You'd be shocked if a coworker said she could gauge the intelligence of a member of your company by the color of her skin, wouldn't you? If your child's teacher said Muslim kids aren't trustworthy, you'd notify the principal at once. If your favorite cafe's owner said he disliked gay people, his blatant bigotry would ensure that you'd never eat his risotto again. You're careful not to stereotype people in wheelchairs or wheatgrass juice drinkers, lesbians or limo drivers, Estonians or the elderly. You see how ridiculous it is to ascribe personality traits to whole groups, or make generalizations about ability or behavior based on so little information. You expect your friends, family and coworkers to show the same respect to others that you do.
So, why are so many otherwise sensitive, multiculturally aware folks so willing to put down the little guy? Why does society hold such contempt for short men? Why are smaller-than-average fellows passed over for jobs, relationships and pay raises at higher rates than other men? And why are jokes and snide asides about short men being less confident, virile or capable so pervasive?
Easy laughs at the expense of men who are mere inches shorter than average are commonly accepted in daily conversation, in ads, in TV shows and films, at work. Even the rare man who shares my own height of just five feet two inches is only 10% smaller than a man of average stature in the U.S., and most men who are publicly berated for being short come within 5% of average height. Why do we ascribe so much social importance and status to such a small variance in size?
My own height is below the 25th percentile for American women, so I've always been aware of society's preference for taller people. But as a petite female, I sometimes benefit from stereotypes about small women. Short women are often assumed to be cuter, nicer or more approachable before people even get to know us. Our stature is less threatening, so strangers often assume our personalities will follow suit. Because people expect us to be friendlier, meeker and weaker than average, they might let down their guard more easily with us and be more willing to help us. However, they also condescend more, sometimes assume we're less capable or even less intelligent, and not infrequently they offer assistance we haven't asked for and don't want, sometimes insistently, as if being smaller than they are means we can't be trusted to gauge our own strength and ability appropriately.
In study after study, the majority of men say they much prefer dating women who are smaller than they are. Shorter-than-average women make men feel bigger and stronger in comparison with taller women. Tall women definitely find it harder to find men who are comfortable dating them, and they say overwhelmingly that they prefer to date men even taller than they. They then hear fewer comments about their height and get less attention for sticking out in a crowd. But tall women also have a lot of positive characteristics ascribed to them. They're assumed to be more capable and powerful in social, academic and business settings, so they earn more money as a group than their smaller sisters. There are various advantages to being taller than average, of medium height or even shorter than average height for women, and men of taller-than-average height gain noticeable benefits in social, financial, academic, business and governmental realms. But short men? They're at a social disadvantage across the board.
Surveys of attitudes reveal that people both perceive and treat people of shorter stature as inferior. This is particularly notable in the business sphere. International university studies have shown that short people, male and female, are paid less than taller people, with disparities similar in magnitude to those ascribed to race and gender gaps. Tall people have significant advantages when it comes to hiring, pay, promotions and prominence within their companies. A 2005 survey of the heights of Fortune 500 companies' CEOs revealed that they were on average six feet tall, approximately three inches taller than the average U.S. man. Fully 30% of these CEOs were six feet two inches tall or more. Ninety percent of CEOs are of above average height.
In the U.S., taller candidates have the advantage in electoral politics, though heightism isn't a problem in Russia, where President Dmitry Medvedev is just over five feet five inches tall and former President Vladimir Putin is just over five feet seven. France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is just over five feet six. He is married to the former model Carla Bruni, who is five feet nine inches tall, and this fact is constantly remarked upon throughout the world. Endless jokes have been made about his power being enough of an aphrodesiac to make up for his lack of height, which many assume would otherwise make him appear weak and sexually less desirable. As if a man's attractiveness, sexual skill or ability to be a good husband had anything to do with his height!
Shockingly, heightism has been cited as one of the underlying causes of the Rwandan genocide, in which approximately one million people were killed. One of the reasons that political power was conferred on minority Tutsis by the exiting Belgians was reportedly because Tutsis were taller and were therefore seen by the Belgians as superior and more suited to governance than Hutus. That's a horrifying price to pay for baseless prejudice, isn't it?
Why do a few inches of height matter so much that over 90% of women say they wouldn't want to date someone shorter than they are? Why do men and women find being of short stature so risible? Film and TV directors often elicit laughs by having a short man make an entrance in a scene when a man of power, action or attractiveness is expected, playing off the audience's expectation that a charismatic individual must be tall. Think for a moment about how often people laugh at the mere idea that a short man could be considered worthy of their admiration, just as people used to laugh at the idea of showing respect to women, black people or gays and lesbians.
The excellent actor Peter Dinklage, who was so moving in the film The Station Agent, has made a career of playing bright, serious men with dwarfism in a world in which people make constant assumptions about their ability, their personalities or their manhood based on nothing more than height. The brilliant economist Robert Reich met Bill Clinton while they were Rhodes Scholars; he went on to be Clinton's labor secretary and is now a professor at UC Berkeley. He is a particularly witty and pleasant fellow, and is quite willing to make jokes about his four-foot-ten-inch stature. He has to be a good sport about this; it is cited as a relevant fact about him far too frequently. Reich is wise to let this roll off his back; when short men show fatigue or frustration at the frequent comments and stares, the public that so enjoys razzing them about this inane fact is all too quick to turn nasty and attribute a panoply of bad characteristics to them based on, yes, their lack of height.
We've all heard that short men are supposed to be prone to the Napoleon Complex, or Little Man Syndrome, an alleged type of inferiority complex said to affect men of short stature who attempt to overcompensate for their height in other aspects of their lives. Yet this supposed syndrome or complex does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Ironically, Napoleon Bonaparte was, at five feet six, taller than the average European man of his time. Yet how many images have you seen of Napoleon depicted as unnaturally short, and how many times has that trope been used for comic effect? He and countless men of less-than-average height have been depicted as angry, pompous and much shorter than they are, and the negative characteristics ascribed to them are often assumed to be related to a burning desire to overcome supposed embarrassment and self-hatred brought on by their height.
Think of how often this cliché appears in television, film and especially advertising. When people need visual shorthand to express negative characteristics, isn't it remarkable how often they resort to using height as a signifier for social, sexual or business failure? The primary villain in the popular animated movie Shrek is Lord Farquaad, whose most notable physical characteristic is his extreme shortness. He is repeatedly made the butt of jokes about his stature, even in his presence, despite his power and authority. His every entrance is made more ridiculous by his attempts to conceal his lack of height. The idea that his dastardly and grandiose gestures are all efforts to compensate for shortness (or his supposed lack of virility) is not only alluded to tacitly but is explicitly mentioned numerous times. His small stature is, if you will, visual shorthand meant to allow the audience to detest and dehumanize him so that he can be made more hateful and ridiculous in our eyes.
Michael J. Fox has been an extremely popular actor and public figure for over 25 years. He is talented, likeable, attractive and witty, and his articulate and impassioned advocacy for stem cell research brings a huge amount of attention and funding to his cause. He suffers from Parkinson's Disease, which often causes embarrassing physical tremors and even difficulty speaking, but he has been willing to brave the snide remarks and derision of people like Rush Limbaugh in order to help his others, no matter how difficult or exhausting public speaking are for him, and no matter how much travel and public scrutiny and exhaustion aggravate his symptoms. Yet, despite his remarkable efforts, which have allowed his foundation to fund over $171 million worth of research to help people with Parkinson's to live better lives, public figures and private ones continue to make jokes about his height and caustically remark on his shortness, as if his size should in any way impact our ability to take him seriously.
Tom Cruise's having had several wives taller than he is has gotten nearly as much press as his dismaying affiliation with Scientology, and has garnered much more press than stories of his actual acting talent or business acumen. His over-the-top demeanor and outspoken behavior certainly merit attention and even, at times, derision, but why is his height alluded to alongside descriptions of his behavior, as if the two were related? He is one of the most popular, lauded, influential, powerful and wealthy men of all time, yet there is usually a derisive smirk on the faces of commentators and poison in their prose when they refer to him. How many times have you heard journalists laugh because a shorty like Tom Cruise thinks himself worthy of the amazonian goddesses at his side? And how minuscule, how lilliputian, is this allegedly tiny and unworthy human being who thinks he's man enough to stand next to Katie Holmes (who is five feet eight) or Nicole Kidman (who is five feet ten)? At five feet seven, he's two inches shorter than the average U.S. male. Two inches. The width of a lemon. But because he dares to fall in love with women who are taller than he, he is castigated and verbally emasculated by media outlets on a nearly daily basis. How ridiculous is that?
For the fun of it, consider the following list of shorter-than-average famous men. Consider their accomplishments, personalities, their talents, their influences on culture. Think about whether they fit general stereotypes of short men. Then consider whether you have unwittingly bought in to these stereotypes, or carelessly perpetuated any of them. It's so common, and so easy to do. But it's not fair. It's time to stand up for the little guy.
Five feet tall: David Ben-Gurion • Andrew Carnegie • Danny DeVito • Fiorello LaGuardia
Five feet two: Buckminster Fuller • Paul Simon
Five feet three: • Mohandas Gandhi • Sammy Davis Jr. • Martin Scorcese
Five feet four: Ludwig van Beethoven • Mel Brooks • Elton John • Pablo Picasso • Rod Serling • Auguste Rodin
Five feet five: Harry Houdini • J.R.R. Tolkien • Lou Reed • Armand Hammer • Gus Grissom
Five feet six: T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) • Alfred Hitchcock • Spud Webb • Bob Dylan • Peter Falk • William Faulkner • Elijah Wood • Dustin Hoffman
Five feet seven: Martin Luther King, Jr. • Stephen Spielberg • Mario Andretti • Doug Flutie • Bono • F. Scott Fitzgerald • David Eckstein • James Cagney • Robert Downey Jr. • Salvador Dali
Monday, February 15, 2010
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Finding Beauty in Each Day
Tonight I watched the end of the PBS six-hour series "This Emotional Life" to see the segment featuring my friend Betty Schneider. Betty, who is 87 and has always loved learning and finding beauty in the world, said that her life continues to be filled with pleasurable, meaningful activities and good times with people who are dear to her. I found it moving to hear her speak about how good old age can be.
Betty misses Jack, her husband of 61 years, and wishes she could share her ongoing adventures with him, but in the six years since his death she has found ways past her sadness over his loss and again enjoys and appreciates her life. Her days are rich with activity, and there are still new things to learn and people to enjoy. She takes classes, lunches with friends, plays the piano and goes to cultural events. Life has never stood still for her.
Betty is inspiring not only in the way she lives her life now, but in the way she has always sought beauty and understanding and wished to be a force for good in the world. She loves to share the things she's learned, seen or created in the most positive and energetic ways. When I first met her and her husband Jack over 20 years ago, they spent part of each year in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University, where Jack had long taught statistics, and they spent another part of the year in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Jack taught and did research and Betty got her PhD in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (known to South Africans as Wits). Already in their late sixties and early seventies, they traveled back and forth and around the world, going to lectures and concerts and plays, taking cruises, doing research, writing and filling their lives with interesting people and stories.
Jack and Betty were active in liberal politics and loved sharing political ideas and keeping up with international news. Betty took photos so beautiful that some were published in National Geographic magazine. She painted, she wrote and published, she had friends to dinner often and brought tales of her adventures to others' parties. At Wits she made a friend of Johnny Clegg, the sensational South African pop star whose music helped spread the anti-apartheid message around the world in the 1980s; she and Johnny were both members of Wits' anthropology department.
Part of what has always made Betty such a delight is her positivism and energy. There's nothing frantic or edgy or forced in this. She's down to earth and easy to talk to, but she's also a worldly intellectual who can speak engagingly on many subjects. She is always curious to learn more and takes a genuine interest in those around her.
Betty's life is rich and full because she makes those around her feel that they and their interests matter, and that good things can and will be done if we make an effort. She is patient and gives her full attention to those she is with. As full as her life and her mind are, she still has the time and interest to open herself to new experiences. In this way, she draws toward her people of energy, positivity, passion and excitement. Because she gives so much, I believe people bring forward their best selves when they see Betty because they feel valued, respected and inspired.
I believe Betty knows the keys to a rich life at any age. Never stop learning. Never stop exploring. Keep your ears open. Find things to be passionate about. Work for things you care about. Give people respect and full attention when in their presence. Make compromises and consider the needs of your partner and those you care about. Understand that personal growth and the support of those you love take effort and sacrifice. Look for the good in people. Each of these things is true at any age, and none of them requires superhuman strength or extreme intelligence. When each day is lived with a spirit of openheartedness and positivity, when age doesn't stop a person from trying new things, taking risks and starting whole new ventures, each day can be full, meaningful and worthwhile at any age.
The PBS series focused largely on the importance of human relationships in making people happy, and on the things people do to either limit or damage their relationships with others or to encourage and enhance interpersonal closeness. I believe Betty shows by her example a number of behaviors that draw positivity and happiness into her life. This radiates from her life into the lives of others. She knows the value of being grateful for what she has. She shows the beauty of appreciating the moment and paying attention to what is happening now, and to what those around us have to say. She shows the power of continually expanding the mind and seeking out new skills, new understandings and new friendships while nurturing the old relationships. Betty laughs well and often, and her sense of humor sets those around her at ease and encourages them to relax.
Betty is an exceptional woman, but the example she sets isn't beyond the reach of those of us who may have less energy, drive or mental agility. The attitude of positivity, possibility and appreciation she carries with her each day brings her joy and spreads that joy to others. If we can learn anything from remarkable people like Betty, let us learn to appreciate and bring that sense of wonder and a desire to share the best of our discoveries with others each day.
Betty misses Jack, her husband of 61 years, and wishes she could share her ongoing adventures with him, but in the six years since his death she has found ways past her sadness over his loss and again enjoys and appreciates her life. Her days are rich with activity, and there are still new things to learn and people to enjoy. She takes classes, lunches with friends, plays the piano and goes to cultural events. Life has never stood still for her.
Betty is inspiring not only in the way she lives her life now, but in the way she has always sought beauty and understanding and wished to be a force for good in the world. She loves to share the things she's learned, seen or created in the most positive and energetic ways. When I first met her and her husband Jack over 20 years ago, they spent part of each year in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University, where Jack had long taught statistics, and they spent another part of the year in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Jack taught and did research and Betty got her PhD in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (known to South Africans as Wits). Already in their late sixties and early seventies, they traveled back and forth and around the world, going to lectures and concerts and plays, taking cruises, doing research, writing and filling their lives with interesting people and stories.
Jack and Betty were active in liberal politics and loved sharing political ideas and keeping up with international news. Betty took photos so beautiful that some were published in National Geographic magazine. She painted, she wrote and published, she had friends to dinner often and brought tales of her adventures to others' parties. At Wits she made a friend of Johnny Clegg, the sensational South African pop star whose music helped spread the anti-apartheid message around the world in the 1980s; she and Johnny were both members of Wits' anthropology department.
Part of what has always made Betty such a delight is her positivism and energy. There's nothing frantic or edgy or forced in this. She's down to earth and easy to talk to, but she's also a worldly intellectual who can speak engagingly on many subjects. She is always curious to learn more and takes a genuine interest in those around her.
Betty's life is rich and full because she makes those around her feel that they and their interests matter, and that good things can and will be done if we make an effort. She is patient and gives her full attention to those she is with. As full as her life and her mind are, she still has the time and interest to open herself to new experiences. In this way, she draws toward her people of energy, positivity, passion and excitement. Because she gives so much, I believe people bring forward their best selves when they see Betty because they feel valued, respected and inspired.
I believe Betty knows the keys to a rich life at any age. Never stop learning. Never stop exploring. Keep your ears open. Find things to be passionate about. Work for things you care about. Give people respect and full attention when in their presence. Make compromises and consider the needs of your partner and those you care about. Understand that personal growth and the support of those you love take effort and sacrifice. Look for the good in people. Each of these things is true at any age, and none of them requires superhuman strength or extreme intelligence. When each day is lived with a spirit of openheartedness and positivity, when age doesn't stop a person from trying new things, taking risks and starting whole new ventures, each day can be full, meaningful and worthwhile at any age.
The PBS series focused largely on the importance of human relationships in making people happy, and on the things people do to either limit or damage their relationships with others or to encourage and enhance interpersonal closeness. I believe Betty shows by her example a number of behaviors that draw positivity and happiness into her life. This radiates from her life into the lives of others. She knows the value of being grateful for what she has. She shows the beauty of appreciating the moment and paying attention to what is happening now, and to what those around us have to say. She shows the power of continually expanding the mind and seeking out new skills, new understandings and new friendships while nurturing the old relationships. Betty laughs well and often, and her sense of humor sets those around her at ease and encourages them to relax.
Betty is an exceptional woman, but the example she sets isn't beyond the reach of those of us who may have less energy, drive or mental agility. The attitude of positivity, possibility and appreciation she carries with her each day brings her joy and spreads that joy to others. If we can learn anything from remarkable people like Betty, let us learn to appreciate and bring that sense of wonder and a desire to share the best of our discoveries with others each day.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Sleepy Time Gal
Sleep and I have a love/hate relationship.
On the one hand, it's always felt like an enormous waste of time to me, and I resent having to cut short my days by going to bed when I could be doing any of a million other things that would be more fun or interesting. I've had trouble falling asleep since I was a little girl, and I'm a light sleeper and wake easily in the night. Then I have trouble getting back to sleep. I can rarely sleep on planes or in other conveyances, and conditions have to be just right for me to fall asleep in the first place. Morning light and noises creep into my consciousness and even pillows over my head can only help me so much when I try to sleep in past dawn to make up for the insomnia of the previous night. Sleeping is fraught with a lot of frustration and irritation for me.
On the other hand, without good, regular, deep sleep, I feel awful. Giving birth, while the hardest thing I've ever done, was less physically overwhelming and difficult than the three years of chronic sleep deprivation I suffered after my daughter (also a poor sleeper) was born. Normally an energetic person, when I'm sleep-deprived I feel lackluster and without drive, and the headaches I'm already prone to settle on me more often and for longer periods. They wake me and won't let me sleep, but, cruelly, they require sleep to go away. Once one of my frequent headaches turns into a full-blown migraine, no medicine can dull the pain or make it stop. The only thing that will cure a migraine for me is sleep, but the misery of the migraines pushes sleep out of reach. Then, for the hours until I am exhausted and depleted enough to doze off, all I can do is writhe and whimper and, occasionally, vomit, until I can coax Morpheus close enough to whisper in my ear and let me doze. Only then can I make the nausea-inducing jackhammer in my head desist, or at least decrease the decibel level for a while.
I've been frustrated not to have kept up my blog for so many weeks, but trying to work around loved ones' conflicting sleep schedules in order to have time to talk with them or help them out late at night or early in the morning, when they're free, and feeling always sleep deprived for months on end has meant I've felt less sharp, less productive, frustratingly behind in many projects. My various ideas for essays all felt uninspiring and not worth the hours they take to write because my fatigue makes everything feel like a bigger effort with less reward at the end of it. I feel like I've been grasping at sleep and just missing it, catching only a few feathers in my hand when I try to hold onto it. When I have time to get a big gulp of sleep and can finally catch up, I feel wonderful and run around happily, making the most of it, but my schedule hasn't let me carry that feeling for more than a day or two before I again fall into a series of sleep-deprived days and nights that make me anxious and angry at my body's inability to relax. And lying in bed, exhausted and headachey and mad at myself for not being asleep, does not make me feel sleepier.
I've made pacts with myself to get to bed earlier and get into sleep-friendly habits, and when this school holiday ends, I'm determined to again give this my best effort. But the rush and bustle of holiday preparations has upended my plans and the sleep-deprived slog through the fog continues. I've been going to bed very late, waking in the middle of the night and again early in the morning, fighting headaches and fatigue day after day. I've been feeling ever more frustrated during what was supposed to have been a week in which I could catch up on some lost sleep and reset my broken body clock while having fun relaxing with people dear to me. Hard as I've worked to be ready for this holiday season, I still haven't sent out holiday cards or responded to letters or e-mails. Fatigue makes communication take twice the effort it usually does.
Much as I love Christmas, when I think of how I've actually spent past Christmases, I realize how many of them have found me feeling exhausted, sick with colds, headachey, ill with chronic stomach problems, or completely sidelined with migraines. Somehow every year I overplan and undersleep and again realize, oh yeah, the holidays make me sick! Of course, the problem is not with a Christmas virus or New Year's infection; I just push myself too hard and hold my expectations too high, and I forget how lack of sleep, perfectionism and frequent socializing compress my introverted self into a tightly-wound knot, much as I wish they didn't. I have tried repeatedly to push myself to be what I wish I were, and I've worked valiantly to package myself as more extroverted than I really am in an effort to show more people my best self and make them feel my appreciation for them. Sadly, eventually all that crumbles and the sleepy, headachey little mouse within asks plaintively if it can please just get a little peace and quiet for a while.
Holiday socializing, even with those who are very dear and important, requires a lot of energy from introverts like me. We need quiet time to prepare for and recover from interactions with others. Extroverts don't understand this about introverts; even when we're having fun interacting with others, we're burning through reserves of energy that need regular fill-ups, and those fill-ups come from time on our own, not from spending more time in the company of others. Extroverts gain energy and comfort from doing things together; we introverts love our friends and family dearly, too, but we need time alone each day to gather our wits and prepare ourselves to be up and on and ready for action. If we don't get some time between engagements, we feel overwhelmed and anxious.
We don't want to appear unfriendly, and you're not unimportant to us just because we need to back away for a little while. We just don't gather energy from our interactions the way extroverts do. And since the U.S. population is supposedly made up of about 75% extroverts and only 25% introverts, the general cultural bias around here is toward people who draw energy from parties and who like making small talk with strangers, and who think fun equals being around other people as much as possible. These people just can't understand those of us who never went to a prom and didn't want to, and can't imagine wanting to go to a movie alone instead of going to a bar or a party. Though I love spending time in the company of dear ones, if I'm not well rested beforehand, such visits can wear me out, and then I get frustrated with myself for not being able to last longer without needing to retreat for a bit.
Among my resolutions for 2010 is to quit beating myself up for not being someone I can't be. That means not expecting myself to be a party person just because the season dictates that We Shall All Enjoy Parties Now. It means listening to my body when it tells me You Need To Go To Bed Earlier On A Regular Basis. It means worrying less about letting others down by not being as social as they want me to be and explaining that I need more time between social engagements or that I need to leave earlier than some folks do. I worry too much that people will find me a stick-in-the-mud since some in my past took umbrage at my having to spend regular time on my own. But I want to learn to look after the quiet little mouse inside better next year, rather than trying to dress her in a party dress and high heels when she really just needs some fuzzy slippers and a nice cup of chamomile tea.
On the one hand, it's always felt like an enormous waste of time to me, and I resent having to cut short my days by going to bed when I could be doing any of a million other things that would be more fun or interesting. I've had trouble falling asleep since I was a little girl, and I'm a light sleeper and wake easily in the night. Then I have trouble getting back to sleep. I can rarely sleep on planes or in other conveyances, and conditions have to be just right for me to fall asleep in the first place. Morning light and noises creep into my consciousness and even pillows over my head can only help me so much when I try to sleep in past dawn to make up for the insomnia of the previous night. Sleeping is fraught with a lot of frustration and irritation for me.
On the other hand, without good, regular, deep sleep, I feel awful. Giving birth, while the hardest thing I've ever done, was less physically overwhelming and difficult than the three years of chronic sleep deprivation I suffered after my daughter (also a poor sleeper) was born. Normally an energetic person, when I'm sleep-deprived I feel lackluster and without drive, and the headaches I'm already prone to settle on me more often and for longer periods. They wake me and won't let me sleep, but, cruelly, they require sleep to go away. Once one of my frequent headaches turns into a full-blown migraine, no medicine can dull the pain or make it stop. The only thing that will cure a migraine for me is sleep, but the misery of the migraines pushes sleep out of reach. Then, for the hours until I am exhausted and depleted enough to doze off, all I can do is writhe and whimper and, occasionally, vomit, until I can coax Morpheus close enough to whisper in my ear and let me doze. Only then can I make the nausea-inducing jackhammer in my head desist, or at least decrease the decibel level for a while.
I've been frustrated not to have kept up my blog for so many weeks, but trying to work around loved ones' conflicting sleep schedules in order to have time to talk with them or help them out late at night or early in the morning, when they're free, and feeling always sleep deprived for months on end has meant I've felt less sharp, less productive, frustratingly behind in many projects. My various ideas for essays all felt uninspiring and not worth the hours they take to write because my fatigue makes everything feel like a bigger effort with less reward at the end of it. I feel like I've been grasping at sleep and just missing it, catching only a few feathers in my hand when I try to hold onto it. When I have time to get a big gulp of sleep and can finally catch up, I feel wonderful and run around happily, making the most of it, but my schedule hasn't let me carry that feeling for more than a day or two before I again fall into a series of sleep-deprived days and nights that make me anxious and angry at my body's inability to relax. And lying in bed, exhausted and headachey and mad at myself for not being asleep, does not make me feel sleepier.
I've made pacts with myself to get to bed earlier and get into sleep-friendly habits, and when this school holiday ends, I'm determined to again give this my best effort. But the rush and bustle of holiday preparations has upended my plans and the sleep-deprived slog through the fog continues. I've been going to bed very late, waking in the middle of the night and again early in the morning, fighting headaches and fatigue day after day. I've been feeling ever more frustrated during what was supposed to have been a week in which I could catch up on some lost sleep and reset my broken body clock while having fun relaxing with people dear to me. Hard as I've worked to be ready for this holiday season, I still haven't sent out holiday cards or responded to letters or e-mails. Fatigue makes communication take twice the effort it usually does.
Much as I love Christmas, when I think of how I've actually spent past Christmases, I realize how many of them have found me feeling exhausted, sick with colds, headachey, ill with chronic stomach problems, or completely sidelined with migraines. Somehow every year I overplan and undersleep and again realize, oh yeah, the holidays make me sick! Of course, the problem is not with a Christmas virus or New Year's infection; I just push myself too hard and hold my expectations too high, and I forget how lack of sleep, perfectionism and frequent socializing compress my introverted self into a tightly-wound knot, much as I wish they didn't. I have tried repeatedly to push myself to be what I wish I were, and I've worked valiantly to package myself as more extroverted than I really am in an effort to show more people my best self and make them feel my appreciation for them. Sadly, eventually all that crumbles and the sleepy, headachey little mouse within asks plaintively if it can please just get a little peace and quiet for a while.
Holiday socializing, even with those who are very dear and important, requires a lot of energy from introverts like me. We need quiet time to prepare for and recover from interactions with others. Extroverts don't understand this about introverts; even when we're having fun interacting with others, we're burning through reserves of energy that need regular fill-ups, and those fill-ups come from time on our own, not from spending more time in the company of others. Extroverts gain energy and comfort from doing things together; we introverts love our friends and family dearly, too, but we need time alone each day to gather our wits and prepare ourselves to be up and on and ready for action. If we don't get some time between engagements, we feel overwhelmed and anxious.
We don't want to appear unfriendly, and you're not unimportant to us just because we need to back away for a little while. We just don't gather energy from our interactions the way extroverts do. And since the U.S. population is supposedly made up of about 75% extroverts and only 25% introverts, the general cultural bias around here is toward people who draw energy from parties and who like making small talk with strangers, and who think fun equals being around other people as much as possible. These people just can't understand those of us who never went to a prom and didn't want to, and can't imagine wanting to go to a movie alone instead of going to a bar or a party. Though I love spending time in the company of dear ones, if I'm not well rested beforehand, such visits can wear me out, and then I get frustrated with myself for not being able to last longer without needing to retreat for a bit.
Among my resolutions for 2010 is to quit beating myself up for not being someone I can't be. That means not expecting myself to be a party person just because the season dictates that We Shall All Enjoy Parties Now. It means listening to my body when it tells me You Need To Go To Bed Earlier On A Regular Basis. It means worrying less about letting others down by not being as social as they want me to be and explaining that I need more time between social engagements or that I need to leave earlier than some folks do. I worry too much that people will find me a stick-in-the-mud since some in my past took umbrage at my having to spend regular time on my own. But I want to learn to look after the quiet little mouse inside better next year, rather than trying to dress her in a party dress and high heels when she really just needs some fuzzy slippers and a nice cup of chamomile tea.
Friday, October 16, 2009
So Bad They're Good
With film, there are good movies, and then there are movies that are so bad, they're a special kind of good. In the second case, their very badness makes them so ridiculous that gawping at them in disbelief and outrage, followed by a satisfying session in which one rips them to shreds with a critical eye, brings the greatest delight.
When it comes to science fiction films and television shows, the ridiculously bad category is actually usually more fun than the good movie category. Sure, there are classic science fiction films done so well that their cleverness, artfulness, innovation and insight stand out and inspire admiration: Alien, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the excellent new film Moon with Sam Rockwell, Minority Report, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are exciting, innovative, even moving films that transcend the limitations of their genre to appeal even to people who don't usually enjoy consuming science fiction stories.
The wide and lovable middle ground features classics that are enjoyable, tell good stories, make people think and have staying power but still have a pleasing element of campiness to them. This large batch of movies includes one of my favorite television series of all time, the original Twilight Zone series of the early 1960s (how I do love Rod Serling), as well as fun-to-watch films like the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still ("Klaatu barada nikto!"), Logan's Run, the original Godzilla, and the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston's character is such a complete jerk in Planet of the Apes that one rather enjoys his comeuppance, but you have to love his delivery when he shouts "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" And yes, it does have one of the greatest final scenes in film history. If you want some fun surprises with your science fiction, check out the assortment of television and movie stars who gave memorable performances in episodes of the Twilight Zone, some toward the ends of their careers, others (including Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Burt Reynolds and William Shatner) in their younger years before they became household names.
The Godzilla film empire is one of the largest and longest running in movie history. The first Godzilla movie was actually titled something closer to Gojira in Japanese. Godzilla is the name given to the Westernized version of the film to which unnecessary narration and scenes with Raymond Burr were added to try to appeal to non-Japanese audiences. Apparently rendering the Japanese name into Roman alphabet characters as "Gojira," as is usually done, isn't exactly correct either; the proper pronunciation, as demonstrated here, sounds more like "Gozira."
There is a serious political undercurrent to the first Godzilla film. Created in 1954 at the height of the Cold War and just nine years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla is an allegory about the destruction caused by nuclear war and the frightening and, it was feared, unstoppable menace caused by nuclear radiation. Though supposedly a prehistoric creature, Godzilla's monstrous size and power were said to have come from modern exposure to nuclear radiation.
Below this middle section of cheesy but relatively well-made science fiction and fantasy films is the wonderfully deep and wide basement where one finds such delights as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Brain that Wouldn't Die, and the assorted Hercules and later Godzilla sequels with their rubber swords, rubber suits and laughable dubbing jobs. Much as I appreciate Ridley Scott's fine direction and Harrison Ford's intensity, the classic movie Blade Runner doesn't make me laugh myself weak the way watching oiled musclemen in teeny-tiny togas wrestling with people in foam suits who are supposed to be volcanic-rock-clad moon-men does. Godzilla being challenged for dominance by a giant moth around whom two tiny fairies fly and speak in unison? Priceless. A nearly-dead Bela Lugosi embarrassing himself in Ed Wood's horrendous Plan Nine from Outer Space? Jaw-droppingly laughable. Like a car wreck, it's hard to turn away when something that awful plays out before one's unbelieving eyes.
Of course, these baaad movies are awful on their own, but are rendered even more outrageously funny when snarky commentary is added, hence the success of the delightful Mystery Science Theater 3000 television series, which ran from 1988 to 1999. This cult classic show featured a man marooned in space and forced to watch terrible movies with no company except his robot buddies while his brain is monitored by mad scientists. Over a hundred awful movies and short subjects were skewered by the hosts and robots of MST3K, who make fun of the films with voice-over commentary in real time as we watch along with them. There were two hosts over the course of the series, and while Mike Nelson did a good job, nothing can match the deadpan wit of the original host and series creator, Joel Hodgson. Each episode intermingled skits (some lame, some wildly funny) interspersed with the movie footage, including a number of special songs and outrageous inventions. This is the sort of low-budget hilarity that cable access TV was invented for.
I grew up in an era of laughably low-budget science fiction television shows. Watching and enjoying them anew with my teenage daughter evokes a special, twisted nostalgia. Ah, yes, I remember the days when television production companies could get away with reusing the same bad papier-mache rock outcropping in every single episode of a series, as they did in Lost in Space (a series which features my favorite fictional robot of all time). It wasn't that long ago when female spaceship officers of the future were revealed to be wearing scary polyester panties in fabrics that matched their tiny tunics, so short were their sexy little uniforms (and yes, I'm talking to you, Lieutenant Uhura). Thanks to the SyFy channel, DVDs of MST3K and the easy access to endless classic (and classless) science fiction films provided by Netflix, we can introduce the joys of badly acted, badly cast, badly dubbed, badly directed, underfunded and horribly scribed stories of foam-rubber monsters and space travel gone awry to a whole new generation. Look into it: it's full of stars.
When it comes to science fiction films and television shows, the ridiculously bad category is actually usually more fun than the good movie category. Sure, there are classic science fiction films done so well that their cleverness, artfulness, innovation and insight stand out and inspire admiration: Alien, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the excellent new film Moon with Sam Rockwell, Minority Report, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are exciting, innovative, even moving films that transcend the limitations of their genre to appeal even to people who don't usually enjoy consuming science fiction stories.
The wide and lovable middle ground features classics that are enjoyable, tell good stories, make people think and have staying power but still have a pleasing element of campiness to them. This large batch of movies includes one of my favorite television series of all time, the original Twilight Zone series of the early 1960s (how I do love Rod Serling), as well as fun-to-watch films like the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still ("Klaatu barada nikto!"), Logan's Run, the original Godzilla, and the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston's character is such a complete jerk in Planet of the Apes that one rather enjoys his comeuppance, but you have to love his delivery when he shouts "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" And yes, it does have one of the greatest final scenes in film history. If you want some fun surprises with your science fiction, check out the assortment of television and movie stars who gave memorable performances in episodes of the Twilight Zone, some toward the ends of their careers, others (including Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Burt Reynolds and William Shatner) in their younger years before they became household names.
The Godzilla film empire is one of the largest and longest running in movie history. The first Godzilla movie was actually titled something closer to Gojira in Japanese. Godzilla is the name given to the Westernized version of the film to which unnecessary narration and scenes with Raymond Burr were added to try to appeal to non-Japanese audiences. Apparently rendering the Japanese name into Roman alphabet characters as "Gojira," as is usually done, isn't exactly correct either; the proper pronunciation, as demonstrated here, sounds more like "Gozira."
There is a serious political undercurrent to the first Godzilla film. Created in 1954 at the height of the Cold War and just nine years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla is an allegory about the destruction caused by nuclear war and the frightening and, it was feared, unstoppable menace caused by nuclear radiation. Though supposedly a prehistoric creature, Godzilla's monstrous size and power were said to have come from modern exposure to nuclear radiation.
Below this middle section of cheesy but relatively well-made science fiction and fantasy films is the wonderfully deep and wide basement where one finds such delights as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Brain that Wouldn't Die, and the assorted Hercules and later Godzilla sequels with their rubber swords, rubber suits and laughable dubbing jobs. Much as I appreciate Ridley Scott's fine direction and Harrison Ford's intensity, the classic movie Blade Runner doesn't make me laugh myself weak the way watching oiled musclemen in teeny-tiny togas wrestling with people in foam suits who are supposed to be volcanic-rock-clad moon-men does. Godzilla being challenged for dominance by a giant moth around whom two tiny fairies fly and speak in unison? Priceless. A nearly-dead Bela Lugosi embarrassing himself in Ed Wood's horrendous Plan Nine from Outer Space? Jaw-droppingly laughable. Like a car wreck, it's hard to turn away when something that awful plays out before one's unbelieving eyes.
Of course, these baaad movies are awful on their own, but are rendered even more outrageously funny when snarky commentary is added, hence the success of the delightful Mystery Science Theater 3000 television series, which ran from 1988 to 1999. This cult classic show featured a man marooned in space and forced to watch terrible movies with no company except his robot buddies while his brain is monitored by mad scientists. Over a hundred awful movies and short subjects were skewered by the hosts and robots of MST3K, who make fun of the films with voice-over commentary in real time as we watch along with them. There were two hosts over the course of the series, and while Mike Nelson did a good job, nothing can match the deadpan wit of the original host and series creator, Joel Hodgson. Each episode intermingled skits (some lame, some wildly funny) interspersed with the movie footage, including a number of special songs and outrageous inventions. This is the sort of low-budget hilarity that cable access TV was invented for.
I grew up in an era of laughably low-budget science fiction television shows. Watching and enjoying them anew with my teenage daughter evokes a special, twisted nostalgia. Ah, yes, I remember the days when television production companies could get away with reusing the same bad papier-mache rock outcropping in every single episode of a series, as they did in Lost in Space (a series which features my favorite fictional robot of all time). It wasn't that long ago when female spaceship officers of the future were revealed to be wearing scary polyester panties in fabrics that matched their tiny tunics, so short were their sexy little uniforms (and yes, I'm talking to you, Lieutenant Uhura). Thanks to the SyFy channel, DVDs of MST3K and the easy access to endless classic (and classless) science fiction films provided by Netflix, we can introduce the joys of badly acted, badly cast, badly dubbed, badly directed, underfunded and horribly scribed stories of foam-rubber monsters and space travel gone awry to a whole new generation. Look into it: it's full of stars.
Friday, September 25, 2009
For What It's Worth
Journalists wondering how the recession has affected average people have been writing a lot of articles about the booming resale market lately. Nearly weekly I read about how consignment clothing shops, flea markets and thrift stores can hardly keep items in stock, they've become so popular. It's clear from ubiquitous Craigslist and eBay references on TV shows, in movies and in daily conversation that society has fully embraced resale culture.
We're more eager than ever to get what we perceive to be good deals in exchange for our hard-earned (or painfully borrowed) dollars. The old distaste for the outmoded, dated or used has been replaced with a new appreciation for vintage style. But how can we determine the true value of whatever we buy, new or used, in an economy where the cost and accepted value of everything—a job, a car, a house, a suit, a vacation—keeps shifting wildly? How do we know what our possessions, our talents, even our own selves, are really worth?
This summer at a garage sale I got an exquisite pair of sterling silver, pearl and pink tourmaline earrings for $1 from the same woman to whom I gave $10 for a plastic Darth Vader full-head mask and helmet. The chic earrings were quite a deal, but the Darth Vader head, made of plastic, a few screws and a battery-operated voice box that still worked, was, to my mind, the real deal. The earrings were made of materials with more intrinsic value: silver, pearl and gemstone earrings are a luxury item. However, one can find nice jewelry in many places, but a vintage Darth Vader head that plays James Earl Jones' voice with the flick of a button? THAT'S special. Why? Because it's hard to find, and well, it's a life-sized Darth Vader head. (Duh!) And since value has a lot to do with scarcity, that plastic toy is worth more to me (and probably on eBay, though I could never sell my precious Lord Vader's head) than the earrings, even though the original sales price for the earrings was probably higher.
The rarer and more collectible an item, the more desirable it is, and the greater the value people ascribe to it. So a plastic bobblehead figurine of a popular athlete still in its cardboard box might be considered more valuable than a complete set of cookware, a jade bracelet, a pound of Godiva chocolate or a portable dog kennel. This is so even though the bobblehead's components are worth a few cents at most, and it does nothing but wiggle disturbingly when poked, while the other items can be used, displayed, worn or devoured.
The bobblehead's value doesn't come from its usefulness or attractiveness or the innate value of its components. It's worth what the market says it's worth, based on what the marketplace thinks people will pay for it. Its value, like the value of any item or set of talents, is based on its necessity and desirability as determined by a mixture of largely emotional factors, as well as on its scarcity. I know people who "invested" in Beanie Babies at the height of their popularity, thinking that their value would rise and they could be sold to finance vacations or retirement funds in the future. Now, I'm seeing those same special, limited edition Beanie Babies, still with their tags on, in specially made display boxes, marked at $2 apiece at garage sales. And they're not selling at any price. There are just too many of them and their novelty has worn off. The Beanie Baby market crashed because they're not novel, necessary or scarce.
Last week I bought two antique teacups and saucers in remarkable shape for $3 a set and paid the same amount for an old Big Boggle game. I happen to know that at an antique store, those particular cups would probably have been priced at $25 for each cup and saucer set, and on eBay classic Big Boggle games fetch an astounding $25 to $40. But even though I got to the sale six hours after it began, nobody had snatched up these treasures, because their appeal isn't universal. Their value is based on what they are likely to sell for at a particular time under particular conditions. These items weren't being sold at a high-end antique show or a vintage game convention, but out of an overfilled garage with people looking for deals on cribs and golf clubs and folding chairs. Value is in the eye of the beholder and changes constantly depending on necessity and desirability.
You might think $4 is too much for a pair of shoelaces on Thursday, but when your lace breaks in the airport on Friday, you'll pay $8 for a less sturdy pair in order to get out of the airport and to your important meeting on time. An item's value is what you and the seller agree it is at that moment.
Today I went to a garage sale and found a pair of show-stopping black shoes with chic hardware that had been worn maybe twice and probably cost $75 new. They fit me perfectly and cost a mere $2. A lovely and unusual Japanese fabric wall-hanging was only $3. The set of small, cheap wooden chess pieces with no board tossed into a Ziploc bag? The seller wanted $5 for them. I asked politely if she'd consider $3 for them (I wanted to use them in an art project), but on that she stood firm: $5, please. I politely declined. Considering that much finer chess pieces with full, inlaid wooden boards are sitting unsold on eBay despite rock-bottom prices, I have a feeling she'll be regretting not selling the pieces tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. when they're still sitting next to the unsold Hulk puzzle and the Yahtzee! game. However, she determined that those used, inexpensive pieces with no board or box were worth two-and-a-half times the elegant black shoes or the new Trivial Pursuit game in its embossed tin collectible box that I got for another $2.
And she may be right. For the value is in either what the market will bear, or it's in what something means to us emotionally. Maybe tomorrow a bidding war for the chess pieces will break out between a man whose late parents bought him a chess set at Toys R Us with similar pieces ten years ago and a woman who thinks the bishops look like her great-grandpa and the knights like her childhood horse Spunky. It could turn out that those pieces are actually worth $25 to someone. And maybe nobody else would have bought the chic shoes I got today. If I hadn't dropped by, those shoes might have sat there unsold, and then they would have been worth nothing to anyone. There's no way of knowing.
It's all a crap-shoot, and the decision to value a bag of game pieces at $3 or $5 or even $150 is based on many emotional factors as well as logical ones. That's why economics is an art and not a science. You can draw all the graphs you want, compare Hayek's economic vision with Keynes's or Reich's, review consumer spending habits over the past century till you're blue in the face, but economics still comes down to the thousands of choices people make each year about how to allocate limited resources. Which is why all the clever economists and statisticians in the world couldn't make enough useful predictions to keep banks, real estate markets and car manufacturers' businesses from imploding over the past year. They can track trends, but they can't always smell fear before mass hysteria hits.
For years, during booms and market expansions and times of lack of accountability and deregulation run amok, we've had unrealistic expectations that the value of our homes or our skill-sets were ever-increasing. We believed we would always find reasonably paying jobs or make profits when selling our real estate. When people were buying houses with no money of their own and not even being asked to prove that they could make the initial payments, trying to determine the real value of a piece of property was the furthest thing from their minds. There is no true, actual, real value to anything, be it gold bullion or Q-tips. It's all about what people say it is at any particular time. Get out a compass and you'll find a true north; buy a dress or a car or a house today and its value to someone else tomorrow is only a guess. Once you've bought it, its value to others is largely out of your hands.
Our current worldwide economic crisis frightens us not only because we have to buy cheaper food, go to fewer movies or concerts, take the bus to work or to move out of our comfortable houses. It also frightens us because it reminds us how malleable the value of everything around us is, and how tenuous our own value is in an ever-fluctuating job market. We don't know whether we might lose our jobs tomorrow, or have to work for fewer hours to stay employed, or whether someone else will hire us if we get laid off. We can no longer be confident that a good education, good references and good experience is enough to allow us to keep our position in the world, let alone improve it.
It's scary enough to wonder whether we'll be able to retire when we expected to or whether our particular pile of belongings has retained enough of its value for us to be financially secure. It's much worse to have to face the fact that our value to society is determined by so many random factors, and that it can change enormously, and quickly, based on things that have nothing to do with what we believe are the real determiners of our own worth.
Shocking and upsetting as this is, one positive element comes from this disturbance in our worldview: we are no longer as likely to determine someone's value or meaning based on what he or she does for a living. We're now less likely to assess someone's worth based on what vehicle he or she drives or on the type of home he or she lives in. For the first time in a long time, we are not what we do so much as what we are. When labels are so labile, it is easier to slip out of old classifications that constrained us, and it is easier for others to see us as being more than just whatever it is that we do for a living.
People from other cultures find the United States' fixation with career as a determiner of value and meaning curious. Go to a pub or a bistro or a taverna abroad and you probably won't be asked what you do for a living within the first minute of meeting someone, as you would be in the United States.
Here so much of a person's value is determined by how much money that person makes. If we do something wonderful but aren't paid for it (or aren't paid much), we're considered by some to be mere pretenders as people. Just because one's work isn't lucrative doesn't mean it's not real, valuable, worthwhile or important.
In other parts of the world, the questions of how one thinks and feels about politics, literature, music or cinema are at least as important as careers when choosing topics for discussion, both with old friends and total strangers. By the end of a spirited evening abroad, you might still not know what Saeed, Michiko, Pablo or Marianne do for a living. That can happen here, too, but it's rare; here we are what we do, we are our capacity to earn. Certainly one's career can say a great deal about one's values, one's dreams or one's talents, but it's only one facet of a life, one arbiter among many in determining a person's worth, both financial and social.
When we are shaken to the core until we reexamine our basic values, when we are humbled and forced to do things we don't love in order to save the things we do love, perhaps we can learn both humility and an appreciation for the people around us who do the jobs we don't want to do. Perhaps when we are shaken, we will also be stirred to look more deeply and listen more intently when we meet people so that we can see beyond the old labels which we formerly used to determine whether they were worthy of our time.
Update: Here is an interesting piece on the topic of labeling people based on what they do for a living. It appeared in an October 8, 2009, posting to Salon.com writer Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" column.
We're more eager than ever to get what we perceive to be good deals in exchange for our hard-earned (or painfully borrowed) dollars. The old distaste for the outmoded, dated or used has been replaced with a new appreciation for vintage style. But how can we determine the true value of whatever we buy, new or used, in an economy where the cost and accepted value of everything—a job, a car, a house, a suit, a vacation—keeps shifting wildly? How do we know what our possessions, our talents, even our own selves, are really worth?
This summer at a garage sale I got an exquisite pair of sterling silver, pearl and pink tourmaline earrings for $1 from the same woman to whom I gave $10 for a plastic Darth Vader full-head mask and helmet. The chic earrings were quite a deal, but the Darth Vader head, made of plastic, a few screws and a battery-operated voice box that still worked, was, to my mind, the real deal. The earrings were made of materials with more intrinsic value: silver, pearl and gemstone earrings are a luxury item. However, one can find nice jewelry in many places, but a vintage Darth Vader head that plays James Earl Jones' voice with the flick of a button? THAT'S special. Why? Because it's hard to find, and well, it's a life-sized Darth Vader head. (Duh!) And since value has a lot to do with scarcity, that plastic toy is worth more to me (and probably on eBay, though I could never sell my precious Lord Vader's head) than the earrings, even though the original sales price for the earrings was probably higher.
The rarer and more collectible an item, the more desirable it is, and the greater the value people ascribe to it. So a plastic bobblehead figurine of a popular athlete still in its cardboard box might be considered more valuable than a complete set of cookware, a jade bracelet, a pound of Godiva chocolate or a portable dog kennel. This is so even though the bobblehead's components are worth a few cents at most, and it does nothing but wiggle disturbingly when poked, while the other items can be used, displayed, worn or devoured.
The bobblehead's value doesn't come from its usefulness or attractiveness or the innate value of its components. It's worth what the market says it's worth, based on what the marketplace thinks people will pay for it. Its value, like the value of any item or set of talents, is based on its necessity and desirability as determined by a mixture of largely emotional factors, as well as on its scarcity. I know people who "invested" in Beanie Babies at the height of their popularity, thinking that their value would rise and they could be sold to finance vacations or retirement funds in the future. Now, I'm seeing those same special, limited edition Beanie Babies, still with their tags on, in specially made display boxes, marked at $2 apiece at garage sales. And they're not selling at any price. There are just too many of them and their novelty has worn off. The Beanie Baby market crashed because they're not novel, necessary or scarce.
Last week I bought two antique teacups and saucers in remarkable shape for $3 a set and paid the same amount for an old Big Boggle game. I happen to know that at an antique store, those particular cups would probably have been priced at $25 for each cup and saucer set, and on eBay classic Big Boggle games fetch an astounding $25 to $40. But even though I got to the sale six hours after it began, nobody had snatched up these treasures, because their appeal isn't universal. Their value is based on what they are likely to sell for at a particular time under particular conditions. These items weren't being sold at a high-end antique show or a vintage game convention, but out of an overfilled garage with people looking for deals on cribs and golf clubs and folding chairs. Value is in the eye of the beholder and changes constantly depending on necessity and desirability.
You might think $4 is too much for a pair of shoelaces on Thursday, but when your lace breaks in the airport on Friday, you'll pay $8 for a less sturdy pair in order to get out of the airport and to your important meeting on time. An item's value is what you and the seller agree it is at that moment.
Today I went to a garage sale and found a pair of show-stopping black shoes with chic hardware that had been worn maybe twice and probably cost $75 new. They fit me perfectly and cost a mere $2. A lovely and unusual Japanese fabric wall-hanging was only $3. The set of small, cheap wooden chess pieces with no board tossed into a Ziploc bag? The seller wanted $5 for them. I asked politely if she'd consider $3 for them (I wanted to use them in an art project), but on that she stood firm: $5, please. I politely declined. Considering that much finer chess pieces with full, inlaid wooden boards are sitting unsold on eBay despite rock-bottom prices, I have a feeling she'll be regretting not selling the pieces tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. when they're still sitting next to the unsold Hulk puzzle and the Yahtzee! game. However, she determined that those used, inexpensive pieces with no board or box were worth two-and-a-half times the elegant black shoes or the new Trivial Pursuit game in its embossed tin collectible box that I got for another $2.
And she may be right. For the value is in either what the market will bear, or it's in what something means to us emotionally. Maybe tomorrow a bidding war for the chess pieces will break out between a man whose late parents bought him a chess set at Toys R Us with similar pieces ten years ago and a woman who thinks the bishops look like her great-grandpa and the knights like her childhood horse Spunky. It could turn out that those pieces are actually worth $25 to someone. And maybe nobody else would have bought the chic shoes I got today. If I hadn't dropped by, those shoes might have sat there unsold, and then they would have been worth nothing to anyone. There's no way of knowing.
It's all a crap-shoot, and the decision to value a bag of game pieces at $3 or $5 or even $150 is based on many emotional factors as well as logical ones. That's why economics is an art and not a science. You can draw all the graphs you want, compare Hayek's economic vision with Keynes's or Reich's, review consumer spending habits over the past century till you're blue in the face, but economics still comes down to the thousands of choices people make each year about how to allocate limited resources. Which is why all the clever economists and statisticians in the world couldn't make enough useful predictions to keep banks, real estate markets and car manufacturers' businesses from imploding over the past year. They can track trends, but they can't always smell fear before mass hysteria hits.
For years, during booms and market expansions and times of lack of accountability and deregulation run amok, we've had unrealistic expectations that the value of our homes or our skill-sets were ever-increasing. We believed we would always find reasonably paying jobs or make profits when selling our real estate. When people were buying houses with no money of their own and not even being asked to prove that they could make the initial payments, trying to determine the real value of a piece of property was the furthest thing from their minds. There is no true, actual, real value to anything, be it gold bullion or Q-tips. It's all about what people say it is at any particular time. Get out a compass and you'll find a true north; buy a dress or a car or a house today and its value to someone else tomorrow is only a guess. Once you've bought it, its value to others is largely out of your hands.
Our current worldwide economic crisis frightens us not only because we have to buy cheaper food, go to fewer movies or concerts, take the bus to work or to move out of our comfortable houses. It also frightens us because it reminds us how malleable the value of everything around us is, and how tenuous our own value is in an ever-fluctuating job market. We don't know whether we might lose our jobs tomorrow, or have to work for fewer hours to stay employed, or whether someone else will hire us if we get laid off. We can no longer be confident that a good education, good references and good experience is enough to allow us to keep our position in the world, let alone improve it.
It's scary enough to wonder whether we'll be able to retire when we expected to or whether our particular pile of belongings has retained enough of its value for us to be financially secure. It's much worse to have to face the fact that our value to society is determined by so many random factors, and that it can change enormously, and quickly, based on things that have nothing to do with what we believe are the real determiners of our own worth.
Shocking and upsetting as this is, one positive element comes from this disturbance in our worldview: we are no longer as likely to determine someone's value or meaning based on what he or she does for a living. We're now less likely to assess someone's worth based on what vehicle he or she drives or on the type of home he or she lives in. For the first time in a long time, we are not what we do so much as what we are. When labels are so labile, it is easier to slip out of old classifications that constrained us, and it is easier for others to see us as being more than just whatever it is that we do for a living.
People from other cultures find the United States' fixation with career as a determiner of value and meaning curious. Go to a pub or a bistro or a taverna abroad and you probably won't be asked what you do for a living within the first minute of meeting someone, as you would be in the United States.
Here so much of a person's value is determined by how much money that person makes. If we do something wonderful but aren't paid for it (or aren't paid much), we're considered by some to be mere pretenders as people. Just because one's work isn't lucrative doesn't mean it's not real, valuable, worthwhile or important.
In other parts of the world, the questions of how one thinks and feels about politics, literature, music or cinema are at least as important as careers when choosing topics for discussion, both with old friends and total strangers. By the end of a spirited evening abroad, you might still not know what Saeed, Michiko, Pablo or Marianne do for a living. That can happen here, too, but it's rare; here we are what we do, we are our capacity to earn. Certainly one's career can say a great deal about one's values, one's dreams or one's talents, but it's only one facet of a life, one arbiter among many in determining a person's worth, both financial and social.
When we are shaken to the core until we reexamine our basic values, when we are humbled and forced to do things we don't love in order to save the things we do love, perhaps we can learn both humility and an appreciation for the people around us who do the jobs we don't want to do. Perhaps when we are shaken, we will also be stirred to look more deeply and listen more intently when we meet people so that we can see beyond the old labels which we formerly used to determine whether they were worthy of our time.
Update: Here is an interesting piece on the topic of labeling people based on what they do for a living. It appeared in an October 8, 2009, posting to Salon.com writer Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" column.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Is It Worth It to Get Burned?
When I was about five, I got a working miniature iron for Christmas. I was thrilled. It was painted turquoise on top, had a shiny silver plate on the bottom, and its plastic handle was just the right size for my tiny palm. When plugged in, my dainty-looking electric iron heated up enough that it would have given me a third-degree burn if I'd been careless. As it was, I singed my little fingers every time I used it, but I loved it nonetheless, and I learned to be cautious when it was time to use the real thing.
Of course, what made that toy so exciting was that it was an actual working model of a grown-up's object, not some namby-pamby knock-off without enough power to do anything but look cute. It was lightweight and adorable, which made it cute and seemingly child-friendly in a time when kids were expected to get injured occasionally, and burns, broken bones and various childhood diseases (German measles, chicken pox) were par for the course.
Around that time, a popular gift for young girls was Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven. Oh, how I wanted one! With the power of a single ordinary lightbulb, one could bake tiny, flat cakes made from miniature boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix and ice them with Betty Crocker frosting mix. Every time I saw one on TV, my heart ached with longing. With the magical Easy-Bake Oven, I could be the perfect miniature hostess, baking my own cakes in my own room and arranging magnificent tea parties for the friends who would all want to come to my place after school to share in the joys of flat, goopy, unevenly baked chemical-infused cakes. As I lay in bed at night, I imagined the imaginary row of tiny Betty Crocker boxes in the corner of my room above my imaginary oven, and thought how happy I would be if only I had a lightbulb-based appliance to call my own.
I asked my mother for one for my birthday. She wasn't concerned with how easy it was to burn oneself on the tiny pans. After all, she'd not only bought me the tiny iron but had also given me a Creepy Crawlers set with die-cast molds that cooked Plastigoop into little rubbery flowers and bugs over a hot plate on which I burnt my fingers time and time again. I started the fires in our fireplace and lit candles on my own as far back as I can remember. I did heavy yardwork and housework and cleaned with smelly chemicals from an early age. It's not like I was kept from physical risk. No, the obvious hazards of the toy were no issue; the problem was with the high cost of the tiny cake mixes. My mother wisely pointed out that for the price of two tiny cakes we could buy a full-sized cake mix to bake in the kitchen, or make a better one from scratch for less money, and we could frost it with homemade frosting that was much cheaper AND tastier than the stuff that came in the box. And since Mom and I baked together often, and my grandmother and aunt let me bake in their kitchens as well, it wasn't as if I couldn't bake a whole cake pretty much any time I wanted anyway. Damn. My mother's frugality made perfect sense, but I still longed for another dangerous appliance of my very own with which I could make real cakes that I could serve to real kids without any adult interference.
Happily, it wasn't long before I was having friends over for after-school omelettes, frying up sombrero sandwiches for them or baking things on my own in an empty house with some regularity. My mother usually got home an hour or two after I did, but sometimes stayed later in the afternoons for meetings or had musical rehearsals to attend, so I often had the house to myself before dinnertime from the age of six-and-a-half onwards. This was unusual as most of my friends' mothers didn't work outside the house, but kids were so often on their own at that time that nobody batted an eye. Kids were frequently off by themselves for hours at a time outside, the only stipulation being that they come home for dinner. Four-year-olds were told not to cross the street but to stay on the block when they left the house, but they were routinely out of visual range of their parents or grandparents as they rode tricycles up and down the block or ran to play in each others' houses and apartments with parents often left unaware that kids other than their own were even on the premises.
At age six my friend Diane and I would walk to the railroad tracks nearby and look for old bottles. We'd gather them in grocery bags, then carry them a few blocks away to the liquor store to trade them in for the five-cents-a-bottle deposit money. Little girls walking alone along railroad tracks attracted no attention at all. When my mother wanted a new carton of cigarettes on a Saturday afternoon while entertaining guests, she'd write a note to that effect, give me three dollars and send me down to that same liquor store; I'd trade the money and the note for a new carton of cigs, no questions asked. When I was just a little older and I wanted to ride my bike down to the center of town after school, I'd just leave a note on the kitchen counter and hop on my bike; nobody wore bike helmets and almost no-one had lights or reflectors on their bikes. My friend Toni's parents told her she couldn't ride downtown with me because she'd have to cross railroad tracks and they feared she'd get her tires caught in the tracks, panic, sit there and be hit by a train. We rolled our eyes at this absurd scenario, but never doubted the wisdom of two little girls on bikes driving around town by themselves until dusk.
Nowadays parents are cautioned not to give stuffed animals with any parts that could possibly come loose to any child under the age of three. Even a ribbon around a stuffed dog's neck is verboten. In my day, babies got teddy bears with hard plastic eyes that could easily come loose, or cheap stuffed monkeys or clowns with glued-on felt noses and mouths that came off within a week. Dolls with tiny bows, shoes and buttons that slipped off in baby's hands and fit easily into tiny mouths were given to toddlers with regularity. Tin dollhouses with sharp edges and corners were popular children's toys for girls; boys frequently got chemistry sets with chemicals dangerous enough to cause corrosion or explosions. Skaters didn't wear helmets, knee pads or elbow pads. Toy trains and cars were painted with lead paint. BB guns were common and tiny BB-sized holes in house, school and car windows were, too.
Sharp-ended lawn darts were thrown haphazardly around back yards during countless children's birthday parties and undersupervised Fourth of July parties to such bad effect that they were banned in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1980s. Wet plastic Slip 'n Slides ran down lawns and driveways across the nation as children hurled along the wet surfaces like bats out of hell, then spun out of control when they reached the ends of the long plastic sheets, scraping their way across thousands of sidewalks and into streets. Children hurled onto aggregate driveways, tearing up their knees and thighs along the way, and adults, expecting to slide like children, stopped suddenly in mid-slip after flinging themselves forward, fracturing necks and spines, sometimes resulting in paraplegia or worse.
My uncle tied thick, long rope swings around branches of tall trees that swung out over jutting hillsides so that my cousins and I could stand at the edges of cliffs, wrap our bare legs around the rope, rest our bottoms on giant knots and fly forward with ten to fifteen feet of nothing but air below our feet and above the steeply sloping hillside. The scratchy jute ropes chafed our thighs till they were raw, but a fall meant a long drop and a tumble down a rough and jagged hillside, so we clung to the rope and shouted for more pushes so we could fly far, far, until we swung directly over the gravel road fifteen, even twenty feet below.
Was the extra freedom to risk injury fun? Sure it was! I loved being on my own and getting up to whatever I wanted as a child. It did teach me a measure of independence and self-reliance, but I was built to be independent and self-reliant anyway. Do I prefer the world today, in which parents monitor their children so carefully and fear letting them out of the house so much? Well, that depends. Kids spend too much time in front of computers and TV sets while their expensive bikes sit idling in the garage. Is that really better for them than being left to their own devices in a neighborhood full of risks was a few decades ago? Probably. But I cherish my memories of riding or rollerskating around the neighborhood on my own when I was a kid, of wandering into other people's garages, apartments or houses five minutes after meeting them, of chatting them up without adults telling me what to do. There was pleasure in that, too.
I do fear we've gone too far in providing so much safe, passive, home-based entertainment for kids that they have little incentive to be creative and fight boredom by making their own fun and going beyond their front doors to see what the world has to offer. But I think a world in which parents take a more active interest in their children's lives and know what their kids are doing and where they are is not only a safer world but a friendlier world. Parents were so out of touch during my childhood that they let kids get away with a lot of bad behavior before intervening. Bullying was common and something kids were discouraged from telling adults about; if they complained they were labeled babies, whiners, snitches. Random adults, even strangers, felt free to intervene and even physically discipline other peoples' kids in public. Teachers and coaches teased and bullied students themselves. It happened all the time.
Even during my childhood, not all THAT long ago, some teachers still used corporal punishment on children because kids weren't treated with the respect that they regularly receive today. Parents and teachers often assumed that reason wouldn't work on kids, so they needed to be spanked or smacked to be kept in line. While we kids were taught that we must never talk back to adults, bullies were given free rein to mess with other kids, and teachers rarely did anything to prevent bullying beyond stopping fights that took place during school hours. Playground fist-fights were not uncommon when I was a child; there was even a certain expectation of bad behavior. Among boys, especially, there was an understanding that you'd probably get beaten up occasionally, and you just had to take your lumps and learn to fight back. Nowadays, anti-bullying policies at school make such displays of aggression rare and they're severely punished when they do take place.
Today's greater evidence of parental interest and the emphasis on care and awareness of risks does mean that there are many fewer injuries and preventable deaths. Kids may be coddled in some ways, but they're also aware that there are risks in the world to consider. Nowadays they don't have to look out as carefully, though, because authorities and laws have eliminated or ameliorated so many of the risks before they have a chance to experience them. Forty years ago, we learned by failing a lot more often. Such lessons stick better, but they can come at the cost of sometimes permanent physical or psychological injury. I still bear psychic scars from being regularly bullied for so many years as a child. Now children learn more by warning and avoidance instead of via trial by fire (or by toy iron). I think the drastic reduction in injuries is worth it, over all, but it does come at a societal cost: people expect to be protected and not to have to look out for themselves as much as they used to. I think the benefits to society are enormous, but we do lose some measure of beneficial self-reliance and wariness.
Increasingly, we're also used to being entertained and fed by others rather than entertaining ourselves and cooking at home. We have others provide food in precooked portions at restaurants or take it with us in disposable packaging so we don't even have to learn how to clean up after ourselves. We so fear the discomfort of being a little hungry that we overeat on a regular basis. We don't learn how to measure and regulate our food intake: we eat what's on our plate even when there's much too much, since restaurants routinely feed several servings of food at once in an effort to make us feel we're getting great value so that we'll pay more. Because we've relinquished so much of the responsibility for making and serving our own food, we've lost the knack of measuring out how much food we really need, so obesity is rampant. A third of the U.S. population is overweight, and another third is obese. Think of that: one out of three of us is obese. As a people we no longer expect discomfort to be a part of our lives, as our grandparents did. We seek medicines or junk food to allay aches, pains or boredom much more readily. We believe we deserve as much comfort and happiness as we can get. And I do mean "we": I hate pain and discomfort as much as the next person.
Please, don't misunderstand: I think our increased standard of living is wonderful. I love going out to eat. I love my Mac, my iPhone, movies on demand from Netflix. I'm thrilled that my daughter's schools have believed in respecting children and had extensive anti-bullying curricula. I think society has improved immeasurably both technologically and in our expectations that people all deserve to be treated fairly and kindly. But the expectation that life should generally be pleasant and pain-free used to be the worldview of none but a small segment of the extremely rich and powerful. Now we all feel like we are entitled to live as only the elite lived in the past. And that impacts us in some negative as well as positive ways.
I worry about a growing expectation that pain and effort will be exceptions rather than the rule in life, and that people shouldn't have to sacrifice to get ahead or help their families. Most of us have to do some unpleasant things every day and work harder than we might want to to accomplish most of the important things in life. While I love the increased ease and enjoyment that technological advances bring to my life, I also get satisfaction from doing things for myself, from making things from scratch, from putting effort into life. Increasingly, I grow frustrated with people's willingness to just get by with "good enough." Making an effort to do things well, to go a little further, shows respect, both or oneself and for others.
Life is so much easier in so many ways than it used to be, and we're insulated from so much effort. That's great if we channel the energy we save into being more helpful, productive, happy or engaged with others. But if it just means that we stop recognizing the beauty and benefits that come with effort, with challenge, with risk, then we've lost something valuable. I don't want us to get burned, but I'd like us to remember how to use the iron, how to cook a meal, how to write a real letter, if for no other reason than to recognize that there is an art to each of these, so that we can respect and appreciate those who do such things for us.
How do we learn to be aware and careful and to avoid unnecessary risks while still moving outside our homes and exploring the world? How do we enjoy our wonderful technological advances without being so completely seduced by them that we stop interacting with other people or the world directly? How do we restore our pleasure in making our own toys, food or entertainment sometimes so we can balance out the passive pleasures of life with the active ones? That's our challenge: to balance risks and freedoms with responsibility and caution so that we engage with the world and the people in it. We don't want to lose the lessons of the past or miss out on the life-enhancing innovations of the present. How do we synthesize the knowledge that comes from experience with the knowledge that comes from superior technology? How to we embrace our blessings without taking them for granted?
Of course, what made that toy so exciting was that it was an actual working model of a grown-up's object, not some namby-pamby knock-off without enough power to do anything but look cute. It was lightweight and adorable, which made it cute and seemingly child-friendly in a time when kids were expected to get injured occasionally, and burns, broken bones and various childhood diseases (German measles, chicken pox) were par for the course.
Around that time, a popular gift for young girls was Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven. Oh, how I wanted one! With the power of a single ordinary lightbulb, one could bake tiny, flat cakes made from miniature boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix and ice them with Betty Crocker frosting mix. Every time I saw one on TV, my heart ached with longing. With the magical Easy-Bake Oven, I could be the perfect miniature hostess, baking my own cakes in my own room and arranging magnificent tea parties for the friends who would all want to come to my place after school to share in the joys of flat, goopy, unevenly baked chemical-infused cakes. As I lay in bed at night, I imagined the imaginary row of tiny Betty Crocker boxes in the corner of my room above my imaginary oven, and thought how happy I would be if only I had a lightbulb-based appliance to call my own.
I asked my mother for one for my birthday. She wasn't concerned with how easy it was to burn oneself on the tiny pans. After all, she'd not only bought me the tiny iron but had also given me a Creepy Crawlers set with die-cast molds that cooked Plastigoop into little rubbery flowers and bugs over a hot plate on which I burnt my fingers time and time again. I started the fires in our fireplace and lit candles on my own as far back as I can remember. I did heavy yardwork and housework and cleaned with smelly chemicals from an early age. It's not like I was kept from physical risk. No, the obvious hazards of the toy were no issue; the problem was with the high cost of the tiny cake mixes. My mother wisely pointed out that for the price of two tiny cakes we could buy a full-sized cake mix to bake in the kitchen, or make a better one from scratch for less money, and we could frost it with homemade frosting that was much cheaper AND tastier than the stuff that came in the box. And since Mom and I baked together often, and my grandmother and aunt let me bake in their kitchens as well, it wasn't as if I couldn't bake a whole cake pretty much any time I wanted anyway. Damn. My mother's frugality made perfect sense, but I still longed for another dangerous appliance of my very own with which I could make real cakes that I could serve to real kids without any adult interference.
Happily, it wasn't long before I was having friends over for after-school omelettes, frying up sombrero sandwiches for them or baking things on my own in an empty house with some regularity. My mother usually got home an hour or two after I did, but sometimes stayed later in the afternoons for meetings or had musical rehearsals to attend, so I often had the house to myself before dinnertime from the age of six-and-a-half onwards. This was unusual as most of my friends' mothers didn't work outside the house, but kids were so often on their own at that time that nobody batted an eye. Kids were frequently off by themselves for hours at a time outside, the only stipulation being that they come home for dinner. Four-year-olds were told not to cross the street but to stay on the block when they left the house, but they were routinely out of visual range of their parents or grandparents as they rode tricycles up and down the block or ran to play in each others' houses and apartments with parents often left unaware that kids other than their own were even on the premises.
At age six my friend Diane and I would walk to the railroad tracks nearby and look for old bottles. We'd gather them in grocery bags, then carry them a few blocks away to the liquor store to trade them in for the five-cents-a-bottle deposit money. Little girls walking alone along railroad tracks attracted no attention at all. When my mother wanted a new carton of cigarettes on a Saturday afternoon while entertaining guests, she'd write a note to that effect, give me three dollars and send me down to that same liquor store; I'd trade the money and the note for a new carton of cigs, no questions asked. When I was just a little older and I wanted to ride my bike down to the center of town after school, I'd just leave a note on the kitchen counter and hop on my bike; nobody wore bike helmets and almost no-one had lights or reflectors on their bikes. My friend Toni's parents told her she couldn't ride downtown with me because she'd have to cross railroad tracks and they feared she'd get her tires caught in the tracks, panic, sit there and be hit by a train. We rolled our eyes at this absurd scenario, but never doubted the wisdom of two little girls on bikes driving around town by themselves until dusk.
Nowadays parents are cautioned not to give stuffed animals with any parts that could possibly come loose to any child under the age of three. Even a ribbon around a stuffed dog's neck is verboten. In my day, babies got teddy bears with hard plastic eyes that could easily come loose, or cheap stuffed monkeys or clowns with glued-on felt noses and mouths that came off within a week. Dolls with tiny bows, shoes and buttons that slipped off in baby's hands and fit easily into tiny mouths were given to toddlers with regularity. Tin dollhouses with sharp edges and corners were popular children's toys for girls; boys frequently got chemistry sets with chemicals dangerous enough to cause corrosion or explosions. Skaters didn't wear helmets, knee pads or elbow pads. Toy trains and cars were painted with lead paint. BB guns were common and tiny BB-sized holes in house, school and car windows were, too.
Sharp-ended lawn darts were thrown haphazardly around back yards during countless children's birthday parties and undersupervised Fourth of July parties to such bad effect that they were banned in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1980s. Wet plastic Slip 'n Slides ran down lawns and driveways across the nation as children hurled along the wet surfaces like bats out of hell, then spun out of control when they reached the ends of the long plastic sheets, scraping their way across thousands of sidewalks and into streets. Children hurled onto aggregate driveways, tearing up their knees and thighs along the way, and adults, expecting to slide like children, stopped suddenly in mid-slip after flinging themselves forward, fracturing necks and spines, sometimes resulting in paraplegia or worse.
My uncle tied thick, long rope swings around branches of tall trees that swung out over jutting hillsides so that my cousins and I could stand at the edges of cliffs, wrap our bare legs around the rope, rest our bottoms on giant knots and fly forward with ten to fifteen feet of nothing but air below our feet and above the steeply sloping hillside. The scratchy jute ropes chafed our thighs till they were raw, but a fall meant a long drop and a tumble down a rough and jagged hillside, so we clung to the rope and shouted for more pushes so we could fly far, far, until we swung directly over the gravel road fifteen, even twenty feet below.
Was the extra freedom to risk injury fun? Sure it was! I loved being on my own and getting up to whatever I wanted as a child. It did teach me a measure of independence and self-reliance, but I was built to be independent and self-reliant anyway. Do I prefer the world today, in which parents monitor their children so carefully and fear letting them out of the house so much? Well, that depends. Kids spend too much time in front of computers and TV sets while their expensive bikes sit idling in the garage. Is that really better for them than being left to their own devices in a neighborhood full of risks was a few decades ago? Probably. But I cherish my memories of riding or rollerskating around the neighborhood on my own when I was a kid, of wandering into other people's garages, apartments or houses five minutes after meeting them, of chatting them up without adults telling me what to do. There was pleasure in that, too.
I do fear we've gone too far in providing so much safe, passive, home-based entertainment for kids that they have little incentive to be creative and fight boredom by making their own fun and going beyond their front doors to see what the world has to offer. But I think a world in which parents take a more active interest in their children's lives and know what their kids are doing and where they are is not only a safer world but a friendlier world. Parents were so out of touch during my childhood that they let kids get away with a lot of bad behavior before intervening. Bullying was common and something kids were discouraged from telling adults about; if they complained they were labeled babies, whiners, snitches. Random adults, even strangers, felt free to intervene and even physically discipline other peoples' kids in public. Teachers and coaches teased and bullied students themselves. It happened all the time.
Even during my childhood, not all THAT long ago, some teachers still used corporal punishment on children because kids weren't treated with the respect that they regularly receive today. Parents and teachers often assumed that reason wouldn't work on kids, so they needed to be spanked or smacked to be kept in line. While we kids were taught that we must never talk back to adults, bullies were given free rein to mess with other kids, and teachers rarely did anything to prevent bullying beyond stopping fights that took place during school hours. Playground fist-fights were not uncommon when I was a child; there was even a certain expectation of bad behavior. Among boys, especially, there was an understanding that you'd probably get beaten up occasionally, and you just had to take your lumps and learn to fight back. Nowadays, anti-bullying policies at school make such displays of aggression rare and they're severely punished when they do take place.
Today's greater evidence of parental interest and the emphasis on care and awareness of risks does mean that there are many fewer injuries and preventable deaths. Kids may be coddled in some ways, but they're also aware that there are risks in the world to consider. Nowadays they don't have to look out as carefully, though, because authorities and laws have eliminated or ameliorated so many of the risks before they have a chance to experience them. Forty years ago, we learned by failing a lot more often. Such lessons stick better, but they can come at the cost of sometimes permanent physical or psychological injury. I still bear psychic scars from being regularly bullied for so many years as a child. Now children learn more by warning and avoidance instead of via trial by fire (or by toy iron). I think the drastic reduction in injuries is worth it, over all, but it does come at a societal cost: people expect to be protected and not to have to look out for themselves as much as they used to. I think the benefits to society are enormous, but we do lose some measure of beneficial self-reliance and wariness.
Increasingly, we're also used to being entertained and fed by others rather than entertaining ourselves and cooking at home. We have others provide food in precooked portions at restaurants or take it with us in disposable packaging so we don't even have to learn how to clean up after ourselves. We so fear the discomfort of being a little hungry that we overeat on a regular basis. We don't learn how to measure and regulate our food intake: we eat what's on our plate even when there's much too much, since restaurants routinely feed several servings of food at once in an effort to make us feel we're getting great value so that we'll pay more. Because we've relinquished so much of the responsibility for making and serving our own food, we've lost the knack of measuring out how much food we really need, so obesity is rampant. A third of the U.S. population is overweight, and another third is obese. Think of that: one out of three of us is obese. As a people we no longer expect discomfort to be a part of our lives, as our grandparents did. We seek medicines or junk food to allay aches, pains or boredom much more readily. We believe we deserve as much comfort and happiness as we can get. And I do mean "we": I hate pain and discomfort as much as the next person.
Please, don't misunderstand: I think our increased standard of living is wonderful. I love going out to eat. I love my Mac, my iPhone, movies on demand from Netflix. I'm thrilled that my daughter's schools have believed in respecting children and had extensive anti-bullying curricula. I think society has improved immeasurably both technologically and in our expectations that people all deserve to be treated fairly and kindly. But the expectation that life should generally be pleasant and pain-free used to be the worldview of none but a small segment of the extremely rich and powerful. Now we all feel like we are entitled to live as only the elite lived in the past. And that impacts us in some negative as well as positive ways.
I worry about a growing expectation that pain and effort will be exceptions rather than the rule in life, and that people shouldn't have to sacrifice to get ahead or help their families. Most of us have to do some unpleasant things every day and work harder than we might want to to accomplish most of the important things in life. While I love the increased ease and enjoyment that technological advances bring to my life, I also get satisfaction from doing things for myself, from making things from scratch, from putting effort into life. Increasingly, I grow frustrated with people's willingness to just get by with "good enough." Making an effort to do things well, to go a little further, shows respect, both or oneself and for others.
Life is so much easier in so many ways than it used to be, and we're insulated from so much effort. That's great if we channel the energy we save into being more helpful, productive, happy or engaged with others. But if it just means that we stop recognizing the beauty and benefits that come with effort, with challenge, with risk, then we've lost something valuable. I don't want us to get burned, but I'd like us to remember how to use the iron, how to cook a meal, how to write a real letter, if for no other reason than to recognize that there is an art to each of these, so that we can respect and appreciate those who do such things for us.
How do we learn to be aware and careful and to avoid unnecessary risks while still moving outside our homes and exploring the world? How do we enjoy our wonderful technological advances without being so completely seduced by them that we stop interacting with other people or the world directly? How do we restore our pleasure in making our own toys, food or entertainment sometimes so we can balance out the passive pleasures of life with the active ones? That's our challenge: to balance risks and freedoms with responsibility and caution so that we engage with the world and the people in it. We don't want to lose the lessons of the past or miss out on the life-enhancing innovations of the present. How do we synthesize the knowledge that comes from experience with the knowledge that comes from superior technology? How to we embrace our blessings without taking them for granted?
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Gatsby Is Still Great
One of the greatest of my recent pleasures was revisiting a classic novel from the past and finding it to be just as wonderfully written as I remembered. I read three of Shakespeare's plays with my daughter this summer, but none gave me as much enjoyment as rereading The Great Gatsby with her did.
We read much of it aloud and had to stop often to savor a particularly perfect phrase or laugh at F. Scott Fitzgerald's crisp wit. Lily and I were impressed by his ability to produce an indelible image of a character in just a few words, by how swiftly the story moved along, and by how much we hated to put the book down. We talked several times about the irony of his keen insights into the shallowness of those who lived only for booze and parties, since Fitzgerald himself was famous for drinking himself into a stupor and hosting wild parties that lasted for days with his charming and intelligent but ultimately unstable wife, Zelda. We wondered how he could skewer the excesses of decadent party people in such potent and eviscerating words and yet have spent so much of is own brief life living just as those characters did, ultimately drinking his health away by his thirties and dying of a heart attack at 44.
My mother taught Gatsby to her high school English classes for 37 years and never tired of it, and she referred to the novel often at home until it, like a few dozen other classics, felt like an old friend at our house. Phrases and images from it peppered our conversations as far back as I can remember. Such an old reliable work of literature it seemed to me that I was surprised to find it so fresh and pungent when I read it again this summer. What power Gatsby's yearning still has for me! How compellingly it drew me and my daughter in, making us hunger to know the characters better, making us want to move in closer to gawk at Gatsby's world while at the same time wanting to turn away and not see the sad underpinnings of his desire, not wanting to crowd him or use him for our pleasure as nearly everyone else in the book did, with hardly a thank you or a backward glance.
The arrogance inherent in the present helps us to believe that we are inventing a crisp, unstoppable modernity right now, this minute, that the past is stale and only today is fresh. But so much recent novel writing strikes me as mannered, stifling and overworked, even old fashioned in its preciousness, posturing and desire to shock. Fitzgerald's masterpiece, published in 1925, feels more modern and lively than almost anything I've read in the past decade.
We read much of it aloud and had to stop often to savor a particularly perfect phrase or laugh at F. Scott Fitzgerald's crisp wit. Lily and I were impressed by his ability to produce an indelible image of a character in just a few words, by how swiftly the story moved along, and by how much we hated to put the book down. We talked several times about the irony of his keen insights into the shallowness of those who lived only for booze and parties, since Fitzgerald himself was famous for drinking himself into a stupor and hosting wild parties that lasted for days with his charming and intelligent but ultimately unstable wife, Zelda. We wondered how he could skewer the excesses of decadent party people in such potent and eviscerating words and yet have spent so much of is own brief life living just as those characters did, ultimately drinking his health away by his thirties and dying of a heart attack at 44.
My mother taught Gatsby to her high school English classes for 37 years and never tired of it, and she referred to the novel often at home until it, like a few dozen other classics, felt like an old friend at our house. Phrases and images from it peppered our conversations as far back as I can remember. Such an old reliable work of literature it seemed to me that I was surprised to find it so fresh and pungent when I read it again this summer. What power Gatsby's yearning still has for me! How compellingly it drew me and my daughter in, making us hunger to know the characters better, making us want to move in closer to gawk at Gatsby's world while at the same time wanting to turn away and not see the sad underpinnings of his desire, not wanting to crowd him or use him for our pleasure as nearly everyone else in the book did, with hardly a thank you or a backward glance.
The arrogance inherent in the present helps us to believe that we are inventing a crisp, unstoppable modernity right now, this minute, that the past is stale and only today is fresh. But so much recent novel writing strikes me as mannered, stifling and overworked, even old fashioned in its preciousness, posturing and desire to shock. Fitzgerald's masterpiece, published in 1925, feels more modern and lively than almost anything I've read in the past decade.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Low-Key Lustre, Elegant Beyond Price
My latest vintage magazine adventure has been with the June 1966 issue of McCall's, the long-running popular women's magazine. It's been fun to compare it to the Good Housekeeping magazine from 1960 I wrote about a few weeks ago. In just that six-year span, the advertising copy grew much more florid, less concerned with keeping a perfect household and more concerned with personal sex appeal. I don't know if it was the popularization of the birth control pill in the early 1960s that caused the subsequent cultural obsession with sexiness that sprouted in the 1960s and 1970s (as many social historians posit), but the move from wanting a sparkling oven and a perfect meatloaf for one's husband and children to the quest for bouncier hair, more luxurious nails and more kissable lips for an unnamed man is quite pronounced.
I love the over-the-top ad copy: "Suddenly everyone's all eyes (and sighs!) over [Max Factor] Shadow Creme. The new glowy-eyed eye shadow that slips on like a dream, because it's cream!" I also like the way adjectives morph into ad-copy-ready verbs to try to add youth and vigor to a phrase: with dreamy creamy eye shadow one can "sleek on a shy narrow line of color." Or how about the nail polish which will apparently change your life with its heart-stopping, eye-catching beauty? You don't just brush it on, you slither it on. Not slather, slither: apply it sexily, with the thrilling undulations of a snake. Yes, with Revlon Crystalline Nail Enamel, "Even before you slither it on, you'll see the big difference. . . . On your nails it glows with a soft, low-key lustre. A quiet kind of chic. You'll be smitten with the deep, velvety quality of it. The plushness. The cover. The delicate—but definite—color. Elegant beyond price." I'm practically having palpitations just thinking of it.
Not getting enough action, you brown-haired beauties? The problem is with your makeup: you need Clairol Flicker Stick. "This is only for the brunettes who rather enjoy having their hair mussed occasionally. The very first lip gloss for Brunettes Only. Give your lips a lick of something new." That's wildly suggestive compared to the ads of 1960 and before. Another rather bold ad features a photo of a man in a business suit with his head and one hand both cropped away and his other hand holding a telephone. The focus of the photo is the man's crotch, which is shown splay-legged sitting on an office chair. The headline? "If your husband doesn't lift anything heavier than a telephone, why does he need Jockey support?"
The ad goes on to say that "During a normal day, a man makes a thousand moves that can put sudden strain on areas that require male support. Climbing stairs. Running to catch a bus. Bending. Reaching. Simple things, yet they are the very reasons why every man needs the support and protection that only Jockey brand briefs are designed to provide." Otherwise, what, he might get a wedgie? Or lose his ability to sire a child because he ran up the stairs too fast? They seem to imply that his very manhood is in peril should he wear the wrong underpants.
The fashion emphasis by 1966 is on younger, fresher, livelier styles. The concern isn't so much about using the latest and greatest (and shortly-thereafter-to-be-determined dangerous) drugs, pesticides and cleaning agents around the house in an effort to be more chemically controlled and germ-free, as had been so popular in 1960. By 1966 there was more of a desire to spend money and time on disposable products that made living more convenient and fun. The hedonism index rises dramatically during the 1960s, and there's more of a desire to consume new, specialized products and live for today without concern for the cost or waste involved. There's definitely a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of jonesing for the latest, hippest disposable new thing.
For example, paper napkins and towels and coordinating tissues and became popular, and having one's scented, dyed toilet paper match one's scented, dyed facial tissues was a must. Ads offered bright, bold bath towels with garish flower power colors and patterns, then showed coordinating Lady Scott bathroom and facial tissue with colored flowers printed onto the paper in Bluebell Blue, Camellia Pink, Fern Green and Antique Gold. It's a "color explosion in towels and napkins." "Pop! go the colors of Scotkins—newly pepped-up to bring zing to table settings" and "gay bordered towels." Don't forget to "Scheme your tables with the vibrant new designs in the first cushioned paper placemats by Scott." Scheme your tables?
Best of all, "Color explosion flashes into fashion with the paper dress!" For $1 plus a 25 cent handling fee you could buy a paper shift dress in a red and white bandana print or a black and white op-art geometric design. Original "Paper-Caper" dresses, still folded in their original envelopes, are now quite collectible; one of the bandana print is currently available on eBay for $25; another auction house is asking $150 for the op-art version. "Dashingly different at dances or perfectly packaged at picnics. Won't last forever . . who cares! Wear it for kicks—then give it the air." Campbell's soup cashed in on the disposable dress craze while demonstrating their pop art cred: they sold their own Andy Warhol-inspired paper "Souper Dress" printed with images of Campbell's soup cans. Each sold for $1 plus two Campbell's Soup labels in the sixties. Want one now? Ebay recently listed one with a starting price of $749; it sold for $1,125 tonight. Missed out on that one? Don't worry; another has been listed for sale for $2,000.
Paper dresses were available in very simple styles, which were much like most fabric dresses of the day. Most women did at least some home sewing in an effort to economize, and almost all girls were taught to sew and cook in school, so essential were those skills deemed for females of the day. Many dresses were shapeless, boxy shifts, easy for any home sewer to whip up with a pattern bought at the nearest department store. My mother, an accomplished seamstress and knitter, never stopped with simple shifts; she made me wonderful pintucked blouses, perfectly tailored little coats, intricately cable-knitted sweaters and lovely dresses. We spent many happy hours in all the department stores' sewing sections from as far back as I can remember. We visited the fabric departments of five-and-dimes like TG&Y (which was affectionately nicknamed "Toys, Garbage and Yardage"), popular stores like Mervyn's and Penney's, and slightly tonier establishments like the Bay Area's Emporium-Capwell stores. Every good department store had a fabric section with a wide variety of materials, notions and patterns. Nowadays it's hard to find fabric stores that aren't superstore fabric-and-craft chains, and sewing is a niche market attended to by specialty stores only.
I don't mean to get too personal, but do you remember spray deodorant? Wet and smelly, it got all over everything, spewed fluorocarbons into the air and ended up wasting a lot of product due to overspray, but it was oh, so popular in the sixties and seventies. But how do you market something like that to women? Like this: "Slim, trim, utterly feminine, hardly bitter than your hand . . . new cosmetic RIGHT GUARD in the compact container created just for you." "Elegant . . . easy to hold, Right Guard is always the perfect personal deodorant because nothing touches you but the spray itself." What a prissy little product, huh? And for those not-so-fresh moments that can't be discussed in polite company, there was Quest, "a deodorant only for women." It was a powder that "makes girdles easier to slip into," among other things.
Having a separate female version of a product with prettier packaging was very popular: all sorts of spray cans and discreet boxes featured what looked like miniature wallpaper designs, floral themes and delicately drawn feminine profiles of wispy women who appeared unaware that they were being watched while they sniffed daisies (which are rather stinky flowers, actually).
I wish I could still send a quarter to Kotex for the fact-packed booklet titled "Tampons for Moderns." One can only imagine the bouncy, well-groomed young women in the line drawings that must have illustrated the booklet, which I see in my mind's eye as having a turquoise cover bearing a confident-looking brunette wearing a fresh white dress. (Such products are always advertised by women in white to emphasize their fresh, clean, pure quality and the idea that you won't be the unclean mess you've been made to think you are if you'll just use their products.) The booklet must have read a lot like the brochures and booklets I got at school during the seventies, full of "gee, it's great to be a woman!" ad copy that played up the ease with which one could stay well-groomed, pretty and presentable even when afflicted by the horror of the condition that could barely be hinted at but which every female experienced. A "really, it's not so bad!" tone lay behind every phrase and the subtle instructional nature of each conversational paragraph was supposed to allay concerns. I think it actually emphasized the unmentionable quality of the subject matter: this stuff is so important and secret, the text implied, you need official instruction books to deal with what every woman from time immemorial has gone through—but we still can't address any of it head-on.
Before reading this magazine I'd forgotten just how popular hairpieces were in the sixties. They were quite common accessories and supplemented many women's wardrobes, often with rather ridiculous results. Remember, many women still went to the hairdresser for weekly perms, blow-outs, cuts and curls and slept with their hair in hard plastic or itchy metal-and-nylon brush curlers or pincurls every night, spraying their coifs afresh with new coats of sticky Aqua Net hairspray each morning and avoiding washing their hair for as long as possible between beauty parlor visits. Adding fluffy, braided, curly, straight or poufy switches, falls or wiglets (don't you love that word?) to the mix wasn't a big stretch. Long hairpieces, braided or twisted, or fluffy poufs added onto the top or back of a hairdo weren't uncommon; teasing hair up into domes, small head hillocks or B-52-large beehive cones was a regular thing. I remember women with hair that rose a good four to six inches above their heads and never moved, no matter what the weather did. Women only entered swimming pools without bathing caps in movies; public pools wouldn't allow a woman or girl to swim unless a rubber cap, often covered in ridiculous colored rubber "petals" that came off and floated in the water, completely covered her head.
Of course, a women's magazine couldn't be simply about making oneself prettier for one's man. A good housewife also had to feed him (using lots of prepared food products) and heat or chill the leftovers in appliances that came in sexy new colors and promised easy-care features. The Admiral Duplex Freezer/Refrigerator ad features eight—count 'em! eight!—exclamation points on one page, so you know it must have been a sensational product. With this fabulous appliance's automatic ice maker, there's "no filling, no slopping, no mess."
But what to feed a hungry man on a hot summer night when you don't have time to whip up a big batch of sloppy joes with Shilling's or Lawry's sloppy joe mix? Meat-laden salads! When housewives of the sixties grew tired of the same old coleslaw, Best Foods Mayonnaise had the answer: hollow out a cabbage, scallop the edges of the emptied cabbage head (with kitchen shears, apparently) and pack it to the brim with coleslaw into which you've mixed canned tuna. Or maybe you'd prefer to dollop cottage cheese, celery seeds, shredded carrots and green peppers into your coleslaw? Cottage cheese was plopped on everything in the sixties and seventies, as I remember. The iconic healthy breakfast depicted on TV shows or in ads always included a half-grapefruit with a mound of cottage cheese astride the fruit flesh and a maraschino cherry popped gaily on top. Why anyone would want to consume those three items at the same time was always a mystery to me. What if you're not into tuna slaw or cottage cheese and cabbage? California coleslaw includes crushed pineapple and quartered marshmallows. To wow the guests at your next picnic, serve this candy-sweet coleslaw in a cabbage cut to look like an Easter basket, complete with orange peel "bow," as shown in the ad, and you'll "perk up wilted appetites."
Of course, not every woman alive in the 1960s was a housewife. Many, like my single mother, worked, whether out of pleasure, necessity or both. But the jury was still out on whether those who didn't strictly need to work to pay the basic bills had either reason or right to do so. Paying women less than men for equivalent work because it was assumed that their work wasn't essential to their family's income was common; refusing to promote them or extend them personal credit that wasn't cosigned by a husband or other man was also an everyday thing. When my mom bought her own house with her own savings in 1970, it was quite an accomplishment and unusual among the people we knew.
This issue of McCall's has a letter related to an article about working women published in a prior issue. A reader writes of having worked steadily her whole life out of necessity, but angrily derides the choices of women who work out of a desire to serve, for career fulfillment or for personal satisfaction. "I have nothing but contempt for the wives of prosperous men who, in their own boredom and greed, take jobs away from those who really need to work." She can't see the validity of working for personal satisfaction or from a desire to help others or to extend one's world beyond one's husband's sphere. These opposing arguments played out regularly in the court of public opinion (and in courts of law) regularly throughout the next couple of decades as women fought to be allowed the same access to education, employment and advancement without respect to whether they had as much "need" to work as men.
When the woman of 1966 worked too hard and felt depressed over her inability to get ahead on the job, whether at home or out in the world of paid employment, what could she do to find the vim and vigor she needed to get through the day when her get-up-and-go and gotten up and gone? McCall's had the answer for that, too. Anacin, then a popular over-the-counter headache medicine (and still available at drugstores today), was touted as not just a pain reliever but a mood elevator in an ad with the headine "Casts away gloom, depression . . . as it relieves headache pain fast! Anacin has a combined new action that actually casts away gloom and depression as headache pain goes away in minutes. . . . [F]ortified with a special 'mood-lifter' or energizer that brightens your spirits, restores new enthusiasm and drive. With Anacin you experience remarkable all-over relief." Wow! How did this remarkable wonder drug effect such miraculous changes? What super-effective secret ingredients were at work? Anacin's remarkable active ingredients amounted to nothing more than aspirin and caffeine. Yes, taking two cheap aspirin and a few cups of coffee would "cast away gloom" and relieve headaches just as quickly.
Though I was in preschool when this magazine was published, it's interesting to me to see how vivid my memories are of so many of the subjects, products and styles presented in these pages. My sense memories of them are so clear, and the accompanying mental imagery is so strong, it makes me feel as if I'm there again. How is it that I remember these things so well?
I love the over-the-top ad copy: "Suddenly everyone's all eyes (and sighs!) over [Max Factor] Shadow Creme. The new glowy-eyed eye shadow that slips on like a dream, because it's cream!" I also like the way adjectives morph into ad-copy-ready verbs to try to add youth and vigor to a phrase: with dreamy creamy eye shadow one can "sleek on a shy narrow line of color." Or how about the nail polish which will apparently change your life with its heart-stopping, eye-catching beauty? You don't just brush it on, you slither it on. Not slather, slither: apply it sexily, with the thrilling undulations of a snake. Yes, with Revlon Crystalline Nail Enamel, "Even before you slither it on, you'll see the big difference. . . . On your nails it glows with a soft, low-key lustre. A quiet kind of chic. You'll be smitten with the deep, velvety quality of it. The plushness. The cover. The delicate—but definite—color. Elegant beyond price." I'm practically having palpitations just thinking of it.
Not getting enough action, you brown-haired beauties? The problem is with your makeup: you need Clairol Flicker Stick. "This is only for the brunettes who rather enjoy having their hair mussed occasionally. The very first lip gloss for Brunettes Only. Give your lips a lick of something new." That's wildly suggestive compared to the ads of 1960 and before. Another rather bold ad features a photo of a man in a business suit with his head and one hand both cropped away and his other hand holding a telephone. The focus of the photo is the man's crotch, which is shown splay-legged sitting on an office chair. The headline? "If your husband doesn't lift anything heavier than a telephone, why does he need Jockey support?"
The ad goes on to say that "During a normal day, a man makes a thousand moves that can put sudden strain on areas that require male support. Climbing stairs. Running to catch a bus. Bending. Reaching. Simple things, yet they are the very reasons why every man needs the support and protection that only Jockey brand briefs are designed to provide." Otherwise, what, he might get a wedgie? Or lose his ability to sire a child because he ran up the stairs too fast? They seem to imply that his very manhood is in peril should he wear the wrong underpants.
The fashion emphasis by 1966 is on younger, fresher, livelier styles. The concern isn't so much about using the latest and greatest (and shortly-thereafter-to-be-determined dangerous) drugs, pesticides and cleaning agents around the house in an effort to be more chemically controlled and germ-free, as had been so popular in 1960. By 1966 there was more of a desire to spend money and time on disposable products that made living more convenient and fun. The hedonism index rises dramatically during the 1960s, and there's more of a desire to consume new, specialized products and live for today without concern for the cost or waste involved. There's definitely a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of jonesing for the latest, hippest disposable new thing.
For example, paper napkins and towels and coordinating tissues and became popular, and having one's scented, dyed toilet paper match one's scented, dyed facial tissues was a must. Ads offered bright, bold bath towels with garish flower power colors and patterns, then showed coordinating Lady Scott bathroom and facial tissue with colored flowers printed onto the paper in Bluebell Blue, Camellia Pink, Fern Green and Antique Gold. It's a "color explosion in towels and napkins." "Pop! go the colors of Scotkins—newly pepped-up to bring zing to table settings" and "gay bordered towels." Don't forget to "Scheme your tables with the vibrant new designs in the first cushioned paper placemats by Scott." Scheme your tables?
Best of all, "Color explosion flashes into fashion with the paper dress!" For $1 plus a 25 cent handling fee you could buy a paper shift dress in a red and white bandana print or a black and white op-art geometric design. Original "Paper-Caper" dresses, still folded in their original envelopes, are now quite collectible; one of the bandana print is currently available on eBay for $25; another auction house is asking $150 for the op-art version. "Dashingly different at dances or perfectly packaged at picnics. Won't last forever . . who cares! Wear it for kicks—then give it the air." Campbell's soup cashed in on the disposable dress craze while demonstrating their pop art cred: they sold their own Andy Warhol-inspired paper "Souper Dress" printed with images of Campbell's soup cans. Each sold for $1 plus two Campbell's Soup labels in the sixties. Want one now? Ebay recently listed one with a starting price of $749; it sold for $1,125 tonight. Missed out on that one? Don't worry; another has been listed for sale for $2,000.
Paper dresses were available in very simple styles, which were much like most fabric dresses of the day. Most women did at least some home sewing in an effort to economize, and almost all girls were taught to sew and cook in school, so essential were those skills deemed for females of the day. Many dresses were shapeless, boxy shifts, easy for any home sewer to whip up with a pattern bought at the nearest department store. My mother, an accomplished seamstress and knitter, never stopped with simple shifts; she made me wonderful pintucked blouses, perfectly tailored little coats, intricately cable-knitted sweaters and lovely dresses. We spent many happy hours in all the department stores' sewing sections from as far back as I can remember. We visited the fabric departments of five-and-dimes like TG&Y (which was affectionately nicknamed "Toys, Garbage and Yardage"), popular stores like Mervyn's and Penney's, and slightly tonier establishments like the Bay Area's Emporium-Capwell stores. Every good department store had a fabric section with a wide variety of materials, notions and patterns. Nowadays it's hard to find fabric stores that aren't superstore fabric-and-craft chains, and sewing is a niche market attended to by specialty stores only.
I don't mean to get too personal, but do you remember spray deodorant? Wet and smelly, it got all over everything, spewed fluorocarbons into the air and ended up wasting a lot of product due to overspray, but it was oh, so popular in the sixties and seventies. But how do you market something like that to women? Like this: "Slim, trim, utterly feminine, hardly bitter than your hand . . . new cosmetic RIGHT GUARD in the compact container created just for you." "Elegant . . . easy to hold, Right Guard is always the perfect personal deodorant because nothing touches you but the spray itself." What a prissy little product, huh? And for those not-so-fresh moments that can't be discussed in polite company, there was Quest, "a deodorant only for women." It was a powder that "makes girdles easier to slip into," among other things.
Having a separate female version of a product with prettier packaging was very popular: all sorts of spray cans and discreet boxes featured what looked like miniature wallpaper designs, floral themes and delicately drawn feminine profiles of wispy women who appeared unaware that they were being watched while they sniffed daisies (which are rather stinky flowers, actually).
I wish I could still send a quarter to Kotex for the fact-packed booklet titled "Tampons for Moderns." One can only imagine the bouncy, well-groomed young women in the line drawings that must have illustrated the booklet, which I see in my mind's eye as having a turquoise cover bearing a confident-looking brunette wearing a fresh white dress. (Such products are always advertised by women in white to emphasize their fresh, clean, pure quality and the idea that you won't be the unclean mess you've been made to think you are if you'll just use their products.) The booklet must have read a lot like the brochures and booklets I got at school during the seventies, full of "gee, it's great to be a woman!" ad copy that played up the ease with which one could stay well-groomed, pretty and presentable even when afflicted by the horror of the condition that could barely be hinted at but which every female experienced. A "really, it's not so bad!" tone lay behind every phrase and the subtle instructional nature of each conversational paragraph was supposed to allay concerns. I think it actually emphasized the unmentionable quality of the subject matter: this stuff is so important and secret, the text implied, you need official instruction books to deal with what every woman from time immemorial has gone through—but we still can't address any of it head-on.
Before reading this magazine I'd forgotten just how popular hairpieces were in the sixties. They were quite common accessories and supplemented many women's wardrobes, often with rather ridiculous results. Remember, many women still went to the hairdresser for weekly perms, blow-outs, cuts and curls and slept with their hair in hard plastic or itchy metal-and-nylon brush curlers or pincurls every night, spraying their coifs afresh with new coats of sticky Aqua Net hairspray each morning and avoiding washing their hair for as long as possible between beauty parlor visits. Adding fluffy, braided, curly, straight or poufy switches, falls or wiglets (don't you love that word?) to the mix wasn't a big stretch. Long hairpieces, braided or twisted, or fluffy poufs added onto the top or back of a hairdo weren't uncommon; teasing hair up into domes, small head hillocks or B-52-large beehive cones was a regular thing. I remember women with hair that rose a good four to six inches above their heads and never moved, no matter what the weather did. Women only entered swimming pools without bathing caps in movies; public pools wouldn't allow a woman or girl to swim unless a rubber cap, often covered in ridiculous colored rubber "petals" that came off and floated in the water, completely covered her head.
Of course, a women's magazine couldn't be simply about making oneself prettier for one's man. A good housewife also had to feed him (using lots of prepared food products) and heat or chill the leftovers in appliances that came in sexy new colors and promised easy-care features. The Admiral Duplex Freezer/Refrigerator ad features eight—count 'em! eight!—exclamation points on one page, so you know it must have been a sensational product. With this fabulous appliance's automatic ice maker, there's "no filling, no slopping, no mess."
But what to feed a hungry man on a hot summer night when you don't have time to whip up a big batch of sloppy joes with Shilling's or Lawry's sloppy joe mix? Meat-laden salads! When housewives of the sixties grew tired of the same old coleslaw, Best Foods Mayonnaise had the answer: hollow out a cabbage, scallop the edges of the emptied cabbage head (with kitchen shears, apparently) and pack it to the brim with coleslaw into which you've mixed canned tuna. Or maybe you'd prefer to dollop cottage cheese, celery seeds, shredded carrots and green peppers into your coleslaw? Cottage cheese was plopped on everything in the sixties and seventies, as I remember. The iconic healthy breakfast depicted on TV shows or in ads always included a half-grapefruit with a mound of cottage cheese astride the fruit flesh and a maraschino cherry popped gaily on top. Why anyone would want to consume those three items at the same time was always a mystery to me. What if you're not into tuna slaw or cottage cheese and cabbage? California coleslaw includes crushed pineapple and quartered marshmallows. To wow the guests at your next picnic, serve this candy-sweet coleslaw in a cabbage cut to look like an Easter basket, complete with orange peel "bow," as shown in the ad, and you'll "perk up wilted appetites."
Of course, not every woman alive in the 1960s was a housewife. Many, like my single mother, worked, whether out of pleasure, necessity or both. But the jury was still out on whether those who didn't strictly need to work to pay the basic bills had either reason or right to do so. Paying women less than men for equivalent work because it was assumed that their work wasn't essential to their family's income was common; refusing to promote them or extend them personal credit that wasn't cosigned by a husband or other man was also an everyday thing. When my mom bought her own house with her own savings in 1970, it was quite an accomplishment and unusual among the people we knew.
This issue of McCall's has a letter related to an article about working women published in a prior issue. A reader writes of having worked steadily her whole life out of necessity, but angrily derides the choices of women who work out of a desire to serve, for career fulfillment or for personal satisfaction. "I have nothing but contempt for the wives of prosperous men who, in their own boredom and greed, take jobs away from those who really need to work." She can't see the validity of working for personal satisfaction or from a desire to help others or to extend one's world beyond one's husband's sphere. These opposing arguments played out regularly in the court of public opinion (and in courts of law) regularly throughout the next couple of decades as women fought to be allowed the same access to education, employment and advancement without respect to whether they had as much "need" to work as men.
When the woman of 1966 worked too hard and felt depressed over her inability to get ahead on the job, whether at home or out in the world of paid employment, what could she do to find the vim and vigor she needed to get through the day when her get-up-and-go and gotten up and gone? McCall's had the answer for that, too. Anacin, then a popular over-the-counter headache medicine (and still available at drugstores today), was touted as not just a pain reliever but a mood elevator in an ad with the headine "Casts away gloom, depression . . . as it relieves headache pain fast! Anacin has a combined new action that actually casts away gloom and depression as headache pain goes away in minutes. . . . [F]ortified with a special 'mood-lifter' or energizer that brightens your spirits, restores new enthusiasm and drive. With Anacin you experience remarkable all-over relief." Wow! How did this remarkable wonder drug effect such miraculous changes? What super-effective secret ingredients were at work? Anacin's remarkable active ingredients amounted to nothing more than aspirin and caffeine. Yes, taking two cheap aspirin and a few cups of coffee would "cast away gloom" and relieve headaches just as quickly.
Though I was in preschool when this magazine was published, it's interesting to me to see how vivid my memories are of so many of the subjects, products and styles presented in these pages. My sense memories of them are so clear, and the accompanying mental imagery is so strong, it makes me feel as if I'm there again. How is it that I remember these things so well?
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The Boys in the Band
Some years ago, while staying up till the wee hours while organizing something or other, I turned on the TV and flipped channels till I could find a good movie to keep me entertained while I worked. I happened to catch the beginning of a film that I'd never heard of before that night, and it turned out to be a milestone in gay-themed filmmaking, a cult classic that alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) delighted and appalled New York theatrical audiences in 1968 and then moved to the screen with the entire cast intact in 1970. That film was The Boys in the Band.
Written by openly gay playwright Mart Crowley, the play attracted celebrities and the New York in-crowd nearly instantly after it opened at a small off-Broadway theater workshop in 1968. The cast of nine male characters worked together so successfully that the whole bunch of them made the transition to the screen in 1970, which is nearly unheard of. Crowley had been a well-connected and respected but poor young writer when his play became a smash in 1968. While still a young man, he knew how the Hollywood game was played and how to jockey his success into control over the casting of the film. Working with producer Dominick Dunne he adapted his script into a screenplay and watched director William Friedkin, who also directed The French Connection and The Exorcist, lovingly keep the integrity of the play while opening it up and making it work on the screen.
It's hard to believe that the play opened off-Broadway a year before the Stonewall riots that set off the modern-day gay rights movement in New York and then swept across the country. The characters in the play, and the whole play itself, are not incidentally gay—the characters' behavior and the play's content revolve around their homosexuality. For better or worse, the characters play out, argue over and bat around gay stereotypes: the drama queen, the ultra-effeminate "nelly" fairy, and the dimwitted cowboy hustler (a likely hommage to the cowboy gigolo Joe Buck in the 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy, which was made into a remarkable film by John Schlesinger in 1969). The play also features straight-seeming butch characters who can (and do) "pass" in the outside world, and a visitor to their world who may or may not be homosexual himself.
The action takes place at a birthday party attended only by gay men who let their hair down and camp it up with some very arch and witty dialog during the first third of the film, then the party is crashed by the married former college pal of Michael, the host. A pall settles over the festivities as Michael tries to hide the orientation of himself and his guests. That is, until the party crasher brings the bigotry of the straight world into the room, and Michael realizes he's doing nobody any favors by keeping up the ruse. During the course of the evening he goes from someone who celebrates the superficial and who has spent all his time and money (and then some) on creating and maintaining a reputation and a public image, to a vindictive bully who lashes out at everyone and forces them all to scrutinize themselves with the same homophobic self-hatred he feels. He appears at first bold and unflinching in his insistence on brutal honesty, but he goes beyond honesty into verbal assault, while we see reserves of inner strength and dignity from characters we had underestimated earlier in the play. Though The Boys in the Band isn't the masterpiece that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is, I see similarities between the two in the lashing out, bullying and vindictive name-calling that alternates with total vulnerability and unexpected tenderness.
The self-loathing, high-camp hijinks, withering bitchiness and open ogling made many audience members uncomfortable, a number of homosexuals among them. Some felt the story and the characterizations were embarrassingly over-the-top and stereotyped. They thought that having the outside straight world peek in and see these characters up close would only make them disdain homosexuals even more. This is a legitimate criticism; the nasty jibes, pointed attacks, and gay-baiting that goes on among and against gay characters here is the sort of in-fighting that could encourage anti-gay bigots to become more entrenched in their bigotry when seen out of the context of a full panorama of daily life for these characters.
However, the play and film were also groundbreaking in that they depicted homosexuals as realistic, three-dimensional men with good sides and bad. Even as we watch one character try to eviscerate the others by pointing out the "gay" characteristics that make them appear weak and offensive to the straight world at large, there is also a great deal of sympathy and empathy shown among the characters under attack, and even towards the bully at times. Sometimes this tenderness is seen among characters, and sometimes it is fostered in the hearts of the audience members by the playwright as we watch people behaving badly but recognize over time how fear and self-hatred has brought them to this state.
These characters may try to hold each other up as objects of ridicule, but the strength of the dialog is that we in the audience don't buy it; with each fresh insult, we see further into the tortured souls of those who do the insulting. We see how, as modern-day sex columnist Dan Savage put it so beautifully in an audio essay about sissies on the public radio show This American Life in 2002, it is the sissies who are the bravest ones among us, for they are the ones who will not hide who they are, no matter how much scorn, derision and hate they must face as a result of their refusal to back down and play society's games. Similarly, to use another theatrical example, it is Arnold Epstein, the effeminate new recruit in the Neil Simon 1940's-era boot-camp play Biloxi Blues, who shows the greatest spine and the strongest backbone in the barracks when he does not hide what he is and is willing to take whatever punishment he is given stoically and silently so as not to diminish his honesty and integrity or let down his brothers in arms.
The situation and premise of The Boys in the Band are heightened and the campy drama is elevated for the purposes of building suspense, rather like the action in a Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill play, where the uglier side of each character is spotlighted and the flattering gauze and filters over the lenses are stripped away dramatically as characters brawl and wail. The emotional breakdowns are overblown and the bitchy catcalling is nearly constant for much of the second half of the film, which I find becomes tiresome. However, the play addresses major concerns of gay American males of the 1960s head-on: social acceptability, fear of attacks by angry or threatened straight men, how to balance a desire to be a part of a family with a desire to be true to one's nature, monogamy versus promiscuity, accepting oneself and others even if they act "gayer" or "straighter" than one is comfortable with, etc.
It is startling to remember that, at the time the play was produced, just appearing to be effeminate or spending time in the company of assumed homosexuals was enough to get a person arrested, beaten, jailed or thrown into a mental institution, thrown out of his home or job, even lobotomized or given electroshock therapy in hopes of a "cure." In 1969 the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village by gay men fighting back against police oppression was a rallying cry and gave homosexuals across the nation the strength to stand up for their rights and refuse to be beaten, threatened, intimidated, arrested or even killed just for being gay. However, anti-gay sentiment in retaliation for "uppity" gays coming out of the closet and forcing the heterosexual mainstream to acknowledge that there were homosexuals with inherent civil rights living among them also grew.
Cities like San Francisco, Miami, New York and L.A. became gay meccas that attracted thousands of young men and women, many of whom were more comfortable with their sexuality than the average closeted American homosexual and who wanted to live more openly as the people they really were. There was an air of celebration in heavily gay districts of these cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in the heady years before AIDS. It was a time when a week's worth of antibiotics could fight off most STDs, and exploring and enjoying the sexual aspects of one's homosexuality (because being a homosexual isn't all about sex) didn't amount to playing Russian Roulette with one's immune system, as it seemed to be by the early to mid-1980s. Indeed, of the nine men in the cast of the play and the film, I was shocked and disturbed to learn that five died of AIDS-related causes. This was not uncommon among gay male theatrical professionals who came of age in or before the 1980s. The numbers of brilliant Broadway and Hollywood actors, singers, dancers, directors and choreographers attacked by AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is staggering.
When the film was made in 1970, all of the actors were warned by agents and others in the industry that they were committing professional suicide by playing openly gay characters, and indeed, several were typecast and did lose work as a result of their courageous choices. Of those nine men in the cast, the one who played the most overtly effeminate, campy, nelly queen of all (and who stole the show with his remarkable and endearing performance) was Cliff Gorman. He was a married heterosexual who later won a Tony playing comedian Lenny Bruce in the play "Lenny," which went on to star Dustin Hoffman in the film version. Gorman was regularly accosted and accused of being a closeted gay on the streets of New York by both straights and gays, so believable and memorable was his performance in The Boys in the Band.
The play is very much an ensemble piece; some actors have smaller and more thankless roles with less scenery chewing, but it is clear that it was considered a collaborative effort by the cast and director and that the enormous mutual respect and comfort of the characters with each other enriched their performances and made the story resonate more with audiences than it would have otherwise. The actors saw the film and play as defining moments in their lives when they took a stand and came out (whether gay or straight) as being willing to associate themselves with gay issues by performing in such a celebrated (and among some, notorious) work of art. When one of the other actors in the play, Robert La Tourneaux, who played the cowboy gigolo, became ill with AIDS, Cliff Gorman and his wife took La Tourneaux in and looked after him in his last days.
In featurettes about the making of the play and the film on the newly released DVD of the movie, enormous affection, respect and camaraderie among cast members are all evident, as is a great respect for them by director William Friedkin. All of them knew that they were part of something groundbreaking. Those still alive to talk about it regard the show and the ensemble with great love. As Vito Russo noted in The Celluloid Closet, a fascinating documentary on gays in Hollywood, The Boys in the Band offered "the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form."
According to Wikipedia, "Critical reaction was, for the most part, cautiously favorable. Variety said it 'drags' but thought it had 'perverse interest.' Time described it as a 'humane, moving picture.' The Los Angeles Times praised it as 'unquestionably a milestone,' but ironically refused to run its ads. Among the major critics, Pauline Kael, who disliked Friedkin and panned everything he made, was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it. She also never hesitated to use the word 'fag' in her writings about the film and its characters."
Wikipedia goes on to say, "Vincent Canby of the New York Times observed, 'There is something basically unpleasant . . . about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes.'"
"In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled, 'By the time Boys was released in 1970 . . . it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism.' He called it 'a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it's aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.'" Indeed it is.
Written by openly gay playwright Mart Crowley, the play attracted celebrities and the New York in-crowd nearly instantly after it opened at a small off-Broadway theater workshop in 1968. The cast of nine male characters worked together so successfully that the whole bunch of them made the transition to the screen in 1970, which is nearly unheard of. Crowley had been a well-connected and respected but poor young writer when his play became a smash in 1968. While still a young man, he knew how the Hollywood game was played and how to jockey his success into control over the casting of the film. Working with producer Dominick Dunne he adapted his script into a screenplay and watched director William Friedkin, who also directed The French Connection and The Exorcist, lovingly keep the integrity of the play while opening it up and making it work on the screen.
It's hard to believe that the play opened off-Broadway a year before the Stonewall riots that set off the modern-day gay rights movement in New York and then swept across the country. The characters in the play, and the whole play itself, are not incidentally gay—the characters' behavior and the play's content revolve around their homosexuality. For better or worse, the characters play out, argue over and bat around gay stereotypes: the drama queen, the ultra-effeminate "nelly" fairy, and the dimwitted cowboy hustler (a likely hommage to the cowboy gigolo Joe Buck in the 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy, which was made into a remarkable film by John Schlesinger in 1969). The play also features straight-seeming butch characters who can (and do) "pass" in the outside world, and a visitor to their world who may or may not be homosexual himself.
The action takes place at a birthday party attended only by gay men who let their hair down and camp it up with some very arch and witty dialog during the first third of the film, then the party is crashed by the married former college pal of Michael, the host. A pall settles over the festivities as Michael tries to hide the orientation of himself and his guests. That is, until the party crasher brings the bigotry of the straight world into the room, and Michael realizes he's doing nobody any favors by keeping up the ruse. During the course of the evening he goes from someone who celebrates the superficial and who has spent all his time and money (and then some) on creating and maintaining a reputation and a public image, to a vindictive bully who lashes out at everyone and forces them all to scrutinize themselves with the same homophobic self-hatred he feels. He appears at first bold and unflinching in his insistence on brutal honesty, but he goes beyond honesty into verbal assault, while we see reserves of inner strength and dignity from characters we had underestimated earlier in the play. Though The Boys in the Band isn't the masterpiece that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is, I see similarities between the two in the lashing out, bullying and vindictive name-calling that alternates with total vulnerability and unexpected tenderness.
The self-loathing, high-camp hijinks, withering bitchiness and open ogling made many audience members uncomfortable, a number of homosexuals among them. Some felt the story and the characterizations were embarrassingly over-the-top and stereotyped. They thought that having the outside straight world peek in and see these characters up close would only make them disdain homosexuals even more. This is a legitimate criticism; the nasty jibes, pointed attacks, and gay-baiting that goes on among and against gay characters here is the sort of in-fighting that could encourage anti-gay bigots to become more entrenched in their bigotry when seen out of the context of a full panorama of daily life for these characters.
However, the play and film were also groundbreaking in that they depicted homosexuals as realistic, three-dimensional men with good sides and bad. Even as we watch one character try to eviscerate the others by pointing out the "gay" characteristics that make them appear weak and offensive to the straight world at large, there is also a great deal of sympathy and empathy shown among the characters under attack, and even towards the bully at times. Sometimes this tenderness is seen among characters, and sometimes it is fostered in the hearts of the audience members by the playwright as we watch people behaving badly but recognize over time how fear and self-hatred has brought them to this state.
These characters may try to hold each other up as objects of ridicule, but the strength of the dialog is that we in the audience don't buy it; with each fresh insult, we see further into the tortured souls of those who do the insulting. We see how, as modern-day sex columnist Dan Savage put it so beautifully in an audio essay about sissies on the public radio show This American Life in 2002, it is the sissies who are the bravest ones among us, for they are the ones who will not hide who they are, no matter how much scorn, derision and hate they must face as a result of their refusal to back down and play society's games. Similarly, to use another theatrical example, it is Arnold Epstein, the effeminate new recruit in the Neil Simon 1940's-era boot-camp play Biloxi Blues, who shows the greatest spine and the strongest backbone in the barracks when he does not hide what he is and is willing to take whatever punishment he is given stoically and silently so as not to diminish his honesty and integrity or let down his brothers in arms.
The situation and premise of The Boys in the Band are heightened and the campy drama is elevated for the purposes of building suspense, rather like the action in a Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill play, where the uglier side of each character is spotlighted and the flattering gauze and filters over the lenses are stripped away dramatically as characters brawl and wail. The emotional breakdowns are overblown and the bitchy catcalling is nearly constant for much of the second half of the film, which I find becomes tiresome. However, the play addresses major concerns of gay American males of the 1960s head-on: social acceptability, fear of attacks by angry or threatened straight men, how to balance a desire to be a part of a family with a desire to be true to one's nature, monogamy versus promiscuity, accepting oneself and others even if they act "gayer" or "straighter" than one is comfortable with, etc.
It is startling to remember that, at the time the play was produced, just appearing to be effeminate or spending time in the company of assumed homosexuals was enough to get a person arrested, beaten, jailed or thrown into a mental institution, thrown out of his home or job, even lobotomized or given electroshock therapy in hopes of a "cure." In 1969 the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village by gay men fighting back against police oppression was a rallying cry and gave homosexuals across the nation the strength to stand up for their rights and refuse to be beaten, threatened, intimidated, arrested or even killed just for being gay. However, anti-gay sentiment in retaliation for "uppity" gays coming out of the closet and forcing the heterosexual mainstream to acknowledge that there were homosexuals with inherent civil rights living among them also grew.
Cities like San Francisco, Miami, New York and L.A. became gay meccas that attracted thousands of young men and women, many of whom were more comfortable with their sexuality than the average closeted American homosexual and who wanted to live more openly as the people they really were. There was an air of celebration in heavily gay districts of these cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in the heady years before AIDS. It was a time when a week's worth of antibiotics could fight off most STDs, and exploring and enjoying the sexual aspects of one's homosexuality (because being a homosexual isn't all about sex) didn't amount to playing Russian Roulette with one's immune system, as it seemed to be by the early to mid-1980s. Indeed, of the nine men in the cast of the play and the film, I was shocked and disturbed to learn that five died of AIDS-related causes. This was not uncommon among gay male theatrical professionals who came of age in or before the 1980s. The numbers of brilliant Broadway and Hollywood actors, singers, dancers, directors and choreographers attacked by AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is staggering.
When the film was made in 1970, all of the actors were warned by agents and others in the industry that they were committing professional suicide by playing openly gay characters, and indeed, several were typecast and did lose work as a result of their courageous choices. Of those nine men in the cast, the one who played the most overtly effeminate, campy, nelly queen of all (and who stole the show with his remarkable and endearing performance) was Cliff Gorman. He was a married heterosexual who later won a Tony playing comedian Lenny Bruce in the play "Lenny," which went on to star Dustin Hoffman in the film version. Gorman was regularly accosted and accused of being a closeted gay on the streets of New York by both straights and gays, so believable and memorable was his performance in The Boys in the Band.
The play is very much an ensemble piece; some actors have smaller and more thankless roles with less scenery chewing, but it is clear that it was considered a collaborative effort by the cast and director and that the enormous mutual respect and comfort of the characters with each other enriched their performances and made the story resonate more with audiences than it would have otherwise. The actors saw the film and play as defining moments in their lives when they took a stand and came out (whether gay or straight) as being willing to associate themselves with gay issues by performing in such a celebrated (and among some, notorious) work of art. When one of the other actors in the play, Robert La Tourneaux, who played the cowboy gigolo, became ill with AIDS, Cliff Gorman and his wife took La Tourneaux in and looked after him in his last days.
In featurettes about the making of the play and the film on the newly released DVD of the movie, enormous affection, respect and camaraderie among cast members are all evident, as is a great respect for them by director William Friedkin. All of them knew that they were part of something groundbreaking. Those still alive to talk about it regard the show and the ensemble with great love. As Vito Russo noted in The Celluloid Closet, a fascinating documentary on gays in Hollywood, The Boys in the Band offered "the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form."
According to Wikipedia, "Critical reaction was, for the most part, cautiously favorable. Variety said it 'drags' but thought it had 'perverse interest.' Time described it as a 'humane, moving picture.' The Los Angeles Times praised it as 'unquestionably a milestone,' but ironically refused to run its ads. Among the major critics, Pauline Kael, who disliked Friedkin and panned everything he made, was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it. She also never hesitated to use the word 'fag' in her writings about the film and its characters."
Wikipedia goes on to say, "Vincent Canby of the New York Times observed, 'There is something basically unpleasant . . . about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes.'"
"In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled, 'By the time Boys was released in 1970 . . . it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism.' He called it 'a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it's aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.'" Indeed it is.
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