Today I met the proprietor of this store: Frank Bee Costume. He tells us that a cotton candy machine costs $75 to rent, as does a popcorn machine, although one doesn't actually use the popcorn machine for popping corn--you buy it pre-popped. He also informs us that "any magician worth his soup" cannot be engaged for a Saturday in May, as they are booked months in advanced (and earn $225 an hour). But we are momentarily entertained by a magician who stopped by to pick up some money (Wayne, it turns out, is his agent) and the magician enthralls us with quarter tricks and a rubber bands. He and Wayne met when the magician took his watch during a trick. (Wayne knows a lot of people. He provided tents for a Barack Obama affair, and autographed photos of Obama, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Conan O'Brien, and a Yankee I do not know, hang on the walls around his desk).
There is a box of rattlesnake eggs near my feet. They look like this--I had not seen such since I was, oh, nine, and they remind me of the card sleeves from Clue. Wayne pulls one envelope out of the box, and begins fumbling with it under the desk. I smile at him. He hands the envelope to T-, and she opens it and shrieks. "I can see the smartness coming out of your eyes," he tells me, but it is not so much intelligence as a good memory.
The magician twists a balloon into Snoopy on a scooter, and Wayne gives each of us an envelope of rattlesnake eggs to take home.
4/19/2008
we are the pirates!
9 a.m.
a high, persistent car horn shoves me out of sleep and over to the window. i am bleary-eyed and hung over, thanks to the brooklyn literati, who apparently don't mind if strangers crash their parties in search of jon-jon, the androgynous non-writer who just got a book deal. (a digression which is unfortunately off the record).
below my window, chattering loudly, march small herds of baseball teams—seven year-olds in matching uniforms and baseball caps. their parents walk demurely alongside. some teams walk in lines straight enough to please ms. clavel, but most scuttle forward in an awkward blob. the blobs are yellow, orange, red, green, and they keep coming, entering the frame of my window from the left, and marching north on la avenida de puerto rico. the blobs grow taller in each team; the prepubescent boys bring up the rear and shout, “we are the pirates” with full buccaneer boisterousness.
a man across the street comes to his window. the parents take pictures. no one else is watching, but the b-43 bus waits courteously at the curb until they have all passed by.
a high, persistent car horn shoves me out of sleep and over to the window. i am bleary-eyed and hung over, thanks to the brooklyn literati, who apparently don't mind if strangers crash their parties in search of jon-jon, the androgynous non-writer who just got a book deal. (a digression which is unfortunately off the record).
below my window, chattering loudly, march small herds of baseball teams—seven year-olds in matching uniforms and baseball caps. their parents walk demurely alongside. some teams walk in lines straight enough to please ms. clavel, but most scuttle forward in an awkward blob. the blobs are yellow, orange, red, green, and they keep coming, entering the frame of my window from the left, and marching north on la avenida de puerto rico. the blobs grow taller in each team; the prepubescent boys bring up the rear and shout, “we are the pirates” with full buccaneer boisterousness.
a man across the street comes to his window. the parents take pictures. no one else is watching, but the b-43 bus waits courteously at the curb until they have all passed by.
4/17/2008
A hope as refreshing as air conditioning
My favorite quote from Sade, a lovely young woman who I interviewed this week, on her first job at age 14: "You feel big. You’re like, wow, I’m working in an office with air conditioning!"
Her friend tells me when he met her during their freshmen year of college, all she could talk about was running for President.
Oh, the press would gobble it up. (I like the disjuncture I'm making here regarding my supposed profession. I'm not one of them). She is the oldest child of a teenage mother who dropped out of high school. When Sade was 16, her family became homeless. Now she's waiting to hear on law school acceptances.
But her story, despite what bootstrap bindings one could force it into, is much richer than that.
Now if I could just write a story that would do her justice.
Her friend tells me when he met her during their freshmen year of college, all she could talk about was running for President.
Oh, the press would gobble it up. (I like the disjuncture I'm making here regarding my supposed profession. I'm not one of them). She is the oldest child of a teenage mother who dropped out of high school. When Sade was 16, her family became homeless. Now she's waiting to hear on law school acceptances.
But her story, despite what bootstrap bindings one could force it into, is much richer than that.
Now if I could just write a story that would do her justice.
4/16/2008
Breathing deeply
Don't ask me why, but I was seduced by a recent episode of one of those law and order shows...I don't know which one, and it doesn't really matter. The plot was a regular roller coaster: I missed the first part of the show, but when I began watching, a young woman, whose mother was in jail for dealing pot and other sundry drugs, was raped. The young woman did not see the man’s face, but she knows that it is a guard from the prison where her mother is incarcerated. The guard had been raping the mother (as well as other women), and I believe she had somehow been supplying him with drugs (or he was supplying her--the plot was quite convoluted). When the mother cut off his drug supply, he took his revenge by tracking down the daughter and raping her. Like a true Nancy Drew mystery, he lets the young woman in on this information.
So the show continues to loop the loop--one of the cops tries to ferret out the unidentified rapist by going undercover as a prison inmate. But the climax of the show depends on this medical detail: the young woman comes down with a case of multi-drug resistant TB. The police know that MDR TB is endemic to the prison (and, like, a lot of prisons--one point for Law and Order) and they suspect that she got it from the rapist. The prison goes on lock down because of the health threat, and all the officers are given tests to see who might test positive. This puts our undercover heroine at a grave risk: another cop has gone undercover as a prison guard, but he looses track of her during the lock down, and the rapist takes advantage of this isolation and attempts to rape her. (Of course, she isn't raped, although the show took plenty of time to act out our nation's penal sex fantasies, billy club and all. Don't ask). But the story isn’t over yet. It turns out that the rapist doesn’t have TB—there is no evidence linking him to the young woman. She contracted it from a group home a few months earlier (oh, those filthy, infectious group homes. Accessible health care, anyone?)
You don’t really need to know the rest of the plot, but I’ll humor you—the rapist makes the mistake of revealing certain body parts, parts which sport a noticeable mole. The young woman remembers this, and is able to provide enough evidence to book the prison guard. (Perhaps this is a lesson on the corrupting influence of our overeager and ineffective penal system?)
So why my tirade? (Despite the chance to slip in those annoying, left leaning critiques)? Ahem. Physiology, my dear sirs and madams. Thanks to contagious lawyers who honeymoon in Greece, and fly on multiple airplanes, MDR TB is indeed slipping into the American consciousness (thanks to antibiotics, Americans stopped being so worried about TB in the 20th century. It is curable--if treated). TB is a very frightening disease, and over a million die from it every year. Over a quarter of the world's population harbors TB bacilli in their lungs. But. The immune system is a lovely thing, and one does not generally contract TB from a single encounter, especially a swift one that occurs out of doors. It makes sense, then, that the unfortunate young woman (did I mention her mother gets murdered?) would contract it at the group home, and not during a rape.
Perhaps we should applaud the nation’s networks for bulking up their plot lines with medicine and science (since ER and Grey’s Anatomy are primarily interested in only reproduction). But bad science is just silly. We pride ourselves on our scientific advances, and giggle at the silliness of those old-fashioned quacks who entertained the bumpkins of the 19th century. Shows like Law and Order, or Eli Stone, a wretched waste of an hour which began its season by inflaming the debate over the dubious link between childhood vaccines and autism, demonstrate that while we have more knowledge, we choose to ignore it for the sake of a narrative. But narratives require a deep commitment to fact, or at least to consistency—if your characters fly, I’ll believe you, but if half your characters can’t fly, and you don’t give me a reason why, I won’t trust you. It’s dishonest and fraudulent. One hundred years ago, we may have listened too often to the quacks, but now it is the hacks who have our ears.
So the show continues to loop the loop--one of the cops tries to ferret out the unidentified rapist by going undercover as a prison inmate. But the climax of the show depends on this medical detail: the young woman comes down with a case of multi-drug resistant TB. The police know that MDR TB is endemic to the prison (and, like, a lot of prisons--one point for Law and Order) and they suspect that she got it from the rapist. The prison goes on lock down because of the health threat, and all the officers are given tests to see who might test positive. This puts our undercover heroine at a grave risk: another cop has gone undercover as a prison guard, but he looses track of her during the lock down, and the rapist takes advantage of this isolation and attempts to rape her. (Of course, she isn't raped, although the show took plenty of time to act out our nation's penal sex fantasies, billy club and all. Don't ask). But the story isn’t over yet. It turns out that the rapist doesn’t have TB—there is no evidence linking him to the young woman. She contracted it from a group home a few months earlier (oh, those filthy, infectious group homes. Accessible health care, anyone?)
You don’t really need to know the rest of the plot, but I’ll humor you—the rapist makes the mistake of revealing certain body parts, parts which sport a noticeable mole. The young woman remembers this, and is able to provide enough evidence to book the prison guard. (Perhaps this is a lesson on the corrupting influence of our overeager and ineffective penal system?)
So why my tirade? (Despite the chance to slip in those annoying, left leaning critiques)? Ahem. Physiology, my dear sirs and madams. Thanks to contagious lawyers who honeymoon in Greece, and fly on multiple airplanes, MDR TB is indeed slipping into the American consciousness (thanks to antibiotics, Americans stopped being so worried about TB in the 20th century. It is curable--if treated). TB is a very frightening disease, and over a million die from it every year. Over a quarter of the world's population harbors TB bacilli in their lungs. But. The immune system is a lovely thing, and one does not generally contract TB from a single encounter, especially a swift one that occurs out of doors. It makes sense, then, that the unfortunate young woman (did I mention her mother gets murdered?) would contract it at the group home, and not during a rape.
Perhaps we should applaud the nation’s networks for bulking up their plot lines with medicine and science (since ER and Grey’s Anatomy are primarily interested in only reproduction). But bad science is just silly. We pride ourselves on our scientific advances, and giggle at the silliness of those old-fashioned quacks who entertained the bumpkins of the 19th century. Shows like Law and Order, or Eli Stone, a wretched waste of an hour which began its season by inflaming the debate over the dubious link between childhood vaccines and autism, demonstrate that while we have more knowledge, we choose to ignore it for the sake of a narrative. But narratives require a deep commitment to fact, or at least to consistency—if your characters fly, I’ll believe you, but if half your characters can’t fly, and you don’t give me a reason why, I won’t trust you. It’s dishonest and fraudulent. One hundred years ago, we may have listened too often to the quacks, but now it is the hacks who have our ears.
4/01/2008
to wit
Simile of the week (if not all of April):
“You are a sky-high highbrow,” he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go bra-less, I go about brow-less.”
...the words of Jacques Barzun
...and the chapter title in a book I would like to read (circa 1875, full title: The Intellectual Life):
To a Young Man of Intellectual Tastes, Who, Without Having as Yet Any Particular Lady In View, Had Expressed, In a General Way, His Determination To Get Married
“You are a sky-high highbrow,” he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go bra-less, I go about brow-less.”
...the words of Jacques Barzun
...and the chapter title in a book I would like to read (circa 1875, full title: The Intellectual Life):
To a Young Man of Intellectual Tastes, Who, Without Having as Yet Any Particular Lady In View, Had Expressed, In a General Way, His Determination To Get Married
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