My San Francisco Dongucation

Every little girl remembers her first glimpse of a real live adult male peen. 

If she’s lucky, it was an innocent and accidental encounter with her dad or older brother — a slipped towel or unlocked bathroom door, perhaps. If she’s less fortunate, it was a flasher on the subway or something far worse that precipitated years of trauma and therapy.

For me, it was some random dude’s dong in San Francisco. 

Now, you wouldn’t think it would require a transcontinental flight for a 6th grader from the Bronx to peep her first real-life dick pic, but you’d be wrong because that’s exactly what it took. 

It was my first trip to the west coast, and my parents and I were visiting my Cool Young Aunt Alexis. Alexis made her own jewelry and had big, beautiful curly black hair. She looked and sounded like my mom, but seemed so alluringly different—artistic and free-spirited in stark contrast to my mother’s macabre pragmatism. She had just returned from a stint living at an ashram in India and somewhere else in the mountains near Boulder, and was now in a basement apartment in the Haight. 

“There’s San Francisco!,” my dad said as we came in over the bay for a landing. He let me sit on his lap at the window seat in the non-smoking section of the plane as he pointed out some landmarks. My parents were well-traveled, but I thought this trip was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. 

I fell asleep at dinner the first night because of the three hour time difference—my first experience in another time zone. We did all the touristy San Francisco things on that trip: drove down Lombard Street, swam in the Pacific Ocean, went to Fisherman’s Wharf, and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. 

But what do I remember most vividly as the most fascinating thing I saw that week? Well I’m glad you asked, because the answer is a drunk hippie’s wang. Unlike the other sights, I didn’t take a Polaroid of this one, but if memory serves this spontaneous attraction presented itself to me outside our hotel one morning.

My mom and I had walked down the street to get breakfast, and there on a bench was a passed-out dude. Being from NYC, I was no stranger to passed-out dudes on benches, so I thought nothing of it until I noticed that he was wearing baggy shorts and his ENTIRE humongous, pink junk was pretty much just hanging out in the breeze.

Something deep in my monkey DNA told me this was a fight-or-flight scenario, so I yanked my mother’s purse and leaned into her side. 

“MOM!” I whisper-hissed. “I can see that man’s penis!” 

My 43 year-old mother was unfazed and had never been particulary attached to her only daughter’s innocence. A Bronx-born orphan and scrapper from youth, not to mention a medical doctor, the woman had seen her share of dicks by this time and was decidedly circumspect.

She put her arm around my shoulder protectively and seamlessly steered us in the other direction. “Uch, Feh!” she shuddered in Yiddish under her breath, “Don’t look.” Of course the ONLY thing I wanted to do was look, and I was disappointed that my traveling companion didn’t share my enthusiasm.

“Remember this moment, Elizabeth,” she said when we had given the man and his genitals a sufficiently wide berth. “Because the fact is you won’t be able to forget it even if you want to.”

As with so much else, she was absolutely right.

The Fridge Inventory

Home economics is not my mother’s strong suit. Technically she knows how to sew and cook, although I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw her do either. I’ve seen her water house plants and shuffle piles of papers and other junk from one surface to the next, but that’s about it.

When she’s home, which isn’t often, my mom’s preferred position is sitting on the couch as pictured below, in various mismatched flowing house garments, “finishing one little work thing” or “working on a talk” or “responding to emails because I’m leaving for Rwanda on Monday.”

But the one realm in which my mom retains a stereotypical Jewish mom vibe is by informing me in excruciating detail of every single item that’s in the refrigerator and available for consumption. 

Some of this inventory, she typically warns, “might not be good anymore,” and indeed this week I discovered a hunk of strawberry cheesecake that was here the last time I visited from Alaska and had now developed a thick layer of penicillin on top of it. I am told to discard such things as I find them in the green compost baggies that are now “the law in New York City, if you can believe that!” 

But not before I am made to know the identity and origin of each item of food and drink, catalogued in excruciating detail:

There’s a fruit salad from the farmer’s market with little cut up apricots and currants, and also heirloom tomatoes that are too delicate to sell in a regular store because they can’t survive a ride in a truck. There’s a chicken cutlet procured on a “foraging” mission to a deli in Washington Heights. There is “delicious mozzarella” from Arthur Avenue. And spicy hummus from the farmer’s market too. There are also gluten free brownies and M&Ms in the freezer. Also Coffee Mate. Also Diet Peach Snapple. Also cheddar cheese from the farmer’s market. Do you know about farmer’s markets? They’re “all the rage.” But you can’t get strawberries there anymore. They’re out of season. It’s very interesting and old-fashioned! You can’t just get strawberries at the farmer’s market whenever you want! When you get older you need far fewer calories anyway.

And I’m just like, MOM. You actually don’t have to line-item every single thing that’s in this refrigerator and freezer. I’m perfectly capable of just looking inside of it and seeing what’s there. Can I make fun of you on my blog for this?

And she says “of course, you’re adorable.” No, you are. No you. No you. No you. Oh, there’s also this pepper jack cheese but it’s very spicy. I think I’m going to put out a few nuts. 

Want some nuts?

Mom Macabre

"Oh my GOD," she whispers under her breath. "Look at this one. This one was just a baby." Her green eyes, a mirror image of mine, grow wide as she leans in and squints at the tiny headstone. "You know, Elizabeth," her voice descends to that somber register and tone she takes when she's about to drop literal science. "Babies used to die all the time before there were vaccines and antibiotics." 

I'm paying rapt attention. I conjure a vivid image in my nine year-old mind: a woman who looks like Mary from later-season Little House on the Prairie. A doctor making house calls at a cabin in the woods. A fire in the wood stove. A blizzard raging outside. The mother wailing as she rocks back and forth in a wooden chair, begging the doctor to save her febrile infant.

"See, right there," she points. "It says right there: May 6, 1894- April 11,1895. She wasn't even one year old." She clucks her tongue and shakes her head as we wander among the headstones of another old east coast cemetery, dry brown November leaves and acorns crunching underfoot, hunting for the most tragic cases we can find.

My mom's fascination with death was as much a fixture of my childhood as a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies might be in a more conventional household. It was just something my mom did: thought about death, talked about death, worked around death. It was part of who she was. 

Death was to be feared and avoided, but it was never to be buried or ignored. It was to be discussed. Acknowledged. Thought about. Revered, almost.

She'd watched both her parents die of cancer; lived with her senile Yiddish-only speaking grandmother for a year; was abandoned by her biological family; and placed in foster care with complete strangers all before she turned 13. 

She wanted to be a nurse, but her high school guidance counselor encouraged her to go to medical school. So she had, abandoning a PhD in chemistry to become an internist and then a psychiatrist. She was depressed and anxious when I was young, and constantly working to overcome her childhood traumas.

"Are you scared of dying?" I asked her recently. It was probably the millionth question I'd asked her about death in the course of my lifetime.

“Not at all," she answered, definitive. "I always assumed I would die young, like my mother. I never thought I would live to this age. So I sort of look at every year of living as improbable and remarkable." 

My mom isn't on social media and doesn't care about Mother's Day. But I still want to thank her for working so hard on her mental health. She had such a shit childhood, and worked so hard to recover from it with no modeling and no roadmap. I know how much I'm winging this mom thing, and my mom was winging it even more, with her hands kind of tied behind her back, psychologically speaking. 

This was someone who thought she invented grilled cheese and that she was the only person who farted and just generally had no one to answer her questions about anything. She made up explanations for stuff as she went along, and had to figure out lots of very basic things on her own. She’s still completely addicted to chocolate, she claims because people kept bringing it after her mother's funeral and eating it comforted her.

There's an old joke that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, but not for my mom. For my mom, there are three certainties in life: death, chocolate, and cemetery tourism.

In Retrospect, I Kind of Question My Parents' Decision to Take Me to See the Silence of the Lambs in the Theater

The Riverdale Twin movie theater at 257th Street and Riverdale Avenue in the Bronx was the kind of place that doesn't exist anymore in most places in the country, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

An independent two-screen movie theater in a grungy strip mall, the Riverdale Twin had a big, 20-foot sign on a metal pole in the parking lot that featured the movie titles. Like someone had to literally go up there with a ladder and a grabber-pole thingie every few weeks and change the names of the movies, giant red plastic letter by giant red plastic letter. 

Invariably some letters were broken, missing, or upside down, so the sign looked like this: 

NOM PLAYING: THE B3EAKFAST CLU8

Even in February of 1991--when I was 13 years old--the Riverdale Twin was hanging on by a literal thread. The seats were shabby and worn with springs poking through in places, and the carpet was a greasy blue-gray wall-to-wall mat with decades-old gum ground into it. The floors were so sticky they felt like they'd been shellacked with wet glue. The whole place smelled like buttered popcorn-flavored industrial antiseptic.

The people working there regarded you with a marked disinterest. The teenage girls at the window could not have cared less how old you were or what any movie was rated. The guy taking the tickets was halfway out of a halfway house, and halfway asleep on his feet. 

You had to call an answering machine to hear the movie times, and the woman on the recording shouted all of them at you in a tone of voice that sounded annoyed. Like even though the message was pre-recorded, and you were supposed to call the machine, she was pissed at you for calling. The candy and popcorn were really cheap. 

I loved it.

My parents liked it too. Once in awhile we'd go there to catch a movie, the three of us. I was an only child, and my parents treated me somewhat like a partial-equal. They had high expectations but very few rules, if that makes sense. They definitely weren't into censorship. They didn't actively try to expose me to shocking or inappropriate media, but they also made very little effort to prevent me from accessing it, and occasionally they inadvertently abetted it.

That's what happened, I think, with The Silence of the Lambs.

In retrospect, I appreciated my parents' leeway a lot, and practice a version of it with my own kids. Still, once you have your own kids, you can't help but Monday Morning quarterback certain parental decisions. It's inevitable, and so inevitably I kind of question my parents' decision to take me to see The Silence of the Lambs when I was 13 years old.

Let's recall some of the more memorable themes and scenes from this film: a cross-dressing serial killer named Buffalo Bill skins his female victims' corpses to make a coat out of human hide. Buffalo Bill also puts his dick between his knees and dances around after kidnapping a Senator's daughter and throwing her down a well. Then he yells at her to PUT THE LOTION IN THE BASKET OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN. 

The guy that's helping to catch Buffalo Bill is a maniac, cannibalistic serial killer shrink who bites off a cop's face and tells a young female FBI agent that he "can smell her cunt," and that he once ate someone's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. The film ends with a lesson in forensic entomology amid a hail of gunfire.

On the way out, we ran into a boy who lived in my neighborhood named Dino. Dino was there with a group of other tweens and teens. I didn't know him well and we went to different schools, but I saw him at the park from time to time, and we'd struck up a flirtation. 

Dino was super cheesy, but there was something about him I liked. His confident swagger in his fake leather jacket; his heavy cologne; his bad-boy cigarette habit and prepubescent Justin Bieber/Karate Kid mustache. We'd even kissed behind a swing on the playground, I think.

Anyway, the minute I saw Dino, I knew nothing could be more horrifying than encountering a juvenile delinquent whose tongue had been in your mouth at the movie theater with your parents. It was too late to pretend I wasn't with them. Dino looked back and forth from me to them a few times with a look that said I was the exact appropriate level of embarrassed for myself, which was a lot.

And this, let me tell you, was much scarier than The Silence of the Lambs. How could my parents have risked subjecting me to this? I will NOT make the same mistake.

The Riverdale Twin may be long gone along with 27% of the collagen in my face, but serial killing cannibal shrinks or not, I will make sure I drop my kids OFF at the movies after age 12.

A Dudebro I Once Tried and Failed to Bang Became a Priest, Because of Course He Did

I'm not ashamed to admit that romantic rejection was high on my list of special skills from puberty onward. I tended to pursue fruitless dalliances with dudebros who were ambivalent about me at best, and wholly rejecting at worst, to the exclusion of many booger-eaters and the occasional gem enticed by my well-honed feminine wiles.

I recently learned that one of the aforementioned dudebros whose bones I tried to jump out of boredom (and who was definitively having less than none of me) grew up to be a priest, because of course he did. 

I feel like this is a metaphor for my many failings in love.

Let's be clear: I haven't seen or spoken to this guy in 20 years. In fact, I think the last time I saw him was in 1998 when I tried and failed to make out with him; and even then I barely knew the fellow. He was from the Deep South and I was/am from the Bronx, so I suspect he was not accustomed to a somewhat forward Jewish Jezebel. But he had a beard and long hair and was into the outdoors, and thus proved irresistible to me at the time. (Even then, he looked like Jesus).

I don't presume to conclude that I am the sole reason he took a vow of celibacy and committed his life to God, but I can't discount the possibility. For all I know, it was that moment on a lawn in New Hampshire when I moved in for a kiss and he recoiled in horror that led this man to say to himself, "you know what, this is horrible, and I never want to deal with any of this awkwardness ever again. I think I shall become a priest!"

Yes, I realize this is giving myself a highly narcissistic level of credit for the impact I've had on the life of a relative stranger. But it's often the briefest moments that unexpectedly lead us to our most consequential life choices, isn't it? 

Any priest can tell you that.
 
I'd need the records to be sure, but I am low-key convinced this guy's admissions essay to seminary contained the following question: "when did you know you wanted to become a priest?," and the answer was: "when some girl from New York City tried to stick her tongue in my mouth."

Stock photo of rando priest: not actual dudebro in question.

That Time My Mom Threw a Book Down the Garbage Chute Because "C*nt"

Last week at our parent-teacher conference, Geoff and I spoke with Paige’s third-grade teacher about the difference between knowing how to read words and actually understanding content. This conversation unexpectedly brought to mind—and forgive my vulgarity—“cunts” and “erect penises.”

Of course it did, you’re saying. Hang on, hang on. Don't judge yet. Let me explain.

My parents were what I would generously call “lax” about censorship. They didn’t pay much attention to what I read or watched on TV, I think because they were both too busy working, and simply didn’t care to pick that particular battle. My mom, orphaned by age 11, also lacked a robust model of parental discipline, but even she had her limits, as I came to learn.

Every corner of my parents’ NYC apartment was cluttered with books, and I always managed to unearth the most scandalous and age-inappropriate material from their vast library. Right around Paige’s age, I was captivated by a medical thriller called “Fever,” by Robin Cook. The plot centers on a prestigious cancer researcher in Boston and his 12 year-old daughter who develops leukemia thanks to the dumping of toxic chemicals by an evil corporation, which the researcher later challenges in a David and Goliath/Erin Brockovich-type battle between Good and Evil. 

The opening scene was vivid: the daughter falls ill one winter morning with an uncontrollable nosebleed in the family’s kitchen, shortly before the researcher and his young, attractive wife (the daughter’s step-mother I think) emerge from bed for the day. 

And here is where my question came up (so to speak). I will never forget this sentence, which is seared into my brain forever: “She slid her hand under the covers and encountered an erect penis. 'What's this,?' she murmured." 

"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM??" I shouted from the next room, as I was often wont to do. “What does 'encountered an erect penis' mean?"

"What do you think it means?," my mom asked rhetorically and with a marked disinterest. I had an idea, and didn't pursue the matter further, as my mother seemed content to let me read a medical thriller that contained incidental references to sex.

What she was not okay with, however, was a collection of genuine erotica called "The Pearl," which I found in a similar fashion not long after I finished the leukemia/erect penis book.

"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM?? What's a 'cunt?'" I yelled at the top of my lungs.

This was a bridge too far.

"What the hell are you reading?," my mom demanded, marching into the living room from my dad's office, where if memory serves she was working on a talk or a grant proposal. 

I flashed her the battered cover of "The Pearl: A Journal of Voluptuous Reading: The Underground Magazine of Victorian England."

"Give me that," she said curtly. Snatching the book from my hand, she opened the front door to our apartment, walked down the hallway to the incinerator room, and deposited "The Pearl" down the nine-story high garbage chute.

The end of my mother's long censorship fuse had been reached, and it was her 10 year-old daughter screaming for a definition of the word "cunt."

You Can't Tell My Mom Jack Shit

"Mom, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!" I shouted. I hoped my eyes had deceived me from my vantage point down the hall in the living room, but when I ventured into her bedroom for a closer look, my worst suspicions were confirmed.

My mother was digging around in one of her many, many junk stashes for (what else) some junk, but she was standing on the white handle of a step stool--i.e. not even an actual step on the step stool--to do it. 

My two friends on whose children's behalf she was foraging for clothes and toy crap were duly horrified. (See Fig. 2: my mom's junk stash #5,088 pared down and reorganized slightly by yours truly).

"You're scaring me," said one of my friends. "I can't let this happen on my watch," said the other. 

"What?! I do this all the time!," she exclaimed kicking aside the stool and then climbing instead on top of that dresser thing to delve even further into the garbage cave above, as if that were a better option.

"Seriously, please don't tell me that," I said with my head in my hands. I reminded her that she has osteoperosis and is inevitably going to injure herself. She's finally stopped texting and walking at the same time, at least, and claims that doing Tai Chi is helping her balance. 

"But do you really need to tempt fate by misusing a step stool?" I asked. She accused me of painting her as old and frail to which I responded, "YOU ARE OLD AND FRAIL!!!"

Really I should not have been surprised. After all, this was the same person who stands on leather-surfaced dining room chairs in high heels (she's finally stopped wearing those, at least), and who once peed in the kitchen sink. She was late for work, and had to take a call on her way out. In a time before cordless phones or cell phones, naturally it made sense to squat over the kitchen sink to pee rather than tell the person she'd call back later.

"What?!," she'd said at the time in the same voice she used to defend her ridiculous step-stool climbing. "Urine is sterile!" 

Seriously, you cannot tell my mother jack shit.

Fig. 1: My mom trying her best to break a bone or two, despite the intervention of a horrified friend.

Fig. 2: Junk stash #5,088

Worst. Honeymoon. EVER!

Be it nature or nurture, I come from a long line of cynics, non-romantics, and people who roll their eyes at tradition and sentiment. I didn't appreciate the true extent of my lineage, however, until I heard the full story of my parents' "honeymoon" just this week.

I knew my parents were married in late November, in a dry, administrative ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan, marked with a plain gold(ish?) band my mom picked out at a stall in China Town. I also knew their "honeymoon" had been a long weekend away north of the city. Sounds romantic-ish, albeit practical.

What I didn't realize, however, was that their honeymoon had been in Tarrytown, New York, included two of my uncles, and yielded a framed picture of the headless horseman as the only souvenir.  

"Wait . . . Jake and Kenny came with you guys? On your honeymoon?" I asked my mom incredulously. My dad, Nick, is the middle of three brothers, and he's always been close to his older brother Jake and especially his younger brother, Kenny. "Do you understand how fucking weird that is?!"

"Well they didn't stay in the same ROOM with us!" My mom laughed. Thank God for small favors. "Plus, we went to Tarrytown!" 

Wait. Tarrytown? In Westchester? Home of Ichabod Crane, Sleepy Hollow, and the Headless Horseman and otherwise a bedroom community accessible by Metro North from Grand Central Station? 

My mind was racing.

"Wait . . .  Tarrytown? In Westchester? Home of Ichabod Crane, Sleepy Hollow, and the Headless Horseman and otherwise a bedroom community accessible by Metro North from Grand Central Station?!" I yelled.

"Yeah," my mom responded with a shrug in her thick Bronx accent. "I got a pictchah of the headless horseman for a souvenieah!" Again my brain searched frantically for data.

Oh My God. The one in the bathroom!

You do realize, I told her, that what you are describing is the worst honeymoon ever. And that's coming from someone who got married between the credenza and the coffee table in her in-law's living room, spent her own wedding night in a hotel on Long Island waiting to attend someone else's extremely fancy wedding the very next day, and didn't even go on a honeymoon at all.

So long story short, my parents went to a random suburb of New York City in winter for their honeymoon with my uncles for company, and returned with a picture of a headless beast carrying a flaming pumpkin on a horse. A picture that they then hung on the wall of their bathroom, and that literally haunted every shit I ever took as a child.

There's the secret, I suppose, to a long and happy marriage.

My Mom is Cooler Than Me, Part One Zillion

The shoes alone prove it (See Fig. 1). What 71 year-old grandma wears shoes like this? Granted they are extra supportive to help her not fall all over the place, which she has always done, just now with more terrifying consequences. 

But these kicks are fresh.

Also, Francine emerged from the ladies room in the food court of Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo on Sunday to inform me that a full-grown man--who at least outwardly did not appear to be in any phase of transition to another gender--had been using the ladies room at the same time.

I asked if she was uncomfortable and/or if she brought her AK-47 to defend herself against restroom predation, and she said no to both questions. "We're in a post-gender society now," she added with a shrug. "A man wants to use the ladies room? What do I care?"

She also has a good perspective on aging, as reflected in the following text exchange (Fig. 2) where she was letting me know she and my dad made it safely home to their NYC apartment.

That's my mother for you. I had to move 5,000 miles away just to escape the shadow of her dopeness.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Young Misadventures in Plagiarism

There's a quote or some variant of a quote, attributed to everyone from T.S.Eliot to Oscar Wilde to Aaron Sorkin, that "good writers borrow, great writers steal." 

I've never "stolen" anything in my life. Not even the drugstore lipstick my friends loved to shoplift from a pharmacy near our high school, and certainly not words; although surely I must borrow all the time, if only subconsciously. I guess that makes me a good writer at best, but I'd rather be mediocre than a thief.

I didn't refrain from theft out of principled virtue or a delicate moral compass, necessarily, but simply because I was afraid of authority and a total rules follower. Just the thought of getting caught doing something dishonest or wrong--and certainly I would be caught--set my heart racing to the point that it was unpleasant even to contemplate such conduct, much less engage in it.

The whole kerfuffle over Trump campaign speech-writing plagiarism brought to mind the two times in my life I was accused of plagiarism. One was in junior high, and the other was in law school. I remember them so well because of how terrifying it was to be falsely accused of something and not necessarily be able to prove it. It was almost like a microscopic, childish window into wrongful conviction.

"THIS LOOKS LIKE PLAGIARISM!" I can't remember her name, but I still remember my seventh grade history teacher's angry, scarlet scrawl across the front of a paper I'd handed in about the beginning of World War II. The word "plagiarism" was extra big, and underlined perhaps ten times. 

I stared at the four-word indictment in horrified disbelief, mindlessly running my finger across the serrated edge of the paper you used with an old-school printer connected to an Apple II-E; the kind that sounded like a lawnmower, slowly regurgitated the paper in a long spool, and required you to separate it by hand, carefully tearing off the little ticker-tape margins punctured with tiny holes that connected to the printer hardware. 

My father was livid. He knew I was an imperfect person with many faults, and he wasn't afraid to point them out. But a plagiarist? No. Certainly not. 

I don't remember how the situation resolved exactly, but it involved my dad. And in the end, the teacher understood I had not plagiarized anything, which in fact I had not. Before the internet, plagiarism was both more difficult to commit and more difficult to detect; but whatever my dad said to this teacher satisfied her that my paper had been original work.

Later in law school, I was past the point of calling in my dad to defend my honor. The accusation was smaller in size, physically, and more subtle; but it was much more significant because I was in law school and not junior high. 

The adjunct professor in a class on legal writing hand-wrote on a draft pleading I'd submitted: "The language in this complaint looks very familiar. Did you use a sample?" For non-lawyers out there, "plagiarism" in the world of legal writing is sort of a different animal, simply because there are a limited number of ways to cite and discuss cases and statutes, and recite established principles of law grounded in specific words. Lawyers often rely on templates and each others' work to restate this stuff, and it's perfectly ethical and acceptable to do so. The fact that something might "look familiar" in legal writing is a given.

That being said, I had not "used a sample" beyond whatever course materials and direction were provided. Was this professor--whose name I've also managed to forget--accusing me of plagiarism? It was hard to tell, but I was determined to find out.

I sat down in the basement computer lab of my law school in Brooklyn and composed a long, indignant email, the articulate nature of which I'd hoped would serve the dual purpose of putting this guy in his place and proving I was too good a writer to resort to plagiarism. 

I don't recall what I said verbatim, but it was something along the lines of "I can't tell if you're implying I plagiarized something here, or are accusing me of plagiarism, but that's a very serious accusation. And if that what you're suggesting, I'd like to see some proof." 

He never responded. When the semester ended and I went to check my grades, I saw he'd given me an A.

Who knows why people plagiarize or are tempted to. Surely a lack of ethics and laziness both play a role, but insecurity and fear must too. People must plagiarize for the same reasons I've been tempted to cheat on math tests: I suck at math. But I just accepted that I sucked at math, rather than cheat on a math test. If you're someone as powerful as the Trumps, you can just hire a decent speech writer and then not fuck with their work product. 

Then again, we rank-and-file mortals live in a world where there are actual consequences for our mendacity. I guess if you never suffer the regular consequences of lying, and you've sailed within striking distance of the White House on a raft of lies, why stop now?

Sacred Places

I'm told the average American teenager's fondest weekend memories are of stuff like attending a high school football game or a drive-in movie, skate boarding in and around a shopping mall, or hosting a house party when their parents are out of town.

My fondest high school memories, however, are less Norman Rockwell and more Stonewall Inn. 

Most of them involve going clubbing in Greenwich Village with my mom's "work husband" Richie (right of the silver-haired lynx a.k.a. my mother), and his real husband, Jimmy, immediately to Silver Lynx's left. That's me on Richie's right, with a gnarly unibrow that I don't miss at all, and a level of collagen in my face that I miss dearly. My mom's real husband, a.k.a. my dad, is standing next to Jimmy looking like he's about to hit an open casting call for extras on Seinfeld.

Now before you go judging my mom for letting me spend my junior year of high school drinking amaretto sours and partying until 3:00 a.m. in gay dance clubs every weekend, just know she's already done the job for you. She's asked me many, many times whether this made her a neglectful mother. I assured her it didn't, because as far as I was (and am) concerned, there was no place safer or more fun for a 16 year-old girl in New York City in 1994 than a huge gay dance club.

Keep in mind too: this was a completely different era, when anyone past puberty could pretty much walk into a bar or nightclub without even being noticed, much less carded. It sounds crazy describing it now, but this was just how it was in New York City at the time. Truly, teenagers in bars and nightclubs--gay or straight--was so commonplace as to be completely uncontroversial and unremarkable. 

Our average Saturday night would start at a crappy but lively Mexican restaurant in the West Village called Banditos that catered mostly to gay men. After a few frozen margaritas (each of which was roughly the size of a pig's trough), my parents would head home to the Bronx and I would take the subway to Brooklyn Heights with Richie and Jimmy so we could get ready to go out at 11:00 p.m. 

We'd dump the contents of their entire bedroom closet out onto the bed, over which hung arty posters of Marlene Dietrich and Andy Warhol prints of Marilyn Monroe. We'd select and compare outfits like three teenage girls (even though only one of us was technically a teenage girl), jump in a cab or the train, and hit the town.

The bouncers would always look me up and down briefly and with a marked disinterest, as did all the extremely buff and well-dressed/semi-dressed club-goers. I never felt unwelcome or like an intruder, but I knew I was an outside observer peering into a world that, but for Richie and Jimmy, I would never have known existed. 

I was completely irrelevant in the best possible way.

This was a place where people came to let themselves go and be accepted for who they were; to celebrate their culture and their community; to enjoy each other's company and be together totally free of judgment. For me, too, I could relax and revel in my irrelevance, knowing no man there was leering at me or remotely interested in seeing or touching my body. I felt privileged to witness the entire scene, and lucky to have Richie and Jimmy in my life to share it with me. 

The next morning, we'd sleep until noon and then sit around in our pajamas eating eggs, drinking mimosas, and doing a post mortem on the pros and cons of the previous night's chosen venue. Sometimes we'd watch old black and white Hollywood films on Blu-Ray disc. (Blu-Rays. Oy. Remember those)?

The idea that anyone could storm into a gay dance club and murder the people inside is deeply tragic--just like all the other acts of violence committed in sacred places (or any place)--by assault rifle-wielding lunatics. Pulse in Orlando is just one more sacred place that's been defiled by our country's elevation of semi-automatic weapons over human lives. 

One doesn't typically think of a gay dance club as a sacred place. But it is. It definitely, definitely is.

Me and Jimmy, circa 1994

It Turns Out My Mom Was a Total Scrapper

So it turns out my mom was a total scrapper back in the day, which is a brand new factoid I just learned on her most recent visit here. 

Francine might look like a dried-out, cleaned-up Amy Winehouse (R.I.P.) in this 1964 prom picture from her days in foster care on Long Island, but apparently, at 5"2 and 120 lbs, my mom was prone to street brawling in the Bronx.

This subject came up while the two of us were engaged in our most favorite activity: sitting around on a living room couch, drinking vodka gimlets, and coloring in our adult coloring books. Somehow the conversation turned to physical fighting.

"I've never been in a physical fight," I told my mom, expecting to have her company in lifelong peace-keeping. "Oh, I've been in PLENTY," she offered, casually plucking a blue glitter pen from the box on the coffee table and filling in the petals of a delicate flower.

Wait. Wut. 

"You have?" I asked incredulously.

"Of course I have!" she exclaimed, glancing up from the paper with a look in her piercing green eyes that implied I had the IQ of a grapefruit. "I was an orphan in the South Bronx! I've been in some really nasty physical altercations, with both boys and girls." She continued filling in the flower's stem.

I couldn't help but detect a note of pride creeping into her voice. Of course you have, mom. Of course you have.

"Did you win?" I asked (whatever "winning" meant). 

"Yes. Every time. I remember once I got into a big fist fight with a boy in my after-school daycare program. He said his dad was a police officer and would arrest me when he came to pick him up. So I spent the rest of the afternoon afraid I was going to jail for beating up this kid. When his dad showed up and found out his son got beat up by a girl, he just shook his head and looked at him like, really?! You gotta be joking."

There were a couple of amazing things about this story. The first is that I'd never known before that my mom was a street brawler. The second is that by looking at her, you would never guess this was possible. It's hard to imagine the semi-frail, very petite 71 year-old woman who does Tai Chi on my deck in pink Crocs and brings Chardonnay to a barbeque in a plastic salad dressing shaker beating up boys like she was Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York.

But that's Francine for ya, and it's totally awesome. My mom was a street scrapper, and my eyes are misting over just thinking about it. 

I'm proud of you, Mom. Proud of ya.