love and kisses and music

Do you ever get a mild crush on your boyfriend or husband's bestie? There's always that zone of common territory; there are always things all three people respond to in each other. And yet, there's that fascinating otherness. The bestie is somewhat like your partner but also exotically different. I wouldn't say it's something that always happens to me, but it has and does happen. In one case, I was dating a guy and he and his friend and I hung out a lot - these were AA days in the late 80s, when you often hung out with a friend or a few after a meeting. Anyway, the guy I was dating turned out to be a shithead as far as his relations with women, and kind of unceremoniously dumped me (he later claimed that we hadn't actually had a relationship). Meanwhile, I was still talking to his friend, and realized that I had totally picked the wrong guy.

And it actually had been a binary choice: I met both of them one night at the same meeting, both offered me a ride home, and I accepted the ride from the younger, more handsome guy. Actually, when I think about it, I didn't find myself attracted to Joe (older guy) because of some ways that he was like Larry; in this case, it was pretty much only the differences.

But that guy who's sorta like the guy you love...as I said, it's happened, and still does. It's just that little what-if head-scratch, and fortunately, very out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I actually chat with him quite often when he phones here, but when we see each other, there's a little click.

As I may have mentioned, I'm from a generation that hugs and kisses a lot. We're just like that. And like my earlier musings on changing from signing a letter (well, an email) "best regards" to signing "love," there is that certain point with an opposite-sex friend where you move from kissing on the cheek to kissing on the lips. I'm not talking about making out, here, just about kissing hello and goodbye. It's small but also significant. (I actually tried to go the opposite way, at one point, with V., trying to move from kissing on the lips to kissing on the cheek. He would have none of it. It was all non-verbal, but he still made it pretty clear.)

So the last time I saw Bestie, a couple of months back, I decided it was high time to kiss him on the lips. At "hello," he seemed a little surprised, but by "goodbye," he was there. In between, we had a very interesting conversation where it came out that we had both read the Richard Rhodes book on the development of the atomic bomb. Since we rarely talk anything but music, it was a nice surprise for the both of us. (Barry is not at all a reader, so it was kind of extra-nice.)

All of this, of course, happens in plain sight, except what happens in my head and maybe his. And it's coming up now because I saw him tonight. He and Barry had met up to hang out for a bit, and Barry called me just before five to ask if I wanted to meet up with them. I really hadn't thought about the whole thing much, but Bestie planted a good one on me, and a better one when we said goodbye. It's just a little, warm thing.

I haven't really hung out with men friends too much since I stopped hanging out with V. Don't get kissed much outside of the home...which is not to say that I haven't encountered some men a little too willing to kiss me. (One of the perils of reconnecting with old bfs on Facebook is that sometimes they get a little too wishful. It hasn't yet proven tempting.)

Although...there is Chuck. It's really hard to describe Chuck; he's very nutty and silly and hyper, and also incredibly sweet and thoughtful. When he stops mugging, he's quite handsome. He also has some emotional issues and some bad chemicals - he's way too much of a handful to get involved with, though I gave it a try in the early 80s. But we've always retained a lot of affection for each other, and he's a really affectionate guy.

When Barry started going to some blues jams, about a year and a half ago, he started to meet a lot of my friends from the old days (my blues-bar days in the early-mid 80s and then again in the mid-90s), including Chuckie. He found Chuck wacky but lovable, which is how most people see him, except when they all too often start to find him wacky and annoying. Chuck took to Barry, as did my other old friends; Barry is immensely likeable, but I think got some extra points for being married to me.

This is what I figured out about Chuck some years ago: if you're with him one-on-one, he can be quiet, deep, intense, someone you can talk to for hours. But bringing one other person on the scene turns it into Chuck and an audience, and he automatically gets goofy.

So after Chuckie and a couple of other friends asked Barry numerous times to have me come to the jam, I did. It was really nice to see everyone but especially Chuck. I have such a warm spot for him, and he's so open and sweet with me. Now, he behaves very affectionately toward everyone - I mean he hugs and kisses and holds hands with pretty much everyone, including Barry. But with me...we kinda mean it. And in plain sight.

I found a video of him...but it barely relates to any of this. For one thing, he dresses in a lot of black leather and studs, which bears just about zero relationship to his personality. Also, on stage, he projects a lot of sex appeal. He usually acts so wacky that it's hard to notice just how handsome and sexy he is, but in recent years he's less wacky and more sexy on stage.

I also hesitate to post this clip because he's mainly a sax player, but he's singing here. He has a lot of charisma, but not much of a voice.

Having said that...

I don't know who the guitarists or drummer are, but the bass player is Margey Peters and the keyboard player is the extremely talented David Bennett Cohen.

What always kills me about David Bennett Cohen is that he quit Country Joe & the Fish before Woodstock.

For all of you younger and non-American folk...Woodstock was a hugely famous rock festival in 1969, one of the first enormous outdoor rock shows. (No, I wasn't old enough to be there, but I knew about it. And the movie and album, both called Woodstock, are a mainstay of serious rock fans.) Woodstock is a holy-grail sort of thing, and there is something very godly about having played there. (Which David Bennett Cohen didn't.) Country Joe became famous for an anti-Vietnam-War song he performed there. Which is this:

I may have mentioned recently that I ran into Richie Havens near my office. I interviewed Richie in the 90s and he remembered me. Richie not only played Woodstock, he opened the festival. He was the first performer at Woodstock. That's triple godly.Here's what that looked like:

Richie is an amazingly sweet human being.

I had other stuff on my mind, but music stuff leads to other music stuff. (Bestie is a music guy, too, so the ramble really does sort of connect.)

the queen of anxiety

These past few weeks have just been killing me. Students and faculty are back, school is pretty much in session, and I am being crushed by work. This is the time of year when I come in and find 25 or 30 emails waiting for me, some of which I answer right off the bat, others requiring a posting on a to-do list that often has nine or ten items. Then add in the almost constant worry about money. I just have a lot of days when I'm very anxious and a lot of nights where I'm something of a vegetable. I just don't feel like doing much at all.

I did recently watch "Marley," the documentary about Bob Marley, and found it quite wonderful.

I haven't had much to say about old Amitabh lately. The truth is that I'm finding him to be rather pompous, with a lot of rich-guy problems, very insecure and needful of constant praise. And some of the other fans just lather it on way too strong, and I'm talking about straight men, here. The whole thing has gotten a little icky for me, though I still do love his movies.

I've pretty much planned out the necklace I'm going to make from Raghu's popped guitar string. The center bead will be an Indian bead, coral, self-capped with silver which has small coral and turquoise cabs inset. It's actually the first bead I ever bought, before I started making jewelry. I saw it in an Indian store and had to have it. The rest will be chips of green American turquoise I've been hoarding for about 5 or 6 years. And I have some silver-colored ethnic-looking spacers. I've been concerned about the closure because of the nature of the wire, but I'm going to try a loop and button. I have an extremely pretty pearl shank button, about 28 mm, round, and I'll make a loop from the actual wire. My plan is to use a crimp bead and then wrap around it with gold-filled wire for a good hold. Let's see if that works. Then I promise to get a picture taken, somehow.

Saw Tamsir the other day for the first time in eons, maybe since January. He came to the office and fixed something, took a couple of laptops home to work on. Love to hang out with him. Tamsir, if you ever have the time to read this blog again - I love to hang out and talk with you!

anniversary and some pathological liars.

August 31, 1986 was the day I had my last drink. There was always a big fuss about anniversaries when I went to AA, but today's was very low-key.

Lately I've been thinking about some bad dates and bad boyfriends from my bad drinking days. The one I wanted to talk about was more than a date (we saw each other several times), but definitely less than a boyfriend.

In the early eighties, I was at a Yankees game by myself, and struck up a conversation with an older man who was there with his teenaged son. Martin explained to me that these weren't his usual seats, but that he had lent out his season seats to a friend that day (he pointed to a much better section than the ones we were sitting in). He said that, in fact, he was away on the weekends a lot and wondered if I would like for him to give me the rest of his season seats. I distinctly recall his son rolling his eyes, which at the time I ascribed to his being slightly embarrassed that his dad seemed to e trying to pick up a younger woman right then and there.

I was in my early 20s, and Martin was probably past 50, and I didn't particularly find myself attracted to him. But he appeared to be pretty wealthy, and I didn't see how it could do much harm to see him again - plus I very much wanted those Yankee tickets.

I didn't really understand what a pathological liar was, or really why someone would lie to me at all if I already showed signed of enjoying his company. I saw Martin maybe a couple more times. He gave me his business card, from a company called General Glass, but also explained that he had a lot of other business deals going on. He did drive a Mercedes. He told me about smuggling Torahs and other Jewish religious items into Czechoslovakia. He told me in some detail about a woman he was more or less keeping, a former Miss USA or Miss World  or such. She was from the south, as I recall, and very, very beautiful. He had bought her a co-op. He indicated that they hadn't been getting on too well, and at a subsequent meeting, he acting very upset and said she had killed herself.

What had started to seem like a very exciting and interesting life started to sound fishy. He drank a lot. And although he didn't really make a pass - in fact, he pretty much acted like a gentleman - he started proposing that he keep me in much the same manner as he kept the beauty queen. He would give me an apartment, we would travel together, and he would take care of my every need. And yet, somehow, he always forgot to bring those Yankees tickets. I believe I'd even given him my address so he could mail them to me.

I half-considered it. There was something very exotic about the lifestyle he described, and I felt somewhat honored that he had chosen me; it also touched off a certain level of greed in me. At the time, I worked with a very nice man named Joe, and every time I told him something about Martin, Joe said that the guy just didn't sound right.

The last thing I remember is that Martin had neglected to call, and I tried to reach him at General Glass. Whoever answered the phone told me that Martin hadn't worked there in some time, and kind of laughed about it, as if he couldn't believe that Martin still pretended to work there.

Pathological liar #2: I was fairly newly sober, and met a guy named - I think it was Steve Silverman - at a union meeting at NYU. I was very big in the staff union before I got sober, and stayed with it some time into my recovery, though not long. Steve was age-appropriate and nice-looking. I cant remember what division of NYU he worked at, but I know we started talking on the phone quite a bit. I was working at writing poetry and short stories at the time, and he expressed an interest in reading them. In those pre-internet days, I think I sent them to him inter-office. He later discussed them with me, intelligently and at length. Our phone conversations went on for a few weeks. He told me about some other jobs he'd had - I can't remember what they were, but they sounded interesting. At one point, rather casually, he mentioned that he had applied for a transfer to a position in the division where I worked (though the job was in a different building), and wondered if there was anything I could do to help. I seem to recall that I did speak to someone in the union, and Steve did get the job. He was going to take me out to dinner to celebrate and to thank me, and he stood me up. I never did hear from him again. I did hear, though, that his resume turned out to be largely falsified and that he simply stopped showing up for his new job. I don't know if it was the lying that bothered me so much - it was more that he launched what I would certainly call a courtship rather than simply asking me at the union meeting if I might put in a good word for him.

I never used to assume that someone was lying to me, especially if there didn't seem to be any reason to do so.

The third incident happened when I was well into sobriety, and it's kind of embarrassing in more than one way. When I was sober for a few years, I worked days (still at NYU) and finished my BA at night. I enjoyed school a lot at the time, and was deeply into the romance of scholarship. Between classes and studying, I hadn't had a date - or even gotten laid - for a couple of years. I had also put on a great deal of weight. At the time I got sober, people in AA promoted the use of sugar as a substitute for alcohol, and I ate a lot of sweets to keep myself from wanting to drink. I had put on about thirty pounds.

I should also mention that dating within AA ranged from bad to dreadful. (Joe Ford was an exception, but that's another story). The men blew hot and cold: they'd flirt and show interest, then change their minds, and you'd always have to talk about it. It was excruciating. And I wasn't getting much play from men outside the rooms, so I had this brilliant idea: I saw ads, and read postings online (newsgroup days), about certain bars that had special nights for "Big Beautiful Women" (usually referred to as "BBWs") and their admirers. A guy I met online invited me to one; it was kind of a sexy atmosphere, featuring a lingerie show, but the guy who invited me was way more smitten than I, so I decided to try another club on my own.

I wasn't as "big" as some of the other women who went to these clubs, many of whom dressed in a sexy was, with major hair and makeup; they also tended to be fairly buxom, which I was not and never was. (No matter how much I ever got to weigh, I always somehow remained an A-cup.)

So I went to this smaller club, and was pretty roundly snubbed by the other women. In fact, I won some sort of door prize, and when I went up to accept it, I heard one woman say, rather loudly, "She's too small." So I wasn't quite fat enough to be accepte3d by the other women. However, I did meet a very nice man - I think his name was Chris. He was a good sized fellow - not fat but hearty - and we fell to talking. He was wearing a band jacket, and told me that even though he played in a successful band, he liked a fairly simple life and lived in Staten Island when he wasn't touring. I asked what band he played in, and he rather shyly indicated that it was the band whose jacket he was wearing - Pantera. Now, I was solidly into blues at the time, and knew absolutely zero about those sorts of bands beyond the names, and it didn't strike me as odd that someone who played in a metal band (or whatever sort of band it was) liked a fairly simple home life and had a taste for larger women. When I asked about what seemed to be a wedding band, he said that he and his brother (who was also in the band) had exchanged them as an expression of their brotherly love. I bought that. I started telling him about the blues magazine I had started, and asked if he felt he could offer any sort of financial support (the printing costs were killing me). He said absolutely.

We started to get rather cozy and began doing some kissing and touching in the club. We clearly had the hots for each other, and he asked if he could come to my place, as he was staying at a nearby hotel with the band and it was a little noisy and messy. My apartment at the time was a disastrous mess, so I suggested we go to the hotel instead. He said he had to run out to the hotel and check on the condition of his room, see if his bandmates were running riot...and he left the club and didn't come back.

That one really killed me. It wasn't just the realization that many married men considered these clubs a good spot to pick up willing and possibly desperate women (mostly with big tits). It was that he had lied to me even when I had indicated that I was attracted to him. He had no reason to lie. Which was probably why I fell for it: he was all set for an evening of what would have been some pretty good sex, and he blew it by typing himself up in a knot of unnecessary lies.

It should have been a mere disappointment, but it absolutely crushed me. It played into a lot of self-loathing I had lately experienced, which soon enough led me to a psychiatrist and Prozac. (A couple of AA friends, listening to me describe recent moods, suggested it - both had suffered crushing depressions in sobriety and had ended up on antidepressants).

I still have that naive tendency to assume that someone is telling the truth if they have no reason to do otherwise, but I guess some guys are driven to embellish. My bullshit meter has improved substantially since then.

And once the Prozac took hold, I lost around 30 pounds and started to feel a lot better about myself. I answered a couple of personal ads and went on two dates. Even though both seemed successful to me, I never heard from either again. Still, I liked the idea of dating. When I was a teenager and young adult, no one really dated in any formal way...you hung out, maybe you had sex, maybe you kept hanging out, maybe not. So actual dating was kind of new to me. I figured I'd have better luck placing my own ad. I put my writing skills to work, and came up with an ad that pretty well described who I was and what I was looking for. The headline was "Old hippie at heart seeks same." I mentioned that I was a blues journalist on the side, my age (38) and the age I was looking for (35-45), that I was sober and clean and that I was interested in a serious relationship.

These ads (again, pre-internet dating) would set up a voice mailbox for you, for a limited time, and I felt like my ad had been specific enough to weed out the creeps. I got a very manageable 12 voice mails, spoke to six of them on the phone, and met three face-to-face.

The first one I met was not a bad guy, but he was a sober social worker and basically that was it - all recovery talk. Didn't click. The third one I met seemed to feel that being an "old hippie" meant telling a lot of tripping stories; he also lectured me about Israel. Also not my type.

The second one I met in person was Barry. And we clicked. In fact, I went out with the Israel-lecturing guy the night after I met Barry for coffee, and as much as I had liked Barry, I liked him a whole lot better after the date with the tripping/Israel guy. So as soon as I got back from the Israel date, I called Barry at home, and left a voicemail saying how much I had enjoyed meeting him, and I hoped we'd see each other again soon. He called back in about an hour and said, "I was just going to make the same call." And that, as they say, was pretty much it. I found myself a nice Jewish boy who wanted to get serious, and he was good-looking and funny and warm. He was the guy. And still is.

Of course, I have many other stories of dates and boyfriends and pick-ups (please remember that we're talking about roughly 1975-85, when life and sex were a lot safer and easier), but I still find the liars baffling. And the dating stories are much harder to tell than the work ones.

clarification: Brighton Beach & the Russian community

To my readers in Russia: I wanted to clarify what I wrote about my experience living in the Brighton Beach community, which is heavily Russian. I had a lot of hopes when I moved there. Apart from having found a beautiful apartment and being so close to the Boardwalk, I was hoping to make friends in the community, learn a little something about the culture and customs, and even learn a bit of Russian. My intentions were all the best. I was deeply disappointed by the hostility and unfriendliness I found there. The only person who was at all nice was one woman who sold pastries at a particular store: she was always smiling and pleasant to my husband and me. No one else treated us nicely or even politely. My feeling is that the community is very insular and although very interested in their opportunities in the US, were not particularly interested in mixing with Americans, at least not in their community. I did not mean to imply that Russians as a whole are not likeable or pleasant. It was just that we were unwelcome in a community that was almost entirely Russian.

And if someone would like to leave a comment and let me know why so many people in Russia are reading this blog, I'd be really interested to know.

I went to Rifftrax Live last night, and it was truly enjoyable. Then I got home and Barry was back from his trip; he and three other counselors took seven men from the residence to Baltimore and DC for four days. So I didn't see him for five days (Sunday was a travel day), and we missed each other a lot.

We now have tickets to see Raghu Dixit in New York on September 3. I'm excited, and got a nice tweet back from him when I said I had my tickets and was looking forward to it.

It's Quiet Time at work, the calm before the storm. Next week I'm interviewing for a second fall intern (Caitlin is staying on), and after Labor Day (September 3), everyone comes back. Classes start on the 10th. This is one of the couple of truly dead weeks in the year, when I can kick back just a little.

I have started seriously lusting after a Smartphone, and am going to try to make that happen soon.

once again, the insomniac ramble

First off, I'm not really an insomniac. I have two problems regarding sleep. One is that I have sleep disturbances, meaning I wake up in the middle of the night, often multiple times. This became an issue at some point before I began being treated for depression. I started taking medication for depression in early 1997, and when the sleep disturbances continued for another year, the psychiatrist gave me a medication to help with that.

I take something called trazodone, which is an antidepressant with the beneficial side effect of helping with sleep. I take it an hour before I go to bed (this is not my main antidepressant, which I take in the morning). It doesn't do much in the way of making me tired, but it permits me to sleep through the night when I do go to sleep.

The second problem is a little more recent. Often when I try to go to sleep, I start obsessing about all kinds of things, and then I can't fall asleep. The medical assist for this is an anti-anxiety medication called lorazepam. (This one also helps with the occasional anxiety attack or mood dip.) Sometimes I neglect to take it, and that's when it's time for the insomniac ramble. I get up, take the lorazepam, and do a little writing.

The most common obsession - and this is the one that got me tonight - was the break in my friendship with V. I've mentioned V. here, but it's very little compared to the amount of space he continues to occupy in my head. And it's because there are certain confidences that need to be kept. It's important that he not be recognized here, and there are some things about him and about the way we were connected that are so singular and peculiar that they cannot be concealed by a fake name. ("V" actually stands for "Valdemort," which is how Jannah and I occasionally refer to him.)

For those of you joining us late - I think I can say this much: V. is a musician I started listening to when I was 14 and met when I was 18. We spent very little time together when we met, but we had a connection that stayed very special, and although we saw each other very little for many years, I always felt connected and had a sense that he was someone very special. I can't really speak for how he felt but I think it's safe to say that he remembered me fondly.

We started to reconnect in the early 90s, and became very good friends. I met and became friends with his wife and kids, visited with them around once a week and spent hours and hours talking with V.

Toward the end, his considerable charm wore off, and I realized how extremely self-involved he was, and mostly interested in what other people could do for him. Textbook narcissism. Our friendship revolved around his interests, which were many and diverse and very enjoyable for me. But I was not permitted to bring anything to the table; he didn't want to participate in anyone else's preferences or ideas. I was more of a loyal subject than a friend.

I'll tell a story about how he treated someone else, who I'll call Jack. V. and I met Jack through the newsgroup, and Jack did a lot of things for V. Jack got him gigs, ran interference for a reunion with V.'s former (and difficult) musical partner, and he and his girlfriend hosted rehearsals and parties and jam sessions for V. He let V. and other musicians stay at his home (about 200 miles from NYC).

When Jack and his girlfriend decided to get married, Barry and I were invited, as were V. and Mrs. V., and some other people we had met online. When I asked V. if he was going, he said, "Why should I go?" I was kind of startled and actually had to say that Jack considered him a friend and it was an honor to be invited. He did end up going, but I realized later that his real question was, "What's in it for me?"

The final break was when he blew off an event centered around me, when I had said flat-out, "It's very important to me for you to be there." Two days later, I told him over the phone, "Any time I have anything to do with you, I end up feeling hurt and disappointed," and said I wanted nothing more to do with him.

It's almost four years now. My therapist says that it's not unusual not to be over it yet, which makes me feel a little better. I'm still angry and still bereaved. I don't know if he's stayed out of touch out of respect or because he forgot me five minutes later, and either way is fine by me. It's not fixable. But I do miss what I perceived as friendship; and even if he didn't see it that way, I have to say that we some really great times together. For many years, I enjoyed being with him and doing things with him more than just about anything else. I was intensely focused on him, and we spent a lot of time together.

I still don't like that I can't keep him out of my head as much as I would like. I don't like that it can still render me sleepless. (And I fucking hate it when Facebook suggests that I "friend" him, which happens every so often because we have friends in common.)


Don't know whether or not it was helpful for me to obsess here rather than in bed, but I'll try bed again and see if perhaps I've discharged enough bad energy to permit me to sleep.

bad jobs: the one that got away

I went to an employment agency and was sent to interview for a job as assistant to an architect. He had been a friend of the employment agent's late husband, as I recall. I had a first interview with someone other than the boss - maybe the assistant who was leaving or an office manager or HR person. She indicated that the boss was very particular and not easy to work for. The salary was what I used to call "combat pay": a high wage in line with the difficulty of the boss. But I was up for it.

Then I interviewed with the boss, who was not exactly warm and fuzzy, and he was very clear about what he required and the performance he expected. It went well; I was offered the job, told the salary, and a start date was agreed upon.

About a week later, the employment agent called me, practically in tears. It seemed that someone the architect had wanted to hire in the past stopped by to see him, and he hired her instead.

This is why, even with the nicest employers, I ask for a hire letter when the job is offered. If I had had a hire letter from the architect, I surely would have sued him. I was particularly upset about the potential job-hunting time I lost because I thought I was starting a job in a couple of weeks.

And speaking of combat pay...I had a first interview for a combat-pay job, working for a famously difficult publisher. I never got to meet the publisher. The HR woman deemed me "too nice" to work for her.

I should mention that I worked for many years at NYU, back in the days when university pay was way lower than private-industry pay. (This is no longer the case - university pay and bennies are now better than many jobs in the private sector.) So when I left NYU, I was interested in a substantially higher salary than I'd earned there. (Ironically, the salary I was earning when I left NYU in 1998 is $5K less than I'm earning now.) This is why I had the many flirtations with corporate-type jobs, like the family-office thing. I wanted more money. Silly me. I am breathlessly happy these days with less money and a great work environment.

return of the insomniac ramble

A friend emailed me this joke today:

An Arab Muslim enters a taxi cab in Dallas, Texas, and once he's seated he asks the cab driver to “turn off the radio because he must not hear music as decreed by his religion, and in the time of the prophet, there was no music, especially Western music, which is music of the infidel's and certainly no radio.”                So the cab driver politely switches off the radio, pulls over to the side, stops the cab and opens the back door.               The Arab asks him: “What are you doing, man?”               The Texan answers: “In the time of the prophet there were no taxis. So get out, stand on the curb and wait for a camel.”              

I dunno...am I maybe overly liberal? I found it offensive. I guess I'm a little sensitive about Muslim jokes, especially since American prejudice against them has been huge and quasi-acceptable since 9/11. It's one of those things that makes me uncomfortable about being American at times. I've probably mentioned this before, but Shah Rukh Khan, the very famous Indian movie star, gets detained by Homeland Security almost every time he comes to the US. It is estimated that half of the people on the planet know who he is. Moreover, he's pretty much totally apolitical. (It's kind of like the way African-Americans talk about the police pulling them over for "driving while black," except for Shah Rukh, it's "flying while Muslim.") This has happened twice in the nine months since I've been following Indian film.


I have a few on-line correspondents who are Muslim, and encounter a lot of Muslims in New York City. I try my best to be respectful, as I do with people of all faiths. (Every year on Thanksgiving, Barry and I take a 4-hour round-trip drive with Dad's sister-in-law and her roommate, who are nuns. We refrain from cursing and from topics that might be offensive. Apart from the fact that I love them, I am conscious of not wanting to offend them.) 


There are fanatics and hostile fundamentalists in every religious group, even my own. Plenty of homegrown American fundamentalists who would like to interfere with the rights of everyone because they believe their religion tells them to. There are bad fringe groups everywhere. But just as the religious right is a small contingent of Christians, so the 9/11 hijackers were part of a Muslim fringe. There are hostile and dangerous people all over. But it's not most of us.


I don't think 9/11 should be considered carte blanche for Americans to discriminate against all Muslims, to paint them all as terrorists. Faith is faith; crazy is crazy.


The friend who sent the joke is on Facebook but not Twitter, so I posted a series of tweets about this tonight. During that sequence of half a dozen tweets, the very funny comedian Jim Norton tweeted something which basically said it was OK for comedians to make fun of Muslims. Some coincidence, huh? (He doesn't follow me, so his tweet was totally unrelated to mine.)


So this got me to thinking about the comedy angle. I love comedy, and enjoy Norton, who can be pretty outrageous. But recently, I was re-watching a Comedy Central "roast," where comedians basically make fun of the guest of honor and of each other. I found myself a little bothered that almost all of them were joking about the others being gay. (Example: "Jon Lovitz is the most famous Jew in a closet since Anne Frank.") There were also the usual fat jokes (Jeff Garlin was targeted), age jokes (Cloris Leachman got those), ugly jokes (Jeff Ross and Gilbert Gottfried), etc. But those people were actually fat, old, and ugly. So those jokes were certainly mean, but didn't strike me as prejudiced. But when a heterosexual person is being called "gay" as an insult, it seems very different to me. It certainly implies that being gay is a bad thing to be, and seemed to be a more popular insult that the ones that had some basis in fact. Making a fat joke about a fat person is mean; pretending someone is gay as an insult is prejudiced. So say I. Or at least, those jokes bothered me.


And boy, it's not that I don't have a sense of humor or dislike extreme comedy. The first time I ever saw Jim Norton, Jannah and I happened across him on TV, and laughed our asses off because he is so filthy and so over-the-top. 


Louis CK, who is my absolute favorite current stand-up, did a little impression of a very flamboyant gay man - described him wearing little tight shorts, a scarf around his neck, and yodeling "Yoo hoo!" Then he said, "I don't laugh because that guy's gay. I laugh because he's funny." And I get that. Some gay guys act like that, and sometimes it's very funny.


Sidebar: I once took a speaking commitment at an AA meeting that was nicknamed "The Follies" because so many drag queens went there. After I qualified (= giving my history before, during, and after drinking), a man in drag raised his hand, and said, "I identify with everything you said! Well, except for the part about getting pregnant. I tried, but I guess I always got it...ass-backwards!" Everyone laughed. Not because he was a drag queen, but because he was funny.


Louis CK does a lot of observational humor and tells stories drawn from his life and kicks around ideas, but none of it's, "An Arab guy sat next to me on the subway, and I was nervous, because he could be carrying a bomb and planning to blow us all up..." etc. I don't think I've ever heard him say anything prejudiced, and he's also quite edgy and outrageous.


What I'm saying is, it's very possible to be extremely funny without using religious or ethnic slurs. "Arab" or "Muslim" should not be a code word for "backward but dangerous" or "stupid and weird" or whatever. 


Living in a fairly cosmopolitan and heavily Jewish city, I've rarely encountered prejudice against me as a Jew. (Having said that, a lot of people here dislike Orthodox Jews because they're clannish and keep to themselves, and many of their customs are outside the American norm.) But once, in my bottlecap-collecting days, I was at the convention in Pennsylvania, having lunch with V. and a man from Vermont whom I liked very much. I was talking about a soda cap I'd bought, from the '40s, that said "Kosher for Passover" in "Jewish writing" (which was my way of explaining Yiddish written in Hebrew characters). The Vermont guy said, "Hey, you wanna see some Jewish writing?" Then he took a napkin and drew a big dollar sign on it. I was horrified. I didn't say anything, and neither did V. (who was raised Catholic, mostly practices Buddhism, and is married to a Jewish woman). But I never felt the same affection for the Vermont guy again (although I always did drink the bottle of Moxie he brought every year). It was really horrifying and shocking, whether he knew I was Jewish or not (although my married name is obviously Jewish, my maiden name was odd and not particularly identifiable; I can't remember if this was before or after I was married). Just as bad either way, as far as I'm concerned.


The only other incident that ever came close was in New York; a classmate had invited me to a party that was way out of my league, a lot of very rich blueblooded folk (since maybe this isn't the right time to say "WASPs") in an honest-to-God Park Avenue penthouse. An older woman asked my first name, then my last, and then asked me what kind of name that was. I didn't realize I was being baited - my peculiar last name was certainly not old-school American. Plus, I was a little loose on champagne, so I said, quite cheerily, "It's Latvian. I'm Latvian on my father's side, and Austrian on my mother's - basically, eastern and middle-European Jewish." Her reply, dripping with sarcasm, was, "Isn't that interesting?" And she walked away. It really didn't hit me until a little later just what had happened there. Later, drunker, I was pretty angry, and responded in a fairly typical drunk-days fashion: it was actually her apartment where my friend was throwing the party, and I ended up stealing a couple of things from the bathroom, some expensive perfume and I don't remember what else, maybe a trinket of some sort. It's not the way I would behave today, but it was a pretty classic alcoholic response.


It's hard to confront people who offend me in that way, especially someone like the Vermont guy, who clearly didn't have a clue that he had made an offensive joke. I certainly wasn't going to convince the Park Avenue woman that Jews were like anyone else. And I don't know what the hell to say to the guy who sent that joke, although it's clearly caused me to do a bunch of venting.


So what do I do about the guy who sent the joke? I know that his intention was to be funny, not to be offensive. I've known him for years as a sweet, easygoing guy; he was at my wedding and I was at his. Do I get all stiff and say, "That joke is offensive to me!", maybe with a little lecture about the Brotherhood of Man? Do I snub him forever without explaining? Do I continue to be his friend, knowing that he is (possibly unknowingly) prejudiced? Do I simply put it aside and move on?


I have a very dear friend who is violently pro-Israel and anti-Muslim. She used to email me all kind of shit about how all Muslims want to convert or kill the entire world, etc. I made it clear that I thought that was true of some fringe elements but not Muslims in general; and also, that I didn't think every Jew and every Israeli was always right and always a better person than a non-Jew or non-Israeli. I believe I once said that I'd prefer a Muslim vice-president to Joe Lieberman (a dangerously conservative senator who ran with Al Gore). She was horrified. But we talked about it. What it came to was that she stopped sending me or spouting anti-Muslim screeds, and I stopped lecturing her on why she shouldn't shop at Walmart. (Don't get me started on Walmart. Those stores not only shit on their employees, they shit on every community they move into, and on many, many American manufacturers. Fuck their low prices.) So we reached a friendly detente and move ahead with our friendship.Maybe it was easier because we had an ongoing dialogue about those topics, and finally agreed to disagree. Is it wrong to be friends with someone who's prejudiced, even if I don't share or promote or approve of her prejudice?


Of course, I am the daughter of a hopeless liberal. My mother was so overly liberal that whenever she mentioned a black person, she always made a point of saying how handsome or beautiful they were, even if they weren't. I am fairly certain that her parents always described black people as ugly. I remember once, very vividly (although I couldn't have been older than eight or nine), watching Ed Sullivan at my grandparents' home, and Melba Moore was performing. My grandfather said, "That's the cutest little colored trick I've ever seen." No one said anything, but I'm sure my mother was hugely offended. I knew that "colored" was not a polite way to refer to a black person (this was in era when "Negro" was still used a lot, but was quickly giving way to "black" - which, by the way, I'm never sure whether to capitalize or not). But I had been taught never to criticize or correct my grandfather. When I was older, and realized what he meant by "trick," I was doubly offended.


I'm not blindly liberal like my mother; I knew full well that the black kid who sometimes came over after school was a really nice kid, but he was definitely not handsome. (The only guy I was ever involved with from my high school was also black, and he was handsome, big-time.) I certainly don't walk around saying that all Muslims are wonderful or make a point of trying to befriend every Arabic person or Muslim I meet.


I will admit freely that I dislike the Russians who live in Brighton Beach. We lived there for seven months, and every single person I encountered was rude or unfriendly. We would actually stand at a store counter and the clerk would help every single Russian person before even acknowledging us. They were terribly clannish and not at all interested in participating in any culture other than their own. It wasn't a threatening place to live, but it sure wasn't comfortable or welcoming. And yet - my new primary doctor is a Russian in Brighton. And I adore him.So there goes that. I know there must be a lot of other newish Russian immigrants like him, but I just never met them on Brighton Beach Avenue.


Maybe I'm sleepy now. I'm certainly ranted enough.