Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (excerpt)

My brother was circumcised twice.

At first, the days after birth

the midwife held his penis between

thumb and finger.

Tongue protruding, brow knitted she

delivered him his second knife-edged cut.

Our mother, tired after an arduous labor

watched while her firstborn throbbed in anguish.

(He had yet to know shame.)

And for solace she fed him her

generous breast.

Food for her baby,

salve for the pain.

Please Don't Make Me Eat Shit and Tell Me It's Mud Pie

I've been following the Rte. 34 East and West developments. Last night I went to a public meeting about the 34 East development, Downtown Crossing. As a member of the New Haven Urban Design League I agree that there's an opportunity for more innovative, smart planning to make the entire development an asset to the city.  Forgive me if I'm not convinced that the development is an asset to other than the developer, Carter Winstanley, and Yale New Haven Hospital.  (I don't even know if the taxable real estate will remain City property in decades to come.  One of the great selling points about the project is the tax income projections.  What prevents the city from selling the land to one of the 2 major non-profits in town and rendering it non-taxable?)

As a private citizen who lives very near the land involved I'm disheartened by the lack of thorough anthropological and sociological perspective on the project's impact.  I'm not naive: municipal development is expensive and inherently compromising; and, developers are in it for the profit. I got that. But, believe me when I tell you that while the death of the young and promising is tragic, I do not need to hear one more time about how a "medical student" or a "doctor" got killed near the hospital as the impetus for planning safer streets and calming traffic.

What I need to hear is how is the City going to deal with the possibility of a "golden ghetto" being formed between 2 working-class and poor neighborhoods?  How does a Hill resident "cross the divide" and why would they?  For a job in the knowledge-based sector?  For services and merchandise downtown? Will this development be the impetus for affordable middle-class housing nearby or will those who can buy in Hamden, Madison, Guilford as they do now?  How will Downtown Crossing contribute to neighborhood cohesion and all-around economic development for the entire city not just the research and medical sectors?

Until those questions are honestly answered -- and the answers don't have to be what I want to hear, they just have to be the truth -- I'm not buying.

Saturday Poetry: Maxim

The children of unhappy mothers
Grow up slow.
It takes them so long to do anything at all:

To eat with spoon and fork, to walk, to talk,
To potty train, read and write or
Sleep through the night.
Or spend an evening without a sitter.
To get a driver’s license or
Pay back the loan.
Or leave home.

My Friend, Guitarist Matt Nichols

For your Memorial Day weekend listening pleasure! He has 2 great CDs: CLASSICAL ELECTRIC GUITAR and GONE. Listen to more at http://matthewnichols.com/

His composition:

Make Concubinage Legal in America

In the spirit of like-I-have-this-time-to-waste, I have been reading accounts tawdry and, ehem, from the paper of record, serious, about the projectile vomit which is the Schwarzenegger-Shriver scandal.  (And I know I don't have to link to nuthin' because you have, too.)  Things have gotten so bad in the Republican Presidential field that Obama may win a second term in part because the opposing team is so damn bad.  (Remember when Republicans were all a-twitter with proposing constitutional amendments so that a certain Austrian-born naturalized citizen could be eligible to run for President?  Oh where oh where was Orly Taitz then?)

Daniels dropped out -- I sure his wife, Adultress Cheri, Repentant Cheri, has been reading about all things Newt and Callista, and all things Arnold and Maria and said, No.  Oh Hell No! to subjecting herself to that press scrutiny.  So, no Mitch Daniels to kick around any more.  (Yawn.)  And Newt?  He's been punked by the American press and hasn't copped on yet.  The longer he pretends he's running the worse it will get.  And wait until they catch his wife delivering a speech or answering a question on tape.  The 2 of them will be American mincemeat very soon.  Mark my words.  As for Romney, Pawlenty and the rest of them?  Booooooooring.  And we Americans long to be entertained.  But, I digress.

It's polygamy I'm concerned with today, the need to codify and legalize it so we can stop this Oh-Mary pearl-clutching every time some powerful, prominent, full of himself American male exercises his droit de seigneur in our meritocratic, no-royalty-on-this-side-of-the-Atlantic country.  Let Bill have his Monica, and Arnold his Gigi, his Mildred, his... and so on.  And let all the Hillarys and Marias go on about the business of getting older and jowlier.  Let them expose those swinging-like-a-hammock upper arms that are the proud badge of the female crone.  And let Wives No. 1 spend the rest of their lives doing more meaningful work than running interference for the pigs they married, resuming the careers they abandoned, or pursuing the dreams they deferred.

The kind of men they married will always "be among us".  And there will always be women who want them and will do anything to have them.  (See Sinclair, Anne as Lady Macbeth.)  But, why demean an entire life being in association with them?  They should obtain status as a First Wife.  Once achieved they are officially off the hook for their husband's behavior.  (It's more efficient than divorce.)

Saturday Poetry: Coffin

Except of course it's Sunday.  (Keeping promises as best I can):

My father was buried

at his request

in a "simple pine box"

which costs $3,000 a fact

explained to us

his legitimate children by

his old childhood friend,

the mortician, a man

dying of emphysema.

It was the penultimate

joke he played on us

leaving us to calculate the portion of

our meager inheritance that

was now going to house his

cancer-silted bones.

There is no such thing as

a simple pine box he announced.

Daddy, of course, with his spendthrift’s malice,

at war with his love of money,

would have known that and yet

insist that he be buried in this way

as if he wanted God to recognize in him

an essential humility that had been

so betrayed by the many years of

voracious profligacy.

Saturday Poetry: G Train to the Last Stop

Summer in New York

I needed a job,

and took the first one I got.

She told me to ride

the G train

til you can’t go no more.

South into Red Hook

Smith Street

the last stop.

Lilli & TeTe Go for a Walk

I love my 5 year old niece, I really really do.  There's got to be a word short of pedophilia which describes the insatiable physical lust an adult can have for a particular child.  And unless one of my kids buys me some granchirren, I may not have any and Lilli will be the closest I get to having one.  Which is kind of all right because she's magnificent but even though we both agree that I'm an Old Lady she sometimes and accidentally calls me Mommy and then we get into Heather Has Two Mommies territory and it gets all effed up and that's my clue to go out to my office and let her Real Mother raise her thank you very much.

As much as the two of us love each other when her Real Mother asks me to "take her" for more than a few minutes I clutch.  Like at my age what am I gonna do with a little kid?  But, then my last better angel takes over and I say yes and such was the case today when Sister had to go somewhere (preferably without child) and instead of forcing her to drive Lilli to and pay for a baby sister (which I'm mean enough to do) while I sat around watching grass grow I was Surrogate Mother for the morning.

This morning involved delivering our neighborhood newsletter to local apartment buildings, and going over to West River Memorial Park to participate in a clean up.  We brought along one of those cool tools that you can pick up garbage with without bending over.  (God's gift to the middle-aged.)  And she used it as a crutch krunking down the sidewalk holding my hand explaining that both her right and left legs were broken.

I'd prepped her the night before that we were going to do a lot a walking so she was up to it and, as is the case with this hyperverbal honey, we never ran out of things to talk about which is one reason we stopped at the local Dunkin' Donuts so I'd get a break for a few seconds while she had pink doughnut with sprinkles in her mouth.  And I needed a break.  A ream's worth of paper is heavy; especially after my second trip with it on my back in 2 days.  Although everywhere we went this morning was only a few minutes away when your knees are a-throbbin' and your back is a-hummin' its enough to make you want to flag down a cab.  (Oh wait!  I'm in New Haven not New York!  Snap!)  I was the one who needed crutches.

We walked to the Park through one of the most asinine intersections in New Haven.  The lights are timed for drivers, impatient drivers and even with the walk signal I had us running across the street (or what passes for running with cauliflower knees).  No matter how fast you go the lights at Derby and Grasso change so fast you go from being a pedestrian to prey in no time flat.  I for one can't wait until drivers who go through red lights can get shot.  With a camera that is.

Safely on the other side we signed up, grabbed a black garbage bag and strolled along the rugby field looking for garbage.  We were not disappointed.  Sisyphus had his rock; modern Americans have their trash -- the wrappers, the bags, the papers, the cans, the plastic lids, the cigs, and so on.  Lilli was a trooper.  Because we had the trash gripper we were both entertained.  But, after a while we both realized that filling the bag would require crawling into the brambles.  (Oh, don't even mention all the gooseshit on the bottom of our shoes.) So, we worked for a few more minutes and then ran into an acquaintance.  I was ready for adult conversation but no sooner had it started than Lilli interrupted me with a must-tell recounting of the fat lady who was crying.  My acquaintance tried mightily to understand what she was saying.  I didn't.  It's like "Now you have to talk about this?  Right now?  Can someone else have my attention for 1 minute?  Please?"  So, cranky aunty that I am I just cut Lilli off.

And later when we were alone again she let me know it.  "You hurt my feelings," she told me.  And I leaned in all solicitous and asked her what I, I had done this time.  She told me about the lady and goddamn if it made less sense then than it had a few minutes ago.  The terrible thing about living with children is that you do get "it" after a while.  (I say terrible because if you've become that good at decoding their idiosyncratic language, what does that make you?  An idiot savant?)  Not always on time or right then, but you do get it.  She'd witnessed a woman freak out on the green the week before when she got separated from her husband.  The woman frantically called him on her cell phone.  I know this because Lilli's Real Mother told me the story when they got home, and Lilli was asking her if she found him.

She was still processing that when we wound up at another green expanse and that was the story she was trying in her inimitable 5 year old way to tell me, but I was too busy.  Once my sister came to pick us up the mystery got solved.  "Yes", she said, "the lady found her husband.  I saw them on the green on my way to work a few days later."  So now I know.  Now Lilli knows.  And as a bonus, she's graced me with her forgiveness, which clears the space for love.  And God knows, I need it.

Saturday Poetry: Oceanid

I've decided to post a poem on Saturdays.  This first one is from my unpublished manuscript, "Turn Left at the Dead Dog".

I moved to New York in the early 90's and temped to make a living.  One of my most memorable gigs was working at a Brooklyn shipyard in Red Hook as a secretary.  I'd take the G to it's last stop, Smith Street, and walk by the Red Hook projects to get to work.  The shipyard's lifeblood, Navy contracts, was drying up, and these old-timers, many of the men were in there 60's, knew that their life's work -- engineering, welding, painting, and so on -- was coming to an end.  (The shipyard was where Brooklyn Ikea is now.  My, how times have changed.)  I wanted to memorialize and honor a beloved world.

This poem came from imagining the kids swimming at the city pool near the projects, one of the great rituals of a New York summer:

Oceanid

 

I just love it in the summer

she says to me.

To get off work, while it’s still light?

You walk by the pool.

The kids are playing.

Brown kids black kids.

A few of them are white.

They glisten like baby seals

in bathing suits.

Screaming Spanish, English

It doesn’t matter

You see them running

boy after boy

boy after girl.

And the girls

they’re getting so bold now

not like when I was that age

we couldn’t go to the pool you know.

Our mothers didn’t want us getting too dark

and besides it would ruin our hair.

Lazy Mira got the beating of her life back then

and she was almost grown.

Mama had paid to have her hair done nice for a wedding

beautifully straightened, you’d a thought she was white.

Mira was that light, but as soon as Mama left

she flew to the pool where Mama saw her,

right here where we’re standing now,

arms full of A&P.

Fast Mira, a pink bikini

running around the edge

pretending to be afraid of Danny B,

who she loved, I don’t have to tell you.

And some little shit of a kid, pulling himself up out of the water

butted his bald head into my sister while she was dancing backwards

and she flipped a horseshoe right into the deep end.

Mira could swim, but it didn’t matter.

She knew she was dead.

Required Reading for a Rainy Day

If it weren't for the ability to link to great writing I'd had no ability to write at all.  Ta-Nehisi Coates' reflection on Trump-birtherism-Obama.  (His father is Paul Coates, publisher of Black Classic Press).  Here it is, The Longest War.

No, I'm Trig's Mother

I know it's been a long time.  Don't ask.

Just by accident I heard/read that the White House released Obama's birth certificate.  If ever there was a need to use the phrase WTF???!?!?!?!  this is it.

But I know and you know that in this demographic sea-change in American culture and in this conglomerated media age competing for ever smaller audiences and harder-to-come-by revenue, that if Barack Obama's father had not been a black African this rumor would have been strangled in its crib.

 

I Lost a Poet Once

I didn't mean to but those were my early days of promiscuously tasting what the internet had to offer and I thought surely, surely with his distinctive voice (and my impeccable spelling) I'd simply be able to Google him and find him again:  white man, in his 30's, lives in NYC, teaches for a living.  Couple of collections published.  Well, that narrows it down.

Needless to say I did not find him.  Have not.  And 3 or 4 unbacked up (who the hell backs up one's bookmarks?) hard drive crashes later, I never will.  My bad.  My very bad.

Ever since then I try not to make the mistake of assuming that information is at my fingertips and all I have to do is roll up my sleeve, stick my arm into the digital bin and bam! I pull out some writer's website.

What starts these junkets anyway is an elaborate preamble to writing.  It's Friday, do you know where your poetry is?  I look at various 'zines, walking back and forth before the storefront wondering if I should go in and if I do, will I buy?  Each time I think I'm done with "the poetry thing" another line offers itself.  (As in overhearing on Metro North the girlfriends talking about a hospice patient.)  Here are 2 to play with in honor of April being National Poetry Month:

"We're pregnant."  Maybe it's generational, maybe I'm stupid, but when, oh, when did men start having babies?  Introduce me to the man who's pushed a bowling ball through a key ring while lying on his back for, say, 5 hours and then we'll talk.  In the meantime, who can write a poem with that?

"Lonely as a Witness in Vegas."  I've always wondered (haven't you?) what it must be like to be both a Jehovah's Witness and a resident of Las Vegas.

You write a line

I'll write a line
We'll write a poem
together.
 

It's Saturday Night

As if that's an excuse for the blogger's equivalent of drunk dialing.  I've not written lately for many reasons; the most plausible excuse being that life lately has been so very personal.  So, if you want to know what I have to think about something feel free to hack into my personal e-mail accounts.  (Joke, that.)

Anyway, in addition to Happy Spring (and does anyone else feel like a fat, black bear unfurling from a long hibernation?) I want to share two of my comparative dumb-as-a-box-o'-rocks moments.  Both are tangentially related to religion.  I stopped attending church as a teenager.  A result of the cessation of my mother's enforcement regime (and my disenchantment with the congregation during the height of the Vietnam War).  For years my mother made sure we made it to Sunday School and church with my father.  (My long poem, "Beatrice's Neck" is crafted from those Sundays.)  Only now do I realize that it had less to do with inculcating religiousity than it had to do with creating some god-damn time to herself witha family of one husband and 4 rowdy kids.  (Although I do think church meant something to her; she, herself returned to church towards to end of her too short life.)  All of that to say that I do claim some home training which makes these lapses in recognition all the more mortifying.

Fast forward to the early 1980s.  I'm working in Washington, DC.  It's spring.  I'm still young enough and green enough that The City (and its comfortable denizens) were still undeniably glamourous to me.  One day I'm on say, K Street, and I see this elegant middle-aged woman walking towards me.  Looked like she graduated from Smith (back in the day), and worked for a law firm or was some high-level goverment appointee.  Well put together, like i wished I could be but never ever achieved.  I glanced at her but got stuck at her forehead.  This elegant, Ann Taylor-clad (yeah, yeah when it meant something) woman had a big black smudge on the middle of her forehead.  I wanted to wet my thumb and wipe it off.  It surprised me:  didn't you check the mirror before you left the house?  Don't you have a compact in your purse?  When was the last time you applied your Naked Librarian Coral lipstick?!?!?!  So, when I got into work I started babbling about this woman I saw who didn't realize that she had dirt on her face, can you b'leve it?

I'm sure someone, probably a co-worker who did graduate from one of the Seven Sisters, took pity on me and gently explained that that day was Ash Wednesday.  The Episcopal and Catholic observant are marked as an acknowledgement of mortality and human fallibility.  Oh.  Thanks and I hauled my lapsed Baptist ass to my desk and said not another word.

Never content to make a fool of myself once when I can do it several times years later I asked one of our Egyptian guides why so many men had a dark smudge on their foreheads.  (You know where my mind was going, don't you?)   I asked, of course, while being driven around by one such man.  Patiently and respectfully I was told that it is basically a sign of piety.  That men who pray the requisite times per day and have spent a lifetime putting head to ground acquire that bruise.

Oh.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

So, that's it.  Late and I just finished listening to a great Afropop radio documentary about Um Kulthum.  To Egypt, and elections.  To all the other Christians out there who don't believe in resurrection:  this is all we've got.  Happy spring.

Good night.

So what if April is the cruelest month?

February has got to be the dirtiest.  As feared and expected after the snow evaporated we were treated to everything that was left underneath, plus all the delightful dogshit that owners blithely left behind.

It has indeed been a long, hard winter.  I feel like a bear coming out of hibernation complete with a thick coat and added fat to keep me, eh hem, warm.  I am looking out at my backyard littered with plastic toys, construction debris, possum (I kid you not) feces, and last fall's leaves.  I am so out of shape that I can barely pick up a pencil, much less a rake or hoe.  If I were easier to embarrass I would have cleaned up this mess last fall, but I did not, and now I feel like I'll have to get physical and psycho therapy just to do something about it.  Am I feeling the insidiousness of middle age?  Or is it just the creakiness of a winter spent hunkered down?

In the fall I planted some Japanese maple saplings and burning bush.  I can see the burning bush from my window.  It was buried in the snow for weeks.  Maybe I should warm up a stethoscope and check them for signs of life.  Maybe I should do the same for myself.

I'm Just Askin'....

If the US had not struck a Faustian bargain with Hosni Mubarak (to not go to war with Israel) and thereby sanctioning a dictatorial regime which (among other failings) strangled opportunity, would there have still been a Mohamed Atta?  And, if there were no Mohamed Atta would there have been a September 11th?  And, if there had been no September 11th would the US have invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq?

Special Place in Hell, 2nd Edition

Let me add to the honor roll, Leslie Gelb.  And how could we forget the unforgettable, motor-mouthing, shit-talker extraordinaire, Condoleeza Rice?
 

Surely There Are Special Places in Hell

for Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Jeanne Kilpatrick, Elliott Abrams, Martin Peretz, Tony Blair (who is certifiably barkin' mad) and the rest of the day-old fish called the punditry, the intelligentsia, the Western diplo-political elite who view Egypt's revolution primarily through the prism of realpolitik and "America's interest" and "strategic alliances" and "cold peace with Israel" and the list goes on of those who easily ignore the human suffering and dignity that all the above costs.  (If I link to some of their recent statements my head will explode which might not be a bad idea if it melts some ice, but still ...).

Egypt and Clinton had already been co-joined for me.  Below is an excerpt from a letter to Rita Parker, a friend who lived for several years in Lebanon:

13 March 2008

Mark and I went to Egypt for the first 15 days of September last year.  The genesis of the trip was a conversation with my friend, Fred, who had traveled there a few years prior and had a great time.  Almost 2 years ago Fred was diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer, and one day when we were talking I said wistfully, “Well, after you get through this cancer, why don’t we go to Egypt in 5 years?”

Fred, who is nothing if not assertive replied, “Why don’t we go next year?”  And that started it.  ...  In the meantime, Dailey piped up and said that she really, really wanted to go and so the 3 of us were trying to organize a trip.  ...[s] he couldn’t go until January 2008.  So while the family went to Egypt we did it in 2 legs.

[…] Mark is an experienced traveler – he lived in India, Germany, and southern France – and has trekked many other places in addition to driving through parts of the US.  He’s a great and patient companion on these trips.  We had a fantastic time both partaking of Egypt’s “greatest hits” and of the lives of contemporary Egyptians.

One of the seminal and bittersweet moments was on a trip to Alexandria.  The driver had worked for King Faisal (?) and went to Beverly Hills with him serving as a chauffeur.  He told us that he had been encouraged to get his green card but declined because he wanted to go back home.  (I can’t recollect the chronology, but my guess is that this happened after Nasser’s presidency.)  Considering what life is like for Egyptians today, he rued having made that decision.  He told us, and probably because we were in a van driving as opposed to sitting in a café, that if it weren’t prohibited in the Koran “all Egyptians would kill themselves…”

This was my first trip to an authoritarian country.  I should mention that I loved the country, absolutely loved it and made at least 1 friend there.  Of course there was a kind of kinship with the Egyptians.  (Although it was a hustler’s line “… welcome, my cousin” when we went shopping, I was still happy to hear it.  Having grown up in the US, especially the Midwest, it’s rare that I’ve lived somewhere were I felt at home.  That’s why New York City is my spiritual home.)  I’ve always been annoyed when American leftists talk about this nation as authoritarian.  Yes, there are definite elements of it, and particularly during the reign of Bush and Cheney we fearful Americans have submitted to government oversight like never before, yet we are far and away from being in the state of an Egypt.  One of the first impressions I got as I saw all the young men out is that Cairo resembles inner-city New York.  (I could probably say that of any American city where a great percentage of it’s young, able-bodied males are idle during the day.)  There was a familiarity I felt seeing the young men:  That crushing idleness co-joined with the presence of several kinds of police; the systemic corruption that squelches initiative.  Added to that is a Muslim culture that constrains and frustrates young people’s mating and forces them to delay marriage.  All those things lead to despair.  When a nation’s youth are in despair, I feel that a country cannot and will not grow.  The next generation feels defeated even before they have grappled with leadership.

[…] Years ago I said to friends that while I had no qualms about voting for Hillary Clinton as a senator (and I have twice) I would not vote for her as President.  I wasn’t able to articulate why thoroughly, and I doubt if I was even asked.  Lately, out of obvious necessity, I’ve had to flesh out my objection to her as a president.  My first answer is that both Clintons have a kind of amorality that is a necessary component of ambitious, driven and smart people.  (Necessary for “getting ahead”.)  That leads to a more elastic ethics, and over and over again I think I’ve seen that in the decisions that she’s made as a public figure.  (When people are being neutral about that trait, they call it “caution”.)  But, I disagree.  I’m a cautious person, and try to be prudent and thoughtful when making an important decision.  I can also examine and to some degree, understand the other side of an argument.  What I cannot do is throw my principles or values “under the bus” in order to curry influence, or to score a tactical victory.  And yes, since I can’t I’ll never get far in politics or corporate culture; but, I don’t pretend otherwise.  Hillary Clinton has – in the sense that she has rationalized decisions that are in conflict with professed values and acts as if there is no dissonance.  It’s that characteristic that’s at the root of what has and always will disturb me about her.  Secondly, and this is related to how I perceive her style of leadership, she, like many of our most recent presidents seem to subscribe to an executive style of management, where top-down leadership is the only legitimate leadership.  That, along with fear-mongering, has helped make the citizen body flaccid.  Mark, whose love of America is that idealistic love that immigrants who came here voluntarily as adults have, is so concerned about this country.  How all the initiative and belief in our ability to fix our problems seems to have been washed down the drain.  Hillary Clinton, as admirable as she is in many ways, does not inspire as a leader.  And, at this stage in my life, I’ve already had 1 boss too many.

I once said to to someone that the only thing that is greater than man's capacity for cruelty, is his capacity for rationalization. Now I'll add that a prerequisite to lusting for great power is an outsize capacity for amorality.

Egypt: Cairo, Alexandria & Elsewhere

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

Sphinx Rising

Three years ago Husband No. 1 and I went to Egypt.  I'm not an African-American Egyptianist, i.e., someone who spends time arguing who invented mathematics first -- the Greeks or the Egyptians.  (For the record, nor am I descended from great kings and queens of Africa.)  Fred had gone and recommended we go, so we did.  I now realize that my brain and many other Americans' brains need to be scrubbed because more than once when, after telling someone I travelled to Egypt, they'd ask, "Didya ever go to Africa?"

"Well, yes.  I travelled to Egypt."  Check a map if you don't believe me.

I love that country and hope to, need to go back.  We went to Alexandria one day and toured the modern Library of Alexandria where, I kid you not, I was treated like a movie star.  One moment I'm looking at a lithograph from the the days of Napoleon's sojourn in Egypt and the next minute I'm shaking hands with children asking me who I am, where I'm from and so on.  As stunned and flattered as I was, that's not why I love Egypt.  It's the people I met (some of whom may be out in the streets today).  We were very aware that as Americans we were undoubtedly safer in Cairo than in New York.  You figured out right away that Mubarak's regime would never ever let a Western tourist come to harm.  Husband No. 1 and I used to count the different uniforms we saw  representing different police and/or military forces.  We stopped at five and then wondered how many plain-clothes were around, too.

 When I read or hear of people here complaining about the US being a police state I roll my eyes, because, frankly, they don't know what they're talking about.  Egypt is the real thing.  It is what a dictatorship looks like smells like acts like.  Here's an example of what an authoritarian regime does to its people: The man who drove us to Alexandria spoke excellent English.  He explained that he worked in the States for several years as King Faisal's driver (when the King was in California).  At one point he was offered permanent residence (imagine that happening now) and he turned it down to return home.  Now, he said, if Islam didn't forbid it, he (and all other Egyptians) would commit suicide.

Egyptians are risking their lives in ways most of us Americans never have and can't imagine.  I am in awe of their courage.  I recommend visiting Mona Eltahawy's blog to find out more.

I Have Been Given the Weekend Off ...

... by my husband who decided, in His Infinite Wisdom, that he, too, has too much Work To Do.  (I mean , really now, what do college-educated people in their 50's with bad backs have to do but work?)  I am in the midst of picking up the pieces of a life interrupted (joyously) by a daughter's wedding, approximately 15 inches of snow over several days, and best of all, the offer (accepted) of writing another libretto after having not done so for, say, 15 years.

I'm working with a composer, Whitney George, and we are together writing an opera based on Guy de Maupassant's "The Diamond Necklace".  How times have changed!  Whitney and I have never met, and may not meet until the first performance.  Yet we have this mutual support society thing going on which is a joy.  We're doing this all through e-mail and (gulp) our face-to-face meetings might even be Skyped.  She was referred to me by my Very Good Friend, Fred Ho.  (He and I did some damage to the artistic firmament when we Wrote "Warrior Sisters" together, my last opera collaboration before this one.)  Anyway, doing the libretto is my idea of fun.  

Also, I was on my way to NY last Sunday and just by accident my friend, Taylor Ho Bynum, who I met through Fred was on the same train, and we had one of those rollicking co-artists conversational riots until he had to 'scuse hisself to work on the sheet music for the 10-piece Positive Catastrophe Band performing that night at Jazz Alley.  (Oh, God, New York will never be what it once was where jazz clubs were the center of the universe.  A part of me longs to have lived there in the 1950's, despite the fact that I would have probably drunk myself to death).  And, as I told The Husband, I realized that there was an "Ann T. Greene"  who got left behind when I left New York.  It's only when I work with or run into fellow "creatives" that she emerges.  I miss her and need her here.