Men and Their Pee Pees

What is it about some men that make them send women pictures of their pee pee? Honestly guys, it doesn’t turn us on. A women’s body is beautiful. I get why guys want to paint, sculpt and worship it. But a penis? Sorry, a penis is not a work of art.

When I was thirteen, a boyfriend took a picture of his lower half in a picture booth and sent it to me in the mail. I still remember the photo: a swollen thumb caught in a Brillo pad. Oh, the hair on that thing. It was horrific. And that was supposed to make me want to go steady with him? It wasn’t so much the penis, it was THE SURPRISE of the penis. When I’d opened the envelope I was expecting, maybe a love letter?

Penises are attractive when they’re attached to someone you love. A disembodied penis? Not so much.

As Joel Stein says in his June 8th Time Magazine article, men haven’t been able to figure out women since time began. The men who send those pictures are thinking from a man’s perspective. If I’d like to see a woman’s “eh eh,” than I’m sure she’d like to see my “zee zee.” No boys, it doesn’t work that way. Send us flowers instead.

Men have penis envy, not women. You can soup up your trucks, go to fight clubs, or rev your Harley’s. You can take a ruler, measure and brag about your size. We know, it’s biological; you’re compelled to flaunt your feathers. We think it’s cute. But unless we’re intimate with you, we don’t want to see your junk.

From the women’s blogs I’ve read online about Anthony Weiner, I think the official consensus is: “Ewww…”

An Ode to Books

I went to the dark side today. I bought a Kindle.

I held out as long as I could, but I’m starting research on a new novel, and financially, a Kindle just seemed the smartest way to go.

But boy do I feel guilty.

I’m a purist. I love real books. I love the feel of the paper; I love its smell, which gets stronger as the pages brown with age. I even get a perverse satisfaction out of watching people read books, their eyes traveling across the page, the sound of the paper hitting the air as they lift a sheet, the slap as it strikes the preceding page. I enjoy highlighting and dog-earing pages and then searching through my stacks of books for that exact passage or line that had caught my attention. I love the visceral satisfaction of turning over the last leaf in a book and the feeling of accomplishment at completing the story.

Paper books have a number of purposes beyond reading. They can be used to decorate a coffee table or shelf. They make great doorstops. A shelf full of cookbooks shows the promise of a great cook. Books add as much comfort to a home as the smell of chicken soup. They say, “relax; stay a while; pull up a chair and take it easy.”

They also make you look smart. I can tell a lot about a person by perusing their bookshelves. First off, do they even have a bookshelf? The absence of books, itself, speaks volumes. If they do, what do they read? Are their shelves filled with Nora Roberts and Nicolas Sparks or Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzan.

The bookshelf in my living room displays a number of genres. Our political non-fiction and biographies are stacked on the top right-hand shelf, where a guest’s eye would travel first. (That way, his first impression is that we’re really smart.) We have everything from Woodward and Bernstein’s THE FINAL DAYS to MOSES; A LIFE. Admittedly, I’ve never read any of these books. So what does that tell you about me? They belong to my husband. (He’s really smart; I can tell because he reads those books.)

The novels are mine; from old ones like the CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR series to my new favorites, including Jonathan Tropper’s novels. (If you like funny, read THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU.)

We have the standard Jewish section, as well–the Bible, the Torah–and although we never go to Temple anymore, I’m afraid God will smite me if I give them away.

In my office, I have the plays. My collections go way, way back to when Lonnie and I were actors in Hollywood. He worked at the theatrical publishing house, Samuel French, and each night, he’d bring home a new play or anthology–Anton Chekov, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller. We could never have afforded these plays without his discount. Alongside these legends, I also have some of my old college acting textbooks–INVITATION TO THE THEATER, RESPECT FOR ACTING. Books can be nostalgic, too.

I’ll never give away my books. They’re a glimpse into my past; the state of mind I was in when I read each book; the stages of my literary development.

My father once told me, “you can find whatever you need if you look in a book.” I immediately dismissed this advice because I never listened to anything my father said. But I never forgot it. He was right. Books have given me knowledge, escape, dreams and guidance.

Now I just have to find all that in a Kindle

“Don’t worry, Bubula, they killed the Czar.”

On this mother’s day, I’m thinking of my grandmother, Molly. Like most grandchildren, I never saw my grandmother as anything but OLD. I never thought of her as a young girl, daughter, girlfriend, or wife. To me, she was my chubby grandma, always in the kitchen, grinding meat in the meat chopper, squeezing the last bit of juice from an orange for our morning breakfast, cooking a remarkable chicken soup (that only my sister can duplicate), washing my hair under the bathtub sink while I screamed in terror, kvetching about her ailments. How could this person once have been a young girl with dreams and ambitions?

Molly and my grandfather, Max, lived in Elsinore, a desert retirement community in southern California. Their friends were old too. They drove up to my grandparent’s apartment in electric golf carts (although there wasn’t a golf club in sight). The women had flabby arms and mustaches; the men hawked up phlegm. Every night they sat under the stars in my grandparent’s apartment courtyard and played Pinnacle and Kaluki. I would sit on my grandfather’s lap and watch the moths flit around the lone light bulb he’d attached under the patio umbrella, their tiny heads banging into the light, drawn by some unknown force into its radiance, only to eventually drop dead onto someone’s card trick and be flicked off the table and into the dark.

My grandparents always seemed sad. My grandmother’s philosophy was “life is hard.” Period. They’d had a difficult life, running from pogroms in Russia, starting a new life in America, working in sweatshops, raising kids. When the movie version of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened in 1971, my sister and I took my grandmother to see the film. Grandma said the film depicted, to the tee, her life back in Russia, down to the town yenta. When the Cossacks rode into the village to burn the houses and destroy the town, my sister began to cry uncontrollably.

“Don’t worry, Bubula,” said Grandma with unexpected humor, “they killed the Czar.”

But the origin of my grandparent’s true sadness came when my mother, their youngest child and only daughter, died at thirty-four from cancer. I was only four. They didn’t carry their grief like an anchor, heavy and unyielding. It was just always there, an undercurrent settling over my childhood like a light fog.

I’m sure my grandmother laughed. They had a network of friends; they had dinners, they played cards. I just don’t remember much laughter. I do recall one moment when I glimpsed the young girl peaking out from beneath the soiled apron. My grandfather was sitting with me at their kitchen table and grandma brought him a cup of coffee (I still have his green milk-glass mug tinged with his coffee stains). When she put down his cup, he grabbed her and pulled her close. She giggled, a young schoolyard girl’s giggle. Her brown eyes lit up. I’d been told they had met at a party when my grandfather asked her for a dance. For a moment she was the girl taking his hand. For a moment, I felt their sexual attraction. For one brief instant, I saw the hope.

Eventually, my two uncles developed cancer; one died at fifty, so she lived to see two children die. Then my grandfather passed. By that time, my grandmother had contracted Parkinson’s. My sister taped an interview with her, but she was groggy from her L Dopa medication. My sister did manage to elicit a few light moments, and once again, I heard the giggle. Weak though the laughter was, I saw that girl again.

One of my treasures is a sepia-colored photograph of grandma and grandpa, taken at their engagement. He stood in his dark suit and tie, while she sat on a stool and rested her head against him. She told me once that she still remembered feeling my grandfather’s quickened heartbeat as she leaned against his chest.

I’m sorry I never met that girl; sorry I never searched her out when I was young. I was too self-absorbed, more interested in telling her my sad tales than hearing hers. I’m older now than she was when I was born, and yet I don’t feel old. Did she?

I wonder how my own grandchildren will view me. Will they ever think of me as young? I want them to know my Molly and Max, their great-great-grandparents. I want to keep the connection alive, and hope I can share their light as well as their sorrow.

Scanner’s–Celebrate Distractions!

“Squirrel!!” the dog in the movie, “Up,” shouted every time he got distracted. It seems the dog, like me, was a “scanner.” According to a wonderful blog by Sarah Wilson, a scanner is someone who gets easily sidetracked. She has multiple interests and hobbies and dabbles in all but sticks with none. Wilson actually took the phrase from author Barbara Sher, who has built an entire enterprise celebrating “scanners.”

Yay! My flakiness is to be celebrated! Who knew? I’ve always had a myriad of interests. I need constant intellectual stimulation, and when I have a few quiet moments, I’m suddenly bored. Wilson, via Barbara Sher, states that up until the 1950′s, a generalist was actually a much-desired and respected party guest, someone who could expound on any number of subjects and entertain all. Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I forget a lot. For example, I could watch a documentary on string theory and while the documentary is playing, understand all about quantum mechanics and relativity, but a day later “relativity” is something I call my cousin.

Writing is a perfect profession for a scanner. I can take a subject and immerse myself in that time or culture for a relative short period of time. With WHITE RUSSIAN, it was Belarus and American Communists. With my next book, my research will take me back to the thirties in New York. Writing is my time travel machine. Strap me into Google and I’m gone.

The trouble with scanners is that they don’t finish what they start. They get bored and…”squirrel!…” they’re off on another tangent. The proof of my distractions is on my nightstand (Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and House Beautiful magazines; non-fiction books–Life In Year One; Almanac of World History; novels–Three Stages of Amazement and The Finkler Question); my craft table is covered with three years worth of pictures that need to be scrapbooked, a sewing machine, and an array of fabrics for eventual hair bands; my bulletin board is littered with a wide assortment of papers from a brochure on the Local Birds of Orange County to tickets to the Dalai Lama at my daughter’s university to a coupon for a sale at Loehmann’s. You get my drift. I have piles and piles of stuff that has nothing in common with one another. And do I finish any of these books or projects? No.

But I am getting better. I have completed two books (although if you ask me a question about “The Sound of Music,” I’m afraid I’d have to reread my book because I don’t remember a thing), I have raised two terrific children, and most of all, I’ve stuck with the same husband for thirty-two years.

That’s pretty good for a scanner.

What’s on your nightstand right now? Leave me a comment to let me know.

Belarus – Not everyone’s a dissident

Not every citizen in Belarus felt as oppressed as the dissidents. Our guide, Anya, was  proud of her country and her city, Minsk.

“I’ve lived here since this city was made of wood and bricks. Now look how modern it  is.”

Indeed, we had just passed the new national library, a diamond-shaped glass building with two wing-like structures attached on either side. Lukashenko had built the new library to underscore the importance of education. To me, it was a garish reflection of the dictator. The building reminded me of a kid’s Transformer. I half-expected the entire structure to rip itself up from the earth and begin stomping about the city, smashing buildings and shooting fire.

As we toured the city, I asked Anya if she felt oppressed by the regime.

“I’ve always felt free, even under the Communists,” she said.

“What about travel?” I asked. “I heard that citizens couldn’t even get visas to leave the country.”

She shook her head, “I have a ten-year visa to go to Israel to visit my grandson. I can go whenever I like.”

“And what about when the visa runs out?”

She grew silent for a moment. “That, I don’t know.”

I pressed on.  What did she think about the activists working to overthrow Lukashenko and start a democratic government?

“They are mostly young people,” she said. “They are toothless.”

I was stunned by her answer. How could anyone be satisfied living under a totalitarian dictator.

“Because I don’t know who would come next,” she said.  “It could be worse.”

It’s hard for an American, who has the luxury of big visions and dreams and the right, almost the mandate, to fulfill those dreams, to accept that someone could be satisfied with less choices. Yet Anya has lived this way all her life, and she’s thrived.

But as much as Anya defended her president and her rights, when it came time for me to interview the founders of the Free Theater, an underground political theater group, she refused to have any part of it. It wasn’t because she opposed what the dissidents stood for; she refused to go to the interview because she was afraid.

Next week: Interview with Free Theater (okay, I lied when I said it would be this week. Just checking to see if you’re really paying attention.)

Belarus – Our Arrival in Minsk

Belarus is a country run by an authoritarian dictator named Alexander Lukashenko. His Soviet-style regime has ruled the country for the last two decades. (Read more about the regime in the WHITE RUSSIAN section).

I’d always wanted to travel to Belarus to visit my family village, Antopol, and walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. When I decided to use the country and my little shtetl as the backdrop of my book, I invited my BFF Denae to go along, and we packed our bags and headed out.

My initial impression of Belarus was formed as I stood behind the thick yellow line at customs. It was a line no one dared cross. Not even the tip of one’s sneakers could rest upon that line.

Always the rebellious one, I dipped my toe in the water.

“Behind the line!” The heavy female officer who guarded the line barked at me in Russian and shooed me away. “Behind the line!”

(Belarusians speak Russian because they are not allowed to converse in their native tongue. They are not allowed to fly the Belarusian flag.)

The officer in the passport booth gazed at me from behind the bullet-proof glass. Her name was Helga and I could easily imagine her as a sadist, a Nazi, the kind of woman who obeys the laws in public and cracks the whip in private. She stamped my passport like she was using a mallet on a piece of steak.

Welcome to Belarus.

Fortunately, our tour guide met us in the airport lobby, and we knew we’d be in good hands. (I’ll use the fake name, Anya, for fear of getting her in trouble.) Anya was a seismic force of uncontainable energy in the body of a squat, five foot babushka with a bouffant of strawberry blond hair, eye shadow the color of moss, and massive bosoms that were bound and harnessed into submission until they resembled something like a Doberman’s ears: pointy and ever alert.

“Daalings,” she cried.

We embraced her right away.

I’d arranged for Anya to show us around Minsk, take us to Antopol, and on Denae’s insistence, stop at the Minsk zoo. Denae has traveled the world and in every city, she has to visit their zoos. She believes that the way a city treats its animals is a reflection of how they treat their people.

For all of Lukashenko’s admonishments of the west, the trip to the capital city of Minsk revealed a fairly western landscape. A few poor villages and farms dotted the outlying areas, but that was a familiar sight in any Midwestern state. As we drew closer to the city, newer developments popped up with two-story tract homes and apartment buildings. The main road was wide and clean and filled with traffic.  The streets were almost too clean. Not a speck of trash littered the streets, not even a water bottle. A road crew worked on the side of the highway cleaning what didn’t need to be cleaned.

Once we arrived downtown, the city’s architecture revealed the true Communist nature of the country. Each building was built in the Stalinist style of the former Soviet Union– plain functional rectangular boxes, each no taller than five stories, designed with little adornment and uniformly colorless, painted beige, tan or gray. In fact, when the street rose up on a hill and we viewed the layout of the city, it looked as if the entire capital was covered in a fine layer of dust; even the sky needed a cleaning.

The streets were filled with people walking, yet they seemed as pale and lifeless as the architecture. When I rolled down my window, I sensed an eerie pall over the town, like an old Twilight Zone episode where everyone looked like they were speaking but no sound came out of their mouths. If this was a modern metropolis, where were the honking horns, the street musicians, the bicyclists, the joggers, the homeless?

The answer was simple; they weren’t allowed on the streets.

Next blog: My interview with The Free Theatre of Belarus

 

How I Learned to Stop Kvetching and Love to Blog

I’m having a blog-identity crisis. What can I contribute to the blog world that hasn’t already been said? It’s a loaded question. This exercise goes to the core of who I am. I need a blog therapist.

Who am I?

I’m 50-something-ish.  One marriage. Two kids.

Snore…

In my twenties I was a wildly unsuccessful actress in San Francisco and New York, then moved to Los Angeles where I worked as a story editor in Hollywood for ten years.

Okay, now we might be getting somewhere.

Then I quit the business, moved to suburban Orange County and stayed home to raise my kids.

Snore again…

BUT, I’d made the decision to stay home because I figured if I was going to screw something up, I’d rather screw up my career than my kids.

Okay, noble…

YET, I really didn’t have much of a career to run away from anyway, so the decision was not so hard.

CUT TO…

18 years later. The kids are gone and I’m lost. What is my purpose? What should I do with my life?

After having an affair and drinking too much wine, I decide to write my first novel, WHITE RUSSIAN, about a middle-aged woman who is having an affair and drinking too much wine when her father suddenly leaves the country to join a political theater troupe in Belarus that is dedicated to overthrowing their government. When he gets in trouble with the Belarusian KGB, she is forced to put down her wine (did I mention she drinks?) and run to his rescue.

Now I’m on a roll…

So, the purpose of this blog is to share with you my experiences in Belarus as I visited a country run by a man Condoleezza Rice once described as “the last dictator in Europe,” and my encounters with the courageous activists who are leading the fledging revolution to free their country.

I also want to take you on a journey with me as I research my next novel, The Oldest Living Jew in Boca Raton (also based on a family story), about a widow from Russia who comes to America and runs a boarding house in Coney Island in the 1920′s.

I’d love you all to come on my journey. Are you with me?