Chris Has Stepped Out

Gus, The Beef Jerky King

So I had to make a road trip last week and on the way back home I took some back roads at a leisurely pace. As I was driving down a lonesome highway in the middle of nowhere I saw a scratchy old billboard advertising “Gus’s Really Good Fresh Beef Jerky 90 Miles.” Below that line, in smaller lettering, were the words “Beef Jerky, Honey, Olives, Restrooms.”

I have expressed my deep affection for such signs in a previous post long ago so I won’t repeat myself here. But I will tell you that for the next 15 minutes as I barreled along with the stereo blaring (Elliott Smith, Pointer Sisters, Steely Dan) I pondered the following:

1.    90 miles seems a long distance from one’s business to post a billboard
2.    Isn’t it contradictory of Gus to advertise his beef jerky as “fresh” since, after all, beef jerky is aged and dried and then vacuum-sealed?
3.    Are people allowed to erect and paint their own billboards, since it sure looked as if that’s exactly what Gus did?

By the time I had mentally gnawed on (not unlike eating beef jerky) these weighty questions, I had passed another of Gus’ billboards reminding me that his really good beef jerky was only 60 miles away. Not long after that was another billboard paid for by Gus letting me know that beef jerky, honey, olives and restrooms were only 30 miles away.

Two more signs and 20 minutes later, I understood that I was witnessing the work of a marketing trailblazer. In this era of online, interactive, viral, contextual and guerilla marketing, not to mention $200 million TV advertising campaigns, Gus had, with his six crappy billboards in the middle of nowhere, totally and completely convinced me that not stopping at his beef jerky shack was something I would regret until the day I died. And I don’t even eat beef jerky.

But stop I did, in a cloud of roadside dust, exactly 500 yards after I saw the final billboard proclaiming “Gus’s Really Good Fresh Beef Jerky 500 Yards.”

However modest you might imagine Gus’s Really Good Fresh Beef Jerky establishment to be, it was far more modest than that. It was a tiny cement building that appeared to be a converted gas station with bumper stickers all over the front door and, as promised for the past 90 miles, walls lined with dozens and dozens of packages of beef jerky and cheap wooden racks of olives, honey and dried fruit. There were also restrooms and, as an unadvertised bonus, you could feed Gus’ three immensely crabby chickens for 25 cents if you so chose.

The place was pretty crowded, and I jostled among my fellow travelers trying to choose between hot jerky, teriyaki jerky, elk jerky or sweet and sour jerky. I finally decided to go old school with my beef jerky selection and buy the original “cowboy” flavor.  It cost 8 bucks (three packages for $20), which seemed kind of expensive, but then again I’m no beef jerky expert and besides, I was still under the Gus’ magic marketing spell. I HAD to buy it.

I took a picture of Gus’ beef jerky empire, saluted his evil genius and drove off. About 30 minutes later, I passed a big, modern-looking store with a fancy sign advertising “the world’s best beef jerky.” Poor bastards, I thought, as I sped past. I already had my beef jerky, as did everyone else around these parts, courtesy of Gus. Why would we ever stop at this place?

I actually have a piece of Gus’ jerky sitting next to me on a plate as I write this. I tap out a paragraph, then chew, chew, chew for 10 minutes or so before going back to writing. As eating endeavors go, it’s time-consuming and a bit tiring, but it IS really good beef jerky.

The Polish-American Cultural Center

I just got back from a trip with Big G to the metro Detroit area, where we attended a Sadowski family reunion and belated 90th birthday celebration for his aunt, Sister Mary Albina. If you didn’t get the gist of that first sentence, they are Polish-American. They are from Flint. They are Catholic. It occurred to me as I observed four generations of Sadowskis moseying through the weekend before the Fourth of July what a wonderful representation they are of the 20th century American immigrant experience.

I don’t know how Flint became a magnet for Polish-American immigrants, but Big G surmises that a few Poles  somehow found themselves there, found steady work and let the relatives back in Cracow know about it. Then in no time at all, a lot of Polish people were raising their families in Flint. That’s pretty much how Grandma and Grandpa Sadowski got there.

It was fun to hear about life in Flint 50 years ago. The city was big back then – the second-largest population in the state. That is a stunning contrast to the city’s current state of desolation, crime and poverty, which the family lamented with both sadness and anger. Most of the big auto plants are shut down and boarded up, with weeds sprouting from potholes in the giant, empty parking lots. Even the check-cashing stores have closed down in Flint.

The whole neighborhood spoke Polish back when Flint was thriving (Big G didn’t learn English until he was in kindergarten) and everyone worked for General Motors, which was founded there. In fact, back in the day, almost every adult Sadowski worked on one of the GM assembly lines. Church attendance was mandatory. Or, more precisely, the idea of not going to church did not exist. Services at the local parish were conducted only in Latin and Polish, and of course all the kids attended Catholic school.

No one in Flint was rich. The houses were modest and close together. Vacations were taken by car to northern Michigan, far away from the factories. All the kids would be squished together in the back seat on the drive up. Relatives lived close to one another and helped each other out. In fact, Big G lived with his extended family -- three generations under one roof – until he was in high school.

Those are the kinds of things they talked about at the get-together because that’s what families do at reunions: talk about themselves. They recounted the family triumphs and scandals and holidays and meals.

“Do you remember grandma ever serving vegetables? I mean besides potatoes?” Big G asked one of his cousins. The cousin pursed her lips, tilted her head and thought. You could almost see the Super 8 images of Grandma Sadowski’s house in Flint flickering through her memory.

“Maybe green beans once or twice, but I don’t really recall any vegetables,” she said.

Had Grandma Sadowski been alive, she certainly would have been pleased by the evening meal we consumed at the Polish-American Cultural Center in Troy. We started with noodle soup, served with big, fluffy dinner rolls and bowls of butter. The main course included big platters of kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi filled with cheese, mashed potatoes and golumpki – cabbage leaves filled with a mixture of meat, rice and spices and covered with tomato sauce. And, since that clearly wasn’t enough food, there were also platters of roast beef. We groaned and rubbed our stomachs and then 15 minutes later helped ourselves to a big pile of chruÊciki (fried pastry covered with powdered sugar) for dessert.

Polka music blared from the boom box someone had brought. Business at the cash bar was brisk. Someone else had gone to the Dollar Store earlier in the day to pick up birthday decorations for the room. After hanging the “Happy Birthday” signs on the walls, we realized that they were missing a “p” which, as the trips to the cash bar continued, become increasingly hilarious. To recuperate from dinner and dessert, we wandered into the main hall of the Polish-American Cultural Center to look at its Hall of Fame. Did you know that Madam Curie was Polish? her maiden name was Marie Skobadowska.

They never get tired of recounting their family history  – most families never do – and I never get tired of listening. Theirs was an utterly commonplace, post World War II American immigrant upbringing. Yet it was also in many ways totally unique because it has largely disappeared and isn’t ever going to repeat itself in the same way. The Flint they knew as children is gone and they themselves have mostly assimilated and are scattered across the country. Big G still remembers a smattering of Polish; the generation after him doesn’t understand a word of it.

“We’re losing our oral traditions,” the husband of one cousin lamented as Sister Albina’s friends sang her a birthday song in Polish that none of us understood.

So it was lots of fun and bittersweet and intensely familiar, since so many of us have followed similar paths with our own immigrant families. And when, inevitably, another major family event occurs – a marriage, a birthday or a funeral – the Sadowskis will travel from wherever they live and gather near Flint once again.

Grow Old. Dress Funny. OMG!

I was recently sitting in my dentist’s office (which I affectionately call The House of Pain) when his assistant, who looks to be perhaps 15 years old, looked at me and said, “I love that hoodie you’re wearing!”

Initially I was pleased. “Thanks!” I said. “I got it at Lucky Brand Jeans.” She made one more complimentary remark then flounced off to find my dentist. He was running late, which gave me, as I stretched out in the reclining dental chair, the solitude and visual perspective to ponder what I was wearing that day: said hoodie, which had vaguely Japanese-style graphics and lettering on the back, a pair of slightly flared low-rise jeans and laceless Chuck Taylor sneakers by John Varvatos. Under the hot, harsh glare of the dentist’s lamp, I saw with frightening clarity that I, who am 43, dress like a 15-year-old.  “OMG!!!” I thought

OMG indeed. I did a quick mental inventory of the unwitting damage I had been doing to my dignity for who knows how long. Number of Lucky Brand hoodies? Four. Maybe five. Pairs of laceless Chuck Taylors? Two. Ugg boots? Check. (Though I don’t wear them outside the house.) Been to H&M recently? Yup. Attire by Juicy Couture? No, thank heavens.

The humiliation was made worse by the fact that I don’t even really know any teenagers and have no idea what they really consider fashionable. So I’m not really dressing like a 15-year-old as much as sporting some vaguely freakish and inappropriate post-baby boom interpretation of youth. Ick.

Just then my dentist came into the room. He has been presiding over my dental woes since I was an awkward eighth grader and he was a handsome young man not long out of dental school with a beautiful wife and two young girls. Once upon a time he would ask me how my music lessons were going and I would blush and try to disguise my crush on him. Now he is pushing 60 and divorced, the daughters are married and he cheerfully says things like, “It sucks to get old, doesn’t it, Chris?” as he stuffs my mouth with cotton and prepares the Novocain.

“Errefengrrubah” I respond in agreement. Then my eyes widen as I focus not on the syringe in his hand but what appears to be an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt beneath his white smock.

OMG! Him too! I spend the next several days surreptitiously studying both friends and strangers over the age of 40 to see if they too have succumbed to the same unconscious tendency to dress as if we were all still driving with a learner’s permit. What I uncovered was an epidemic of Outfits Gone Bad: leggings, sparkly flip-flops, baggy jeans, iPods, you name it. “Did you know that the Olsen twins dress just like that?” I ask a friend. “Who?” she responds distractedly, hoisting her giant handbag over one shoulder while adjusting her equally huge Chanel sunglasses.

And just how does this happen? Why do otherwise normal, respectable adults start getting old and dressing funny?  I recall a meeting I had a few years ago with a really smart brand consultant, who basically called those of us in the room (all of whom were under the age of 45) a bunch of Bruce Springsteen-Bob Dylan-loving-totally-out-of-it-dinosaurs. Perplexed by the Paris Hilton phenomenon, he asked? Teenagers aren’t. But we were sitting there scratching our heads and trying to differentiate between Paris, Lindsay, Nicole and Britney because we had jumped the shark long ago without ever realizing it.  But, he added, we shouldn’t feel too bad because it happens to every generation. “The old at some level always want to imitate the young, but young never, ever, ever want to imitate the old,” he said. That’s why I visit the Adidas store on Melrose every so often, blithely unaware that upon seeing me, six college students probably run screaming out the front door.

My assessment is that we will all dress in increasingly ridiculous attire as we get older because, like everyone in the generation before us whose ill-fitting jeans we laughed at when we were in college, it is our sartorial destiny. The only exception is my stepfather, who just turned 70 and has always been effortlessly and unwittingly hip when it comes to clothes. When he and my mother stayed at my house a few months ago, he came down the stairs for breakfast looking insanely cool in an understated yet totally glam sweat suit he had just picked up on sale. “You like it?” he asked, spreading his arms out and modeling it for us. “It’s made by some guy named Sean John.” 

The Week of Eating Dangerously

I just dumped into the garbage can two apples, some carrots, a carton of cottage cheese and a mélange of chicken and vegetables that I paid $10.99 a pound for at Whole Foods. Why? Because in the last seven days I flew from L.A. to San Francisco, then flew from San Francisco back to L.A., then flew from L.A. to Seattle, then flew from Seattle back to L.A. During that dull yet tedious jaunt, most of the healthy groceries I had purchased grew mold, went sour or otherwise disintegrated in my kitchen.

Even more disgusting than the shriveled, blackened bananas on the counter are the memories of what I did consume this past week while bouncing from various hotels and airports.

For those of you who manage to work out consistently and eat virtuously while traveling for business, let me say now that I admire you and also hate your guts. My typical business trip is an exercise in starvation followed by gorging, mini-bar lunches and late-night Mexican eaten with one hand while re-writing a speech with the other.

Let us begin with the gorging: The morning I left for Seattle, I realized that I had bought way too many strawberries and that they would certainly rot by the time I returned home. And because I was raised by people who hectored you about all the starving children in Africa when you didn’t want to eat your zucchini, I felt compelled to eat the entire lot. The jolt of Vitamin C provided by 37 large, organic strawberries was probably beneficial. However, the problem with that kind of meal is that you are hungry two hours later and since Alaska Airlines has decided that humans don’t need anything in the way of food while in their airplanes, by the time I got to the hotel in Seattle I was starving.

Desperate, I peered into the mini-bar and found my favorite hunger management solution: A bag of popcorn and a Diet Pepsi. I think most of you know this recipe, but in case you’ve never had to stay at work until 2 a.m. with vending machines as your only source of sustenance, I’ll share it. (It works equally well if you substitute pretzels for the popcorn.) Eat some popcorn and wash down with a few swigs of Diet Pepsi. Repeat until both popcorn and Diet Pepsi are gone. The carbonation in the Diet Pepsi will combine with the fluffiness of the popcorn, causing the entire mess to expand to 12 times its original volume in your gut. You’ll feel bloated as well as vaguely sick from the sudden influx of chemicals and preservatives, and within minutes your stomach will have pooched out alarmingly and unattractively over your belt. But you won’t be hungry again for at least three or four hours and the caffeine will help keep you awake.

It certainly kept my hunger at bay until dinner was served for us working stiffs doomed to work late into the night getting executives prepared for their public speaking duties. In this case, dinner was pepperoni pizza and buffalo wings and a giant bowl of lettuce next to which sat an equally large bowl of Caesar dressing. It’s hard to describe the aroma, but the sight of the pizza cheese congealing under the heat lamp was too much even for me and so I fled to the hotel bar in search of slightly better fare.

It just proves how low one has sunk when he or she heads to a bar in search of higher quality food. I pondered the menu of fried calamari, fried oysters and fried cheese and picked the only item not dunked in canola oil: Seared tuna on a bit of salad for $15. I finished the 1.5 ounces of tuna in approximately 1.5 minutes and, still hungry, looked around the bar. I spied a bowl of Chex Mix and dug my paw into it, washing it down with a so-so syrah.

If that grosses you out, you are an innocent babe when it comes to business travel cuisine. Last winter I had to get from New York City to Washington, D.C. on the train the morning after a blizzard had dumped two feet of snow along the eastern seaboard in less than a day. Miraculously, my train was still running, though due to power outages and fallen trees, what should have been a three hour trip stretched to almost nine hours. At hour seven, when I was so hungry I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to the café car and asked what was left in the kitchen. “A pastrami sandwich and some Cocoa Puffs,” the guy said. “Great,” I answered. “I’ll take it.”  And I did, paying $10 for the privilege and washing it down with Diet Pepsi.

While waiting in the Seattle airport for my delayed flight back home, I cruised through the food court, which had an inordinate number of sushi and fish restaurants. Seattle may be on the water, but IMHO only an idiot or someone with a death wish eats raw fish at an airport. I settled for the generic-looking bistro, ordering a salad, a chocolate chip cookie the size of a hubcap and a double espresso, thus ensuring that the trip would be a 100% nutritional disaster.

It isn’t all Cocoa Puffs and quesadillas when I travel, however. For those of you who have road-tripped with me on business, you know that I’ll risk the wrath of any accounting department geek in order to visit a fine dining establishment.  Ah, the memories of Craft, Esca, Lever House, Gramercy Tavern and Babbo in New York. Remember dinner at Regoulade in Paris, when I tried to order in French and told the waiter you’d like the “chest of frying pan?”  So much cholesterol, so many trans-fats, so many laughs, so many expense reports sent back to us with red exclamation points in the margins.

A Shot of Whiskey and an $11,000 Cup of Coffee

I’ve been a worker bee and part-time resident of downtown Los Angeles for several months now and I’m finally acclimated enough to have declared a few joints as my own.

The first place – Seven Grand – I found last week, just days after it opened. It is a whiskey bar on 7th Street between Grand and Olive. I read an article on it and immediately wanted to go because it conjured up images of spaghetti westerns and pensive noir films. Also because I had actually never tasted whiskey before, and how very, very lame is that?

Luckily, I had another very, very lame friend who had never tasted whiskey either and so we went together. I knew I’d like Seven Grand even before I stepped inside because the very kind bouncer asked me for my I.D. Ten minutes later, after I had finally stopped laughing, he ushered us up the stairs, which were covered in tartan-patterned carpeting. The walls were dark wood and festooned with the stuffed heads of dead animals. Oddly enough, I loved it.

The main room of Seven Grand has a long bar, an open area with a pool table and a lot more dead animal heads on the wall. Leather booths line the perimeter and the music they play is good ol’ rock and roll and R&B. Behind the bar are the shelves that hold dozens and dozens of bottles of whiskey.

Seven Grand also offers any other kind of beverage you might want, but I was there for whatever it is that whiskey-drinking people ask for. The bartender handed us a menu with long lists of whiskey, scotch and bourbon from Scotland, Ireland, the U.S. and many other places. Since I had no idea what any of it meant, I just asked him for something interesting and something Irish. He presented me with a glass containing an ounce or two of golden liquid, in which drifted a single ice cube. Sensing possible disaster, the wise young bartender also gave me a big glass of water.

Much was learned over the inaugural whiskey shot:

1.    If you want to go with me to Seven Grand sometime, be prepared to spend at least a couple of hours there, because that’s about how long it takes me to nurse my way through a single shot of whiskey.
2.    If you want to beat me at pool, wait until I’ve had maybe four sips of whiskey, since I will get a bit dizzy by the third sip, thus ruining my ability to line up my bank shots accurately.
3.    I’m not crying, it’s just that when I raise the whiskey glass to my lips, the alcohol makes my eyes burn.
4.    I actually remember the lyrics to the Doors’ “Whisky Bar.” Tease me about my dizziness and watery eyes and I’ll sing it and embarrass you in front of the patrons of Seven Grand
5.    Seven Grand, which currently serves nary a crumb of food, would do well to throw a couple of bowls of nuts or popcorn onto the bar to help cushion the blow to one’s empty stomach after drinking Irish whiskey.
6.    For the record, I did not barf.

I may have drunk only an ounce or two of whiskey in my life, but as we all know, I have gargled down an ocean (and possibly two) of coffee. I am addicted to the aroma, immune to the caffeine and forever on the hunt for a perfect coffee house serving a perfect cup of coffee.

And that’s why, when I read in the newspaper that Groundwork Coffee Company in downtown Los Angeles had acquired an $11,000 coffee maker reputed to produce the most amazing cup of Joe in the entire history of cups of Joe, I grabbed a colleague and headed right over.

We stopping by my favorite Groundwork outpost on Traction Avenue -- the one with the good sandwiches, cool art, great coffee and lowdown vibe –- only to be told that the fancy coffee maker, called the Clover, was housed in their 2nd Street branch. So we jumped back in my car, retraced our route, parked the car and burst through the door of the other Groundwork.

“Where’s the $11,000 coffee maker?” I asked the barista. She pointed to a sleek metal object about the size of a bread-making machine. I have to admit I was disappointed. I had been expecting – hoping, really – for something Willy Wonka-esque: coiled tubes, bellows, a giant temperature gauge and steam shooting out in all directions.

I wasn’t disappointed with the Clover’s coffee, however. The barista poured some beans into what appeared to be a shot glass (notice the symmetry here?), ground the coffee and then shook the grounds into the shiny Clover. Then she pushed a button and waited. After a few moments, hot coffee streamed into a white ceramic cup. I gave her a dollar and change and she handed it over to me. I sniffed then sipped. It really was excellent. Pungent yet smooth, a slightly tangy kick and really hot the way coffee is supposed to be.

The dilemma, unfortunately, is that although the 2nd Street Groundwork has the Clover, it doesn’t have the lowdown vibe like the one on Traction Street. In fact, it’s a little sterile. So this weekend I’m going to do a test run: Stop by 2nd Street, get my first cup of coffee from the Clover, then scoot over to Traction Street for cups two and three. Let me know if you want to meet me there.

13 Over Par

Well, I finally ventured beyond the gentle confines of the Majestic Golf Land driving range and played my first round of golf on Easter Sunday. It wasn’t pretty but it was a ton of fun. And so for those of you who have mocked me for taking up the game -- and that’s pretty much everyone who reads this blog -- I offer you a hearty Bronx Cheer in return.

And just to irritate you even further, I want you to know that I’ve totally gone native with the golf thing: I bought an expensive putter, golf shoes and some very cute sweaters at Lacoste. So there.
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Since most of you haven’t played golf, or at least won’t admit to it, allow me to describe the inaugural experience:

First, contrary to that well-known Mark Twain quote describing golf as a good walk spoiled (which I admit I have used on occasion), it feels more like wandering off from a family picnic at the park and getting lost among the trees. On the one hand, you know you’re not far from civilization so you’re not too worried. On the other hand, you don’t know where you are and your only source of food is your Chapstick, and so you remain highly attuned to the fact that things could go bad very quickly.

And since I am a terrible golfer right now, certain things did indeed go bad very quickly. For example, since I’m very competitive and like to do things well, not only did I want to hit the ball perfectly, I also wanted to win the round. That is idiotic, and caused me to tighten up on my tee shots and hit most of them terribly. I lost one ball in the Los Angeles River and actually drove another ball onto an entirely different fairway. Quoting W.C. Fields, I shouted, “Nothing to see here!” to a pair of bewildered golfers and quickly tried to whack the ball back onto the right fairway. I also hit a tree, almost killed a squirrel and dropped the F-bomb at least three times. The latter is neither ladylike nor appropriate golf etiquette, so I’m going to have to clean up my act.

On the other hand, I was a putting fool, twice knocking balls into the hole from more than 20 feet out. I did a little war dance on the green and waved my putter around both times. This too is neither ladylike nor appropriate golf etiquette, so I’m going to have to cut that out as well.

I’m tempted to just tell you that I shot a 40 on a nine-hole round and let you murmur in awe. However, context is everything and I’ll just get ratted out anyway,  so I’ll confess that it was a nine-hole, par 27 pitch-and-putt course. I think the longest distance to any hole was less than 150 yards, a gap I still can’t cover consistently in one shot. It was hardly an auspicious start to my golf career. Though at least there is consensus that my golf shoes are fabulous and I did win by a stroke.

Madeleine Albright and Dr. Funkenstein Say Hi

Last week I attended a lecture by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a concert by George Clinton and Parliament. And while I can’t say that the two events resembled each other -- for one, the smell of pot did not linger in the air at the Albright gig as it did during the Parliament show -- I can report that Dr. Albright and Dr. Funkenstein both offered scathing reviews of the Bush Administration and messages of hope for humanity.

Madeleine Albright has long been one of my favorite public figures. I tend to agree with her politics and as much to the point, she’s always struck me as not just incredibly smart but also incredibly sane. She’s also rightfully well-known for her wit, though she never lets her impeccable comic timing overshadow her arguments. She also can, by her own admission, leg-press 400 pounds, so she’s tough in even more ways than you’d expect.

Her presentation at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last week was largely a passionate and well-articulated criticism of the Bush Administration,  specifically its handling of the war in Iraq. President Bush has left himself and thus our country with “no good options,” she said. Our soldiers are now mired in a civil war that renders them unable to discern who is friend or foe and so “they don’t know who to shoot at until they’re shot at first, which is untenable.”

She also discussed Russia, China, Kosovo, Darfur, Sudan, New Orleans and the growing gap between the rich and the poor in this country, but inevitably kept returning to the President and the damage she believes he has done to the country’s stature and influence as a world leader. Among her accusations: destabilizing the Middle East, ceding our country’s moral authority through the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, severely straining relations with our European allies and squandering diplomatic gains of the Clinton Administration, such as those with Kim Jong Il. Infusing a bit of levity into things, Albright, who met with the Dear Leader to negotiate the discontinuation of his nuclear missile program added, “Our intelligence on him was totally wrong. They told me he was crazy and a pervert. He’s not crazy.”

I’ll admit I’ve been a George Clinton and Parliament fan a lot longer than I’ve been an Albright admirer -- pretty much since they first started cranking out the funk hits in the late 1970s. For a fair number of us of a certain age and sensibility, it takes nothing more than the first few bars of “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” or “Flashlight” to make us freeze in our tracks, drop whatever we may be holding and begin to dance.

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that the show was smokin’ -- really one of the best I’ve ever been to. The Parliament lineup has morphed over the years (alas, I’ve never seen Bootsy Collins perform as part of the band) but it’s still a huge menagerie of guitars, horns, drums, bass and synthesizers -- at least a dozen people onstage at any given time -- with the requisite outrageous costumes, dancers and freaks. There were feathers and short-shorts and a male guitarist in a wedding gown and of course George was sporting his hot pink and blue dreadlocks.

The humor that I love so much has tended to overshadow the insanely excellent and innovative musicianship of Clinton and the band. They were in full force last week, storming through an extraordinary set that spanned 30 years of rock, funk and R&B and lasted almost four hours without a break. It seemed as if they would never stop the show.

Clinton formed his bands in part as political expression in the late 1960s and there has always been a political current running between the psychedelia and bass line of his music. Just listen to Chocolate City sometime. Indeed, midway through last week’s show, one of his guitarists hoisted a banner over his head that read, “F*** Bush.” Raw, yes, but the crowd roared. And, really, though Albright’s version was far more articulate and substantive and offered actual solutions, her assessment of the President was not much different from Clinton’s. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially she said, “We have two more years of this guy and then hopefully we'll be able to begin undoing some of the damage he has wrought.” And the Dorothy Chandler crowd was no less noisy in its approval of that sentiment than the Parliament audience.

Both Madeleine and George in their very different ways also communicate a fundamental belief that the world can become a better place. As Albright told the crowd, her deep commitment to this country and its people was formed when, upon arriving as a young Czech immigrant, she found herself wholly and unequivocally accepted. Since then she has always wanted to give something back and believes that while the world’s problems are extraordinarily difficult, not all of them are intractable. In other words, there is hope. George’s version may seem of another planet and surely incorporates the word “booty” much more frequently, but there really is a consistency. Ironically, hardly anyone has had their words and music sampled as heavily by hip hop artists and rappers, yet his music has never been about guns and misogyny. His is a language of pleasure, but also of empowerment and faith in the human spirit. As George himself has said -- and I expect Madeleine would concur -- “You don’t need the bullet when you’ve got the ballot.”

The Retiring Life

It’s been almost five years since I moved into my house in Menlo Park and despite the fact that I’m now spending the majority of my time in Los Angeles, I’ve decided to keep this place. It doesn’t make the most economic sense but, frankly, I don’t care. I really like the house and the neighborhood will make a better place than most to live when I retire. Why am I so sure about that? Because of the approximately 200 people who live here, the vast majority are in their 60s and 70s and so I have a lot of reliable firsthand research.

Four of us kids who are in our 40s happen to live just a few houses apart and from time to time we stand under the oak tree in the middle of our street  and discuss this topic.

Nick and Dave live three doors down and bought their house a year before I moved in. Gary lives across the street and has, incredibly, lived here since the development was built 20 years ago when he was just out of college. We were all attracted by the views, the lack of crime, our low-maintenance houses, the utter quiet and the close proximity to both Palo Alto and San Francisco. Gary says he was young and clueless when he bought his house and Nick, Dave and I agree that we were so terrorized by the price of our homes that it wasn’t until after we moved in that we noticed other key details, such as the fact that we were living in what was essentially a retirement community.

But none of us has any regrets. And I’ve learned a lot about growing old by living in this neighborhood.

For example, I’ve learned that if you have a bit of luck and a good investment plan, your retirement really can be one long vacation. A lot of my older neighbors travel often to exotic places or have another house somewhere else in the desert or at the beach or in the mountains. And when they’re around they’re either pulling golf clubs out of their cars after an afternoon round or talking about their painting or cooking classes or the book they’re writing. Suffice it to say that a lot of them are having way more fun than any of us and they’re totally unrepentant about it. It’s something to aspire to.

And if my neighbors are any indicator, we’ll all still be trying to stay in some sort of decent shape when we’re old. There’s a handful of them who play tennis religiously a few times a week. The community tennis court is around the corner from my house and almost every Saturday morning I can hear the steady poink poink poink of the tennis ball getting hit back and forth across the net. It’s a comforting sound, punctuated occasionally by screams of anguish as someone hits a backhand wide or gets nailed in the gut by a brutal volley. The rest of my neighbors just walk -- like fiends. They’re the walkingest bunch of people I’ve ever seen in my life. As soon as the sun comes up there’s at least a half-dozen of them storming around the neighborhood wearing big, puffy New Balance walking sneakers. And the parade of walkers, all wearing sun hats, continues all day long.

Moreover, my neighbors prove that most of us will try desperately to keep ourselves together physically as long as possible. I have one neighbor who looks to be in his late 70s and who makes his way past my house a few mornings a week. Everything about his demeanor and outfit indicates that he’s out for a run. Except that he is bent in the shape of a backwards “C” and really can’t move his legs any higher or faster than a shuffle. It makes my heart squeeze tight for some reason  -- fear? dread? -- every time I see him but I don’t do anything except pick up my newspaper from the driveway and say “good morning.”

And then there’s the inevitable point where you simply can’t maintain yourself physically anymore. Houses don’t come on the market very often in my neighborhood but when they do it’s almost always for the same reason: The owners are simply too old and frail to live there independently anymore and they are moving into an assisted living facility. Or they died. Most often it is the husband who passes away first. Some of the wives stay in the neighborhood. I’ll see them walking in the morning, only one when there used to be two. Others move, the prospect of living alone in that house unbearable. The kids manage the sale and usually a recently retired couple in their 60s buys it. That’s the cycle.

It’s sobering, how life ends. If you live in a more typical neighborhood it’s easy to ignore but this is my neighborhood and so I see it more often and thus can’t help thinking about it sometimes.

Nick and Dave and Gary and I might consider moving because of this generational gap, but interestingly enough, we’ve all kind of dug in. Nick and Dave gutted their house and remodeled it so spectacularly and so beyond the price point of the neighborhood I can’t see how they can ever leave. And Gary last year bought the place next to his and is working on the architectural plans to combine them into one giant mirror-image house. It’s as cheerily and defiantly ridiculous as it sounds and the result will be a 5,000-square-foot bachelor party palace, with plenty of room for a pool table, foosball, the screening room, the spa and the massive chef’s kitchen.  The entire neighborhood is waiting in great anticipation for construction to begin because it’s Gary who throws the raucous neighborhood Christmas party at his house every year. And as most of you know I’ve redone a lot of my house and that work continues.

So we’re here. We all joke that in 40 years we’ll all roll our wheelchairs down the hill, right into the very new, very luxurious assisted living center across the street from Stanford University, where two of our neighbors recently moved. Until then, I have to say that I’ll probably live my life a bit differently than I would have otherwise if I hadn’t moved into this neighborhood. I’ll try to retire earlier, for sure. I’ll try to have as much fun and as many adventures as I possibly can for as long as I can. Because even if life is long, it’s too short.

Get a Job

So I was talking this week to a friend of mine whose daughter is graduating from college in June. I asked him if she was going to look for work or go to grad school. “I think it’s going to be grad school, since she wants to delay having to get a job as long as possible,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow, but only on the inside, since my Life Rule #32 is to never comment on how my friends raise their children, seeing as how I’ve only raised a dog. But if Life Rule #32 didn’t exist, I would have said something along the lines of, “Get a job.” Because this kid, who I like a lot and is smart and kind, has never really worked. Sure, she’s had a few housesitting gigs and maybe she did some chores around the house when she was younger. But she’s never actually filled out an application and then a W-4 and then showed up somewhere on a Saturday to cast her lot with a bunch of strangers and learn how to work the cash register or the meat slicer. And that’s too bad.

LIke most of you reading this, I’ve had a lot of jobs since I was a kid. Heck, some of us had those jobs together. And I gotta say, however mundane and poorly paid those jobs were, and however ill-equipped or overly qualified we were when we had them, each without fail provided some seriously good times and excellent life lessons.

My first job was a paper route at age 12. I got up at 5 a.m. seven days a week to deliver the San Francisco Chronicle on a Schwinn Varsity 10-speed that was way too big for me. Sound horrible? You would be so wrong. I would ride that bike in the dark quiet of the morning, a transistor radio attached to the handlebars with duct tape, singing along at the top of my lungs to free-form FM and flipping papers left and right with no one to bother me.

I had that job for two years and this is what I learned: Some jobs pay way better than others even though the jobs require the same skill level and experience (which, when you’re 12, is approximately zero in both departments). Compared to baby-sitting, washing cars or anything else you could do at that age to earn cash, the paper route paid a fortune. I earned about $120 a month including tips, more than enough for me to buy all the Elton John and Stevie Wonder albums I wanted and to join a private tennis club and pay the monthly dues myself. (See, even in grammar school I was a snob.)

I also learned how to apply teamwork and ingenuity to do my job faster, better and more efficiently in order to have more time to goof off -- a skill that serves everyone well in adulthood. I accomplished this by cutting a deal with a friend of mine that involved us surreptitiously using his older brother’s motorcycle, rather than our bicycles, to deliver our newspapers a few mornings a week. This reduced our “workday” by approximately 75%  without sacrificing quality. And since we didn’t own helmets and only vaguely understood the workings of a motorcycle, it could have also cut our life spans by an even bigger percentage. Our mothers never knew. Until now.

Many of you know that I seriously considered going to culinary school to become a chef and worked in a restaurant during high school and college. Like everyone else, I started out by doing the prep work, a job that began as the sun came up. I would stand on a damp concrete floor in front of a freezing cold stainless steel countertop and dice approximately eight million carrots, crack 40 million eggs and peel 8 billion potatoes. I eventually worked my way up to running the breakfast shift and working on the dinner line a few nights a week. It took me about three months to realize that cooking professionally was hideously grueling work and that it wasn’t the career for me. However, I kept the job a long time despite that, and this is what I learned: The workplace is, basically, improv theater -- comedy, drama, musical, tragedy or a combination thereof depending on where you are -- and you really should try to enjoy the show and also learn from it.

Case in point: The head chef at the restaurant where I worked was a beady-eyed guy named Bobby. He was maybe five-foot-two, built like a bowling ball and had a serious coke habit, often doing lines off the top of his desk in his tiny office near the walk-in freezer to energize himself for the dinner rush. Unfortunately the drugs also exacerbated his foul temper, general sense of imperiousness and loathing of the wait staff. (Bobby was a strong advocate of the traditional social order in restaurants dictating that the kitchen staff, or the “back of the house” will show only impatience and contempt toward the “front of the house” and vice versa. Not that this kept a lot of them from sleeping with one another, but that is another story for another time.)

All of this came to a head one night when a waiter that Bobby particularly hated dared to take one step into the kitchen to ask about an order that was slow in coming up. Bobby picked up the foot-long fork we used to turn hunks of meat on the grill, whirled around, and plunged it into the waiter’s calf. This is the precise moment I learned how to arch my eyebrow on the inside. The waiter was carted off to the hospital for a tetanus shot, Bobby retreated momentarily to his tiny office and I continued to sauté mushrooms.

I also learned at the restaurant that you will sometimes be rewarded in ways you can’t anticipate. Work is a funny place and people do funny things and sometimes it ends up in your favor. You shouldn’t wait for it to happen, but at some point it will -- probably more than once in your career.

For example, after I had graduated from college and was starving to death on my reporter salary, my mom called  to tell me that a mysterious, legal-looking envelope had arrived at her house with my name on it. I went over to take a look and when I opened the envelope I saw a check made out to me in an amount equal to about six months of my take-home pay at that time. Apparently, the managers of the restaurant had been skimming money from the waiters’ tips for years and eventually had been caught. Unbeknownst to me, there had been litigation and since I, like everyone else in the “back of the house” had been paid a percentage of the tips each week, I was reimbursed for my stolen wages as part of the case. I bought a futon and a stereo, paid my rent, took a vacation and got my car fixed with the money.

These are just a few of the many things I learned from my early jobs. But probably the most important thing I learned is how much fun it is, when you’re much older, to continue performing the many inane and largely useless skills you learned along the way. I can still crack six eggs at a time, ignite really big fires on the stove without blowing up the house and I am very comfortable with sharp knives. I can also toss your newspaper onto your porch without hitting your front door and I could probably do it even while riding a motorcycle.

Uncle Fidel and Me

So the Cuban government released a video on Monday of the ailing Fidel Castro having a meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Predictably, as I was paying for some groceries on Wednesday, the cashier looked at my name on the check and said, “I see your uncle Fidel is still hanging in there and causing trouble.”

For those of you who also share a surname with a communist dictator, the episode I describe is likely to be very familiar. For those of you who don’t, let me illuminate.

I was born in 1964, just a few years after Castro overthrew Batista and the U.S. was defeated in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Thus through a quirky combination of parentage, timing and geopolitics, my last name has always resonated in a very specific way with a fairly large swath of the population. Their visceral response has been surprisingly consistent over the past four decades: about two parts nonsense and one part confusion with just the tiniest dash of hostility. And this of course  has caused me to react to my own name in a very specific way that I’m sure my parents never intended.

I can’t remember ever not hearing Uncle Fidel jokes, which of course means I was hearing them before I knew who Fidel Castro was. I was not a mensa tot. I was watching Sesame Street in kindergarten, not reading the op-ed page of The New York Times. And so I admit I wasn’t as fully informed as I might have been about the cold war buildup and the maneuverings between the U.S., Cuba and the Soviet Union that were going on around that time.

So I asked my father why I had never met my Uncle Fidel. My Puerto Rican father, who was more than a little irritated by the political and cultural ignorance of the joke, and that the butt of the joke was his six-year-old. “Tell them you’re PUERTO RICAN, not Cuban,” he told me.  Unfortunately, declaring that I was PUERTO RICAN caused a second wave of confusion and nonsense. My father and his family had black hair, brown skin and riveting blue-green eyes. And, well, you know what I look like. As they say on Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others.

But back to Uncle Fidel. I have heard that joke approximately 14 billion times. At this point I’m so bored with it I can’t even muster a polite smile. What I do still find interesting is that with almost 100% consistency over the decades, the people who say it 1) find it to be a huge yuk and 2) assume they were the first to think of it. THEY laugh. Hysterically.

What also has been consistent is that many while people react negatively to the name, they are as fuzzy on the political details as I was in kindergarten. Case in point: People have been giving me newspaper headlines about Fidel Castro for years, often rearranging the words to make them funnier. When I was in college, Castro and the U.S. were slap-fighting over one thing or another and there was a spate of headlines, which my roommates taped to the door of my dorm room. The doctored headlines were very clever and so I left them up. Then I began to notice that some people in my building were becoming a bit standoffish, averting their gaze in the elevator and walking past me in the hallway without smiling. Something was going on; I just couldn’t think of what it could be. Until a friend of mine suggested I take down the headlines. “The new freshmen think you’re a communist and they’re scared of you," she said.

And I did I mention a scootch of hostility, yes? A few years ago I received a letter at work from an angry customer. His problems with one of the company’s services had in his opinion become intractable and his interactions with our customer care staff unbearable. He ranted and raved about our stupid company, our stupid services and our stupid employees. At the end of the letter, he had signed his name and then added: “P.S. Nice job in Cuba, asshole.”

Much more recently, I was on the phone trying to confirm an order I had placed with a company. I had stated my name to the customer care person at least four times without getting her to accurately repeat it and knew it was time to resort to the dreaded but surefire way to achieve clarity:

Me: Castro

She: Casper?

Me: No, Castro

She: Castor?

Me: CASTRO! C-A-S-T-R-O!

She: Craspo?

Me: (Sighing) No. Castro...Like Fidel

She: Oh, Castro!...Oh...Oh my. It must be hard having such a...a...shameful last name.

And so on. In so many variations. And whenever he is in the news it only escalates. The cumulative effect is that I have always kept tabs on Uncle Fidel. Which of course is ridiculous since my connection to him is really no different from yours. And yet after a lifetime of constantly being reminded of him, I can’t help it. I see his name in the newspaper, I read the article. I see him on TV, I watch. And now that he’s old and sick and no longer in control, with so many people  watching, waiting and in many cases hoping, I find myself curious. I’ve spent a lifetime with this guy. When he’s finally gone, how will people react to my -- our -- name? And will there finally come a time where they don’t react at all?

Inconceivable! I Finally Met Wally Shawn

I am a huge Wally Shawn fan and have been since high school. It’s not really a common thing, to be a huge Wally Shawn fan, unless you are well into middle age, have enjoyed a certain type of aesthetically privileged upbringing and are at least a second-generation New Yorker. I am none of these things. But as I said, I’m a fan. A huge fan.

A lot of you know this about me and almost all of you think it’s weird. Even I think it’s weird, but I can’t help myself. Wally is chubby. Wally is bald. Wally speaks with lispy whine and looks like a gnome or a frog, depending on who you ask. And, after I met him last weekend, my suspicions were confirmed that he is actually shorter than I am. I’m not being mean, by the way. These are universal observations about Wally. You can look them up.

You may not think you know Wally, but you kind of do. Now in his 60s, he is the son of William Shawn, venerable editor of The New Yorker from 1951 to 1987. From what I’ve read about Wally, he enjoyed one of those rarefied Upper East Side childhoods that almost always exist as a myth. Except Wally actually lived it, growing up with a constant ebb and flow of the giants of literature, music and theater, the rich, the powerful, the scandalous. You and I read Charlotte’s Web after school.  Wally very likely sat next to E.B. White at one of this parents’ dinner parties. Wally went to Harvard and then to Oxford. And then he became a playwright and an actor.

The first time I saw Wally was in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, which he wrote and starred in with another playwright, Andre Gregory. It was directed by Lous Malle. The premise is simple: Wally and Andre, mostly playing themselves, meet for dinner at a fancy restaurant and they talk about life. Andre’s point is that we have all so thoroughly insulated ourselves from the world and each other that we aren’t really “living” at all. Wally by and large thinks this is a load of crap:

Andre: What does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold, don't in any way affect us? I mean, were animals after all. I mean... what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars, we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, Andre. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter. I mean, our apartment is cold! It's a difficult environment. I mean, our life is tough enough as it is. I'm not looking for ways to get rid of a few things that provide relief and comfort. I mean, on the contrary, I'm looking for more comfort because the world is very abrasive. I mean, I'm trying to protect myself because, really, there's these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look!

For most of his time on-screen, Wally sits there looking incredulous and alarmed. When Andre says something that particularly rattles him, he squeaks, “What?!” and his food falls from his fork, or from his mouth. I watched the film and couldn’t see myself reacting any differently than Wally. I became a huge fan.

You’re probably a Wally Shawn fan too, though you might not know it. Not a huge fan, like me, but a fan nonetheless. Wally supports his career as a playwright by acting. After My Dinner with Andre came The Princess Bride, in which Wally starred with Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and Andre the Giant. Wally plays the inept kidnapper and spends most of the movie running around in tights and shrieking, “Inconceivable!” during the dramatic peaks. After that was the excellent Vanya on 42nd Street (another Louis Malle film), in which Wally, Julianne Moore and some other terrific actors rehearse the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya in the derelict, rat-infested New Amsterdam Theater before it was renovated. Andre (Gregory, not The Giant) is directing them in the rehearsal. Wally plays Vanya.

I won’t see Wally for a few years and then I’ll be watching TV or sitting in a movie theater and unexpectedly he’ll appear. The teacher in Clueless? That’s Wally. The voice of Rex the Dinosaur in Toy Story 2? Wally. The short, lisping alien with the giant ears in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? Wally again. Sex and the City? There’s Wally. Manhattan? Hey, there’s Wally! He’s everywhere yet deliberately below the radar. He is commited to both the highbrow and the absurd. All of this I respect.

But as I said he is first and foremost a writer, and a very good one. His themes are usually political and dark and the language complex and melodic. His plays include Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner and The Fever. The problem with being a huge fan of Wally Shawn the playwright, however, is that his performances of his plays are as unpredictable as his screen appearances. And he never seems to leave Manhattan. For example, a few years ago I read that he was doing maybe 20 performances of The Designated Mourner. Except it wasn’t being performed in a traditional theater. Rather, it was being staged in an abandoned building near Wall Street and the space only seated a few dozen people. Oh, and there really wasn’t any information about where you could buy tickets.

That’s why after 25 years of being a huge fan I had yet to see Wally perform one of his plays onstage. Until last weekend. I had seen a small ad in The New York Times announcing that The Fever would be performed in New York City for several weeks. In the theater district. In an actual theater. There was even a phone number you could call to order tickets. The ad read, “Please join Mr. Shawn one half-hour before each performance for a sip of champagne.” I bought tickets for two different dates, just in case, and booked my flight. 

And so that’s how I found myself on the stage of The Acorn Theater, a glass of champagne in my hand, standing in line to say hello to Wally Shawn. He was round and a little slumped, and was wearing a tweed jacket and comfortable walking shoes. He was imminently courteous as he received each person, though I noticed he did not shake hands. (Afraid of germs, I thought. Very Wally-esque.) As I got nearer, with Big G behind me, poking me in the spine to move me along since he could tell I was a little flustered, I could hear Wally’s conversations:

Man: “This is my first play!”

Wally (squeaking, though very politely): “The first play?”

Man: “The first of your plays.”

Wally, nodding: “Well, I’ll do my best. I think you’ll survive.”

Woman: “I loved you in Star Trek!”

Wally, tilting head and thinking for a few seconds: “Well, this will be a bit different.”

And so on. Then it was my turn.  “I’m really looking forward to the performance,” I said. “I’ve been a huge fan of yours since high school!”

Wally’s eyes widened a bit. He tilted his head. “Well,” he said. A few people laughed. It did sound pretty weird. I told him about trying to find tickets to The Designated Mourner. I didn’t tell him that when I worked at Disney (the distributor of Toy Story 2) I had a Rex poster hanging in my office. “We’re really looking forward to the performance,” I said again. And then I fled to my seat.

The Fever is a 90-minute monologue in which Wally’s character essentially makes the point that despite all of our hand-wringing and protestations to the contrary, most of us lucky enough to have money and comfort will only help the poor to a degree that does not – wouldn’t ever – impact our own position of privilege. Uncomfortable truths, beautiful words. Then the lights came up and after waiting just a moment as we applauded, he walked up the aisle and out the door. Once again, he was gone. Who knows when and where I’ll see him again?

The Pain and Strain is Mainly on the Plane

I am, as I write this, in seat 22B on an American Airlines flight back to L.A. from New York. The woman at the ticket counter assured me I was first on the list for an upgrade to business class. I was actually seventh and so here I sit, right next to the bathroom and the galley. The flight attendants are great on this flight, though they keep parking the beverage cart right next to me. It is chilled to approximately minus 30 degrees. I am sure I now have arthritis in my right knee. Or maybe it’s just frostbite.

The movie on this flight is, by default, The Queen, since the movie we were supposed to see won’t load properly into the AV equipment. The Queen was the movie American Airlines showed on my flight to New York a few days ago. I also saw it last week in the theater. Let me know if you would like me to recite any (or all) of the dialogue from The Queen for you sometime.

All of this sound familiar? Of course. So I won’t bore you with a rant about air travel, since we all have plenty of those. This is more of an observation on air travel as our collective expression of confusion, suspicion and defiance, the most recent example of which is the new TSA rule requiring the scrutiny of all gels and liquids and the restriction that such items be no more than three ounces each.

We all got the hang of bringing our identification to the airport, putting our laptops into bins and figuring out what, exactly, constituted the one “personal item” we were allowed to bring with us on the plane. We even learned to take our shoes off, an act that I at the time considered the very last straw. I didn’t want to stand around in my socks in germ-infested airports. And though you may be a very nice person, I didn’t want to see the insides of your sweaty Cole Haans as they rolled out of the X-ray machine. We hated the lines and the indignity of it all, but we wiggled our toes, sighed heavily and did exactly as we were told.

Then they announced the gels-and-liquids rule and we all started to have a little bit of a breakdown. My theory is that we reached a tipping point as a society, coming to a sort of collective conclusion that we just couldn’t invest any more energy into an overly complicated directive with a dubious value proposition explained poorly by anonymous authority figures we suspected we didn’t like anyway. They could make us do it, but they couldn’t make us do it well.

Of course this has happened before. Need an example? Let us recall the national effort in the 1970s to institute the metric system in the U.S. Who made that decision? I can’t remember. What I do remember is that my 6th grade teacher added liters and centimeters to math class and we did a lot of converting of miles into kilometers. But it never really stuck. And why was that? Because we didn’t try very hard. We were 11 years old but we were already skeptical that as a country we would actually pull off the metric thing and we somehow understood that if we all pooled our inertia, we could probably hasten its demise. You must have done the same thing too, since that’s exactly what happened.

And let’s not forgot the U.S. Postal Service’s edict that we would all have to convert to nine-digit zip codes. Since the mail seemed to have always arrived with only a five-digit effort, nobody really saw the point of trying to memorize another four numbers. And so we didn’t. I couldn’t tell you the last four numbers of my zip code if my life depended on it and neither could you. Yet we all got each other’s Christmas cards on time this year and so those last four digits continue to bounce off our tightly sealed brains, fall to the floor and roll under the sofa.

The gels-and-liquids edict is closely related to the metric meltdown and the zip code follies. Sure, we understand the gravity of the broader situation. Yet we’re having a very hard time understanding why our deodorant is so involved and since no one is doing a very good job of explaining that, we’re starting to get a little distracted and a little stubborn and thus not quite remembering the rules even though we’ve been told a hundred times now. And that’s why pretty much every time I’m at an airport I still see security people throwing away containers of $40 bath gel and giant bottles of Old Spice while grown men and women beg for leniency. 

The TSA people are trying not to succumb to our woozy mob, but it’s an uphill battle. I’ve been in six different airports in the past three weeks and most of the time my gels-and-liquids ziploc was allowed to simply roll through the x-ray machine with everything else. Only once did someone actually look at it: I was at the Phoenix airport and a female security staffer held the bag aloft, pursed her lips and pondered the contents. “Is there a problem?” I asked. “I was just looking at your mascara,” she said. “I love that brand!” (She’s right, by the way. I use Diorshow Unlimited by Christian Dior and it’s pretty fab.)

But it’s the poor male TSA agents I really pity. My theory is that the reason my gels and liquids just roll on by is that the guys don’t know what they’re looking at and, frankly, they don’t want to know. Liquid eyeliner, liquid mascara, bronzer, peel-off face mask and three kinds of moisturizer. This is The Land Where Most Men Dare Not Tread, and yet these guys find themselves wandering in it, lonely and frightened, 40 hours a week. A few months ago one of them opened my clear plastic bag of overpriced, prettily packaged beauty potions and pulled out my hair goop. The tube was white, the brand name incomprehensible, the writing minuscule. He put it back in the bag and carefully sealed it. It was painfully clear he didn’t know if there was spackle or butter cream frosting in the tube, and he certainly wasn’t going to ask. I don’t know what’s in the tube either, truth be told, but it’s expensive and keeps my ‘do under control like nothing else and if he had tried to take it away from me I would have skipped my flight.

And this is how it always starts. This is how millions of strangers eventually come together and bring about change through a random conspiracy of pigheadedness and ineptitude. Open cans of Red Bull and half-squeezed tubes of Crest still overflow the trash cans at LAX and JFK. Airport gift shop employees have had it with travelers mooching courtesy ziploc bags  (because they forgot theirs -- again) but not buying any magazines or candy bars because now they’re late for their flights. Friends like mine say, “The HELL I’ll cram all my makeup in a baggy. I bought that stuff at Bergdorf!” and check their luggage, thus helping to overwhelm the airline baggage system. Confusion reins, heels dig in, and the system slowly grinds to a halt.

But I try to look on the bright side. We might surprise ourselves this time and actually get our collective act together. Or then again, maybe we won’t. Either way, the result could be a better system. Or at least a compromise, like the metric labels on quarts of milk that we totally ignore. Now don’t you feel better? I know I do. I think I’ll go out and run the hundred yard dash.

Have Myself a Merry Little Christmas

So I’ve been out Christmas shopping. Ahead of the crowds, ahead of Santa. I’m even ahead of this year’s airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The problem is that while I’ve been out shopping for all of you, the purchases so far have all been for me.

I blame this on my utter devotion to buying all of you the perfect gifts. For example: I went to the really nice mall because of course I want to buy you something really nice. I looked at cashmere, Tiffany and high-def. None of it was quite what you wanted. But Kate Spade and Max Mara were 30% off. You are obviously worth full retail, so nothing for you. But 30% off is a pretty good deal, so something for me.

I also want to buy you really cool gifts, so I headed over to Melrose Avenue. The first stop was the Adidas store, a place I’ve been visiting every so often since the time I bought a pair of Missy Elliott limited edition low tops just because I liked them and found myself, for the first time ever, at the bleeding edge of cool among everyone under the age of 20. Someone actually offered to buy them off my feet. But I didn’t know your shoe size or whether you’d actually like a pair of black sneakers with pink stripes.  However, I did know the answers to both of those questions when I asked myself. So still shopping for you. But who can now  continue walking down Melrose more comfortably and fashionably? That would be me.

I even tried the outlet mall, since I know you’re eclectic and practical and the outlet mall has a little bit of everything at very reasonable prices. This outlet mall also happens to have a little bit of one particular thing at insanely cheap prices. And that thing is Prada. Did you mention that you and I wear exactly the same size? Uh oh. Nothing left for you. Merry Christmas to me.

Still hopeful of finding the perfect gift, I went to Amazon.com. It was overflowing with encouraging headlines like “Recommendations for You” and “New for You” and “Free Shipping for You.” The problem is that when Amazon says “you” it really means “me.” On the upside, I just love the CDs and books that are “New for You” but are being shipped to me via Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping even as I write this. It leaves a little more time and money before Christmas to keep shopping for you. Or was it me?

Majestic Golf Land

When I was in Palm Springs last month I had an unexplained, overwhelming urge to learn how to play golf. Since I couldn't recall ever having the tiniest bit of interest in the game other than to mock it occasionally, the sudden need to play it was hard to fathom. There must have be something in the air in Palm Springs. Or something in the cocktails. Either way I can only assume that the local real estate agents were behind it. Devious, sure, but brilliant.

So a few weeks later I headed over to Griffith Park for my first golf lesson. Boris was my instructor. Boris didn’t look like a Boris. He looked like a football player, with broad shoulders and big hands. He also was a very good instructor, getting me to execute the several incongruous motions of the golf swing without whacking myself on the head or breaking any bones. Even more miraculously, he got me to actually hit the ball with the club. Don’t get me wrong. I sliced, I hooked, I dribbled. Several times I swiped nothing but air. But every eighth or ninth swing, I would whack that 7 iron and watch the ball fly high and straight past the 125 yard mark -- not great, but not bad. I’d shout “Wow!” or “Ooh!” while Boris silently pumped his fist. (Apparently, shouting “Wow!” isn’t proper golf etiquette, so in addition to my back swing, Boris and I are going to work on my volume control.)

And so it was that I learned how the golf obsession begins: Just like hitting a running backhand down the line or firing off the jump shot that doesn’t touch the rim, hitting a golf ball well feels wondrously effortless and also rewards you with the discreet, minimalist sound of perfection. The quick ripping sound of the basketball as it brushes the net, the single ”tink” of the ball firing off the club head. It’s beautiful, addictive music.

Boris let me know that it’s going to be a while until I’m ready to actually play a round of golf. There are a lot of clubs to learn how to hit and apparently real golf courses aren’t flat and made of Astroturf like the driving range, which adds some complexity to things. All of this sounded intriguing so I signed up for a series of lessons.

I still haven’t decided if by taking up golf I am taking up a “sport” or a “recreation.” Yes, it takes skill, coordination and strength to play golf, which gives it points in the sport column. But honestly, can you call it a sport when people can – and do – smoke cigarettes while doing it? At Griffith Park I watched more than a few players suck on a Marlboro, spew the smoke out over their heads and then grab a club to tee off.

Recreation or sport, this golf thing has given me some new  and interesting places to hang out. For example, I’ve been practicing after work at the Majestic Golf Land driving range. (In addition to having a fantastically fantastic name, it has a well-deserved four-star user rating on Yahoo! Local.) Majestic Golf Land is on Melrose near Vermont in Koreatown, so much of the clientele is Korean and that’s the language you mostly hear there. The people who run the place are incredibly nice. It’s a three-story structure, so when you’re on the lop level you’re kind of suspended in the night, surrounded by floodlights. Car horns and music waft up from the street. Cell phones ring, golf balls fly. Everyone swings their clubs. Mostly everyone smokes between swings. We all listen intently for the “tink.” It’s great.

A Turkey Is Just a Big Chicken

Thanksgiving is almost here and so I am in deep into my final preparations for the cooking marathon ahead. I’ve been the Thanksgiving chef in my family since adolescence, so I feel pretty entitled to opine on the holiday and offer some advice to those of you who are also cooking next week.

A Little Self-Delusion Is Good for the Soul

I recommend starting Thanksgiving Day with some rigorous exercise. Back in the days when I ran, I would put in a good 6 or 7 miles before breakfast. These days, I try to get in a couple of hours on my bike. The 700 calories you burn won’t even begin to make a dent in the 12,000 calories you will eat that day, but you will feel the gentle glow of self-delusion and self-righteousness and nothing can beat that.

Fear Not The Turkey

Interestingly enough, the prospect of cooking a turkey makes people nervous in a way that cooking, say, lamb chops, does not. I’ve received plenty of phone calls over the years from friends nervously eyeing the turkey defrosting in their kitchen sink and asking, “What the hell do I do with this thing?” I will tell you what I tell them: You are not the one who has been beheaded and then had your internal organs removed, individually wrapped in butcher paper and stuffed back into your chest cavity. Recognize that you have the advantage here and seize it. If you’re still cowed, it helps to think of your turkey as just a really big chicken. You wouldn’t be afraid of a chicken, would you? Of course not. Just roast that sucker at 325 degrees for 20-22 minutes per pound and you’ll be fine.

Side Dishes

When it comes right down to it, Thanksgiving dinner isn’t about turkey anyway. It’s about the stuffing. I love stuffing and if you’re coming to my house for Thanksgiving I hope you do too, since there’s going to be a whole lot of it. And if you are spending the day trapped in the house with irritating relatives and need to dull the pain, I will happily provide you with my cranberry relish recipe. It’s stupidly easy to make and requires a veritable ocean of port.

The Pumpkin Pie Wars

You’d think dessert would be easy on Thanksgiving, but it’s not. I find the baby food consistency of pumpkin pie utterly repellent. And since I don’t cook what I don’t eat, pumpkin pie is not on the menu. This fact mightily displeases the pumpkin pie-loving G-Man and the result is a torturous negotiation process each year in which I propose recipes that are not pumpkin pie but do include pumpkin as an ingredient. We wheel and deal. We bluff and compromise. Documents are exchanged and reviewed. The SALT II negotiations were probably less complex than the annual Castro/Black Pumpkin Pie Summit. Last year’s negotiations resulted in pumpkin cheese cake. The year before that yielded pumpkin soufflé. This year it’s pumpkin bread pudding. Though the ink on the final contract hasn’t quite dried so who knows what could happen by next Thursday.