Sunday, March 26, 2006
Philosophy of fun
This lady's on to something. Rread between the lines, and you'll know what i mean. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 26, 2006
Questions for Bonnie Fuller
Too Much Isn't Enough
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: As a wife, a mother of four and a symbol of female accomplishment who has served as the editor of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Us Weekly, Marie Claire and other magazines, why would you stoop to writing a book like "The Joys of Much Too Much," which basically argues that greed is good?
I think it is good to be greedy in terms of your dreams and in terms of trying to have everything you want out of life. The road to the richest life is one in which you partake of careerhood, lovehood, mommyhood — all of those things.
But we can't have everything. We're in a moment of postfeminist Realpolitik, when women are realizing that juggling a job and family life requires some sacrifices. It's impossible to do everything well all the time.
I'm not suggesting that you do. In fact, I say it's O.K. — your house doesn't have to be clean. You don't have to have clean floors. Your drawers don't have to perfect, and dishes can pile up in the sink. That's part of my philosophy.
What philosophy is this? The philosophy of Dishevelism?
It's certainly a philosophy of nonperfectionism. It's O.K. to let newspapers and magazines and the mail pile up.
You mention several times in your book that you are the main breadwinner in your family. Are you boasting?
I do like it. I don't mind it.
But how does your husband feel about that? You never even say what he does.
He is a self-employed architect. At one point, after we had our second child, he decided to take time off and stay home. I think he's happy that at least one person in our family is a breadwinner.
And how are you faring as the editorial director of American Media, where you oversee many magazines, including the celebrity weekly Star?
I love overseeing Star. I love being at a newsmagazine and breaking a big story. I am much more sought after at dinner parties now. Most everybody is eager to ask me whether there is a contract between Tom and Katie, is Britney really pregnant, all the basics.
Fashion magazines teach readers to cultivate an aesthetic sense. What can one say about Star? Does it have any socially redeeming value?
A lot of the traditional women's magazines are too much work. They are full of how-to service information, and that can feel like homework. It's like how to ace a job interview, organize your desk, make a good impression on a first date, make sure he will call you back, paint your kitchen, not to look needy.
But didn't you yourself promote that how-to-do-everything-better trend at Glamour?
It can make you feel inadequate! When you come home and want to relax, you may not want to read about improving yourself 100 percent. You might want to be satisfied with yourself and have a good laugh looking at what happened to Brad and Angelina this week.
What field do you think is a good one for young women now?
The field of celebrity journalism.
Oh, no. I hope that is not an expanding field.
Yes, it is. That's why I suggested it. We're all competing to find writers and editors who can do it. The circulation of the Star is 1.5 million every week, and then it's 9.5 million readers, because it has a lot of pass-along readers.
>Where are you politically? Are you a registered Democrat?
I guess I am registered as a Democrat. I guess, because you have to register?
Right. You can be a Democrat, a Republic, an Independent.
No, I believe we registered as Democrats, my husband and I.
Perhaps Star could introduce a column on politics in time for the next elections.
We cover Hollywood's political fund-raisers. A lot of people in Hollywood feel that Ben Affleck has a political career in his future as the senator from Massachusetts. But you have to stick to what works for your brand, and readers are not coming to Star to read a political column.
Which magazines do you subscribe to?
I don't subscribe to any magazines. Subscriptions come too late for me, and I am too impatient. I have to get my magazines at the newsstand.
###
The New York Times
March 26, 2006
Questions for Bonnie Fuller
Too Much Isn't Enough
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: As a wife, a mother of four and a symbol of female accomplishment who has served as the editor of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Us Weekly, Marie Claire and other magazines, why would you stoop to writing a book like "The Joys of Much Too Much," which basically argues that greed is good?
I think it is good to be greedy in terms of your dreams and in terms of trying to have everything you want out of life. The road to the richest life is one in which you partake of careerhood, lovehood, mommyhood — all of those things.
But we can't have everything. We're in a moment of postfeminist Realpolitik, when women are realizing that juggling a job and family life requires some sacrifices. It's impossible to do everything well all the time.
I'm not suggesting that you do. In fact, I say it's O.K. — your house doesn't have to be clean. You don't have to have clean floors. Your drawers don't have to perfect, and dishes can pile up in the sink. That's part of my philosophy.
What philosophy is this? The philosophy of Dishevelism?
It's certainly a philosophy of nonperfectionism. It's O.K. to let newspapers and magazines and the mail pile up.
You mention several times in your book that you are the main breadwinner in your family. Are you boasting?
I do like it. I don't mind it.
But how does your husband feel about that? You never even say what he does.
He is a self-employed architect. At one point, after we had our second child, he decided to take time off and stay home. I think he's happy that at least one person in our family is a breadwinner.
And how are you faring as the editorial director of American Media, where you oversee many magazines, including the celebrity weekly Star?
I love overseeing Star. I love being at a newsmagazine and breaking a big story. I am much more sought after at dinner parties now. Most everybody is eager to ask me whether there is a contract between Tom and Katie, is Britney really pregnant, all the basics.
Fashion magazines teach readers to cultivate an aesthetic sense. What can one say about Star? Does it have any socially redeeming value?
A lot of the traditional women's magazines are too much work. They are full of how-to service information, and that can feel like homework. It's like how to ace a job interview, organize your desk, make a good impression on a first date, make sure he will call you back, paint your kitchen, not to look needy.
But didn't you yourself promote that how-to-do-everything-better trend at Glamour?
It can make you feel inadequate! When you come home and want to relax, you may not want to read about improving yourself 100 percent. You might want to be satisfied with yourself and have a good laugh looking at what happened to Brad and Angelina this week.
What field do you think is a good one for young women now?
The field of celebrity journalism.
Oh, no. I hope that is not an expanding field.
Yes, it is. That's why I suggested it. We're all competing to find writers and editors who can do it. The circulation of the Star is 1.5 million every week, and then it's 9.5 million readers, because it has a lot of pass-along readers.
>Where are you politically? Are you a registered Democrat?
I guess I am registered as a Democrat. I guess, because you have to register?
Right. You can be a Democrat, a Republic, an Independent.
No, I believe we registered as Democrats, my husband and I.
Perhaps Star could introduce a column on politics in time for the next elections.
We cover Hollywood's political fund-raisers. A lot of people in Hollywood feel that Ben Affleck has a political career in his future as the senator from Massachusetts. But you have to stick to what works for your brand, and readers are not coming to Star to read a political column.
Which magazines do you subscribe to?
I don't subscribe to any magazines. Subscriptions come too late for me, and I am too impatient. I have to get my magazines at the newsstand.
###
Thursday, March 23, 2006
End of the Affair
The New York Times
March 12, 2006
The Funny Pages | Sunday Serial
At Risk
By PATRICIA CORNWELL
Chapter 10: The End of the Affair
Win took the letter that the man in the red scarf left for him at the Diesel Café to the crime lab, where a forensic scientist named Rachael, or Rake, examined it. She found indentations, probably from another piece of paper in the same pad, saying, 3 year market exclusivity and $8.96, up from an earlier forecast of $6.11.
Monique Lamont sits in a marble-and-cherry kitchen on Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill, one of the most expensive and coveted addresses in Boston. She is drinking her first martini of the day, straight up, Grey Goose, one pimento-stuffed green olive, and a glass that she took out of the freezer.
She wears jeans and a loose-fitting denim shirt. The warm-up suit she had on earlier is in the Dumpster behind the 19th-century brick complex where the apartment was safely and secretly tucked away until this morning, when Sammy disclosed the location to the troops, insisting that the police patrol the area, insisting that she can't stay in her Cambridge house, not now, not that she would. She will always see the back door, the key box, the gas can. She will always see him in her bedroom, the gun pointed at her head as he did what he wanted, as he recreated her into his own image — a small, filthy creature, a nothing, a nobody.
"I only wish I'd killed him myself," she says.
Huber sits across the table from her, drinking his second beer. He is having a hard time looking at her, his gaze interrupted as if his eye muscles were suddenly palsied.
"You've got to get beyond this, Monique," he says. "I know that's easy for me to say. But you're not thinking right, couldn't possibly be under the circumstances."
"Shut up, Jessie. If it ever happens to you, you'll find yourself howling at the damn moon. Then you'll understand empathy."
"So it helps if you ruin everything else in your life? You shouldn't have told them about this place."
"And what? Refuse police protection when I don't know who's behind what happened, who put him up to it?"
"We don't know for a fact that anybody did."
"Go to a hotel? Walk into the lobby, find the media in packs, waiting to tear into me?"
"You're the one who went to the media," he says somberly, his eyes moving around, doing their cold, calculating thing. "Now we have to take your stupid oysters and make pearls out of them."
He has the most banal metaphors and analogies of anyone Lamont has ever met. She says: "Why did you let him? You could have told him the documents lab was tied up, that Rachael wasn't there, was busy, something. That was stupid, Jessie."
"Win's always had a special membership to Club Crime Lab. He's too smart. If I'd started making excuses, he would have known right away something was going on. He trusts me like a father."
"Then he's not as smart as you think." She sips her martini, drains the glass, eats the olive.
"And you're a Harvard snob." Huber gets up, opens the freezer, gets out the Grey Goose, a frozen glass, makes her another, forgets the olive.
She stares at the martini he sets on the table, stares at it long enough for him to remember the olive.
"You know what that guy's I.Q. is?" Huber says from inside the refrigerator. "Higher than yours and mine put together."
She replays that unforgiving footage, Win seeing her. . .handing her his jacket, telling her to take deep breaths. She sees him seeing her naked and powerless and degraded.
"He just can't take tests, the damnedest thing," Huber continues, opens another beer. "Graduated from high school with a 4.0, valedictorian, most likely to succeed, best looking, best everything, except for one minor thing. Tanked his SAT's. Then after college, tanked his G.R.E.'s, his LSAT's. He can't take tests. Something happens to him."
Win didn't show up at The Globe. He defied her. He has no respect for her after seeing her.. . .
"I hear there are people like that." Huber sits back down. "Brilliant but can't take tests."
"I'm not interested in his learning disabilities," Lamont says. "What exactly did he find out at the lab?" The vodka has made her tongue bigger, less nimble, her thoughts stuttering. "Or what does he think he found out?"
"He probably doesn't know what it means. Can't prove anything, anyway."
"That's not what I asked!"
"Notes from a phone conversation with my broker."
"Oh God."
"Don't worry. They won't find fingerprints, nothing to link that letter to me. One thing I do know is forensic science." He smiles. "Win probably thinks it's you. For that matter, probably thinks you're behind it. Probably thinks Roy did it, called him a half-breed." Huber laughs. "Now that for sure ticked him off."
"Another one of your impulsive, high-risk decisions."
He didn't ask her, just did it. Then he told her after the fact because the more she knows, the more implicated she is, that's been his strategy all along.
"It did exactly what I said it would." Huber drinks his beer. "You threaten him, insult him, try to scare him off a case, and he locks his jaws on it like a pit bull."
She is silent, sips her martini, trapped.
She says: "It wasn't necessary. He's a pit bull anyway."
"Your fault for insisting on talking to him in person instead of over the phone. You should have left him down there in Knoxville." He pauses, his face twitching. "Maybe you got a thing about him. That's what it looks like."
"Go to hell, Jessie."
"Of course, it's a blessing he was here. Providence, your guardian angel, living right, whatever," he indelicately, indifferently goes on. "Win got steamed and came to see you. As it turns out, my little ploy actually did us all quite a favor. You're still alive, Monique."
"Don't sound so disappointed."
"Monique.. . ."
"I'm not joking." She holds his gaze, doesn't flinch, realizes that she has come to hate him, to wish him harm, misery, poverty, death. Then: "I don't want Toby coming back. He's worthless. I'm done with that favor. I'm done with any favors."
"He can't stand working for you anyway."
"I've had enough of you, Jessie. I have for a long time." The vodka is making her uninhibited. He can go to hell. "I told you I'm not playing along with it anymore. I goddamn meant it. It's not worth it."
"Of course it is. You've gotten what you want, Monique. What you deserve," he says, and there is no mistaking what he means.
She stares at him, shocked. "What I deserve?"
He stares back at her.
"I deserved that? You're saying I deserved that? You bastard!"
"I meant you work hard, should get something for it." His eyes don't jump around this time. They look at her, flat, nothing in them.
She starts to cry.
It is dark now, the moon new.
Win opens the driver's door of Nana's old Buick, stopped in the middle of the road again, watching Miss Dog wandering aimlessly again, headlights flashing in her old blind eyes.
"That's it. The end," Win says, furious. "Come here, girl," he coaxes, whistling. "Come on, Miss Dog. Whatcha doing on the street again, huh? She forget to shut the door? Let you out, too lazy to make sure you got back in? Her son-in-law lowlife kick you again?"
Miss Dog's tail droops, her head hangs. She drops to her belly as if she's done something wrong. Win gently picks her up, keeps talking, wonders if she can hear him at all, places her inside the car, drives off, tells her where she's going and what will happen next. Maybe she hears him, maybe she doesn't. She licks his hand. He parks behind Nana's house, and the wind chimes are chiming softly, the night clear, the cool air barely stirring, the chimes quietly chiming as if telling secrets, and he unlocks the back door, Miss Dog draped over his shoulder like a furry sack of potatoes.
"Nana?"
He follows the sound of the TV.
"Nana? We have a new addition to the family."
Sykes has been on the phone for over an hour, getting bounced from one old-timer to the next. Twenty-three years ago is forever. So far no one at the Asheville Police Department remembers Detective Mark Holland.
She dials another number as she drives west toward Knoxville, approaching headlights confusing her, reminding her what a rip-off it is to get old. She can't see worth a hoot anymore, can't read a menu without glasses, her night vision awful. Damn airlines. Damn delays and cancellations. The only rental car left one with four cylinders, got the pep of a sea cow.
"I'm trying to reach Detective Jones," she tells the man who answers the phone.
"Been quite awhile since I was called that," the voice says pleasantly. "And who's this?"
She introduces herself, says, "As I understand it, sir, you were a detective with the Asheville P.D. back in the 80's, and I'm wondering if you might remember another detective named Mark Holland."
"Not well, because he'd only been a detective a couple of months when he got killed."
"What do you remember about that?"
"Only he'd gone to Charlotte supposedly to interview some witness in a robbery case. You want to know my opinion, he wasn't no accident. I think he just didn't want to take his own life in a place where one of us would've had to work his case."
"You have any idea why he might have wanted to take his own life?"
"The way I heard it, his wife was cheating on him," he says.
Nana is asleep on the couch, in her long black robe, her long white hair loose and splayed over the cushion, Clint Eastwood on the TV, making somebody's day with his big, bad gun.
Win sets down Miss Dog, and she instantly puts her head in Nana's lap, animals always reacting to her like that. She opens her eyes, looks at Win, holds out her hands to him.
"My darling." She kisses his face.
"You didn't have your alarm on again. So I have no choice but to give you a guard dog. This is Miss Dog."
"Welcome my friend, Miss Dog." She pets her, gently pulls on her ears. "Don't you worry, Miss Dog. She won't find you here. That nasty woman, I can see her plain as day, could use a few teeth, couldn't she?" petting Miss Dog. "Don't you worry, my little one," Nana says indignantly. "I have ways of taking care of people like her."
If you want to incur Nana's wrath, treat an animal badly, incite her to go out on one of her mysterious missions late at night, flinging 999 pennies in a bad person's yard, a payment to the old-crone goddess Hecate, who knows how to take care of cruel people.
Miss Dog is fast asleep in Nana's lap.
"Her hips are hurting," she says. "Arthritis. Gum problems, pain. Depressed. She yells at her a lot, that big, unhappy woman, not a nice person, treats her the same way she treats herself. Terrible. Poor baby," petting her as she snores. "I know all about it," she then says to Win. "It's all over TV, but you're all right." She takes his hand. "You remember that time your father beat up that man who lived three streets over?" She points. "He had no choice."
Win isn't sure he knows what she's talking about, nothing new. Her world isn't always obvious or logical.
"You were 4, and this man's son — he was 8 — shoved you to the ground and started kicking you, calling you awful names, calling your father awful names, racist names, and oh, when your father found out, he went to their house, and that was that."
"Did Dad start it?"
"Not your father. But he ended it. It happens. And you're all right. If you go back and look around, you'll find a knife."
"No, Nana. It was a gun."
"There's a knife. You know, the kind with a handle that's got a thing." She draws in the air, maybe she means a knife with a guard, like a dagger. "You look. The one you killed, and you mustn't blame yourself for that. He was very bad, but there's another one. He's worse. Evil. I tried the honey on a muffin this morning. Tennessee is a pure place with lots of good people, not necessarily good politics, but good people. The bees don't care about politics, so they like it there, are joyful making their honey."
Win laughs, gets up. "I think I'm going to head down to North Carolina, Nana."
"Not yet. You have unfinished business here."
"Will you please set the burglar alarm?"
"I have my wind chimes. And Miss Dog," she says. "Tonight the moon is aligned with Venus, has entered Scorpio. Misconceptions abound, my darling. Your perceptions are veiled, but that's all about to change. Go back to her house, and you'll find what I'm talking about and something else." She stares off, says: "Why am I seeing a small room with rafters overhead? And a narrow staircase, maybe plywood?"
"Probably because I still haven't gotten around to cleaning out your attic," he says.
Next week: The Finlay file surfaces in an unexpected place.
###
March 12, 2006
The Funny Pages | Sunday Serial
At Risk
By PATRICIA CORNWELL
Chapter 10: The End of the Affair
Win took the letter that the man in the red scarf left for him at the Diesel Café to the crime lab, where a forensic scientist named Rachael, or Rake, examined it. She found indentations, probably from another piece of paper in the same pad, saying, 3 year market exclusivity and $8.96, up from an earlier forecast of $6.11.
Monique Lamont sits in a marble-and-cherry kitchen on Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill, one of the most expensive and coveted addresses in Boston. She is drinking her first martini of the day, straight up, Grey Goose, one pimento-stuffed green olive, and a glass that she took out of the freezer.
She wears jeans and a loose-fitting denim shirt. The warm-up suit she had on earlier is in the Dumpster behind the 19th-century brick complex where the apartment was safely and secretly tucked away until this morning, when Sammy disclosed the location to the troops, insisting that the police patrol the area, insisting that she can't stay in her Cambridge house, not now, not that she would. She will always see the back door, the key box, the gas can. She will always see him in her bedroom, the gun pointed at her head as he did what he wanted, as he recreated her into his own image — a small, filthy creature, a nothing, a nobody.
"I only wish I'd killed him myself," she says.
Huber sits across the table from her, drinking his second beer. He is having a hard time looking at her, his gaze interrupted as if his eye muscles were suddenly palsied.
"You've got to get beyond this, Monique," he says. "I know that's easy for me to say. But you're not thinking right, couldn't possibly be under the circumstances."
"Shut up, Jessie. If it ever happens to you, you'll find yourself howling at the damn moon. Then you'll understand empathy."
"So it helps if you ruin everything else in your life? You shouldn't have told them about this place."
"And what? Refuse police protection when I don't know who's behind what happened, who put him up to it?"
"We don't know for a fact that anybody did."
"Go to a hotel? Walk into the lobby, find the media in packs, waiting to tear into me?"
"You're the one who went to the media," he says somberly, his eyes moving around, doing their cold, calculating thing. "Now we have to take your stupid oysters and make pearls out of them."
He has the most banal metaphors and analogies of anyone Lamont has ever met. She says: "Why did you let him? You could have told him the documents lab was tied up, that Rachael wasn't there, was busy, something. That was stupid, Jessie."
"Win's always had a special membership to Club Crime Lab. He's too smart. If I'd started making excuses, he would have known right away something was going on. He trusts me like a father."
"Then he's not as smart as you think." She sips her martini, drains the glass, eats the olive.
"And you're a Harvard snob." Huber gets up, opens the freezer, gets out the Grey Goose, a frozen glass, makes her another, forgets the olive.
She stares at the martini he sets on the table, stares at it long enough for him to remember the olive.
"You know what that guy's I.Q. is?" Huber says from inside the refrigerator. "Higher than yours and mine put together."
She replays that unforgiving footage, Win seeing her. . .handing her his jacket, telling her to take deep breaths. She sees him seeing her naked and powerless and degraded.
"He just can't take tests, the damnedest thing," Huber continues, opens another beer. "Graduated from high school with a 4.0, valedictorian, most likely to succeed, best looking, best everything, except for one minor thing. Tanked his SAT's. Then after college, tanked his G.R.E.'s, his LSAT's. He can't take tests. Something happens to him."
Win didn't show up at The Globe. He defied her. He has no respect for her after seeing her.. . .
"I hear there are people like that." Huber sits back down. "Brilliant but can't take tests."
"I'm not interested in his learning disabilities," Lamont says. "What exactly did he find out at the lab?" The vodka has made her tongue bigger, less nimble, her thoughts stuttering. "Or what does he think he found out?"
"He probably doesn't know what it means. Can't prove anything, anyway."
"That's not what I asked!"
"Notes from a phone conversation with my broker."
"Oh God."
"Don't worry. They won't find fingerprints, nothing to link that letter to me. One thing I do know is forensic science." He smiles. "Win probably thinks it's you. For that matter, probably thinks you're behind it. Probably thinks Roy did it, called him a half-breed." Huber laughs. "Now that for sure ticked him off."
"Another one of your impulsive, high-risk decisions."
He didn't ask her, just did it. Then he told her after the fact because the more she knows, the more implicated she is, that's been his strategy all along.
"It did exactly what I said it would." Huber drinks his beer. "You threaten him, insult him, try to scare him off a case, and he locks his jaws on it like a pit bull."
She is silent, sips her martini, trapped.
She says: "It wasn't necessary. He's a pit bull anyway."
"Your fault for insisting on talking to him in person instead of over the phone. You should have left him down there in Knoxville." He pauses, his face twitching. "Maybe you got a thing about him. That's what it looks like."
"Go to hell, Jessie."
"Of course, it's a blessing he was here. Providence, your guardian angel, living right, whatever," he indelicately, indifferently goes on. "Win got steamed and came to see you. As it turns out, my little ploy actually did us all quite a favor. You're still alive, Monique."
"Don't sound so disappointed."
"Monique.. . ."
"I'm not joking." She holds his gaze, doesn't flinch, realizes that she has come to hate him, to wish him harm, misery, poverty, death. Then: "I don't want Toby coming back. He's worthless. I'm done with that favor. I'm done with any favors."
"He can't stand working for you anyway."
"I've had enough of you, Jessie. I have for a long time." The vodka is making her uninhibited. He can go to hell. "I told you I'm not playing along with it anymore. I goddamn meant it. It's not worth it."
"Of course it is. You've gotten what you want, Monique. What you deserve," he says, and there is no mistaking what he means.
She stares at him, shocked. "What I deserve?"
He stares back at her.
"I deserved that? You're saying I deserved that? You bastard!"
"I meant you work hard, should get something for it." His eyes don't jump around this time. They look at her, flat, nothing in them.
She starts to cry.
It is dark now, the moon new.
Win opens the driver's door of Nana's old Buick, stopped in the middle of the road again, watching Miss Dog wandering aimlessly again, headlights flashing in her old blind eyes.
"That's it. The end," Win says, furious. "Come here, girl," he coaxes, whistling. "Come on, Miss Dog. Whatcha doing on the street again, huh? She forget to shut the door? Let you out, too lazy to make sure you got back in? Her son-in-law lowlife kick you again?"
Miss Dog's tail droops, her head hangs. She drops to her belly as if she's done something wrong. Win gently picks her up, keeps talking, wonders if she can hear him at all, places her inside the car, drives off, tells her where she's going and what will happen next. Maybe she hears him, maybe she doesn't. She licks his hand. He parks behind Nana's house, and the wind chimes are chiming softly, the night clear, the cool air barely stirring, the chimes quietly chiming as if telling secrets, and he unlocks the back door, Miss Dog draped over his shoulder like a furry sack of potatoes.
"Nana?"
He follows the sound of the TV.
"Nana? We have a new addition to the family."
Sykes has been on the phone for over an hour, getting bounced from one old-timer to the next. Twenty-three years ago is forever. So far no one at the Asheville Police Department remembers Detective Mark Holland.
She dials another number as she drives west toward Knoxville, approaching headlights confusing her, reminding her what a rip-off it is to get old. She can't see worth a hoot anymore, can't read a menu without glasses, her night vision awful. Damn airlines. Damn delays and cancellations. The only rental car left one with four cylinders, got the pep of a sea cow.
"I'm trying to reach Detective Jones," she tells the man who answers the phone.
"Been quite awhile since I was called that," the voice says pleasantly. "And who's this?"
She introduces herself, says, "As I understand it, sir, you were a detective with the Asheville P.D. back in the 80's, and I'm wondering if you might remember another detective named Mark Holland."
"Not well, because he'd only been a detective a couple of months when he got killed."
"What do you remember about that?"
"Only he'd gone to Charlotte supposedly to interview some witness in a robbery case. You want to know my opinion, he wasn't no accident. I think he just didn't want to take his own life in a place where one of us would've had to work his case."
"You have any idea why he might have wanted to take his own life?"
"The way I heard it, his wife was cheating on him," he says.
Nana is asleep on the couch, in her long black robe, her long white hair loose and splayed over the cushion, Clint Eastwood on the TV, making somebody's day with his big, bad gun.
Win sets down Miss Dog, and she instantly puts her head in Nana's lap, animals always reacting to her like that. She opens her eyes, looks at Win, holds out her hands to him.
"My darling." She kisses his face.
"You didn't have your alarm on again. So I have no choice but to give you a guard dog. This is Miss Dog."
"Welcome my friend, Miss Dog." She pets her, gently pulls on her ears. "Don't you worry, Miss Dog. She won't find you here. That nasty woman, I can see her plain as day, could use a few teeth, couldn't she?" petting Miss Dog. "Don't you worry, my little one," Nana says indignantly. "I have ways of taking care of people like her."
If you want to incur Nana's wrath, treat an animal badly, incite her to go out on one of her mysterious missions late at night, flinging 999 pennies in a bad person's yard, a payment to the old-crone goddess Hecate, who knows how to take care of cruel people.
Miss Dog is fast asleep in Nana's lap.
"Her hips are hurting," she says. "Arthritis. Gum problems, pain. Depressed. She yells at her a lot, that big, unhappy woman, not a nice person, treats her the same way she treats herself. Terrible. Poor baby," petting her as she snores. "I know all about it," she then says to Win. "It's all over TV, but you're all right." She takes his hand. "You remember that time your father beat up that man who lived three streets over?" She points. "He had no choice."
Win isn't sure he knows what she's talking about, nothing new. Her world isn't always obvious or logical.
"You were 4, and this man's son — he was 8 — shoved you to the ground and started kicking you, calling you awful names, calling your father awful names, racist names, and oh, when your father found out, he went to their house, and that was that."
"Did Dad start it?"
"Not your father. But he ended it. It happens. And you're all right. If you go back and look around, you'll find a knife."
"No, Nana. It was a gun."
"There's a knife. You know, the kind with a handle that's got a thing." She draws in the air, maybe she means a knife with a guard, like a dagger. "You look. The one you killed, and you mustn't blame yourself for that. He was very bad, but there's another one. He's worse. Evil. I tried the honey on a muffin this morning. Tennessee is a pure place with lots of good people, not necessarily good politics, but good people. The bees don't care about politics, so they like it there, are joyful making their honey."
Win laughs, gets up. "I think I'm going to head down to North Carolina, Nana."
"Not yet. You have unfinished business here."
"Will you please set the burglar alarm?"
"I have my wind chimes. And Miss Dog," she says. "Tonight the moon is aligned with Venus, has entered Scorpio. Misconceptions abound, my darling. Your perceptions are veiled, but that's all about to change. Go back to her house, and you'll find what I'm talking about and something else." She stares off, says: "Why am I seeing a small room with rafters overhead? And a narrow staircase, maybe plywood?"
"Probably because I still haven't gotten around to cleaning out your attic," he says.
Next week: The Finlay file surfaces in an unexpected place.
###
Bearly Safe
Close calls. I had one myself, with a charging bison in Oklahoma's Witchita Mountain Wildlife refuge in July of 1978. The bull buffalo almost ran me down after i encroached (albeit unknowingly) upon his rutting territory. My heart has never beat so fast. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
The Funny Pages | True-Life Tales
My Island Paradise
By JON BENJAMIN
I wanted to take a trip with my girlfriend before we had our baby. She was about six months pregnant, and we both felt we needed one last fling with freedom before we were saddled with the excruciating pleasure of raising a child. Amy wanted to go to Mexico, to the beach. I had never been. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of Mexico. I was sure it was great, but I have an aversion to "great." Everyone I know had been to Mexico and enjoyed it, therefore "Why go?" was my feeling. I had this strange impulse to make the trip wonderfully terrible.
It was late fall, so naturally I suggested the most inopportune place, Nova Scotia. We flew to Halifax and stayed at a small B & B situated on a promontory overlooking a quiet harbor. It was one of those B & B's where people are friendly and everyone eats breakfast together. Because neither of us is friendly, this was extremely awkward. The next day we decided to leave Nova Scotia altogether and take the ferry to Prince Edward Island, an even more remote province.
The ferry to the island was enormous, and there were about four people on it. It was as if we had privately rented it. When we landed, things looked pretty barren. A guy with a Billy Gibbons beard was sitting behind a picnic table selling wooden clocks shaped like Prince Edward Island. You couldn't even get a bottle of water, but you could buy a homemade clock from a Canadian hillbilly. (No offense, hillbillies.)
We figured we would head to town and grab lunch before we went to our inn. There were two things open: a fish restaurant and a knife factory. We ate at the fish restaurant, which was empty except for us. The waitress told us it was off-season. Things pick up again in May, she said. I suggested that Amy be induced on the island so as to repopulate it, but as much as she is normally unamused by me, she really wasn't amused at this point. After lunch, we strolled over to the knife factory and bought a bread knife. Then we went to our inn, which, like everywhere else we had been on this trip, was located on a quaint harbor. (No offense, quaint harbors.)
The next morning we planned to head to a national-forest type place and take a walk. This was a big deal for us. We're not very outdoorsy, but there wasn't much else to do unless we wanted to get jobs at a sawmill. We filled a backpack and headed in the car to the other side of the island. This was the turning point. We were going to embrace our isolation. It might not be fun, but we would give ourselves over to the solitude of nature.
We pulled up and looked at the wooden placard that marked out the trails. A huge expanse of forest unfolded before us. We chose the one-and-a-half-mile loop. I mean, we wanted outdoor adventure, but a very limited amount. We zipped up our jackets and plunged ahead into the deep Canadian wilderness.
As we made our way, the forest grew quiet, and trees canopied us from the day. We walked on in silence. About 15 minutes in, we were doing relatively well, although I could sense a mild level of dread. As we turned a corner, I saw it, only a few yards in front of us, looming in the center of the path. A massive pile of animal dung. And this was not some ordinary pile of dung. It was a heaping load. We approached it slowly. It was still steaming.
"This looks like fresh bear dung," I said.
I saw Amy's face go ashen. Diplomatic as I am, I repeated, "This is definitely bear dung." (Note: I have no idea what bear dung looks like.) Somehow I forgot that bears attack people and that this might alarm Amy, who, remember, had a baby in her.
Amy's look turned to horror, and our peaceful walk took a sudden turn. She started striding ahead down the path, murmuring incoherently. Her fear triggered my fear, and I ran ahead, senselessly babbling out ideas of what we should do if confronted by a bear. Amy speed-walked to keep up with me, taking heavy breaths and exhaling loudly and rhythmically. Amy sounded as if she were in labor. I eventually stopped talking, and we both walked together at a clipped pace, staring straight ahead in a full state of panic. Everything went away except the primal instinct to survive. The last thing I remember saying was: "Don't run. Just walk fast."
Suddenly, I heard something coming from behind us. I didn't even want to turn around. The sound swelled. Instantly and without fanfare, two teenage girls in jogging shorts swept past us in a split second. Amy and I looked at each other blankly. It was a tacit but mutual admission of pathetic-ness. We walked the rest of the path and back to the car.
Amy wanted to leave the next day, a day earlier than we planned. I could only comply. On our way home, I bought a wooden clock from the hillbilly as a keepsake of our island journey. When I look back on that trip, I often wonder why I wanted it to be that bad. But we will always have that shared experience of sort of possibly being potentially attacked by a bear. In a strange way, that will stand out more than some great trip to Cabo.
Jon Benjamin is a writer and performer who lives in New York City.
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
The Funny Pages | True-Life Tales
My Island Paradise
By JON BENJAMIN
I wanted to take a trip with my girlfriend before we had our baby. She was about six months pregnant, and we both felt we needed one last fling with freedom before we were saddled with the excruciating pleasure of raising a child. Amy wanted to go to Mexico, to the beach. I had never been. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of Mexico. I was sure it was great, but I have an aversion to "great." Everyone I know had been to Mexico and enjoyed it, therefore "Why go?" was my feeling. I had this strange impulse to make the trip wonderfully terrible.
It was late fall, so naturally I suggested the most inopportune place, Nova Scotia. We flew to Halifax and stayed at a small B & B situated on a promontory overlooking a quiet harbor. It was one of those B & B's where people are friendly and everyone eats breakfast together. Because neither of us is friendly, this was extremely awkward. The next day we decided to leave Nova Scotia altogether and take the ferry to Prince Edward Island, an even more remote province.
The ferry to the island was enormous, and there were about four people on it. It was as if we had privately rented it. When we landed, things looked pretty barren. A guy with a Billy Gibbons beard was sitting behind a picnic table selling wooden clocks shaped like Prince Edward Island. You couldn't even get a bottle of water, but you could buy a homemade clock from a Canadian hillbilly. (No offense, hillbillies.)
We figured we would head to town and grab lunch before we went to our inn. There were two things open: a fish restaurant and a knife factory. We ate at the fish restaurant, which was empty except for us. The waitress told us it was off-season. Things pick up again in May, she said. I suggested that Amy be induced on the island so as to repopulate it, but as much as she is normally unamused by me, she really wasn't amused at this point. After lunch, we strolled over to the knife factory and bought a bread knife. Then we went to our inn, which, like everywhere else we had been on this trip, was located on a quaint harbor. (No offense, quaint harbors.)
The next morning we planned to head to a national-forest type place and take a walk. This was a big deal for us. We're not very outdoorsy, but there wasn't much else to do unless we wanted to get jobs at a sawmill. We filled a backpack and headed in the car to the other side of the island. This was the turning point. We were going to embrace our isolation. It might not be fun, but we would give ourselves over to the solitude of nature.
We pulled up and looked at the wooden placard that marked out the trails. A huge expanse of forest unfolded before us. We chose the one-and-a-half-mile loop. I mean, we wanted outdoor adventure, but a very limited amount. We zipped up our jackets and plunged ahead into the deep Canadian wilderness.
As we made our way, the forest grew quiet, and trees canopied us from the day. We walked on in silence. About 15 minutes in, we were doing relatively well, although I could sense a mild level of dread. As we turned a corner, I saw it, only a few yards in front of us, looming in the center of the path. A massive pile of animal dung. And this was not some ordinary pile of dung. It was a heaping load. We approached it slowly. It was still steaming.
"This looks like fresh bear dung," I said.
I saw Amy's face go ashen. Diplomatic as I am, I repeated, "This is definitely bear dung." (Note: I have no idea what bear dung looks like.) Somehow I forgot that bears attack people and that this might alarm Amy, who, remember, had a baby in her.
Amy's look turned to horror, and our peaceful walk took a sudden turn. She started striding ahead down the path, murmuring incoherently. Her fear triggered my fear, and I ran ahead, senselessly babbling out ideas of what we should do if confronted by a bear. Amy speed-walked to keep up with me, taking heavy breaths and exhaling loudly and rhythmically. Amy sounded as if she were in labor. I eventually stopped talking, and we both walked together at a clipped pace, staring straight ahead in a full state of panic. Everything went away except the primal instinct to survive. The last thing I remember saying was: "Don't run. Just walk fast."
Suddenly, I heard something coming from behind us. I didn't even want to turn around. The sound swelled. Instantly and without fanfare, two teenage girls in jogging shorts swept past us in a split second. Amy and I looked at each other blankly. It was a tacit but mutual admission of pathetic-ness. We walked the rest of the path and back to the car.
Amy wanted to leave the next day, a day earlier than we planned. I could only comply. On our way home, I bought a wooden clock from the hillbilly as a keepsake of our island journey. When I look back on that trip, I often wonder why I wanted it to be that bad. But we will always have that shared experience of sort of possibly being potentially attacked by a bear. In a strange way, that will stand out more than some great trip to Cabo.
Jon Benjamin is a writer and performer who lives in New York City.
###
Who da man ?
Funny article about the whole idea of "manliness." Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'Manliness,' by Harvey C. Mansfield
Who's the Man?
Review by WALTER KIRN
REMEMBER those great old "Saturday Night Live" bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to "pump you up" while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words "girly" and "manly" — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?
Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn't. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of "Manliness" (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that's happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of "manly" than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).
"But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question."
In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club? Let's put these mysteries aside, though — as well as the puzzle of how a writer can purport to analyze human humor (even flat-footedly and badly) while remaining personally immune to it — and move on to the essence of Mansfield's argument, to the hot sweaty groin of it, the manly crux.
"Manliness" starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female — that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject. He may as well just pound the table, since those who don't agree with him already won't have their minds changed by the case he makes (which largely consists of reassuring us that the case has been made by others). "Our science," Mansfield writes (slyly suggesting with a possessive adjective that he is, indeed, a fellow Homo sapiens) "rather clumsily confirms the stereotypes about manliness. . . . But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact?"
The answer is meant to be, "yes," of course (or, rather, "yes, professor"), but a reading of Mansfield's book suggests it's "no." No, there is actually nothing to be learned from deciding that we've known everything all along about how men are a mixture of pluck and pride and a certain primordial selfish-unselfishness that would rather die than live unfree, but which, if permitted to live free, isn't afraid to kill, if necessary — especially to protect the weak.
But just because there's nothing to be learned doesn't mean there's not plenty to be lectured on. Once Mansfield has put science squarely on his side, he moves on to literature and laboriously demonstrates that when it comes to matters manly, the work of Homer, Kipling and Hemingway is just as we remembered it from our high school days. He pays special attention to "The Old Man and the Sea," Papa's least complex statement of these themes, which reads nowadays like a novel for young adults, and pays no attention to the less well-known posthumous books (like "The Garden of Eden") involving cross-dressing and so on. Conclusion: "The manly man, as we say, 'makes a statement.' " And: "The old man is portrayed as thinking for himself."
After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.
These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.
After making what he believes to be a meal of all these clucking hens that think they're roosters, Mansfield wipes up the grease by going back to Aristotle and something called "philosophical courage," which is held out as the manliest manliness yet, and something that we, in these trying times of ours, could use a whole lot more of. "Extreme manliness," he warns us, is not the answer, though, nor is returning women to the kitchen and holding them there with the threat of a sound flogging. Still, they may want to remain there voluntarily once they understand, as Mansfield does, that "weaker than men, women have to be indirect in getting what they want; they cannot simply insist."
Hear him now, believe him later.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'Manliness,' by Harvey C. Mansfield
Who's the Man?
Review by WALTER KIRN
REMEMBER those great old "Saturday Night Live" bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to "pump you up" while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words "girly" and "manly" — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?
Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn't. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of "Manliness" (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that's happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of "manly" than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).
"But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question."
In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club? Let's put these mysteries aside, though — as well as the puzzle of how a writer can purport to analyze human humor (even flat-footedly and badly) while remaining personally immune to it — and move on to the essence of Mansfield's argument, to the hot sweaty groin of it, the manly crux.
"Manliness" starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female — that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject. He may as well just pound the table, since those who don't agree with him already won't have their minds changed by the case he makes (which largely consists of reassuring us that the case has been made by others). "Our science," Mansfield writes (slyly suggesting with a possessive adjective that he is, indeed, a fellow Homo sapiens) "rather clumsily confirms the stereotypes about manliness. . . . But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact?"
The answer is meant to be, "yes," of course (or, rather, "yes, professor"), but a reading of Mansfield's book suggests it's "no." No, there is actually nothing to be learned from deciding that we've known everything all along about how men are a mixture of pluck and pride and a certain primordial selfish-unselfishness that would rather die than live unfree, but which, if permitted to live free, isn't afraid to kill, if necessary — especially to protect the weak.
But just because there's nothing to be learned doesn't mean there's not plenty to be lectured on. Once Mansfield has put science squarely on his side, he moves on to literature and laboriously demonstrates that when it comes to matters manly, the work of Homer, Kipling and Hemingway is just as we remembered it from our high school days. He pays special attention to "The Old Man and the Sea," Papa's least complex statement of these themes, which reads nowadays like a novel for young adults, and pays no attention to the less well-known posthumous books (like "The Garden of Eden") involving cross-dressing and so on. Conclusion: "The manly man, as we say, 'makes a statement.' " And: "The old man is portrayed as thinking for himself."
After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.
These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.
After making what he believes to be a meal of all these clucking hens that think they're roosters, Mansfield wipes up the grease by going back to Aristotle and something called "philosophical courage," which is held out as the manliest manliness yet, and something that we, in these trying times of ours, could use a whole lot more of. "Extreme manliness," he warns us, is not the answer, though, nor is returning women to the kitchen and holding them there with the threat of a sound flogging. Still, they may want to remain there voluntarily once they understand, as Mansfield does, that "weaker than men, women have to be indirect in getting what they want; they cannot simply insist."
Hear him now, believe him later.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."
###
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Hair today - gone tomorrow
My night began as any other normal weeknight. Come home, fix dinner,
play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully
in my mind for the next few hours: "Maybe I should pull the waxing
kit out of the medicine cabinet." So I headed to the site of my
demise: the bathroom.
It was one of those "cold wax" kits. No melting a clump of hot wax,
you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you
peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you
pull the hair right
off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I'm not a genius,
but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (YA
THINK!?!)
So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each
other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius
kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees.
("Cold wax," yeah...right!) I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the
skin around it tight and pull. It works! OK, so it wasn't the best
feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer
eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker
of smooth skin extraordinaire.
With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I
sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting
championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet.
Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side
of my bikini line, covering the right half of my *hoo-hoo* and
stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (Yes, it was a long
strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself....RRRRIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!....OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!! Vision
returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the
strip. CRAP!!! Another deep breath and RRIIP! P!! Everything is
swirly and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...Do
I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK, back to normal.
I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has
caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to
revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the
strip! There's no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???
Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see
the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am
touching wax.
CRAP! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which
is now covered in cold wax and matted hair.
Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped
up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot
down.
DAMN!!!!!!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. *hoo-hoo*? Sealed
shut! Butt?? Sealed shut!
I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do
and think to myself "Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My
head may pop off!"
What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!!!
I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in,
immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently
wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!!!!!
I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to
torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit.
Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued
together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom
of the tub...in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, doesn't melt
cold wax.
So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement-
epoxied myself to the porcelain!!
God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a
phone put in the bathroom!!!!!
I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some
secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation
starter - "So, my butt and who-ha are glued together to the bottom of
the tub!"
There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for
removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to
know exactly where the wax is located, "Are we talking cheeks or who-
ha?"
She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the
rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box.
YEAH!!!!! Right!! I should be the joke of someone else's night.
While we go through various solutions. I resort to scraping the wax
off with a razor. Nothing feels better then to have your girlie
goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot
water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!!
By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling
for this event.
My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving
grace....the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I
really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!!!!!!
The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my
friend.
It's sooo painful, I but I really don't care. "IT WORKS!! It works!!"
I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up.
I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my
grief and despair....THE HAIR IS STILL THERE.......ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!!!
So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I
could have amputated my own leg at this point.
Next week I'm going to try hair color......
Now that's funny ........ Notttttttttt Send this on to other ladies
who need a good laugh!
play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully
in my mind for the next few hours: "Maybe I should pull the waxing
kit out of the medicine cabinet." So I headed to the site of my
demise: the bathroom.
It was one of those "cold wax" kits. No melting a clump of hot wax,
you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you
peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you
pull the hair right
off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I'm not a genius,
but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (YA
THINK!?!)
So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each
other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius
kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees.
("Cold wax," yeah...right!) I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the
skin around it tight and pull. It works! OK, so it wasn't the best
feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer
eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker
of smooth skin extraordinaire.
With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I
sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting
championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet.
Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side
of my bikini line, covering the right half of my *hoo-hoo* and
stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (Yes, it was a long
strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself....RRRRIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!....OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!! Vision
returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the
strip. CRAP!!! Another deep breath and RRIIP! P!! Everything is
swirly and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...Do
I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK, back to normal.
I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has
caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to
revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the
strip! There's no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???
Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see
the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am
touching wax.
CRAP! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which
is now covered in cold wax and matted hair.
Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped
up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot
down.
DAMN!!!!!!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. *hoo-hoo*? Sealed
shut! Butt?? Sealed shut!
I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do
and think to myself "Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My
head may pop off!"
What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!!!
I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in,
immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently
wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!!!!!
I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to
torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit.
Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued
together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom
of the tub...in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, doesn't melt
cold wax.
So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement-
epoxied myself to the porcelain!!
God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a
phone put in the bathroom!!!!!
I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some
secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation
starter - "So, my butt and who-ha are glued together to the bottom of
the tub!"
There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for
removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to
know exactly where the wax is located, "Are we talking cheeks or who-
ha?"
She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the
rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box.
YEAH!!!!! Right!! I should be the joke of someone else's night.
While we go through various solutions. I resort to scraping the wax
off with a razor. Nothing feels better then to have your girlie
goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot
water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!!
By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling
for this event.
My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving
grace....the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I
really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!!!!!!
The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my
friend.
It's sooo painful, I but I really don't care. "IT WORKS!! It works!!"
I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up.
I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my
grief and despair....THE HAIR IS STILL THERE.......ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!!!
So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I
could have amputated my own leg at this point.
Next week I'm going to try hair color......
Now that's funny ........ Notttttttttt Send this on to other ladies
who need a good laugh!
Who Da Man ?
Funny article about the whole idea of "manliness." Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'Manliness,' by Harvey C. Mansfield
Who's the Man?
Review by WALTER KIRN
REMEMBER those great old "Saturday Night Live" bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to "pump you up" while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words "girly" and "manly" — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?
Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn't. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of "Manliness" (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that's happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of "manly" than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).
"But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question."
In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club? Let's put these mysteries aside, though — as well as the puzzle of how a writer can purport to analyze human humor (even flat-footedly and badly) while remaining personally immune to it — and move on to the essence of Mansfield's argument, to the hot sweaty groin of it, the manly crux.
"Manliness" starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female — that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject. He may as well just pound the table, since those who don't agree with him already won't have their minds changed by the case he makes (which largely consists of reassuring us that the case has been made by others). "Our science," Mansfield writes (slyly suggesting with a possessive adjective that he is, indeed, a fellow Homo sapiens) "rather clumsily confirms the stereotypes about manliness. . . . But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact?"
The answer is meant to be, "yes," of course (or, rather, "yes, professor"), but a reading of Mansfield's book suggests it's "no." No, there is actually nothing to be learned from deciding that we've known everything all along about how men are a mixture of pluck and pride and a certain primordial selfish-unselfishness that would rather die than live unfree, but which, if permitted to live free, isn't afraid to kill, if necessary — especially to protect the weak.
But just because there's nothing to be learned doesn't mean there's not plenty to be lectured on. Once Mansfield has put science squarely on his side, he moves on to literature and laboriously demonstrates that when it comes to matters manly, the work of Homer, Kipling and Hemingway is just as we remembered it from our high school days. He pays special attention to "The Old Man and the Sea," Papa's least complex statement of these themes, which reads nowadays like a novel for young adults, and pays no attention to the less well-known posthumous books (like "The Garden of Eden") involving cross-dressing and so on. Conclusion: "The manly man, as we say, 'makes a statement.' " And: "The old man is portrayed as thinking for himself."
After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.
These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.
After making what he believes to be a meal of all these clucking hens that think they're roosters, Mansfield wipes up the grease by going back to Aristotle and something called "philosophical courage," which is held out as the manliest manliness yet, and something that we, in these trying times of ours, could use a whole lot more of. "Extreme manliness," he warns us, is not the answer, though, nor is returning women to the kitchen and holding them there with the threat of a sound flogging. Still, they may want to remain there voluntarily once they understand, as Mansfield does, that "weaker than men, women have to be indirect in getting what they want; they cannot simply insist."
Hear him now, believe him later.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'Manliness,' by Harvey C. Mansfield
Who's the Man?
Review by WALTER KIRN
REMEMBER those great old "Saturday Night Live" bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to "pump you up" while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words "girly" and "manly" — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?
Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn't. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of "Manliness" (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that's happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of "manly" than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).
"But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question."
In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club? Let's put these mysteries aside, though — as well as the puzzle of how a writer can purport to analyze human humor (even flat-footedly and badly) while remaining personally immune to it — and move on to the essence of Mansfield's argument, to the hot sweaty groin of it, the manly crux.
"Manliness" starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female — that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject. He may as well just pound the table, since those who don't agree with him already won't have their minds changed by the case he makes (which largely consists of reassuring us that the case has been made by others). "Our science," Mansfield writes (slyly suggesting with a possessive adjective that he is, indeed, a fellow Homo sapiens) "rather clumsily confirms the stereotypes about manliness. . . . But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact?"
The answer is meant to be, "yes," of course (or, rather, "yes, professor"), but a reading of Mansfield's book suggests it's "no." No, there is actually nothing to be learned from deciding that we've known everything all along about how men are a mixture of pluck and pride and a certain primordial selfish-unselfishness that would rather die than live unfree, but which, if permitted to live free, isn't afraid to kill, if necessary — especially to protect the weak.
But just because there's nothing to be learned doesn't mean there's not plenty to be lectured on. Once Mansfield has put science squarely on his side, he moves on to literature and laboriously demonstrates that when it comes to matters manly, the work of Homer, Kipling and Hemingway is just as we remembered it from our high school days. He pays special attention to "The Old Man and the Sea," Papa's least complex statement of these themes, which reads nowadays like a novel for young adults, and pays no attention to the less well-known posthumous books (like "The Garden of Eden") involving cross-dressing and so on. Conclusion: "The manly man, as we say, 'makes a statement.' " And: "The old man is portrayed as thinking for himself."
After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.
These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.
After making what he believes to be a meal of all these clucking hens that think they're roosters, Mansfield wipes up the grease by going back to Aristotle and something called "philosophical courage," which is held out as the manliest manliness yet, and something that we, in these trying times of ours, could use a whole lot more of. "Extreme manliness," he warns us, is not the answer, though, nor is returning women to the kitchen and holding them there with the threat of a sound flogging. Still, they may want to remain there voluntarily once they understand, as Mansfield does, that "weaker than men, women have to be indirect in getting what they want; they cannot simply insist."
Hear him now, believe him later.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."
###
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Seeing red
A dear friend loves her masters tennis leaugue right up there with her children and non-profit job. in fact, she gained permission to skip out of work on a regular basis to play tennis - arguing that "networking" while she played helped her raise money for the non-profit.
Now she's considering buying a red sports car convertible - which she, no doubt, will drive to donors' businesses to ask for money. She'll probably wear red to pick up the checks.
Enjoy.
March 16, 2006
Online Shopper
Angling for the Edge in Tennis? Wear Red
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
THERE was a time, before I started playing in a tennis league, when I thought that the most difficult peace to negotiate would be a settlement in the Middle East.
Then last year I became a team captain. Territorial disputes? Feuds that stretch back decades? One entity using another as a pawn? Welcome to the United States Tennis Association's spring league.
There's a lot of maneuvering involved — before anyone steps foot on court. Some teams insist on playing at night, while others will schedule matches only at 9 a.m. Some players demand to play low in the lineup to protect their ratings, while others try to negotiate a binding agreement to play No. 1 in every match.
It's all about who has the advantage. Anyone who loses had a weak partner, was unfairly forced to play on courts that "had a weird glare" or believes that the net was too high and plans to confirm that hunch with a tape measure at the next match. (I did that only once though.)
So after my friend Stacey agreed to be captain this year, I breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of turning over the whole mess to the sort of seasoned negotiator who once managed to survive a two-year stint as a P.T.A. president.
"I guess you don't need me to do anything," I told Stacey.
"Not a thing," she agreed. "But would you mind getting everyone to agree on which team shirt to buy?"
On our roster are 22 women. Some like a tank top. Others favor cap sleeves. Some want collars. Some prefer long sleeves to protect them from UV rays. Two want cotton because synthetic fabrics make them itch. Three don't look good in green — or is it blue? — and nobody liked my suggestion of putting a skull-and-crossbones emblem across the front of the shirts.
Clearly, I faced an impossible task. So I turned to the Internet. After all, many online sporting goods stores have a uniform department, like Playerstennis.com (where teams get a discount) and Racquetssportswear.com (which offers custom color combinations and the option of adding a monogram).
As I scrolled through pictures of white-striped tank tops (at Slamgear.com) and yellow tank jog bras (at Tennishut.com), a question occurred to me: Which shirt would give our team an advantage over our opponents?
I phoned a color consultant for advice.
"You mean you want to project confidence and a winning attitude on the court?" asked Jill Morton, chief executive of Colorcom, a color consulting firm based in Hawaii.
"At a minimum," I said.
"I take it you're a very professional team, who got where you are because of your achievements," Ms. Morton said.
"Sort of," I said. "Plus, we wouldn't mind wearing a color that scares the other team to death."
"That's an easy one: red," Ms. Morton said. Last year the journal Nature published results of a British study showing that teams wearing red have a higher probability of winning than teams wearing blue.
Yellow is the most attention-getting color. Green is refreshing and cool. Navy blue projects power and authority. But if the purpose of a uniform is to get a competitive edge? Red.
"What is it about red?" I asked.
"It's an advancing color," Ms. Morton said. "The study of vision optics gives us a lot of scientific evidence about certain color combinations that cause muscular fatigue. Red objects appear to be larger, they appear to be moving forward toward us, and project an aura of aggression."
"That's what we need," I said.
"People are going to be seeing that red color more than the tennis ball," she said.
Ms. Morton cautioned against making broad statements about hue. "I hate it when people make big general statements about a color like blue, when light blue and dark blue are completely different," she said.
Keeping that in mind, I listened to the last bit of advice she gave me before hanging up — to avoid berry red ("it has blue undertones and more feminine associations") — and vowed to instead concentrate my efforts on finding an orange red. ("Think fire, think power, energy and danger.")
Muttering "fire, power, energy, danger," I ended up at Tennis-warehouse.com, where I found among the merchandise a selection of clothing from Nike called the Cruise Group. There were 12 styles of shirts to choose among, 9 skirts (although I wouldn't recommend the geometric print skirt even to an opponent), shorts, pants, a warm-up jacket and a visor. Every style came in at least one of three colors — white, navy or engine red — with contrasting trim.
I phoned the site's team orders department.
"When you say 'engine red,' do you mean berry red or orange red?" I asked the salesman.
"I can run in the back and look," he said.
A few minutes later, after he reported, "a really bright orange red," I set up an account for my team. Team members will receive a discount of 10 to 20 percent (the discount varies by manufacturer). I learned that each team member could phone in her order and pay separately with her own credit card; there is no minimum order.
I was thrilled that I appeared to have successfully outmaneuvered every complaint I could imagine from a teammate. I had found not one but several styles of tank top, a style with cap sleeves, a collared shirt, a long-sleeved number. For those who look bad in red orange, there's navy with red-orange piping. For those who think navy is too hot in the sun, there's white with red-orange piping.
"What about those who will only wear cotton?" Stacey asked.
So this is what successful P.T.A. presidents do. They stomp on someone's dream.
She drove with me to a local tennis store. There we found a white cotton Ralph Lauren shirt with navy trim.
Then I sent out e-mail to every player on the team, a very long message in which I described all the uniform options, covered contingencies like cotton and suggested that each member place her order fast because some items cannot be re-ordered if they sell out.
I predict a winning season.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com.
Now she's considering buying a red sports car convertible - which she, no doubt, will drive to donors' businesses to ask for money. She'll probably wear red to pick up the checks.
Enjoy.
March 16, 2006
Online Shopper
Angling for the Edge in Tennis? Wear Red
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
THERE was a time, before I started playing in a tennis league, when I thought that the most difficult peace to negotiate would be a settlement in the Middle East.
Then last year I became a team captain. Territorial disputes? Feuds that stretch back decades? One entity using another as a pawn? Welcome to the United States Tennis Association's spring league.
There's a lot of maneuvering involved — before anyone steps foot on court. Some teams insist on playing at night, while others will schedule matches only at 9 a.m. Some players demand to play low in the lineup to protect their ratings, while others try to negotiate a binding agreement to play No. 1 in every match.
It's all about who has the advantage. Anyone who loses had a weak partner, was unfairly forced to play on courts that "had a weird glare" or believes that the net was too high and plans to confirm that hunch with a tape measure at the next match. (I did that only once though.)
So after my friend Stacey agreed to be captain this year, I breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of turning over the whole mess to the sort of seasoned negotiator who once managed to survive a two-year stint as a P.T.A. president.
"I guess you don't need me to do anything," I told Stacey.
"Not a thing," she agreed. "But would you mind getting everyone to agree on which team shirt to buy?"
On our roster are 22 women. Some like a tank top. Others favor cap sleeves. Some want collars. Some prefer long sleeves to protect them from UV rays. Two want cotton because synthetic fabrics make them itch. Three don't look good in green — or is it blue? — and nobody liked my suggestion of putting a skull-and-crossbones emblem across the front of the shirts.
Clearly, I faced an impossible task. So I turned to the Internet. After all, many online sporting goods stores have a uniform department, like Playerstennis.com (where teams get a discount) and Racquetssportswear.com (which offers custom color combinations and the option of adding a monogram).
As I scrolled through pictures of white-striped tank tops (at Slamgear.com) and yellow tank jog bras (at Tennishut.com), a question occurred to me: Which shirt would give our team an advantage over our opponents?
I phoned a color consultant for advice.
"You mean you want to project confidence and a winning attitude on the court?" asked Jill Morton, chief executive of Colorcom, a color consulting firm based in Hawaii.
"At a minimum," I said.
"I take it you're a very professional team, who got where you are because of your achievements," Ms. Morton said.
"Sort of," I said. "Plus, we wouldn't mind wearing a color that scares the other team to death."
"That's an easy one: red," Ms. Morton said. Last year the journal Nature published results of a British study showing that teams wearing red have a higher probability of winning than teams wearing blue.
Yellow is the most attention-getting color. Green is refreshing and cool. Navy blue projects power and authority. But if the purpose of a uniform is to get a competitive edge? Red.
"What is it about red?" I asked.
"It's an advancing color," Ms. Morton said. "The study of vision optics gives us a lot of scientific evidence about certain color combinations that cause muscular fatigue. Red objects appear to be larger, they appear to be moving forward toward us, and project an aura of aggression."
"That's what we need," I said.
"People are going to be seeing that red color more than the tennis ball," she said.
Ms. Morton cautioned against making broad statements about hue. "I hate it when people make big general statements about a color like blue, when light blue and dark blue are completely different," she said.
Keeping that in mind, I listened to the last bit of advice she gave me before hanging up — to avoid berry red ("it has blue undertones and more feminine associations") — and vowed to instead concentrate my efforts on finding an orange red. ("Think fire, think power, energy and danger.")
Muttering "fire, power, energy, danger," I ended up at Tennis-warehouse.com, where I found among the merchandise a selection of clothing from Nike called the Cruise Group. There were 12 styles of shirts to choose among, 9 skirts (although I wouldn't recommend the geometric print skirt even to an opponent), shorts, pants, a warm-up jacket and a visor. Every style came in at least one of three colors — white, navy or engine red — with contrasting trim.
I phoned the site's team orders department.
"When you say 'engine red,' do you mean berry red or orange red?" I asked the salesman.
"I can run in the back and look," he said.
A few minutes later, after he reported, "a really bright orange red," I set up an account for my team. Team members will receive a discount of 10 to 20 percent (the discount varies by manufacturer). I learned that each team member could phone in her order and pay separately with her own credit card; there is no minimum order.
I was thrilled that I appeared to have successfully outmaneuvered every complaint I could imagine from a teammate. I had found not one but several styles of tank top, a style with cap sleeves, a collared shirt, a long-sleeved number. For those who look bad in red orange, there's navy with red-orange piping. For those who think navy is too hot in the sun, there's white with red-orange piping.
"What about those who will only wear cotton?" Stacey asked.
So this is what successful P.T.A. presidents do. They stomp on someone's dream.
She drove with me to a local tennis store. There we found a white cotton Ralph Lauren shirt with navy trim.
Then I sent out e-mail to every player on the team, a very long message in which I described all the uniform options, covered contingencies like cotton and suggested that each member place her order fast because some items cannot be re-ordered if they sell out.
I predict a winning season.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com.
