled dogs like Siberian Huskies.   The difference between a Chinook and a Siberian Husky is that if you fall off the sled, a Chinook will notice.    Nancy and I sometimes have her friend’s Siberian Husky with us when we walk around the lake.  Rika sets off with a job to do, one which doesn’t include a lot of socializing.

Chris and Dee’s Chinooks are Willow, Starfire and Enzo.  I began a major campaign a few years ago to ingratiate myself with Starfire because it disturbed me that she was afraid of me.  I won the campaign.  Now she likes to be on my lap gazing adoringly at me with her nose between my breasts.

When Enzo joined the family last spring, he was a cute little doofus with enormous feet.  When I’d come in the door, the girls would rush over to get their Paul Newman organic dog treats.  Enzo would wrestle his way to the front, excited and pleased but with no idea what was going on.

“Here I am!” he’d announce.  “I’m here!  I’m here!”  He’d look around, tail wagging joyfully.  “What am I here for?”

Enzo is still a puppy except he’s already taller than both girls and weighs close to 50 pounds.  He still comports himself like a puppy.  When he decides he has to do what Starfire is doing, he launches himself at me from across the room, wriggles all over me, licks every inch of exposed skin and chews my feet whether there are shoes on them or not.  I wish to point out that between Starfire and Enzo I often have nearly 100 pounds of dog on me. Starfire shoves him away and licks my face.

I generally come home from an evening at Chris and Dee’s fully moisturized.   My cats look pityingly at me, mouth “whore” to each other, and request doorman services.

Willow is my final conquest.  It’s my great goal, my Siberian Husky-type goal to so ingratiate myself with her that she will do for me what she does for Chris and Dee when they first walk in the door: bring me one of her stuffed toys.  The opossum is cute, but the lobster will do.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

I’ve got my sugar ration down to just fruit.  I had to do something.  All my summer play clothes are loose and diaphanous.  With the recent chill in the air I tried to pull on some real clothes and the biggest thing in my closet was tight.  Not for the first time.  For some of us, it’s always a struggle.

But now that I’m off sugar, I feel so much more energetic.  I feel capable of anything.  My joints ache less.  It’s wonderful to be alive!  I could go on and on.

Except I’m now on a list.  Actually I’m on several lists.  I come up at least twice on the Lord High Executioner’s hit list in the The Mikado.  But that was written in 1885 and some attitudes have changed since then.  Maybe.

In the story, the Mikado has declared flirting to be a capital crime.  In the town of Titipu, the authorities have frustrated the new law by appointing Ko-Ko, a prisoner condemned to death for flirting, to the post of Lord High Executioner.  They reasoned that Ko-Ko could not cut off anyone else’s head until he cut off his own. Since Ko-Ko was not likely to execute himself, no executions could take place at all.

The Mikado retaliates with a decree that unless someone is executed within a month, the town will be demoted to the rank of village.  So someone must be executed.  Ko-ko has a list of people no one would miss:

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed, who never would be missed!
There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs,
And people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs.  .  .

The list goes on in the ensuing verses: The banjo serenader, the piano-organist, people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face, third persons who insist on spoiling tête-á-têtes, and “that singular anomaly, the lady novelist.”

The song ends like this:

The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.
But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list,
For they’d none of ’em be missed, they’d none of ’em be missed!

In the spirit of filling up the blanks, I’ve got my own list:

People who should be put in cages for two years until they get over themselves

People who have discovered yoga

People who have learned to meditate

People who have stopped imbibing caffeine

People who have become vegetarian or vegan.

People who have discovered the runner’s high.

People embracing the New Age belief system du jour.

People who have “found the Lord.”

People who have stopped eating sugar.

W.S.Gilbert was just cranky and looking for words that rhyme but my list has a thread: people whose self-congratulation has infiltrated their sense of what it means to be human.  Not that everyone who takes up yoga is insufferable about it, but I speak as someone who has made my own list several, ok, many times.

It’s fine, it’s good to cultivate healthy new habits.  Except in the case of spiritual experiences, it’s good to be pleased with ourselves.  But we’re alive and life trumps stoicism.  Actually life laughs at it.

For one thing, there are People.   A student brings in a piece of birthday cake she saved just for me. A friend needs a ride to the emergency room because he is bleeding profusely during my meditation time.

Now I’m cranky because I just remembered there’s sugar in chocolate.

I feel better because of my sugar ration and I hope my winter clothes start feeling more comfortable soon, but I am too old be stoical and I have never been a perfectionist.  I will do the best I can and this spout of virtuous living will last as long as it lasts.

This attitude is what gets me off my own list.  It’s what lets you out of the cage.  If you live in Titipu, you’re on your own.

In this recent spate of late but glorious summer, I did something I haven’t done in years because it hasn’t been warm enough.  I dragged a chair into a shady patch of my yard where the lilac branches meet the tops of the black currant bush and create a cool cavern.  I maneuvered the chair in different ways before I found a spot where the ground was level, and where the sun wouldn’t find me through the leaves.

I repaired to the house for a large iced tea, a plate of melon, and a napkin.  I tested the glass on the uneven ground before I was satisfied it wouldn’t fall over.  Finally I went back for my book.

When I returned with my book, there was a cat on my chair.

Now if you are not a cat lover you are probably wondering what the point of this boring narrative is.  If you are a cat lover, you can guess where it’s going.

I looked at my cat.  It was Freud, the orange tabby; as sweet and smart a cat as I have ever known.  He looked at me. A bit defiantly, I thought.  I looked at my carefully arranged chair and repast.  It had taken a good five minutes to get everything just right.

But, you know, one just doesn’t upset the cat.

I sighed and went back to the house for another chair for which I never succeeded in finding a level spot.  I spilled the tea while I was making my new arrangements and most of the melon slid off the plate onto the grass.  When I got myself all arranged a second time, the sun was shining through the lilac branches, making shadows move across the page of my book so I couldn’t read it.

Freud had gone to sleep.  As soon as he knew his territory wouldn’t be challenged, he lost interest in anything I might do.

There was a related incident the next day. I got all set up to do paperwork at my desk.  I arranged bills in one pile.  I made a mound of slips of paper with notes and dates to transfer to the calendar.  I collected a pile of those artifacts we use to call letters and which I wanted to answer.  I brought out the recycle box.

I reached for my chair with the expensive memory-foam pillow, the one I plant my butt on when I have to sit for a long time.  There was Freud again, curled up and fast asleep.

I consider myself a mildly reasonable person.  I don’t like to be bullied, patronized or controlled, for example, and I will defend or offend as needed.  I have told off priests in my lifetime.  I have gone off on mechanics and thrown things at my therapist.  Once I so aggravated someone at the IRS, he hung up on me.

But faced with a cat on my $50 chair cushion, I meekly use a less comfortable chair.

Don’t judge me.  If you have pets, you may not behave as I do, but you have your own version of life as a peasant under tyrants.

I used to tell my friends that if I ever started dressing my cats up in little nightgowns I had run up on the machine, they should shoot me.  Now I think of it, it seems they all smiled rather too patiently.

I have a cutesy green jacket with images of French cartoon cats labeled in curlz font.   It catches people’s eyes just like it caught mine in the store window, and I get comments about it all the time.   When I first began wearing it, I asked several friends, “Do you think I’ve maybe crossed a line?”

“Oh no, nowhere near.”

“Maybe, but it’s still cute.”

My painting friend, Madelaine, said, “You crossed that line a long time ago.”

I didn’t think I liked cats until I first owned one.  That was 30 years and six cats ago.  When one of them goes to work on me purring like a sewing machine, kneading up and down with its little needle-claws, well, I think I would sit on broken glass for this.