2007-04-25 - 11:58 p.m.
It has been a week bounded on one side by all this kurfluffle about Don Imus, and on the other by this ghastly tale of the boy going amok at the college, shooting up a dorm’s worth of kids. And, yet, if you were in New York, like I was, this past week was all about the upcoming Nor’easter, which was heading towards the city like a gigantic beast, preparing to devour and crush all in its path.
Oh, didn’t I tell you that I was going to New York? Well, it doesn’t matter, for I am back in LA now. But, you see, last week the time came round for my semi-annual visit to my grandmothers, and so off I went to the glamorous Real City, and I was there for a full week. It was an unusually pleasant visit, too! I saw a bunch of plays, visited a bunch of relatives, and had more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
That said, I have to admit that my respective grandparents were looking decidedly more frail and weak than they appeared last visit. Blind grandmother is now about 82, and she can barely walk at all. Yet, it’s quite amazing how sharp her mind is. Rich Grandmother is 84, and is turning bitter, clearly due to her failing physical health and her fears of imminent death.
It is unnerving to me that the elderly do not seem to fear death less as they get older: They seem to fear it even more. This idea of lovable oldsters sighing “ahh, it is time to die! And I won’t mind it so much when it happens,” as they reach 90 is just a figment of soap operas and sappy movies. In reality, we always go out kicking and screaming and however long we get to live is an irrelevant factor. And for all their expressed sentiments of affection, if they could, both Blind and Rich Grandmothers would gladly have sucked out all my blood and killed me dead right then and there if it could have garnered them ten more years of life. And who could blame them?
One of the purposes of the trip was so that my mother could attend the 50th reunion of her sixth grade elementary school class, an event which at first struck me as being oddly self absorbed to the point of near-parody. Doesn’t going to an elementary school reunion seem to you as sort of Baby Boomer-ish? Like everyone is deluding themselves into thinking that,“no one aside from My Generation ever got old and who else is b!”
Yet, as my mother explained, my mom attended this fancy magnet school for New York’s Most Gifted and Talented Children, and amongst the events that occurred during her sixth grade year was that the kids were all invited to sing Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” to Eleanor Roosevelt at the 10th anniversary of the Opening of the United Nations. So I suppose it was not as ludicrous as all that. My mother demanded that I escort her (and not like that, you dirty minded troll) to the Reunion Lunch, at a fancy restaurant on 11th and 5th.
In the end, the event was actually rather charming: One can’t help but notice that, for all the hype and boogaboo surrounding the original class of kids – and, at the time, newspapers were full of articles about the kids who went to this Gifted and Talented School, claiming that they were the great hope for America – the now sixty-something adults who attended the school have come to little. I mean, they are all professional types: The group consisted of lawyers and some professors and a doctor or two. However, none of them had actually achieved any of the Astonishing Glittering Prizes that had been predicted as their true potential.
If anything, it was a little bit touching to watch them, these sixty-something near-retirees, who were essentially at the tail end of their professional lives and were aware that things had not gone as they had predicted. They were supposed to be Presidents and Judges and the Greatest Novelists in the World. For all of that, they just wound up being rather generic souls, leading standard and unexceptional lives.
However, when they all got together in the same room, the most amazing thing happened – all of these sixtogenerians suddenly transformed into children in adult bodies. I mean, you could see it: It was like that inner core of youthful innocence, long submerged for perhaps fifty years, suddenly rose to the surface like bubbles on a lake. I have a feeling that it is a marvelous thing to be suddenly reunited with folks who remember you as you were when you were young. And you could tell that these folks all got a kick out of it.
On Sunday, we braved the vile Nor’easter and headed up to Riverdale to see Blind Grandma. She’s doing unexpectedly well, in spite of being blind and wheelchair bound! I mean, by this, that her mind is truly as sharp as a tack. It’s amazing, and I think I have noted this before, that the contrast between her and Rich Grandmother, whose mind is turning to mush from lack of stimulation, is becoming more and more pronounced.
I do think there is a big difference between someone who, even blind, sits in her room and listens to every book on tape that she can get her hands on – from Chaim Potuk to dry-as-dusty histories of the Rabbi Akiva – to the other one, who has her own eyes but spends them totally on watching episodes of AMERICAN IDOL and reading THE NEW YORK POST, and only Page Six in that.
Mind you, when push comes to shove I can hardly blame my grandmother for being interested in AMERICAN IDOL this year, as even I myself have been gripped by the furor surrounding that talentless little Indian boy, Jambalaya or whatever his name is. I was rather sorry to hear that he was dumped off this last week, if only because I was fascinated by the obvious techniques of manipulating the phone lines that went into keeping him on the show for so long as it is. There must be a lot of Indian teenage girl fans clogging up the phone lines, I tell ya. But, you see, I also have other interests and am not reduced to debating with intensity that differences between AMERICAN IDOL and GREASE: THE ONE THAT I WANT.
But, anyway, we were talking about New York, and I was telling you about my many adventures. So what did I do during my glamorous week in Manhattan? Well, before the Nor’easter hit, I went to the Met to see this fascinating exhibit of Islamic influences on Venetian art. There were tons of beautiful, ancient paintings of Venice, for which, as you know, I have a soft spot. I went to see two plays – GREY GARDENS, which was stupid beyond my means of driveling, and part two of THE COAST OF UTOPIA, which was stunningly ambitious, but dramatically uneven.
GREY GARDENS, which is based on a documentary from the 80s, is the story of a pair of crazy old spinsters (mother and daughter) living in a huge, derelict mansion in the Hamptons. Act one shows the two when they were young and beautiful socialites, the daughter being wooed by none other than John F. Kennedy. The relationship is derailed by the clingy, possessive mama, who so terrorizes JFK that he runs off and marries the girl’s more eligible cousin Jackie Bouvier.
Act two takes place in the late seventies, in the same house, now gone to ruin, with the mother and daughter still living together, surrounded by garbage and sixty-something cats. In my humble opinion, or IMHO as you young folks say, the two acts had nothing to do with each other. And you could not tell that the people in act two were supposed to be the same as the people in act one. The musical numbers were also utterly forgettable in a way that assures that the musical is likely to sink into oblivion and shortly.
THE COAST OF UTOPIA, on the other hand, was downright weighty. It’s a three part drama about the writers who created the philosophies that motivated the Russian Revolution. Dramatic stuff, no? Well, I have to admit that there was not that much drama in there, per se – but the dialogue was wonderful beyond what my words can express. I had never heard of any of the Russian philosophers whom the play was about – but the stage crackled with clever repartee and “Big Ideas”. And if the story was itself rambling and a bit uneven, well, you can hardly blame it: Every once in a while, a good work of theater has to be praised for its audacity. And ambition THE COAST OF UTOPIA had in spades.
I must admit that I found the Hamptons to be a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting much more from the seaside community which I had always read about but never visited. All it was, it seems to me, was a fairly upscale tourist town – a lot of stores and big ole mansions, many of them pretty, but few of them of architectural note. We met my mother’s childhood friend, who spends most of the year in Alaska, but comes home to the Hamptons in the dead of winter. She was sweet and jolly and she showed us over the gallery she curates that holds a near-priceless stash of her deceased father’s art. Her father was quite the famous artist, you see – one tiny bracelet he made for her when she was 16 paid for her entire college career.
As for sex, well, New York IS the CITY of sex, as you know. And, yes, I did get me some action at the damn place. You see, I found myself at this terrific party at a little nightclub that was no more than a stone’s throw from the hotel I was staying at on 11th and 5th. But I shall leave you hanging for details, I think. Why babble everything at once?
