birthday season

Welcome to birthday season.  There have always been a lot of people in my life with November and near-November birthdays, and of course I'm one.  Robin is one too, and so is my uncle Howard.  And my aunt Marion.  There are other people who have been in and out of my life who also have those birthdays, which is why the borders of the season are a little wavy.  There are some former boyfriends, an old girlfriend I'm not in close touch with, and, actually, V. as well.  V. was always fun to birthday shop for.  He wasn't that into birthdays but he loved presents.

But this was a big year for Barry:  he turned 60.  The big surprise that I was too paranoid to post about here was that I arranged a surprise jam session.  He plays drums, if I haven't mentioned that lately -- he was in two bands when I met him.  Now he doesn't play in a band but has started to go to a couple of blues jam sessions.  It took me about a year to go to one with him.  He was meeting a lot of people I knew from my blues days some years back, and I got to see them, and I got to meet some people he had met.  I've written about this.  I got a fifteen minute crush on a guy at one of those jams -- I'm sure I mentioned it.

Anyway -- I had an idea this summer to rent a few hours of studio space and get a bunch of his musician friends to come and then have him go there and be surprised.  I floated the idea past a couple of his friends during the summer and they loved it.  Then I had to investigate the whole business of renting a studio and what it cost and how big and what comes with the rental (amps? keyboards?).  And I touched base with more guys, and more or less decided on the date, and so on.  I realized that I would have to tell him to bring drumsticks, so it wouldn't be a surprise that he'd be playing, and he knows the block where a bunch of studios are (30th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue), but he wouldn't know who would be there. 

Some people couldn't make it, but he ended up with exactly enough:  Felix Cabrera (vocals and harp), Evan Wagner (bass), Chuck Hancock (tenor sax and vocals), and Arthur Neilson (guitar).  Felix is Barry's bestie; Barry used to play with Evan in a couple of Brooklyn bands; and Chuck is one of my old pals who Barry also met at the jams.  These are all people who have some other income source.  Arthur is kind of a notch up; he's the guitar player for Shemekia Copeland, who's pretty much the top female contemporary blues artist at this moment.  He's also in the house band for the Monday night jam.  I'm personally in touch with some of these people through Facebook, but Arthur isn't on and he and I have only met once.  I had to have Felix ask him for me, and was absolutely stunned that he said yes.  Barry was also somewhat stunned that Arthur came, because they don't know each other very well.  The deal with Arthur is that he's one of the nicest guys ever, and we got lucky that he wasn't gigging or on tour.  It was a very big deal.

All of these guys are first-rate, make no mistake; there are a lot of amazing musicians out there who have day jobs.  Felix is woefully underemployed.  Chuck works, and has toured internationally, but I'm not certain if he works regularly with any one band.  Evan has a day job and is still young enough to have the energy to play with a band.  (When I met Barry, he played with two bands and had a day job.)

Barry, when he played with two bands.  This was taken at one of his gigs in late 1997, very soon after we started seeing each other.  Were we not adorable?

Anyway, the surprise jam was a rousing success.  They had the studio for three hours, then Evan took Barry out for a bite to eat.

Friday night, which was Barry's actual birthday, I couldn't get off early to do anything about cooking (had to take minutes at a Board meeting until 4:00).  So we ordered in, although I did buy a dozen tiny, two-bite cupcakes from a placed called Baked by Melissa.  They were a big hit.  Saturday was the jam, and Sunday evening Elise (and her sibs Evette and Marty) took us out for dinner.  Marty's wife Laurie was also there, Evette's husband Freddie was not, niece Lindsey was nephew Ross and girlfriend Margaret were not.  The Taub/Singer/Levy clan is pretty hard to get together.  We went to a nice dairy (kosher) place (I had a salad nicoise with fresh grilled tuna, a big fave of mine).

The only thing bad all weekend was at the very end:  we came home after dinner, and most of our neighbors were in the first floor hallway.  No one had seen our front-apartment neighbor Johnny for a couple of days, and he wasn't answering his phone or door.  He had some health problems and seemed a little more wobbly of late, and as we feared it turned out he was dead in his apartment.  Johnny was kind of the mayor of our building, which is a big deal in a six-apartment building.  He helped the landlord (let Con Ed into the basement, washed the hallways, kept an eye on the trash & recycling), and all of us (took packages for people, distributed the overflow from the landlord's backyard garden).  He was just a nice, kind, sweet guy, and we were all really broken up.

I am extra broken-up that his funeral is tomorrow afternoon...the same tomorrow afternoon when my (Providence, RI-dwelling) brother and sister-in-law and nephew will be in New York and available.  I haven't seen them in two years.  We have all been too poor to travel back and forth, and my brother is pretty much not speaking to my dad, so he doesn't come for Thanksgiving...so it's been two years.  I feel terrible that I can't go to John's memorial, but anyone who knows me -- and now you all know too -- knows that I love my brother to pieces.  We have at times been almost smotheringly close.  There was a time when we both worked at NYU Law, across the street from each other, and averaged one lunch and two two-hour phonecalls a week, just crazy.  We've had friction here and there.  Part of it may be that for a really major seven-year chunk of our young lives, it was just the two of us and our mother living together, and she's gone.  He's just one click closer than anyone else I'm related to.

So, I'm stupidly excited about seeing my brother -- and this is even without taking into account my eight-year-old nephew Walter, who is kind of a junior Danny.  Very smart and very friendly and very adorable.  (Pictured: tiny baby Walter, and 2010 Walter.)  (Note my 2002 slobby dressing and grooming.  Oddly enough, I am just now wearing the exact same tee shirt.  But I'm knocking around the house, not out in public.) (This is also one of my favorite pictures of Barry.  He looks very handsome and very sweet.)

I also love my sister-in-law Jane, who is a very good mother and as smart and funny as most of our family seems to be.  Is.  Jane is also the one who was brave enough to take the last name Zogott, which made me feel a little better about kicking it to the curb two years later, when I married Barry.  There are actually only six or seven Zogotts at present in the US, all related to me; Howard's first wife, Tina, uses "Zogott-Onsted", so she's the #7.  I use it as my middle name, so people can find me who knew me as Zogott, but for all intents and purposes, I'm a Levy.

And by the way, this is my birthday weekend -- in fact, today is my birthday.  I got a lot of cards and a lot of Facebook messages and flowers and a potted orchid and a fancy lunch out and a fun dinner in.  Barry gave me a much-needed and much-wanted gift:  a new everyday watch.  The last one he gave me pretty much gave out recently, after 13 years.  That's a pretty good run for an everyday watch.  And he really nailed the style:  dial, numerals, about the size of a nickel, black leather band...and Indiglo!  I like a very simple, neutral, classic, hard-working, old-school watch, and I got me a new Timex.  (Indiglo, BTW, is when you press the stem and the face lights up with an excellent blue light.  I know other watches light up but Timex Indiglo rules it.)  I LOVE my watch. 

I do indeed have other watches.  One I would call "dressier," but it's vintage and tends to need pricey repairs once a year, so it hasn't been in rotation for a while.  The others I have are on the silly side, and some need batteries and one needs a strap.  Some of those are promotional, linked to movies, gifted to me by John Jorge when he worked at MCI/Universal.  One is Badz-Maru.  (You can Google that one yourself, if you're not a Sanrio maven.)

I've found myself a few Bollywood co-fans.  Marty Taub is one.  And also a recent Facebook friend, someone I was involved with many years ago when it was wildly age-inappropriate.  (Can't really talk about all that, but he's still very funny and a smart smart guy.)  And not only that, I have a new Facebook friend who is a Bollywood fan -- and he lives in Mumbai!  He must have seen me on an Amitabh Bachchan fan page, and sent a friend request.  So it's really my first interaction with a Bollywood film fan who not only lives in India, he lives in Mumbai, which is...well, Bollywood. 

(For those of you who don't have the Bollywood religion, the Indian film industry is centered in Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay -- which is how the Indian film industry came to be called "Bollywood."  See?)    I'm really a beginner with Indian film, very enthusiastic, but still inexperienced.  I'm somewhat limited by not knowing Hindi, along with often finding that my ill*gally d*wnloaded movies don't have subtitles.  I may actually have to break down and buy some DVDs (used on eBay). 

I did finally nail a copy of Bbhuddah...Hoga Terra Baap (I think I spelled that right) with subtitles; I believe it's Amitabh's most recent film, certainly his most recent starring role, from this past summer.  I've watched some, but I have to admit I've had trouble getting past the first big song/dance scene, which I've probably watched six times already.  It's a pisser.  Oh, wait a minute...

Not exactly up to what he did in Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna in 2006, but the music is great and he is way cool.  Though I've noticed that in everything I've seen him in, with the exception of Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna, he is dressed horrendously.  Be it the 70s or the 00's, he is wearing absolutely godawful crap. 

Anyway, he's the coolest, we all know that.  And his newest grandchild was born two days ago (here's another November birthday).  He has two from his not-acting not-famous daughter, but the new granddaughter is from famous-actor-son Abishek and his famous-actress-and-world-famous-beauty daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, so the media there is insane over it, and this baby girl will most likely be blindingly attractive, whether or not she chooses to be an actress (it tends to be a family business over there). (You can look up pictures of them too, I've done enough tonight.)

I'm not writing as often as I should, because I don't have the time, or am not making it.  I don't have nearly enough personal time during the workweek -- or, like money, not enough so that I can be careless with it.  If I decide to spend two hours watching Bollywood videos on YouTube, that's two hours that I'm not writing.  AB blogs every day, bless his heart, and tweets as well, but I'm no good at brevity.  I need some wide-open time and space to write. 

And since I can't keep anything in order at all at this point, I did also have a birthday-eve dinner with Robin yesterday.  We ate Indian food (and -- new tradition -- Starbucks after).  She gave me three of what I like to call "hair toys":  two velvet headbands and a French hairclip.  There used to be a store in Soho that sold French goods, and over the years, she gave me four hairclips from there.  They're pretty much my favorites.  Then the store closed.  But unknown to me, she found another store in the city that carries the same make of hairclips, and so I now have five of the amazing hairclips!

Since I wore short hair for the majority of my life (see above photo), hair toys are still a pretty big deal for me.  (Please ignore the horrible scrunchy in the other above photo.)  Well, I find that in general I'm a bit of an accessory slut since I started actually dressing myself decently.  I think I somehow crossed over at some point from not wanting to be seen or noticed to wanting to be seen and noticed, connected to a whole change of  dress and hair and wearing makeup.  Not to be too jargony, I think I started to own who I am and what I look like, and I turned out to be more attractive than I thought.  Yay for me!  But I can't quite figure how or why it happened.  Life: mysterious.

Disorders and holidays

I think a lot of kids have, or former kids had, some sort of disorder, an irrational fear or something resembling OCD that may have required magical thinking or magical acts to keep the evil at bay.

I was afraid of the kinds of elevators that had gates so you could see the shaft. My school building was 13 stories tall so I did take them, but I stood near the back. Elevators stopping between floors still scare me. Elevators dropping a floor or two, forget it. (I guess I carried the elevator thing somewhat into adulthood.)

I also had a few about swimming. At the bungalow colony where we stayed, there was a very nice pool, but I was terrified of the drains. There were hockey-puck-sized indentations in the floor of the shallow water and one in the deep water (which was 8 or 10 or 12 feet, not much more), which may have been plugs, but I wasn't too sure so I avoided them. The monster was that big black hole at the side of the pool, I can't really remember if it was one or two of them, in the middle section or the deep water, and I have no idea if they were drains or if they filled the pool, but they were large and black and scary. I was terrified of them, no matter how many people I saw casually hanging out by them with no problem. If I was playing a game with friends, I had a real problem if I had to be stationed by one.

Also, there was a weird pool at one of the day camps we went to, Floradan. (Was it Floradan or Floridan?) It was filled with water diverted from some stream or lake, so it entered at one end and exited at another. I think the deeper end had a cemented bottom and sides, but not the shallow end. But there were *things* in that water, I knew it;the tiny snails that climbed the cemented sides were proof. I don't know if I'd already seen The African Queen or if some dopey kid just said, "I heard someone got bit by a leech here once," but I was not getting into that damn pool. This, by the way, is the pool where Donny Most was a lifeguard, his nose permanently coated in bright white zinc oxide.

I sometime get antsy about the ocean, not just our lovely local Brighton and Coney, but even the beautiful ocean in the Caribbean, though for different reasons. (Barry and I have been to Puerto Rico twice, and spent our honeymoon in Aruba.) Locally, you can never stop worry about medical waste and other weird garbage, though I've personally seen very little. But even the "good" ocean has jellyfish and sea urchins and stuff. Didn't stop me, tho. Being shoulder-deep in salt water just plain feels too good. I don't get out in nature that much, and being in the ocean really gets to me; there's a certain amazement that conquers the fear.

I'm thinking about me now, but I guess this topic came up for me because I was lucky enough to see my nephew Walter yesterday. Walter is six now, and I find myself charmed by the fact that he has opinions, likes and dislikes, a sense of humor and a very friendly personality. He also reminds me a lot of my brother, and that's a really rare thing for me, since the last person born in our family was my brother, forty-two years earlier. I look at this kid, and I just *know* he's related to me, he has my little brother's mouth from when he was a kid, we're just somehow, at least in part, made of the same stuff. (This happened to me once before, when I met a first cousin of my father's who lived in Mexico City; he and me dad were both maybe in their late 50s. It was incredibly obvious to me that Fievy was related to dad, even with his Yiddish-Mexican accent.)

We actually got the whole family together yesterday, with the exception of my uncle Howard, my dad's brother. His wife Tina's mother is 92 and in a retirement community, so I expect they will spent holidays with her for the time being. The big deal is that my brother and sister-in-law and Walter came in from Rhode Island. No one makes the trip too often and things are a little rough between my brother and my dad. Our family is slightly odd in that my stepmother is Catholic rather than Jewish (which is what the rest of us are), and her sister is a nun. She's not a habit-wearing nun and in fact refers to habits as "penguin outfits," but I really like about her is that she lives in a spiritual and practical manner: she wants to see kids educated and fed and women in the priesthood. She has a master's degree which is more than I ever got. plus, and it's a huge plus, she's not judgmental about other peoples' faith or lack of faith or how they worship or don't. All I have to try to remember is not to curse. Now what's even more interesting is that she has lived with another sister from her order for many years, and the other sister's family is not very nice, so she spend the holidays with us, too, and is as much a part of the family as anyone else. The sisters are kind of like a couple but if they are, I'm almost positive they're celibate. They're in that weird space where they obey the Pope, even if they don't agree with him. And by the way, the second sister has a Ph.D., and I've always thought she looks somewhat like Vanessa Redgrave.

Anyway, the sisters live in Bay Ridge, so they've been driving us out to Long Island for Thanksgiving for a number of years now. I'm getting to look forward to our annual dose of quality time.

The other thing that's happened in my family, since my father was never very observant and was not surrounded by observant family, is that the Christian stuff started tin "win." Christmas started immediately, if Passover and Easter were too close, Easter won, etc. (There were also things like "PassEaster." It involved Jewish stars on dyed eggs. It involved gefilte fish and ham.)

Today's Yiddish lesson: gefilte fish. This literally means "stuffed fish." A few kinds of fish, usually carp, whitefish, and pike, are ground, and a few things are added like onion and matzo meal (ground matzo). It's made into balls and poached in fish stock. It's usually served cold. It used to be stuffed back into the fish skin, but I think everybody decided it was too gross. When it's cold, the broth is kind of jellied, so you have the jellied broth and the cold poached fish balls, often served with some matzoh, a slice of carrot, and a dollop of horseradish. (Sublesson: the Yiddish word for horseradish is chrain, using that "Bach" sound on the "ch.")

Anyway, I was very glad to marry into a family where there were a lot of observant Jews and where there was a real Seder and a real Succoh, and I could learn some more Yiddish words. My mother was from a generation that was very "modern" and "American," and Yiddish was something her mother and grandmother spoke -- in fact, my great-grandmother, who came over from Austria, spoke no English -- and so it wasn't spoke in my home. My mother used it with my grandmother when she talked about something she didn't want "the kids" to hear. So it was used against us, not taught to us. Talk about your lost folkways!

But my new family -- I had my mother-in-law until two years ago, my father-in-law until a year ago, and Barry's brother, who died young at 56, 6 years ago -- had a lot more Yiddishkeit ("Jewish-ism") going on than I was used to. Even my mother's kosher parents, when they had big Seders, never did the after-dinner part. I really wanted a religious wedding to Barry, even if it was reform, but he had had a religious marriage to wife #1, and even if they hadn't taken it to seriously, I thought it only right to have a get, which is a religious divorce. I went with him and it was rather awesome, a whole row of rabbis, one writing Hebrew with a feather quill pen.

Another thing that was lucky for me was that my husband had a last name that was easily identified as a Jewish name. My maiden name...let's say it was hard to spell, didn't seem to indicate a particular nationality, was a source of ridicule in school, and was way the hell back in the alphabet. Since my sister-in-law was brave enough to take it on, I figured 42 years was long enough to deal with it, and I took my husband's very easy, very Jewish name. It's true that I use my maiden name as a middle name when I do certain types of writing projects, because I was known by that maiden name, but I often do without it. It's fewer letters and has better alphabetical placement.

Listen, I don't mean to be any more insecure than I've already revealed myself to be, but I haven't had a single comment on this blog and it's really freaking me out. I know of one person who's subscribed to this, and I seem to be too big an idiot to install a counter on this thing, and I don't known if I'm getting read. It would just be nice to know. Not that I'm going to stop one way or another, but I'm curious.

Mohegan Woodlands

On Facebook, I am reconnecting with a lot of people from high school. On my last blog, I gave a shout out to people from Mohegan Woodlands, a bungalow colony where I spent my summers from around 1964-1973. I got a few wonderful responses, but my hard drive has crashed since then and I lost off of your e-mails and phone numbers. There were 30 or 31 families who lived there, half a dozen who were close with my folks (later, my mother and her boyfriend), and most of us kids hung around together at some point. I really am anxious to hear from you folks and promise to call anyone who'd rather talk than e-mail. I know I've done searches for Mohegan Woodlands fairly often and have come up with almost nothing. I'm trying to keep my name off this blog as much as possible, though I know that some of your got here from a Facebook page that does have my real name (ambivalent, me?), but my mother's name was Joan Zogott and my brother's name is Daniel.

Some time when I'm a little less tired, I'll talk some about the place. It is iconic for me. It represented a place to play safely in the outdoors, even when we left the official boundaries of the colony and ventured into the woods. Worst care scenario was poison ivy.

I was in fact talking to my nephew about Woodlands the other day. Walter Jonah Zogott just started first grade and is taking tennis lessons. I told him how his daddy and I used to play tennis until you couldn't see the ball any more. He asked why, which is a fairly good question. The answer is that there was only one tennis court and all the grown-ups liked to play, so they only let the kids play from seven to eight at night, when it was getting dark. (We also got ten to eleven in the morning, when we were almost all at day camp. Thanks lot, grown-ups!)

I'd even like to hear from people who went to the same day camps we did: Laur-Lee and Floridan. I did track down my favorite counselor from Floridan a couple of years ago, who turned out to be someone rather important in some sort of federal government health agency, and seemed weirded out to hear from me.