On the rechristening of Henry Miller's Theater *update*

(I posted this as a note on my facebook page and got some interesting comments; I've included them here in the comments section below)

Sometimes I have to agree with Christopher Isherwood. There have been some stupid, crass, and embarrassing decisions made in the renaming of certain Broadway theaters. The renaming of the Plymouth and the Royale theaters after bureaucrats would be the worst examples if there weren’t also a Broadway house named for an airline company nobody even likes to fly with. Henry Miller's Theater was rechristened The Stephen Sondheim Theater the other night. This choice isn’t as bad as the first ones described here, but it is still an inappropriate one, and here’s why:

There’s no Broadway theatre yet named for either Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. Now, no matter how much Sondheim lovers love Sondheim, they cannot make a case for him having as great an influence over American cultural life as Williams or Miller. This is not a polemic on the quality of Sondheim’s work; I wouldn’t presume to be able to speak intelligently on the subject, and I have too many sensitive song-and-dance friends who would pout if I did. However, I don’t know anyone who isn’t already a musical theatre enthusiast who knows or cares either way about Sondheim or his musicals. But every American reads Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in school, and there is a reason for that. The influence of these writers and the importance of what they had to say extends beyond the realm of Theatre (where, aside from that Johnny Depp film, and a few episodes of Topper, Sondheim’s influence stops), into that of literature and even the way Americans see themselves. In fact, Arthur Miller reworked the basic formula for tragedy, which had not been tinkered with for over three thousand years, to state that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” The “heroic attack on life,” which from the birth of drama had been the exclusive domain of kings and gods, Miller imparted to the unknown, laboring, “small” man—the Willy Lomans, Eddie Carbones, and John Proctors of the world. In his essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller writes,

“I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity…. the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing--and need be nothing--but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.”

If it seems strange that that there were ever a question that this “compulsion to evaluate himself justly” is a universal, classless compulsion that drama must portray if it is to reflect the human condition accurately, it is because Miller had the insight to write a tragedy in the high tradition centered not on a king or a prince but on a traveling salesman. Drama has not been the same since.

How often does someone rework something that the ancient Greeks came up with and change it for the better? Not often. But Arthur Miller did. And with it, the way we think about heroism, fate, and the mirage of the American Dream.

We can take for granted that Sondheim changed, revolutionized, even, the musical both stylistically with his non-linear plots (which Miller also did first with After the Fall) and thematically in his divergence from the usual bright fare to darker, more introspective themes (which straight theatre had been doing for, again, several thousand years). But that says more about the musical as being a still-young art form, and about Sondheim’s great influence in helping it catch up with the other arts, than it does about him as an artistic force on the level of artists whose influence does what art should do, that is, change not only the mores and structures of its own genre, but of the society and culture that produced and witnessed it. If you write a book about the Chicago meatpacking industry, and the President of the United States reads it, throws his breakfast sausage out the window, and rallies his administration to create what eventually becomes the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, you have changed culture you live in, maybe even the world. If you create a character who personifies sensitivity, frailty, even spirituality, and place her in a losing match with one personifying brutality, pragmatism, and profanity, you’re holding a mirror up to a society in which those very forces are vying for primacy, and hopefully, inspiring people to guard as well they can what’s sensitive, frail, and sacred. If you write a play that makes not only Americans but people all over the world question the “American Dream” and the moral, human value of the characteristics that help one achieve success in a cold, inhuman, and corrupt system, you change the way people think about their own dreams and eventually, hopefully, how they will act. You have, in a way, changed the world. If you write a musical and it changes musicals, you haven’t changed the world; you’ve just changed musicals. Which warrants a name on a marquee, changing musicals or changing the way America thinks?

New York's Historic Second Avenue Deli is Now a Chase Manhattan Bank.

...the very means by which oustanding success declines makes the process doubly destructive to cities....For some reason, banks, insurance companies and prestige offices are consistently the most voracious double destroyers in this way. Look to see where banks or insurance companies are clustered, and you will too often see where a center of diversity has been supplanted, a knoll of vitality leveled. You will see a place that is already a has-been or is becoming so.

-The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Valentine's Day Shvitz

The Russian Turkish Baths are a legendary New York institution, referenced by some of the last century’s great writers such as Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets. Under Russian management throughout its entire 114 year-old history, the baths are set in a brownstone with a famous red staircase in the East Village, the city’s old Russian-Ukrainian neighborhood. For twenty-five dollars, one gets a sagging pair of shorts, an ill-fitting, un-closing robe, and a thin, undrying towel, and can enjoy an uninterrupted day of steaming and unclogging. Unlike many of the popular newer spas, like the Japanese Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe or Kabuki Springs in San Francisco, or the numerous trendy dayspas in New York, the Russian Turkish baths do not present a sleek, glamorous, or relaxing environment. There are no soothing aromatheraputic scents wafting in through the grates, no sliced cucumber for one’s eyes, no new-age instrumentals playing over hidden speakers, and the slippers lying around the locker room were almost certainly not sterilized since the last person wore them (when one leaves after a session of steaming, one might experience a perplexing mix of feeling cleaner than one has ever felt in one’s life and a conviction that one has contracted a skin condition). There’s often a burly middle-aged man stomping about in his soaked shorts shilling his massages to the patrons, sometimes by actually grabbing one of their forearms and kneading it until it’s red. The patrons aren’t the young yoga-toned professionals in anklets and lotus-tats who frequent the Japanese spas; they’re mostly ancient, thick-trunked Russians and African Americans with patchy leg hair and spinal humps—I have never seen so many naked blacks and Slavs in one place, and getting along so well!

On Valentine’s evening, the Russian Turkish Baths hosted a public party, and I immediately knew this was indeed the thing to do on Valentine’s. I enlisted my good friend Angela (see “Totally Belated Halloween Post,” paragraph 3) to accompany me to this fete, which featured a boisterous gypsy band, unlimited vodka (which I found a little odd considering it was in a place that specialized in inducing lightheadedness and dehydration in its customers) and pierogi with sour cream. The crowd that night was younger and fitter than usual, and seemed more dedicated to the art of toxing than that of detoxing, replenishing their lost liquid with a constant stream of booze. People relaxed the usual New Yorker embargo on eye contact and spent the evening aggressively wooing each other, a trend that Angela and I avoided by getting into a serious debate on the Landmark Forum in the Turkish room; I guess men leave you alone once they realize just how argumentative you can be. One man proved more fearless than his colleagues, however. In the early part of the evening we noticed a young, small, reedy blond man shuffling back and forth in his flip-flops from the various steam rooms, carrying a laminated sheet of paper, which he offered for examination to one after another of mostly disinterested-looking bathers. In my dizzy state (which forced me to spend much of my time sitting on a bench in the common area nodding dully to the procession of men who approached me thinking I was waiting to get hit on), I didn’t think this man and his paper odd, although later I wondered how I could have overlooked the absurdity of someone carrying anything other than a bottle of vodka in the steaming areas. This man (I feel odd calling him a ‘man,’ as he couldn’t have been older than 22) approached Angela and me while we sat on the bench catching our breath. He introduced himself as “Avi,” the exoticism of his name contrasting noticeably with his rather whitebread appearance. A recent graduate of University of Michigan, Avi was trying to start his career as a boardgame inventor. Here he showed us the mysterious paper, steam-dampened even through the laminate, which depicted the ‘map,’ if you will, of a four-person boardgame inspired by the horrors occurring on the Gaza strip. The players represent Hamas, militant Israel, moderate Islam, and moderate Israel, with “global opinion” acting in a manner similar to monopoly’s chance card, and suicide attacks and car bombings as the modes of stealing/losing points towards the objective, Gaza control. The game itself, if dubiously informed, might have been pretty clever and appropriate for self-consciously intellectual New Yorkers, but the inventor’s sliding around the Turkish baths in his trunks presenting the game with an elaborate explanation of the rules and objectives to drunken strangers in bikinis, seemed somewhat uncouth. No matter, I started to nod off from faintness while Avi managed to engage the reluctant but unfortunately lucid Angela in a more personal discussion. In my stupor I caught snippets of their conversation indicative that I really should remain alert enough to eavesdrop more thoroughly—something about “rope burn,” and “transcendant pain.” Later Angela reprimanded me for failing to rescue her from an unwelcome invitation to a session of bondage and domination by the delicate Avi, who apparently enjoyed the strain of clamps on his nipples. I apologized for my negligence, secretly delighted that I could now use my low blood pressure as an excuse to obliviate from unwanted chatting.

Angela and I then proceeded to the Russian Room. A note on the Russian Room: this is an asset of the Baths that I have not encountered in any other spa I’ve patronized. The interior resembles what one might imagine the inside of a volcano to look like, craggy, dark, steamy, with sloped, rough walls—except along the walls are two rows of faucets out of which pour constant streams of ice-cold water into buckets. This room is so damn hot, hotter than anything in the Japanese or Finnish spas, that as soon as you step inside, you have to grab one of these buckets of chilled water and dump it on your head. This comforts you for about a minute and a half, until your hair starts to burn the back of your neck and you have to douse yourself again. Now you sit down on the wooden bench, flinch as you burn your ass on the molten cedar and curse loudly so everyone peers out at you from under their head towels, and then you pick a random towel, soaked with either some stranger’s sweat or the water collecting in the uneven plains of the floor, throw it on the bench and clumsily aim your ass on it before you faint and crack your head open against the jagged wall-boulders. Now you start to wheeze and you swear that you can actually hear the delicate cilia lining your lungs sizzle and char like so much dry brush. You wince at the worrisome sensation that the liquid membranes on the insides of your eyelids are burning your eyeballs. You dunk your head into the bucket nearest you, and take long, grateful gulps from the water, which is so cold that, at any other time, you would complain that it’s freezing your sensitive teeth and hazardous to your singing voice. You eventually resign yourself to your discomfort, as the danger of slipping, tripping, burning, or fainting on your way to the door scares you into staying put. Now your eyes adjust and you find that as long as you hog one of the buckets of water and sip at it like a giant beer mug, you can almost stand it without wanting to die. Now you notice that there are maybe fifteen other people in the room, all lounging and chatting and not seeming at all as though their every pore is screaming in protest at the heat. Gays in mud masks, burly middle-aged Russians comparing forearm bulk, babas in soaked robes, bemoaning the bitchery of their American grandaughters. In the corner atop an elevated platform, a youngish studly-type, lent a slightly-thuggish aura by the towel wrapped ‘do-rag style about his shorn head, straddles a topless woman lying on the bench, holding her ankle fast against her ear for several spectacular seconds until he lowers her leg to the bench and proceeds to flog her breasts with a soapy oak branch. You then realize that the disturbingly flexible topless girl is Angela, and the man with the best job on earth offers this service for $35 a pop. Then Angela emerges sudsy and glowing from this ‘treatment,’ slurrily testifying to the profound bliss induced by the Russian stretch-and-whip (a review you find suspect as you know Angela to be an undiscriminating enthusiast of any activity requiring toplessness, flexibility, and flagellation). She even offers to buy the treatment for you as a Valentine’s ‘gift,’ and expresses annoyance at your refusal. The other patrons overhear your bickering and join with Angela in pressuring you on, pooh-poohing your objections and then just shouting over your increasingly-frantic protests. Then they start splashing you with cold water from the buckets, which feels surprisingly unpleasant, perhaps because of the village-lottery atmosphere which has suddenly overtaken the Russian Room. Finally, the hooded strongman saunters over to you and unwinds the towel from his head, revealing a sensitive face touched with concern.

“Hello. I am Sasha. I not hurting you.”

He pouts at your resistance, offers you his beefy cocked arm, and gazes benevolently into your eyes. You hesitate a moment, then place your weary hand in the crook of his elbow. With a beatific, dippy grin on your face like Blanche du Bois receiving the kindness of strangers, you lean on his shoulder and ascend the steps to the whipping bench.

I remember very little else from that night other than treading through thick slush and the sharp 2am chill through an uncommonly quiet East Village to the subway for the long ride home, where I crawled, clean and chastened, into bed.

On Discovering Porn in My VCR

I sent this one out as a private email almost a year ago; several readers may recognize it. I withheld it from public viewing on principle of good taste or decency or morals or some other such easily-disposable principle. My living arrangements and company have since changed, as has my interest in protecting the secrets of the "star" of this story, due to a complicated and uninteresting (except to scholars of the greedy and wicked), battle over my then-abode, involving threatened misdemeanors, illegal rent hikes, and forged eviction notices sent over blackberry's. Ah, New York life...

Several times a year I leave New York for a few days to do a trunk show for my mother's jewelry business. When I come back from these short trips, I inevitably find my room changed in a subtle but disturbing way. After the first of these trips, I came home and noticed a pair of my hostess's sling-back heels resting on the floor beside my bed. I didn't think much of it, as this used to be her bed, and I don't object to her taking a nap in it when I'm not there rather than having to arrange her cumbersome fold-out bed in the living room. When I turned on the TV, a small, bright red light in the lower right-hand corner of the machine flickered on. I guessed that this meant there was a videotape in the machine, which there was, one entitled "Niblets." My hostess works for a company which designs educational programs for schoolkids deriving inspiration from, of all things, mainstream Hollywood movies. She used "Shakespeare in Love" to launch an Elizabethan history seminar, and somehow wrangled "Elf" into a program for promoting awareness of the four food groups. So I imagined "Niblets" would be, perhaps, fairy tales brought to life by animated baby forest creatures, gerbil Cinderella and such. However, when I reinserted the tape and it started to play, instead of baby gerbils waltzing at a forest-critter ball, I got a giant black man sodomizing a disgruntled-looking blonde in the back of a van.
My hostess had not only been in my room and in my bed, she had watched porn in it--and then I understood that her slingbacks were not merely, innocently, resting on the floor; they were strewn there in that, "let me sexily kick off my slutty shoes and play with myself in my subletter's bed while watching jungle-fever porn" kind of way, the heel of one caught up in the lace ruffle duster and the other lying on its side. Only then did I realize that my sheets and pillowcases had been changed. What had gone on here? It occurred to me that she might not even have enjoyed herself alone in my sanctuary. At the time she was dating a real-estate broker who, she had once mentioned, was an excessive and boozy porn fanatic; a typical night at his Bridgehampton home, even a dinner party with friends, nearly always commenced with him sliding in a DVD from his vast hard-core collection for all to watch on his 90 inch plasma screen TV, disregarding the typically ungrateful response from his guests and lover while he broke out the box-wine. She had also obtained for me a job in his brokerage firm (see "Confessions of a Telemarketer, " paragraph 6), so this miracle of men was also my boss. When it occurred to me that the man who paid me every week with damp bills pulled out of his back pocket, might have lumbered in my bed in all his bloated hairiness and left personal remnants in my sheets, I found myself grasping for a pen or plastic take-out fork until I remembered that I couldn't actually stab out my mind's eye. Meanwhile on the tube, the interracial romance had come to an end and was succeeded by a couple in a bowling alley, another black man, this one with dreadlocks, pleasuring an elven redhead over the ball dispenser. This was one in several short films (hence the title?), most about fifteen minutes long, all shot in exotic locations and with multi-ethnic casts. All, in addition, seem to have been filmed with a low-grade camcorder, as the director/cameraman issued blocking orders from directly behind the camera. The performers would seem perplexed and had to turn their heads in uncomfortable-looking angles and look into the camera (and, illusively, disconcertingly, into my own eyes) to ask him to repeat his requests, unheard over the din of their own gamboling. This cinematographical quirk resulted in one amusing episode, in which a sleek Asian woman fellated a gentleman with a mullet, while the director barked complaints from behind the camera about the insufficiently-tousled state of her hair, the inadequately-feline arch of her back, her general lack of enthusiasm for her task. The harried actress silently withstood the onslaught of criticism until she pulled the instrument out of her mouth, and, still gripping it like a microphone in her manicured fist, bellowed directly at her audience, "Why dontchoo git yo' ass ovah heah an' blow 'im yo'self, limp-dick muthahfuckah?" For a moment I didn't know how to respond.
Many of the films suffered from noise and interference from "offstage," as when, in yet another van-sequence, someone started knocking on the side of the vehicle and jiggling the door handles, which panicked the cast and crew into silence for about three seconds until the picture froze and went to static and the next film began. Ron Jeremy himself showed up in one of the features, engaged with what looked like a half-asleep teenager, her head hanging over the bed's edge, while he uttered jokes about his bellyfat. She was barely awake enough to laugh politely.
I realized that I could not remove the videotape from my machine or even broach the subject with my hostess. Any action would admit to my knowledge of her taste in entertainment, which may be awkward for us, as well as cause her to wonder if I suspected her of engaging in inappropriate activities in my boudoir during my absence, also unspeakably awkward for both of us. Finally it would force me either to admit to my distaste for her indulging herself in my room and bed, potentially offensive and hurtful to her (who either harbors no qualms about such things, liberated Manhattannite that she is, or who simply made the mistake of not covering her tracks), or feign acceptance of the situation as normal in a swinging hostess/impressionable subletter arrangement, which might invite further unchecked debauchery in my own sacred quarters by her and unknown greasy men. I realized that I even had to rewind the tape to the exact spot where I had begun to play it, for if she came in again while I was at work and saw that the tape had advanced several hours beyond where she had left it, she would believe that I too was a closet porn enthusiast and think she needn't exercise even a modicum of stealth in her thrill-seeking. I could only leave it in the machine and expect that the next day while I was out, the red lightbulb would go off in her head and she would rush into my room hoping beyond hope that I hadn't watched the tape and found out her dirty secret, and, relieved that it was stopped at the scene where she had left it, remove the tape and hide it, never mentioning the faux pas. Then I decided to examine the mysterious storage box in the corner under the TV tray, which I had never been curious enough to open. Needless to say, in it were some forty tapes, all with names like "Behemoth," "Double-Stuff Chaos," and "Eileen Dover: Busty Cop".
A whole week went by, with that red light glaring at me. My hostess, who usually only spends one or two nights per week at the apartment, stayed there the entire time, with nary a word about the displaced object, let alone the anticipated removal of it. Only at the end of the week when she was gathering her things to drive over to her house in Sag Harbor did she breeze into my room while I was watching TV, eject the tape, and toss it in the mystery box to include with her luggage, all right in front of me and without a word. I could only play dumb and marvel at her shamelessness.
This has happened three times since the first occasion, despite the permanent removal of the mystery box. I come home to the red light giving me the eye, I see that my bed is either more rumpled than I left it or newly-clothed and neater than I ever make it, I press play to witness some grisly sex-act, and wait in vain for my hostess's sense of the appropriate to kick in. The VCR in the living room, where she officially sleeps, never has the red light on. Apparently, only in my own sweet bed and on my television can she indulge her libidinal fancies. As I write, the red light is hovering in my periphery like a burst capillary, and I have to figure out what to do about it before tomorrow, when my mother arrives for a visit.

First Snow!

It snowed yesterday!! I packed this snowball and walked around all day, tossing it back back and forth in my hands, striking fear into the hearts of passersby. Was I going to throw it at one of them with deadly aim and pitiless speed? Whom would I choose as the hapless victim of my wrath? Who knew?

Confessions of a Telemarketer

That’s right, I was one of "those people" and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Well, yes I am.
When I first informed my friends that I was moving to New York, and that I had chanced upon living arrangements that would only require a meagre $600 a month in rent from me, they usually responded with incredulous stares and dropped jaws, and, once they had recovered from the shock, cracked jokes like, "600 a month?!? You could beg for spare change in the subway and make that!" I would join in laughter at my good fortune, and, when feeling bold, would take the joke a step further and act out busker routines with which I intended to wow ‘em at Times Square subway station or the Port Authority bus terminal. My favorite of these was a Metallica-inspired rendition of the negro spiritual, "Pilgrim of Sorrow." I’d hold my air guitar upright and close to my face (which was distorted with the rage that can only be expressed through heavy metal) and hiss the lyrics of "Pilgrim of Sorrow" to the melody of "Puppet Master." Actually, the idea of having only a month to come up with $600, every month, ignoring the other necessities like food and opera tickets, filled my heart with foreboding. The only jobs I had ever had were babysitting, daycare, and writing geneologies and pricing for my mother’s jewelry line. Babysitting would yield $20-$40 for a night, daycare paid $8/hour, and my mother’s work wasn’t organized beyond the understanding that I worked for her and then spent her money (I knew, and believe she suspected, that my spending to working ratio was rather top-heavy). I had never had to pay rent or electric bills or worry how to budget for my enormous food intake. My jobs had been more gestures symbolic of my good intentions than an authentic commitment to contributing to my own and my family’s welfare, somewhat similar to Marlene Dietrich’s stint flipping burgers as a USO cafeteria server. Because I "worked," I had the right to "spend like a drunken sailor;" the fact that the amount of money I made had very little connection to the amount I spent was a nuance I assiduously overlooked. Usually earned money and spending money weren’t even the same bills. I would collect my modest check from the San Francisco Tennis Club daycare center, deposit it in my savings account (deposits were the only transactions I ever had with the bank), and return home, where I’d fish several fifties out of my mother’s money envelop to keep as casual spending cash. Or I’d attach three or four price tags to some necklace chains during the commercials while The X Files was on, feeling not only that besmirching quality TV time with labor proved the solidity of my work ethic, but that it also justified my regularly helping myself to elaborate and pricey spa treatments and sushi dinners as well as my ongoing quest to find ever more posh and luxurious bras. I am still waiting for them to come out with one lined in chinchilla.

In other words, I was scandalously ignorant of the value of the dollar.

When I moved to New York, I checked the Times job notices and the listings on an online organization which catered to people seeking employment in the arts. A legendary Broadway theatre would be seeking a new dramaturg (a dramaturg provides criticism and guidance to the theatre’s directors and writers) and I’d write to them explaining how I was over-qualified for this job due to my lofty "Great Books" education and the fact that I had sold drinks during intermission at my theatre company in San Francisco, and thus already had experience in the thea-tah. The same Broadway house found my qualifications lacking when, my dramaturgy application having been ignored entirely, I applied for a job selling tickets over the phone in the basement.

I applied to work at four different Starbuck’s, hoping to take advantage of their excellent medical benefits and get myself a pair of glamorous rimless eyeglasses, but was ignored every time. I could understand the first time, as during my interview, when asked what I loved about Starbuck’s and why I wanted to work there, my annoyance at being asked such an idiotic question and my natural candor joined forces and I blurted out that I had actually sworn off coffee two years ago for health reasons and didn’t usually patronize chain businesses, preferring to support the dying mom-and-pop shops instead. Realizing my blunder, I tried to redeem myself by declaring that I was ever so excited about the new green tea frappucino and was in fact relaxing my embargo on Starbuck’s since, as there’s one on practically every corner in Manhattan, I often couldn’t find a mom-and-pop coffeeshop for miles anyway. I spoke more wisely in subsequent interviews (one can near-anonymously apply to work at all the different Starbucks "districts." Each "district" is made up of four or five Starbuck’s locations and usually covers up to one and a half city blocks). I waxed poetic on the comforting purr of the espresso machine, the cozy morning smell of a hearty Venezuelan roast, the caffeine high that makes me love the world just a little bit more, and the hip-yet-chill-yet-groovy-yet-unobtrusive array of music played there to which I was delighted to learn they had just added early recordings of Bob Dylan. What better venue for the establishment-hating folk icon? Still, no go.
Finally I answered an ad from the Village Voice for telemarketing for local theatres and symphonies. I felt this was much unlike regular telemarketing jobs because even though I would make a living calling people at home and trying to sell them stuff, what I was selling them was of such a worthy nature that the people I called would be impressed and even grateful that I was contacting them about it: for if I did not save the arts, who would? I would definitely sleep peacefully at night.
I was put on the Yale Repertory Theatre campaign, and most of the leads I was given were people who lived in Connecticut. I had never been to Connecticut and had only a very Thomas Kinkade-ian image of what it must be like. After my first few minutes of making calls I realized that most people were not going to be impressed or even grateful to be solicited by me for any reason. I always had the vague impression that I was interrupting their Christmas dinner, even though I was calling in late August. To me, Connecticut enjoyed a perpetual state of mid-Autumn--outside, that is--all red and gold leaves cascading over quaint cottage-style family homes. Inside the cottages, one could sit in one’s Norwegian wool sweater with silver buttons sipping hot cider by the fire and gazing out the window at a silent winter scene as snow flakes softly floated by and stuck to the frosted window pane. Oh, and there was always a candle placed near said window, shimmering elegantly in its glass,--and wafting in from the kitchen was always the smell of the Christmas turkey being cooked just right. The streets they lived on had names like "Old Orchard Road" and "Cherry Tree Lane." This for me was Connecticut, and these the scenes I was interrupting with my crass big-city marketing ploys. "All male Taming of the Shrew!! What will they dream up next??" (non-sequitur commentary: I later spent several days in Greenwich on a trunk show for my mother. For reasons never explained to me, I have been banished forever from the Saks Fifth Avenue location there, as well as the Stanton House Inn, the oldest inn in Connecticut, where I stayed. The Saks incident is a complete mystery to me, but I suspect that my banishment from the Inn had to do with something that happened the first night I stayed there. I have never suffered from migraines, but that night I came down with the worst, most thunderous, searing headache I have ever experienced. I had neither pain pills nor sleeping pills with me, and, in too much agony to sleep, and crying noisily, I staggered upstairs in my bare feet and PJ’s to find the receptionist and beg for some remedy. I had not realized that since this was a Bed and Breakfast-style Inn and not a hotel, there was no night-clerk. The lobby was deserted. I rang the little bell on the desk several times, hoping to somehow invoke someone who could take pity but nobody came. Clutching my head and starting to sob, I stumbled into the lobby hoping to find a liquor cabinet or wine case that I could break into, then smash one of the bottles against a tree outside (I don’t carry a bottle opener with me. Perhaps I should.) and sedate myself with it and just incur the consequences of the theft, wreckage, and inevitable hangover in the morning. I was truly desperate. There was no liquor anywhere. Now I abandoned myself to all-out wailing, hoping that someone staying in one of the rooms adjoining the lobby would hear me and rescue me from my pain. Nobody came. So I started howling and scratching on the doors like a cat, and still nobody came. I made my way on my knees to the front entrance, intending to flag down a passing car and hitchhike to the nearest walgreens so I could steal a small packet of advil, but when I opened the heavy wooden doors, I found that it was pouring rain outside, and that I’d have to crawl across a wide and stately courtyard laid with gravel to get to the road, Maple Avenue, which was off the main city streets and mostly untrafficked. So I started calling "Hello? Hellooooooo?" into the night, hoping that some homeless vagabond prowling this tony area for burgling opportunities would hear me and offer me some drugs. But nobody came. Finally, I fell back inside the lobby and dragged myself, now soaked to the skin, along the hardwood floors, whimpering that I wanted to die. I don’t now how I finally fell asleep that night, but the next morning my pain was all gone and when I revisited the lobby for continental breakfast, I noticed that I was being met with unusually disapproving stares from other guests and the staff. The receptionist answered my taxicab request coldly indeed and I realized that the night before I had not in fact been "alone" but rather "ignored;" these Connecticut-types believed that I had undergone some rock-star episode, like I’d run out of methodone or had a particularly bad case of D.T,’s, and they hadn’t wanted to get involved. I was a persona non grata because of my headache, and thus, -banishment.) Anyway, this job paid so little that even if people had been happy to disrupt their Christmas dinners with a subscription purchase, I couldn’t stay on. To illustrate, I worked 16 hours a week, and for the two week period when I was the "star" of the office, winning all the little selling competitions and closing the most deals, I brought home a check for $230.
I also had a job in a real estate office cold-calling all the property owners in Manhattan asking if they wanted to sell their homes. Nobody ever did. My hostess had gotten me this job with her then-boyfriend who was the main broker. He paid me in cash and despite the debilitating tedium of the job, I liked having it, because my boss was never there, and my one co-worker and I often sat in the office net-surfing, telling scatological jokes, and discussing Southpark. Plus, I had access to much useful information there; for instance, I now know that if I ever meet a man with the last name of Brusco, I must marry him immediately because he and his clan own most of the Upper West Side. Imagine the alimony payments! However, after a few months my hostess had a fight with my-boss-her-boyfriend and punched him out, after which he never wanted to see either of us again.
I then sunk even lower and took on another telemarketing job, this one with a company that offered discount vacations in Florida and the Bahamas and required vacationers to attend a timeshare demonstration. There was no cushy moral cause that I could rest on to justify disturbing peoples’ dinners or workdays or time with their families. Furthermore, these people weren’t all congregated in some posh New England gated community. They were scattered all over mid-America, and had signed up to win what they believed was a free vacation while they were (definitely drunk) at various events and festivals—"Minneapolis Rib America," "Sturgis Bike Rally," "Great American Beer Fest." I would recite the script to them, and if they were still game despite sobriety, I’d coax their credit card numbers from them and charge the $600 the trip cost, after which I’d inform them of the extra $150/head of port departure taxes as well as the fact that booze on the cruiseship was not covered in the price of the vacation. All this was strictly according to the script, and I usually felt like I was taking advantage of people too naïve and good-natured to stand a chance against New York commercial selling tactics. They were too polite to object when I ordered them to read me the security code on the back of their Visas, too cowed to reconsider when I insisted that they surprise their spouses with a Disneyworld vacation rather than wait to consult with them before they put the money down. I often had to instruct them to get themselves passports, men and women in their fifties who had never left the country and had no idea what was involved in so doing.
After withstanding as much shame as I could take, I left the office one day and never returned.
I just signed on with Cipriani New York, a catering company with several ballrooms in Manhattan. I was drawn to this company because I heard it caters a lot of celebrity parties and I figured I’d get better stories out of spilling things on famous people than I would spilling things on regular joes. I bought the uniform tux (and was appalled to have to spend $100 on something made entirely of polyester) and attended the hospitality training session. The session involved no actual practice; instead the instructor just inserted a training video into the VCR at the head of the table and left the room. The soundtrack to this video was the same as that of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, complete with the bizarre synthesized rendition of Purcell’s "Death of Queen Mary" march. I take this as a good sign.