BIG BIRTHDAY – 70 – 1946-2016 – Page 3

Big Birthday Memory #4: Patti Smith, CBGB and an Observant Life

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from October 16, 2006

I’ve never been to CBGB OMFUG. Why do I care about a punk music club whose entrance was always spattered with graffiti and most of whose musical appearances were by people I knew almost nothing about — except Bruce Springsteen [he wrote this with Patti Smith] , Patti Smith [two favorites: People Have the Power, Peaceable Kingdom], Joan Jett [I Love Rock and Roll] and a few others? (I don’t t know the lore all that well – but it always seemed to me that women really got a crack at center stage at CBGB.) I think it was just nice to see it there – waving its fist in the air. It has closed – maybe to reopen, maybe not – and I’m just kind of sad to see it losing its lease to what some have called “the suburbification of Manhattan.”

Patti Smith, whom I had the honor to meet at last year’s Media Reform conference in St. Louis, was a real CBGB heroine and I felt, meeting her, a deep connection. We’re the same age. She’s a heartbreakingly honest person who lost her husband way too soon (and wrote People Have the Power partly at his instigation) — a mom and a singular human soul. The music she made was remarkably articulate (she is a poet after all) and inspiring. I’ve linked above to two of my favorites — one of which, People Have the Power, was an anthem of the Vote for Change election tour in 2004.

So what do the final days of a gritty music club where I never went have to do with my life as an observant Jew? Believe it or not – plenty. Both of them were fascinating universes I always observed from the outside and wondered about. Both stood for making one’s own way to truth. That search has taken me, for some reason I’m still grappling with, to the Orthodox Jewish community where I’ve found a home and spirit that brings a new kind of meaning to my life.

At my last big birthday I complained to a friend about my age and her response was “but you’re completely reborn in this new life – you’re not old AT ALL!” In some ways she’s right. I certainly feel that there’s a universe I’m traveling through that’s new, moving, inspiring and mysterious. Sometimes though it’s also a pain. For the past several weeks, from Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) to the end of Simchas Torah (Ending the annual, week-by-week reading of the Torah: the five books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and beginning again) the holidays consumed days of time: in synagogue, inviting guests to meals and going to meals at friends, building and dismantling a sukkah and observing the prohibition on driving and work. Since this year many of these days fell on weekends it meant NO catching up on work on Sundays and no farmer’s market. (two weird examples, I admit.) Since it’s the end of tomato season that last was sad though not critical to the future of the human race or my household.

Even so, all these small requirements, which I try to follow since I’ve made this commitment, can consume time and tax serenity and spirituality. I’ve come to love the prohibition on the Sabbath and enjoy the quiet days reading, taking walks, visiting, napping and sharing ideas. But the surrender to and acceptance of all these rules is a peculiar experience and I grapple with it daily. Even so, the quest, like that of the young rebels who put CBGB on the map, is a great adventure – and the learning is exhilarating.

Go listen to People Have the Power whether this post makes sense or not. It will make you happy on a Monday – although that’s easier here today since it’s the third amazingly gorgeous fall day in a row – with leaves turning and leaf smells beginning to fill the air. Which, I just realized, takes us right back to faith and gratitude for the world’s beauty when it shows up.

Big Birthday Memory #3: TRY TO REMEMBER — THE FANTASTICKS, JERRY ORBACH, THE INTERNET AND ME

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from August 24, 2006

OK – so I should be used to it by now. I’ve been — as I often say, a walking demographic Baby Boomer as long as I can remember. But on this morning after the re-opening of THE FANTASTICKS* – which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, I read “adults 55+ adapting online.” Of course they are — sooner or later whatever I’m doing becomes part of a generational wave.

Don’t worry – there IS a connection.

I saw THE FANTASTICKS with my college room mate and her mother during fall vacation of my freshman year. That was 1964 – four years after it opened. At the end, all of 18, I was crying so hard that the woman sitting next to me – probably 25 or so – handed me the rose her date must have given her at dinner. I kept it on the wall of my room for years.

El Gallo — the irresistible seducer and originator of the “hurt’ without which “the heart is hollow” — was first played by Jerry Orbach. [hear him sing Try to Remember here.] I met him when I was close to 50 – and told him I’d seen the show when I was 18. His face just changed – not a trace of Lennie Briscoe but a combination of affection, nostalgia and pleasure. We spoke a bit more and then I apologized for approaching him at a reception and acting like a groupie. He replied “You saw the Fantasticks when you were EIGHTEEN! That wasn’t an interruption that was a pleasure.” So I guess the story had the same impact on the cast that it had on girls like me. “Please God please,” the young girl (“the girl”) cries out – “don’t let me be NORMAL!” That was me alright. Please let me be singular – not like the others!

Well it hasn’t turned out that way. Whatever I come to, my peers hit within a year or so. It made me a great talk show producer – never a visionary too far ahead to be relevant, just enough ahead to know what story to do next. I guess that’s why I accommodated to my role as close enough to normal but with an edge — rather than the downtown woman I had once wished to be.

I know about this headlong Boomer journey online because my older son, in the industry, had read a similar study. Last weekend I told him that I seemed to be getting a lot more online consulting work and his theory was that companies need boomer consultants more because more “civilian” boomers are finally hitting the web. I always knew we would; the tribe that is the baby boom loves to be connected. The web was a perfect home for us. Just like THE FANTASTICKS.

*OK Feminist friends, there’s an element of sexism in this original fairy tale (they’ve rewritten the only really troubling song) but I have chosen to ignore it. It just can’t trump the wonder and poetry.

Big Birthday Memory #2: Home and Heartache

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from December 4, 2006.

Yeah, we’re home – and as usual it’s like walking into an electric fan. We landed, unpacked, did laundry, slept (until 3AM) then Rick went back to the airport for a fund-raising trip to California. I’m working on several major projects and wanting to organize for when the boys come home for the holidays. Grocery lists and activity planning in addition to many hours of business obligations.

Lots on my mind. Today a friend told me about the last conversation she had with her father and I was ambushed by a deluge of memories. It’s tough to come to terms with the loss of a parent. Both of mine have been gone for years and there isn’t a day I don’t think of them — and, often, wish I could ask them something – or tell them something — or just feel their love again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time and it surprised me. I just wasn’t expecting the intensity.

I once sent my dad the lyrics to a Judy Collins song about her father. It’s a wonderful evocation of the love between fathers and daughters and the bitter-sweet realization that one’s life will exceed that of a beloved parent. It’s what they’d wish for us but it’s complicated. Anyway there wasn’t a moment of my life when I doubted the love for and faith in me felt by both my parents.

There were also circumstances in my life that led me, in my memory at least, to be less attentive than I wanted to be. I think it will haunt me forever- times when finances or my own parental responsibilities kept me from visits; times when I let my dad tell me not to come because he didn’t want us to “see him like this.” — all those things we all wish we’d done differently. I am beginning to think that this is a real issue for me and one I’ve got to get some clarity about.

This is the second time in the space of the 90 days or so I’ve had this blog that my dad has come up and he’s been gone since 1991. Somehow though I’m more at peace with the loss of him. I can summon memories that make me smile and I know that he had a profound and lovely effect on my sons, which adds to my own fond remembrances of him.

My mother, who died in 1998, haunts me though. I know things in her life frustrated her – and that she would have liked to do more in the world outside the house. My husband told both her and me that I was guilty that my arrival had pulled her out of a promising career but she insisted that that was HER choice and I should get over it. That she loved raising the three of us. I don’t doubt that she loved raising her daughters but I also think she needed more than she was able to get in life as a suburban mom. I don’t know – all I know is that I feel a need to be particularly helpful to elderly women on the street, or the bus, or the synagogue steps. As if I can do for her by doing for them. Agh. I don’t know. I’m going to bed to see if I can beat the last of the jet lag. This is too sad.

Big Birthday Memory #1: My Mother’s Sisters

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here. Today -from June 30, 2007: the end of a generation.

They’re all gone now – my mom and my aunts. Here they are at the wedding of Barbara, the youngest, who died this week. My mom, Jeanne, the oldest, gone since 1998, is the one on the right – that’s my dad next to her. On the left side of the photo is Bettie, and my Uncle Jim.

Growing up in the Depression, they were wartime girls – my mom worked for the Office of Price Administration — the agency that controlled prices and tried to prevent gouging and war profiteering. She met my dad there – his hearing loss prevented him from active military duty so he fought unscrupulous businessmen instead. Bettie was in the WAVES. Barb, the youngest, came of age closer to the war’s end; her husband Bob was a Ranger, decorated several times.

The Depression had been hard on them. My grandfather was unable to bring in much. It was so traumatic that once, when Bettie started to talk about putting cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes, my mother cut her off. We were in a car, the three of us, and Bettie was just kind of spinning yarns. But to my mother she was raising things better left alone. I have always understood that these three sisters – so lovely and happy here — went through plenty. I also understood that they were not alone; no one their age was untouched by the Depression and the war.

I’ve come to realize over the years that my parents’ Depression experiences had a profound effect on me. Not only did I read menus from the price to the item – and check dangling price tags before examining clothing on a rack. That was the obvious stuff I inherited. Beyond it though was a sense of sadness for them all. My mother, who was an artist, got a scholarship in education, so she because a teacher. My father, who wanted to be an architect, got a scholarship to law school so he became a lawyer. My Uncle Bob was to be a veterinarian but his wartime injuries impaired his movement too much for him to be able to lift the animals so his dream died too. That was just how it was.

In some ways, they were the lucky ones; all three sisters and my father and uncles — were able, on scholarships, to go to college. All three marriages, despite tensions and tough times, survived with a real friendship between spouses for most of their lives. Each had three children who were smart, interesting, and self-sufficient. Even so, the bounty of choices they gave to us was so much more than they had had themselves. The young women in this photograph, and their husbands, never had the luxury of dropping out of school to campaign for Eugene McCarthy or majoring in music or theater or spending years doing trauma medicine a couple of months a year to pay for a life of mountain climbing and exploration. There was no give, no leeway, in the lives of those whom the Depression and the war that ended it – had stamped forever.

None of that shows here, of course. It’s a wedding. There’s no hint of all the scars the Depression had left on them, no hint of the loved ones and friends lost to World War II, no indication of the profound pain of watching a father who couldn’t support them and a mother who was permanently enraged. Nope. This was a wedding day and a lovely one at that. Tonight – well tonight I’m thinking of what it must have been like as the third sister, the baby sister, married. Who, I wonder, was missing – lost to the war. Who, I wonder, were the absent friends lost to the jolt of economic inequality when their parents retained a steady income and my grandparents could not. What are the stories my sisters and cousins and I will never know?

When we cleaned out my mom’s apartment I found the strangest thing: the Phi Beta Kappa key of the husband of one of my mother’s best childhood friends — a woman whose first husband had died early in the war. Why did my mother have it instead of her? What, if anything, had been between them when they were young? To me, the key is a symbol of all that was never said – the reserve of this brave and noble generation who didn’t want us to know how tough it really was. One picture and so many random thoughts — probably self-indulgently cobbled together here.

I’m writing this at the beach — the ocean slamming against the shore just steps away. This little barrier island on the Jersey shore has been a family destination since I was little –well more than 50 years — so I’m probably more available for all this nostalgia as memories rise up unfiltered on the sidewalks and sand dunes and ice cream parlors. But that’s not all it is; these thoughts are never very far away and when my sister sent this photo tonight many rose to the surface. I so wish I had asked more questions and said more often “You guys were great, so brave, so remarkable.”At my mothe’s funeral I said something to an old friend of hers about their role as “the Greatest Generation.” He laughed. “We weren’t great Cindy. We just did what we had to do. If you have to, so will you.”

Look at this photo and think of all that touched these young women and their families. If, as they did, we faced more than a decade of economic and political upheaval, wiould we be as strong, as determined?

So long girls. I know we always loved you, but appreciate all you were and all you never got to be? No we didn’t do that. At least not enough.