Thoughts of a rainy afternoon

The alcoholic sexual abuser is now seated as a Supreme Court Justice.
I don't care.

There is a dangerous madman in the White House.
I don't care.

The finger wagging zealots who follow the supernatural over science are imposing their minority morality on the rest of us.
I don't care.

The Russians are distorting our reality to suit their agenda.
I don't care.

The opportunity to save the planet has slipped through our greedy fingers.
I don't care.

The government helps the wealthy find new ways to accumulate obscene riches while others starve.
I don't care.

Those people we chose to serve our interests hide behind lies and hypocrisy so blatant that Satan would blush.
I don't care.

We run our land-yacht SUVs on oil from countries that want us dead.
I don't care.

We kill by remote control and are shocked that we're hated.
I don't care.

I don't care because it took cellphone videos to open eyes to reality that every, EVERY black boy is warned that anything less than complete surrender of self-respect to a cop, any cross look could lead to a beating...or a bullet.

I don't care because the rare conviction of a murderous cop is hailed as a turning point instead of the abberation it is.

I don't care because racism and greed, the original sins of America are now at their strongest in a generation.

I don't care because anything short of yelling "nigger" in my face is not really considered racism.

I no longer care because this bloated, rotting carcass of a nation has lost its specious claim to a soul. 
I no longer care because the poor and the brown will always be seen as useful dirt to be exploited and despised.
I no longer care because we go through the world wearing golden blinders.
I no longer care because we show the moral depth of a puddle of spit,
the memory of goldfish, and only enough curiosity to wonder who will get the rose, who will be voted off the island, and what Kim and Khloe and  Kylie will wear next week.

I don't care because children are asked to choose their gender.

I don't care because we got the President we deserve.

I don't care because the frustration and pain and soul-sucking rage of being a modern Cassandra make it too difficult to face the hopelessness of opening the newspaper.

I no longer care and won't
        ......for at least another week.

Debra, my beloved Nasty Woman

Debra has been a wonderful wife and mother for thirty-nine years;  loving, nurturing, patient and, if it is possible, even more devoted as a grandmother since our son’s daughter Joan was born two years ago.
When I leave to tend to our grandchildren she always says, always-
“Hug and kiss my grandchildren for me.”
Tomorrow, at one of our favorite restaurants, those grandchildren, their parents, their co-grandparents and their aunt and uncle will all meet to celebrate Joan’s birthday. All those people who love and cherish her sparkly eyes and crooked grin will attend-all but Debra, her loving grandmother Bebe, because Debra will be at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza marching in solidarity with women across the globe, women whose lives and work have been undervalued, wisdom disparaged, education denied, dignity soiled, bodies reduced to sources of entertainment and utility.
She last attended a political rally some thirty-four years ago to denounce the expansion of nuclear weapons. She marched then for the future of our son.
She marches tomorrow for the future of his children.
Debra and her sisters-in-spirit will march to denounce the man whose words and deeds have marked him unworthy and grossly unsuited to lead the nation he claims to love.
She will miss the opportunity to look into Joan’s eyes and wish her a Happy Birthday, because to not join her voice to those of these women would make it difficult for her to ever meet those young eyes.
She will forego this celebration that she might help her granddaughter’s future…and I have never been more proud of her.

Make America Great Again

  

April 5, 1976
Boston

Make America Great Again

Woolworth "Whites Only" Lunch Counter

May 28, 1963 

The White Mask Falls

The White Mask Falls

Well, you’ve finally done it-confirmed my gnawing doubts of the intelligence, open-heartedness, critical abilities, fair-mindedness and inclusiveness of so many  Americans. You have, in electing this boorish, shallow, mendacious, racist, hyper-sensitive, bullying, huckster to be President, you’ve allowed the masks of civility and integrity to slip away and reveal your fears and your long-denied hatreds.

For a brief moment in history it became unacceptable to show blatant racism in polite company, so your preferred tactic was one of plausible deniability.
You believed if you didn’t yell Nigger, wear a Klan hood, make ape noises or toss bananas when Browns were around, if you coated your poison in what you called jokes, (and then called us poor sports for not laughing along), you could claim innocence-perhaps even convince yourself that your newly unfashionable impulses were undetectable so long as your acts of discrimination could be explained away as being something else, no matter how farfetched that explanation.

An example:
We were once lost one afternoon on Randall’s Island and tried to wave down a car to ask directions. The couple in the car, without stopping, drove on, close enough to spray dust on my shoes. When we later caught up with that couple down the road as they entered a building, I asked why they hadn’t stopped, one of them said, “I didn’t see you.”
I stand six-feet, four inches and weighed two-hundred-seventy pounds at the time, but this person, who had been sitting in the passenger seat; with whom I had made fleeting eye contact as they passed us, was willing to offer the gauze-thin excuse that I was somehow invisible. The pure brazenness of that excuse struck me. “Would you have seen me if I were white?”, I asked. That was met with a snort of derision and an angry, insulted wave of dismissal.

Plausible deniability
We see it in the sworn statements of police officers after another unarmed Brown has been taken from the world of time.

Plausible deniability
We see it in the willful mis-interpretation of ‘Black Lives Matter’, insisting it is a term of exclusion rather than one of revelation and aspiration. To an intellectually honest person it might have been less assailable had it been instead, ‘Black Lives Matter, Too’, but I fear you’d have nit-picked your way to seeing even that phrase as threatening, as being the cry of terrorists.

Plausible deniability.
It is more horrifying to me that you cannot all be explained away as yahoos and rednecks, because I’ve found some of you to be intelligent and coherent, and I’m sure most of you are not racists.
But you voted for one.

Plausible deniability
I am sure most of you would never subject wives, sisters, aunts, mothers to breast and pussy grabbing.
But you voted for one who does.

Plausible deniability
I am sure you would never attempt to delegitimize, solely because of his race, an elected President by questioning his citizenship.
But you voted for one who did.

Plausible deniability
You would never mock a handicapped man before a national audience.
But you voted for one who did.

Plausible deniability
Surely you would never approve of a sleazy, foul-mouthed radio host calling your twenty-three-year-old daughter “a piece of ass”.
But you voted for one who did.

As manumission gave rise to the Klan, as the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s gave us George Wallace’s campaign for the White House, the Presidency of a Brown gave us the election of perhaps the most unqualified, ill-tempered, profoundly, fundamentally flawed candidate in the history of The Union; one claiming he knows more than the Generals, that he, and he alone could solve our problems.
Don’t you know how transparent your condescension, contempt and dissembling are, and have always been? How, while you look through us, we see through you?
And now you’ve elected this man.

Your deniability is no longer plausible.

Eat Your Heart Out, David Sedaris

Mall Santa for a Day

The nylon beard was scratchy, the wig hanging over my eyes made seeing through my daughter’s glasses more difficult. The red-and-white cap needed sharp tugging to fit over my now padded skull. Impossibly shiny black puttees covered most of my huge shoes, but the red knickers barely stretched into them so I was forced to wear the waistline much lower than was usual for my vestigial, middle-aged, sense of fashion; I imagined myself as a hip-hop Santa and laughed my first natural laugh of the day.

The photographer, in her Santa-esque jumpsuit, cocked her head from side to side, adjusted my cap and wig, finger-combed my beard, pulled the too-short cuffs down past my bare wrists to meet my white gloves and, nodding more to herself than to me, coolly appraised the large package before her and said, “Okay, are you ready?, They’re waiting.”

 I looked at her through the white strands that covered my black eyebrows, took in the blue-grey cinderblock walls, conduits and ducts that hung suspended some fifteen feet over our heads in the back corridors of the mall. Still off-stage, I took the hand bell from her, shook it as loudly as I could to herald my arrival, gave a hearty ‘Ho Ho Ho’ and strode out, past the guitar shop, around the cordons and, waving regally, made eye contact with each of the grinning, quivering children individually, some of whom took a step or two back from me, and the smiling mothers needlessly pointing me out.  Mounting the low, foil-wrapped dais I magisterially lowered myself into the shallow ornate throne and smiled at my awestruck petitioners.

                Santa was in session.

                Showtime

Two days before, after a day spent in the kitchen of the New Yorker Hotel, I texted Debra from the B train as it rumbled over the bridge and I arranged to meet her for Happy Hour at the Applebee’s conveniently situated above the DeKalb Ave. station. Having secured a waiting seat for her, just after the barmaid asked me where the other half was, I was approached by a regular of casual acquaintance.  When he asked me if I’d be interested in being a Photo Santa I surprised myself by arranging with Debra the care of neighbor Evander on the day in question, and agreed to it.

At 11:05 of the appointed day I met him on the lower level of the mall, was handed my brand new, slightly too short poly wrapped costume and prepared to start a day unlike any I’d had before. My first tiny supplicant was a delightful little girl, quiet and smiling, clearly ecstatic to be on the knee of this personification of Christmas, myth made real, an incarnate abstraction with fuzzy red pants and a six inch-wide patent leather belt that draped loosely around my belly, feeling like a large Muppet but being, to her, the embodiment of wonder, of bountiful giving, the guide at the threshold between the real and the magical. (“Bear but a touch of my hand…and you shall be upheld in more than this.”) Accompanied by her grandmother who stood off to the side of the camera during the photo shoot, the girl needed no prompting to smile. What made this a perfect beginning to my stint was her grandmother returning to my dais a few minutes later to show me the pictures of her grandchild with Santa. Her eyes, moist with the ready tears of age, were crinkled in a smile. “I wanted you to see these, thank you.” she said. I thanked her in turn and my session was off and running.

Through the eight hours of my holding court I saw patient loving parenting and angry mishandling; a mother brushing the sparse hair of a three-week old before entrusting him to my arms, and toddlers, berserk with alarm at the sight of a huge red suited man whose eyes and nose were the only features visible through a mass of white hair that fell down to the middle of a vast chest, being dragged by their little arms towards the terrible source of their perfectly reasonable fear, a mother who yelled at such a child, “Stop that crying, you’re too big to be crying like that!”, a young father, baseball cap askew, berating his son for not smiling at the camera, a grandmother trying ploy after ploy to get her frightened charge to stand beside me. It’s true, I know, that holidays can bring out both the very best and the very worst in people, but I was not prepared for this broad a spectrum.

There was the thirteen year old girl, just budding past immaturity, who, at her mother’s suggestion and against my sense of propriety, alighted on my lap and whispered through her smile that she was doing this for her mother; another young girl, perhaps Indian, perhaps Afghani, in beautiful non-western clothing whose father translated my words to her. What must she make of this? I wondered, she to whom the trappings of Christmas are as opaque as the festivals of Vasant Panchami, or Mawlid are to me? This piecemeal embrace of a newly adopted land, its life, beliefs, has it always been the immigrant’s way of fitting in, like my father, Chinese, accepting the cruel joke of some immigration agent in changing his name from Chai to Charles?

One, another girl, perhaps ten or eleven, whose father stood some way apart, announced that some of her friends claimed I did not exist. When I told her that I was clearly sitting before her and that I would exist as long as the spirit of Christmas she smiled and recited her wish list, posed for her photos, then walked off to her father and ascended the escalator without making eye contact with me or inquiring about the pictures they had no interest in. Was this done out of poverty or a get-what-I-can stance, and was this bright girl desperate to convince herself that Santa yet existed despite her dawning vision of the stark, less magic-filled life stretching before her?

There was the trio of smirking street-wise fourteen or fifteen year old young women who chose to stand around my vacant lap and only reluctantly followed the photographer’s suggestion to hug Santa. Had they already crossed into that stark life and were casting wistful glances over their
shoulders?

After our lunch break, a BLT and diet cola in the cinderblock corridor backstage, I readjusted my beard and wig, looked in the mirror and finished dressing. We started to use the props I’d brought to the show. Debra had taken a ten-pound coffee table book, covered it in shiny silvery paper and written across it in large Magic Marker block letters-

                                   Santa’s List MMXI

I placed this huge book and a long quill on the stack of gifts to my left. Leaning forward on my raised throne I loomed over each child in turn and asked if they had been good in the time since last Christmas. All but one assured me of their squeaky cleanliness and rectitude both at home and in school. The photographer would then walk over and put the book in my lap, tilt it up, and nudge them back to keep them from peering over the top of the book to the pages. I would ask the child again for her first and last name and run my quill down a series of pages until the name came up.

“Ah, here you are! Now you told me you’ve been a good child and listened to your mother every time, right?” I’d say. At this time my brief glance to the mom would bring a conspiratorial nod or quick shake of the head. “Well, it says here that you usually listen but that you sometimes forget. Does that sound about right?” This was nearly always met with downcast eyes and a whispered admission. With the book now closed on my lap I lowered my voice and asked them to try a little bit harder to listen to Mom and be the kind of child both she and Santa knew they could be, that Mom loved them and tried to do what was right for them. Behind my whiskers I prayed they had mothers as good as my promise. They were then told such increased efforts would make Mom and me very happy and, as befit my part in this commercial enterprise, asked if they’d care to have a picture taken with me. Relief and joy flooded their faces and that joy shone through onto the photos.

There was the boy who, when I looked up his name, seemed insulted-“Have you been spying on us?” he asked. There was also the heart-rending response from the girl who, when asked if she had been good replied, “No, but I will be.” Stunned into rare silence, Santa sat back in his chair, waved her closer and whispered, “Thank you for being honest.” After her photos I beckoned her mother over to me with a subtle, gloved gesture, (how willing adults were to accept my authority!), and told her what her daughter had said. Mom told me her daughter sometimes had tantrums both at home and at school but was by far the brightest in her class. I nodded, arose from my seat and walked over to the girl. Bending my creaky knees I told her I knew it could be difficult to be the brightest, how it made one seem different, made other kids treat you differently, and that her being bright was a gift she shouldn’t cover up or waste. The fierce hug she gave me helped the next few hours race by. I will not soon forget her, and she may long remember that large man who played Santa.

 I was very aware of referring to Mothers exclusively for fear of hurting the child of a single parent. I took the chance that there would be few if any children of same-sex parenting. I hope I was right.

Wearing the costume created both distance and false intimacy. While hiding and thus separating me, it lent the outsiders, those observers being observed, a shorthand understanding of who and what I might be. This interaction was fairly new to me, for my own childhood family was not given to the other great American costume ritual-Halloween, and I didn’t don one until my mid-thirties when I took my young daughter to Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue parade. I wore the hooded orange and black jalaba I’d bought in Morocco over my six-foot-four frame and put on a Death’s skull mask. A plastic scythe completed the transformation to what was a surprisingly powerful persona-while children reacted as one would expect, freezing in terror or backing away, adults, and especially older adults, chose to cross the threshold with me. I took to approaching seniors, both those along the parade route and other participants in costume, at a slow and gliding tread. After locking eyes with one, something quite easily accomplished, for their participation in this ritual required them to be observers, I would then look slowly at my wristwatch, slowly back at that person, and, as decided by whim and the degree of trepidation displayed, either slowly shake my head ‘no’ or beckon them to join me. The most effective of these impromptu glimpses into the magical took place when I planted myself, motionless, in the open doorway of a bar where the patrons, one by one, noticed the apparition. One man, shaking off his surprise, nudged his buddy whose back was to me, pointed his chin at the window and said, “Someone to see you.”  When the drinker turned to look at me his mouth fell open and his beer dropped from his hand.  

That Halloween night I learned the liberation of the costumed; how the taking on of a new identity frees one from social restraints and lends the privilege to interact with others on a heightened, distilled plane. Wearing the Santa costume did this and more by showing me how costume allows others to shape their actions and reactions to a Mythic being, one existing outside of time and age, for the Santa of one’s youth was old beyond young reckoning and, seen now through adult eyes, is of the same attenuated and undetermined age as before.

Santa, though a male figure, is so old, both in the then and in the now, and so mythic as to be beyond active gender. There was a young mother who came to the dais with her child and husband for a photo with Santa. When the photographer suggested she take her seat on my lap the mother’s only voiced concern was for my comfortably supporting her weight. She cast not so much as a glance at her husband for his approval of her sitting on a strange man’s lap, but instead chose to accept what she perceived as my age and magic neuter state; she was worried that the Old Elf’s leg would be injured by her medium frame.

As child followed child to an audience with Santa, it became increasingly clear that what I said and did might become a lasting and profound memory for each of them. One never knows what will adhere to a child’s mind, which fleeting glance or casual words will go into shaping what they become. Given the heightened, distilled plane on which we met in this dance of magic, I grew ever more aware of the responsibility implicit in my day’s work. This suspension of disbelief is delicate and must be treated withcare. As I walked through the Mall after changing into my street clothes I saw one of the girls who had solemnly handed me her wish list. My breath caught as she came near, but she and her mother walked past, no glimmer of recognition in the eyes of either one, and I hoped the mother’s purse still held the girl’s list I’d slipped to her. She

         

was

We were at the local weekly CSA share distribution at Havana Outpost’s outdoor area one recent Saturday.

A table had been set aside for us to lay out baskets with samples of homemade breads and vessels of butter, honey, and seasoned olive oil to eat with them,

                                                                                 copies of our leaflet.

and Debra’s big Chinese garden basket.

Our purpose was to let more people know about the bread baking class we offer.

And to let them taste what breads are taught:

                The easy, non-threatening No-Knead Bread. Artisanal in look and structure, made with the Fundamental Four bread ingredients-Flour, water, salt and yeast, its dense, chewy crumb, crisp crunchy, crackly crust, and big uneven holes like those in Ciabatta make it great for pastas, soups, stews, toast, and the best French Toast. This is the Bread of Dreams for many and has the added feature of being quite adaptable. When making this bread for my son and his friends to take  camping, I’ve loaded it with raisins that keep it moist days longer, though it doesn’t always last through the trip to the camping site. Shredded sharp Cheddar or diced black olives are other variations on the simple and effective theme. It is really not kneaded, but requires planning and a substantially longer rising than more conventional breads.

               Greek Crusty Country Bread-- χωριάτικο ψωμί, pronounced hoh-ree-AH-tee-koh psoh-MEE or Pstomi, is the other bread taught at these sessions. Illustrative of a more conventional bread making technique, it adds to the Fundamental Four Honey, Milk, and Olive Oil.  This has become the standard all-purpose bread in our home. Though not as versatile in what can be added, it is an excellent bread for Tuna sandwiches, Grilled Cheddar and Bacon with Honey Dijon, fresh Mozzarella with Tomatoes and Basil leaves, PB & J, or for morning toast. It also is excellent cubed for stuffings or as croutons for Caesar Salad or a -Panzanella.

                       Both are wholesome-

                                                     free of the additives found in mass-produced bread,

                        economical-

                                                      both cost under $1.00 to bake,

and stress reducing to craft.

                 The lessons, conducted in our apartment on St. Felix Street in Up-And-Coming-Fort Greene, (Italics as mandated by the Borough President’s Office), are for beginning bread bakers including those intimidated by the mystery of bread and those discouraged by past failures. The sessions run between three and four-and-a-half hours depending on the temperature that day. Classes are small- no more than four at a time, and include lots of hands-on instruction, underlying theory, printed handouts, videos, suggested books and web sites. The open time in bread baking allows for discussion, questions & answers, and eating bread. Honey, butter, preserves and coffee/tea are served so no one is driven mad with hunger by the aroma of baking bread. Each apprentice goes home with a warm loaf that she/he has baked.

            Get in touch with us via email:  Chefwoo2@aol.com and we will set up a date for you to start baking your own bread!

photos & video by Lisa Cohen