My review of the book on the left,

in the journal to the right.

This morning I watched the best fifteen minutes of television I have seen in a VERY long time.  Stephen Colbert joined John Heilemann on Morning Joe.  The satirist and the commentator reduced the host, Joe Scarborough, into a jiggling mass of joviality while I forgot to pack my sons’ lunches in the midst of my laughing fit.

Colbert’s brilliance reigns supreme this presidential season.  Heilemann appeared on Colbert’s eponymous Report and routinely appears on Morning Joe, where he weds wit to wisdom while he intersperses Latin (my favorite phrase de facto et de jure for example) into his punditry.  If you have not followed @JHeil on Twitter, you have missed a true treat for your funny bone and your brain.

Wildcats’ purple reign stretches across the Atlantic.  In Amsterdam, ‘Pep’ Rosenfeld (once upon a time known as Jon) and Gregory Shapiro take down the great and the good with their form of improvised immolation on stage and on air.   Whose writing helped us to laugh at the 2000 election debacle on Saturday Night Live?  Rosenfeld’s.  Where did wildcat Seth Meyers acquire the comical chops to sit behind the SNL newsdesk?  On stage with Rosenfeld, Shapiro, and yet another wildcat, Andrew Moskos, at Boom Chicago.

With our political efficacy decimated by sins of hubris, I’m proud of my alma mater‘s sense of humor.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/when-worlds-collide

via imdb.com

Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Imagine That

via imdb.com

made their way onto our holiday watch list thanks to our need for films able to bridge the sixty year plus age spread at our family gathering.  As it happened they were the same film and shared much with last summer’s The Smurfs.

via imdb.com

All three focus on the transformation of men from maniacally-career-driven-capitalists to child-focused family men.  More striking still are the long-suffering women waiting for their men’s metamorphosis.

Once upon a time, this story would have had the man trade in family for Mammon (A Christmas Carol).  In post World War II movies, single mothers learned to love dreamers over earners (Miracle on 34th Street & Holiday Affair).  Now, Hollywood imagines women left at the wayside of testosterone driven-capitalist acquisition as soft-hearted scions of the not-for-profit sector.

Like all myths, these all draw on the cultural context in which they were born.  Dickens knew that men of the city insulated themselves from the rot and ruin their success wrought for others.  Women recovering from the uncertainty of war – widowed or not – no doubt needed a nudge towards the possible rewards associated with risk.  The three recent films reassure the many unemployed or underpaid fathers fuming over our financial fiasco that they wouldn’t want to be one of the one percent anyway.

The the ex-wives and mothers (or wife and would-be-mother in Smurfs) have distinctly warm, fuzzy, and profit-free vocations.  Eddie Murphy’s fictional ex-wife needs him to watch their daughter so she can run her non-profit’s annual pledge drive.  Jim Carrey sees the light and seduces his ex-wife away from a vaguely defined do-gooder trip abroad to stay with their newly reunited family.  The Smurfs teach Neil Patrick Harris that he is ready to appease his artist wife’s will to breed.

These moms don’t have to quit their jobs to prove their parenting prowess (as forties flicks demanded), but they do demonstrate their commitment to their present and future children by pursuing nurturing professions.

We’ve come a long way since my grandmother had to hide her engagement or lose her teaching job.  Our mythological mothers still put love before money, but they persuade their menfolk to do the same.  The end of each film, (SPOILER ALERT) in which the fathers find even greater private-sector success after they put family first, left me to wonder if women or men will ever see a similar outcome in reality….

Mulling the Common Cup

A Jewish advisee once told me his connection to his faith came foremost through food.  No matter where he roams, the food upon the Shabbat table looks and tastes the same.  He knows he has found his community whether or not he has previously eaten with the particular people.

I thought of him as I watched my husband mull the wine in advance of our annual neighborhood bash.  One of the neighbors asked about the house drink.  That would be my British husband’s aromatic brew.  It is the common cup of our community’s gathering.

Some will hold a chalice during Hanukkah.  Others will celebrate Christmas with a sip from a communion cup.  Each steps into our kitchen to affirm commitment to a community born not of blood or of belief but from proximity.  We watch out for one another’s progeny, pets, plants, and post.  If one falls ill the others rise to fill the gaps s/he leaves in our little world until the crisis has passed.

This year that little world expanded in an unexpected way.  We had too much.  Twice as much to be exact.  In a fit of Midwestern fear about under-feeding, we ordered two of everything when we needed one.  The only fear greater than that of running-out is of waste.  No church or synagogue would take my call or my food on Sunday morning.  The YMCA, however, greeted me and my platters with great glee.  177 hungry men we drinkers from the common cup have never seen but belong nonetheless to our community dined from our communal platter last Sunday lunchtime.  That shared feast, which crossed all boundaries – religion, race, class, and so much more, meant more.

We expect to share a feast with friends and family.  We should expect to share with the strangers in our midst.  Sunday, I found how difficult it can be to find those whose pain we wish away.  I never saw a face.  I take on trust that our communal bounty fed anonymous bodies and souls.  Although unnamed and unseen, they remain with me, and I hope with you, throughout the holidays.

via IMDb.com

2006

2011: Gone or Grown?

Not long ago, I attended a dinner party that consisted of four men, two skinny women – both older than I, and not-so little me.  Over the course of the evening one slim female managed in different contexts to comment on a female politician’s chub and the evil of obesity.

Now, I have checked all the charts (trust me), and I am not obese.  I am chubby/overweight and extremely aware of it.  I imagined all eyes judging me as unworthy of their skinny coterie and my husband secretly questioning how he as the youngest man at the table had come to have the chubbiest spouse.

My colleagues lecture me on my poor body image.  I’ve been told not to say negative things about my weight or appearance, but I await comments like the ones over that gourmet meal.  I’m a believer in the preëmptive strike.  I would rather fess up than have someone else think me so stupid I don’t realize I’m fat.

I know precisely how many calories I would need to cut and hours I would need to sweat in order to attain the svelte figure that supposedly indicates nutritional ‘smarts.’  When I was an at-home mom, I gave over to making weight maintenance my full-time job.  Now I have a full-time job.  I’ve gained ten pounds each year I’ve held it.  I pains me, but there it is.  I’ve grown tremendously in those five years intellectually, emotionally, and alas physically.  The problem lays in the obvious physical growth and the unseen psychic development.  Thus, I have happened blissfully upon “Drop Dead Diva.”

The skinny diva finds herself living in the body of a woman with a simultaneously big body and brain.  She remembers how she treated and what she thought about women who had ‘let themselves go.’  She sees the look we with extra weight have all endured from the self-righteously skinny and knows she gave it.  She explains to her best friend from her thin life that now she spends her day in court she can’t summon the energy for an evening run.  This fictional full-figured gal has no spouse or children just a new-found need to exercise her brain.

Dr. Oz appeared with his wife on Morning Joe and preached the value of teaching low-income children that they can control their bodies through diet.  In his mind, it is the first step towards giving them control over their world.  I’ve seen enough randomness in my life to think that lesson a dangerous one.

Yes, children should eat their vegetables.  Yes, I’ll head back to Zumba as soon as my cold clears.  However, we won’t wake up in a perfect world as a result of a parsnip or a push up.  We can only hope to increase our strength and flexibility as we cope in a world we can’t control.

So yes, let yourself go!

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris via Wikimedia Commons

The diners gathered at the feast we celebrate today failed to remain friends for long.  Europeans on American soil took far more than they ever gave.  Native Americans found themselves run off their land and written out of their rights when the descendants and fellow-travelers of those they fed at Plimoth founded a nation in Philadelphia.

NPR and lower-brow advisers on matters of etiquette warned the nation against the political squabbles prone to diminish our pleasure in baked squash.  If a table talk turns from turkey to taxes, it is time to purvey the pumpkin pie.

If the Natives who fed the Pilgrims when they could not figure out how to fertilize their own soil (give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and he will deplete your waters; show him how to wrap a fish around his seed corn, and he will grow fat on your land) had insisted upon a meaningful conversation over their meal, they might have found a way to avoid ceding their land with their corn.  Unlikely?  Yes.  Preferable to decimation by those you fed in their time of need and doubt over what might have been different?  Definitely.

So in a time of national crisis, I prefer to think of issues probed over potatoes (no yelling over the yams) in pursuit of a truly common good.  The Americans left to squat at the base of European squatters’ table in the iconic image above, inspire me to shout across the centuries, “Stand UP!”  As seated students succumb to pepper-spray and the “99%” flee public squares, those of us at private tables possess the power and the responsibility to speak.

Think deeply about whom we ought thank for any plenty that persists in our lives.  The Pilgrims bit the hands that fed them.  We can at least thank those who gave everything to strangers unworthy of their trust by taking heed not to repeat their mistake.  Around our tables we likely share a language whether English, Hindi, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Wolof, or whatever.   The food itself offers a mode of communication across the chasms that separate the pumpkin from the pecan pie preferrers.  Today is a day to share a slice of each; discuss their comparative merits; and find a means to coexist.