Magnetic Pride

A few weeks ago, I was engaged in a lively dialogue with a co-worker about something or other that was wrong with this country. I think it might have been political correctness. Actually-- yes, that was it. My co-worker, a psychologist, who also happens to be Israeli, was railing against people who take issue with the term "mentally retarded" to describe people who are, well, mentally retarded.

"What dee fack?!" he screamed in the chart-room, in his charming dialect that I know all too well, "mentally retarded eees mentally retarded! It's not a facking insooolt! Now, if you are saying it to put somebody down, okay, fack you, you're an ess-hole, but der eees nathing wrong wit 'mentally retarded' as a clee-nee-cal term!"

And I agree. Slower processing. Slower cognition. Retarded. Nothing wrong with that. However, in this country of ours, where everybody is so petrified of saying "the wrong thing", we are content to seek shelter behind euphemisms and politeness and couching. It's funny, because I think, if you asked most foreigners if Americans were a "polite" society, they'd laugh in your face. No, we're not polite, because politeness really means graceful and considerate, it doesn't mean not speaking the truth. We're rude and brash, and we're generally socially unacceptable, but, don't worry, we won't dare call someone with an IQ below 70 "retarded".

I can remember feeling slightly bad during this conversation with our Israeli psychologist, and he said to me, "Don't worry-- you're not American, you have a dee-freent perspective than these other morons."

And I remember finding that funny, because I've never really thought of myself as not American. Sure, my father is Israeli, but he moved here eight years before I was born. My mother is American-- so American that she used to flirt with life guards in Atlantic City when she was fourteen, lying about her age. I mean, what's more American than that?

On paper, I'm American. In my heart, I'm... whatever. I don't know. Israel seems to think I'm Israeli, at least that's what they told my father when he was planning a family trip for us there back when I was seventeen. They told him that I would be taken into custody at the airport and inducted into the army. Oh, but there was some paperwork that could be filled out to avoid this happening.

"No thanks," my father told the consulate.

I don't know if my views on America have been more shaped by the fact that my father is Israeli or the fact that I'm a cynical, skeptical bastard. Of course, I may very well be that because my father is Israeli. Chicken. Egg. Israeli. Falafel. Who knows?

I like this country well enough, I suppose. Sometimes, things that our government or some of its citizens do embarrass me, or make me ashamed, or make me want to pretend I'm from Oxford, but I expect that citizens of other countries can't help but feel that way about their homelands, too. Sometimes my family members say and do things that embarrass me, too, but it's not like I can say, "Oh, see that goy family eating ham and swilling zinfandel in that big stone house with the Mercedes 550 in the circular driveway over there? That's my family," because we all know it's not.

We all know.

I look at peoples' cars sometimes, with their "Proud to Be An American" bumper-stickers and I can't help but envy them sometimes. I wish I could feel that way all the time. Maybe I could have a "Proud to Be An American" magnet, that I could take off and put on according to the behaviors and statements and actions of our government-- and its citizens. Like, if I'm in line behind a boorish, petty, obnoxious, ornery American at the bank, I could go out to the parking lot and take the magnet off. When we devote humanitarian aid to a foreign country (one where we have no special interest), I could slap that puppy back on my trunk.

I would be okay with that.

I think.

Yesterday morning, I was in a doctor's office waiting room while my wife went in for an appointment. On the television, some crazy-ass network I'd never heard of called "HLN" was featuring coverage of the Casey Anthony murder trial. It brought me back to the heady days of 2002, when I would sometimes skip class in college if a particularly good trial was being featured on "Court TV," and it made me remember how much I can't stand Nancy Grace. But what was far more interesting than anything the prosecutor was saying in her laborious opening statement, was a small graphic in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen that said,

"Justice for Caylee"

And I thought to myself, Wow. If I had that magnet on my car, this would be one of the times where I'd take it off.

The Exioma

My father refers to people who puzzle him and the world as "exiomas."

We know the word is "enigmas," but his version if funnier if nothing else. Israelis. Always good for a ha-ha.

I'm an exioma, I suppose. We probably all are, to some extent, though I think some of us are probably guilty of overcomplicating ourselves for the sole purpose of appearing more interesting. And I can understand the motivation for doing that. It's like-- why wear a plain t-shirt when you can wear one with a snappy "Daily Show" quote on it, or a picture of Gandhi, or a Bob Dylan song lyric nobody understands. In the book, "The Killer Angels," Confederate General James Longstreet jokingly says to General George Pickett,

"George, you certainly have a talent for complicating the obvious and trivializing the momentous."

Well, people like to do that, and people do it well.

I think I realized I was an enigma yesterday when someone was discussing the proposed sales tax on Philadelphia cultural events, like tickets to see live theatre. The arts community in Philadelphia is in an absolute uproar over this proposed tax, and Philadelphia theatre companies are claiming that it will rob them of already-dwindling audiences, and will threaten to exterminate an cultured and essential art form that has long been teetering on the perilous edge of exinction.

Theatre people. They're such fucking drama queens, aren't they?

Well, the person who was discussing the proposed tax hike on arts and culture was, I think, expecting me to share in her indignation over such an obvious affront to the arts in Philadelphia, a scene which I am a part of, however marginally. I'm an actor. I am an avid theatregoer. I teach theatre. I'm a playwright, of sorts. Shouldn't I be leading the parade, the protests, shouting rabid slogans into a megaphone with a hypothetical Molotov cocktail in my hand?

Meh.

I turned to my colleague and I said the following:

"You know what? I think everybody needs to quit crying in their fucking beer, okay?"

She looked at me. And blinked. Twice.

"Going to the theatre in America has always been a rich man's game, and it's always going to be that way. Do any of these fucking 'artists' have any idea how to balance Philadelphia's budget? No. Do any of these goddamned fru-frus and morons know that nearly 300 Philadelphia police officers were almost laid off in order to balance the budget? Is that what they want? Would they volunteer to get fucking deputized and patrol the streets of North and West Philly for free to stave off this stupid theatre tax? No. They wouldn't. This city would be brought to its knees, to its knees if we laid off 300 cops. But do they give a fuck about that?! No! They just want to live in their own protected world where accessibility to the arts is the only important thing in the world."

She blinked again.

"Well," she said, "I guess, when you are involved in one aspect of life, that tends to be what you choose to fight for."

Did I mention that this woman is my boss?

"I would have thought," she continued, "that as an actor and as a theatre educator that this issue might be more important to you but, obviously, it's not."

Obviously not.

And why not? I am a theatre educator. I appear onstage and lustily lap up applause that I probably don't deserve. I see plays far more frequently than I see movies. I was a theatre major in college. Shouldn't I care that the city of Philadelphia is taxing arts events, and not sporting events? Well, yeah. And it's unfair to tax one form of entertainment and not the other, but I'm certainly not going to bust out an editorial to the Philadelphia Inquirer about it, and I'm not going to write a letter to some politician's lover (excuse me-- secretary) about it either.

Why? Because I'd rather pay $8.00 more for a ticket to a play in this city than see 300 prematurely retired cops working at local Targets and Shop-Rites as rent-a-badges for $9.00/hr.

It's really that simple.

And, as I was having this conversation (or was it a monologue?) with my boss, I wondered yet again if I am not in the wrong profession. The performing arts are important to me, but they are certainly not where my overt passions lie. If I could find some way to turn the fervor of my beliefs into a tangible job with a steady income, I'd do that. But I don't know how to do that.

A staunch proponent of law-and-order with a theatrical streak. Or is it the other way around?

Exioma indeed.

Forging Ahead Back In Time

While I was away on vacation, my sister had a baby.

I was relaxing on a small beach in Rockport, Maine, watching a ten-year-old blonde girl stab a hopefully deceased lobster with a stick when I got the typically dry text message from my father:

"NOAH is doing great was born
around 1 today big baby 7 lb 11 oz
everyone is doing great i love you
dad take"

My father's text messages are always the same: factual, uneffusive, grammatically dubious/containing scant punctuation and always, always concluding with one extraneous word. I suppose that, whenever he wants to send a text message, he merely recycles one he already sent, deletes most of it, starts anew, and forgets to delete the final word of the old message. Often I receive texts from him that end in a word having to do with his business-- manufacturing undergarments for sports teams. One day prior to Noah being born, he sent me a text about my mother:

"mommy is a nervous about everything
Now I know where you got it from ha ha ha
love dad phillies"


One thing he has gotten very good at with his phone is taking pictures. My wife and I enjoyed several of them while we were in Maine, sent as attachments to his bizarre text messages ("mom @ noah" [ed: I presume that meant "mom & noah"] "you sister is running away" [ed: the picture that accompanied this text is my oldest sister holding Noah as if he was a bomb slathered in radioactive honey] and, my personal favorite, "mom is high" [ed: I have no idea what the fuck that means.]) It was only upon our arrival home tonight that we were treated to the full barrage of Noah pictures on my father's cell-phone, including two others of my oldest sister holding her new nephew both gingerly and increduously. According to my father, my oldest sister's nose looks inordinately larger in these pictures than it ever has before. He now refers to her as "Pinocchio."

While a new baby was entering my family's life back in Pennsylvania, it seemed only fitting that I should make the acquaintance of an old baby in Rhode Island. Last night, I got to experience my wife as a captivating, newly-minted four-year-old girl, courtesy of some dusty Betamax video tapes, and the perhaps even dustier Betamax player that resides in her mother and father's bedroom and, miraculously, still functions. While we fumbled our way through setting up the Betamax player, which had lain dormat since, I presume, around 1987, when most of those items went the way of the dinosaurs and vinyl bench car seats, I realized that people were more intelligent back when Betamax players were popular. For example, the Betamax video cassette cases were emblazoned with the word "epitaxial." I mean, I can only presume that average, run-of-the-mill 1987 grown-ups knew what that word meant, otherwise they wouldn't buy things listing it as an apparent selling point or virtue. Also, you had to be pretty clever to actually set up the Betamax player, and being Hercule fucking Poirot couldn't hurt if you need to find the tracking dial.

I can't speak for Mrs. Apron but, for me, it was a pretty strange experience, sitting there on the edge of her parent's bed, next to my 27-year-old wife, watching her four-year-old self be-bopping around a totally different world. I mean, there she was, opening up presents that turned out to be not Anthropologie skirts but Babar & Celeste music boxes and puzzles. And, unlike in all the photographs I've seen, this version actually talked! She looked straight into the lens, at me, and she told me about how she went into the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson's and she stuck her head under! I mean-- what a big girl! What a sweet girl. A bossy girl on occasion, but, on the whole, a sweet girl. With her raven-haired father and her smooth-faced mother, clad in the eye-popping duds of the day. Frozen in time and bustlingly alive with motion, all at once. I'm glad the Betamax held on for one more trip down an epitaxial-laden memory lane.

We never had a video camera when I was a little boy. The earliest film of me comes from when I was twelve years old, filming a 6th grade English mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster in which I played four characters, including the program host, and I referred unknowingly to another character called "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python. Fortuantely, my English teacher refrained from calling home about that. Though it was an innocent faux-pas, the more innocent, earlier years exist only in still pictures, and I think that's actually okay. If I could see my beautiful and energetic mother moving around, devoid of her trigger finger and her arthritis, my robust father with more, well, hair, I just don't know. I don't know if I could sit through that without hot, blinding tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know how my wife did it. I felt a thickness in my throat last night, and they weren't even my movies, my history. I guess I just look at the world differently than she does, and I think that's okay, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy the world the way it used to be, without obsessing and depressing about what it is now or what it will be in days and years to come.

Well, I suppose it is anyway. I wouldn't really know.

It's okay, though. There are always new memories to enjoy, to someday join the old ones. There may not be Betamax films to preserve in a layer of dust-bunnies, but there are text messages, like the one my father sent me on Tuesday. He's been on a mad dash to find my sister, her husband, and their brand-new baby a house, seeing as they're rapidly outgrowing my sister's one-bedroom apartment. He sent me a text to inquire about houses for sale on our street:

"We just saw a twin near you the
realestate kathleen stupid blond told
me twice on the phone 185,000 i went
there at 5 to c it she said sorry mistake
its 285,000 i almost toppoled her out
the fucking window"

STUMP! A Broadway Hit Sensation.

Many years ago, when I was but a child with dark circles under his eyes from never sleeping and a lustruous, brown bowl-cut, I woke up and lazily got out of bed to see a strange sight.

The front door to our house was open, and I could see my father, on his knees out front. He was tearing out the hedges that had graced the perimeter of my ancestral home since it was constructed in 1955.

"Fuck this!" he screamed, the sun beating down on his burgeoning hint-of-a bald spot. He had grown weary of the yardwork he once prided himself on. When he emigrated to this country from Israel in 1972, perhaps the idea of owning a home and doing his own yardwork appealed to his lust for accomplishment. After all, there isn't any yardwork to do on your house in B'Nai Brach. What are you going to do there-- mow the dirt? Any shrub that would dare to grow there will eventually be obliterated by a ketusha rocket anyway.

But the thrill of hedge pruning wore off eventually for my poor father and, one morning, the man just cracked. The primal instincts of the desert beast that had been carefully kept at bay under his faux American veneer tore through him like the Incredible Hulk busting through his button-down Oxford shirt. At eight years old, I could do little but watch him in utter bewilderment. And bring him 7-Up whenever he appeared on the verge of collapse.

I prayed hard that I would not end up like him. I was relying heavily on my mother's genes to mellow out, distill and dilute the hot-blooded Israeli insanity that threatened to one day compel me to do battle with Arabs and/or shrubbery.

Alas, it was not to be.

When my wife and I purchased this house in February, we noticed that the former owners had left eleven stumps of rather appreciable size and girth in the flower beds of our house for us to deal with. They were unsightly, twisted, ugly things. They accounted in large part for our house looking like a set piece for a Tim Burton film. Not only were they pretty fucking ugly, but the termite inspector who checked out the house prior to settlement left us with an ominous warning,

"Those stumps are a haven for termites. If you don't get those suckers out, you're going to have big problems. Count on it."

In our typical way, we ignored the warning as we were quickly overwhelmed with other problems: a perpetually clogged bathroom sink, leaking gas pipes, a psychotic oven with a mind of its own, and a significant dearth of closet space which resulted in us calling in our carpenter friend and only now, after his construction of a 7 foot closet can we take most of our clothes out of the boxes and suitcases in which they've lived since February.

One night a month or so ago, we were walking the dog around the neighborhood and we walked past one home in particular where we saw an unusual sight-- twisted and torn tree stumps, freshly uprooted and lying on the side of the road. The victorious gentleman who did all that work was filling in the holes with soil as we past. He noticed my wife and I, who had stopped dead in our tracks to admire his handywork.

"Hello," he said, rather jovially.

"You did all that?" I asked, with a touch of idolotry in my voice.

"Yeah, it was tough," he replied.

My wife told him about our particular dilemma and elucidated her view that we were incapable of removing them ourselves.

"Oh, no," he said, "you can do that."

The guy had obviously got us pegged wrong, rather like the supermarket clerk yesterday who tried very courageously to talk to me about baseball.

As we had done with the termite inspector, we ignored this guy. Until this morning. We were doing some light gardening and, during a Diet Coke break as we were sitting on our porch and I was staring at the stumps I said,

"God, I sure would like to tear those fuckers out today."

Uh-oh.... was I turning Israeli? Was it, after twenty-nine years of keeping the beast at bay, finally happening?

"Are you serious?" my wife asked, probably trembling a little.

"Yes."

"Well, let's get the tools from the garage."

The "tools" by the way, were tools that the previous owners had left in the garage, and were probably created by friends of Jesus Christ. They're all wood-handled and very, very old.

As we attacked Stump #1 without mercy or logic, we suffered a minor setback:

Not to be downhearted or defeated, we hopped into the car and went to the local hardware store where we had a philosophical dilemma. My wife was aghast at the prices for fiberglass-handled shovels and pitchforks. Between $30.00-$40.00, as opposed to the wooden-handled ones which were about half the cost.

"I'm not paying $30.00 for a fiberglass shovel," she declared.

"Right, but the wooden one broke, so why are we going to buy another wooden one that's just going to break, too?"

"It's too expensive."

"You know what I would have done if you weren't here?" I asked her rhetorically, "I would have bought the fiberglass one, thrown out the receipt and the price sticker in the trashcan at the store, brought it home and lied to you about the price."

"That's nice to know, dear."

We ended up buying the $30.00 fiberglass one.

In the end, it's good that we bought that one because these stumps were big motherfuckers held in place by some unbelievably thick roots. We also stopped at my parents house and liberated/borrowed/stole their pruners to clip some of the roots once we had dug down far enough. Miraculously, the former owner's elderly, wooden pitchfork held up and my brand-new toy performed excellently.

However, neither tool could stop me from getting hurt. A long forgotten shard of glass was imbedded deep into the dirt and, as I was digging around down there looking for root ends, while wearing heavy-duty gardening gloves, mind you, I felt a slicey-slice.

Cut straight through. And it left our front porch looking like a scene from CSI.

After some first aid provided by EMT-in-Training Mrs. Apron, and some covering of a silver dollar-sized blister on my palm, we were back at work, Mrs. Apron twisting through the dirt and roots with the pitchfork, and me macheting my way through the roots with my fiberglass shovel, spearing them like, um, a fucking crazed half-Israeli psycho.

In the end, the sidewalk was littered with the stumpy carcasses, our prey, our kill. Yeah! Fuck all's y'alls, stumpy-assed motherfuckers! As we Israelis say, "May a trolley car grow in your stomach!"

Aren't they positively awful-looking? And to think, that was the first thing our guests saw upon walking up our walkway. Well, if we had guests, I mean. Here's a close-up of these bitches:

Was it worth the bloodshed and the copious amounts of sweat? In a word: fuck yes. Something very positive was done today, and it wasn't just the beautification of our little patch of the world. Today's hard work proved to my wife that we are, on occasion, capable of achievements that may seem daunting, if not next to impossible. For three solid hours we hacked away at those sonsofbitches, and we did it. Sure, we only got out eight and there are three humongous ones, beyond our capacity to remove ourselves, but those will be dealt with at a later date. For now, it's time to enjoy the fruits of our labor and be proud of what we can do with our own mettle.

And fiberglass.

Sure, it's a little hard to type right now, but I feel great.

Good morning. I'm first.

Well, it's Minor Medical Procedure Week in my immediate family circle apparently.

Yesterday, my father finally went in to a local "surgical suite" (which almost sounds inviting, doesn't it?) to have an object removed from his lower left leg.

When I say "object" it's because a.) I don't yet know exactly what it was, in terms of proper medical terminology and b.) there's really no other way to succinctly describe it. This thing developed approximately three years ago, and my father, who is good at ignoring things that have the potential to inconvenience him, ignored it as it started out looking like a pimple, and then a boil, and then a clementine.

My father, who is Israeli and is, consequently, a VHB (Very Hairy Bastard) had another one of these things on his back which my mother made the mistake of lancing one evening when I guess both of them were bored and Masterpiece Theatre was a repeat. It got severely infected and my father developed MRSA, a life-threatening staph infection that requires massive doses of antibiotics and regular visits from Jehovah's Witnesses. He recovered, but the wise decision was made to put the kabash on any other at-home surgery surrounding the Titleist on his leg.

This object on my father's leg has been the source of constant joking in our family since it grew to a jokeable size around a year-and-a-half or so ago.

"Dad, I didn't know you were hiding a Volkswagen Beetle inside your leg-- that's pretty cool."

"Hey, do you think you've got an underdeveloped twin in there?"

"Oh, so that's where my old Super-Ball went."

"Jesus, Dad-- why didn't you tell us your leg was pregnant?"

And so on and so on.

My father would take it all in stride, laughing amiably and responding with his trademark line,

"I'm seeing Dr. Rose about it in a couple weeks."

My father first started this line in 2006. After about a year, I was convinced that "Dr. Rose" didn't actually exist, and he was just some figment of my father's imagination that he employed to placate us when we would bring up the golf-cart-sized growth on his leg.

"Seriously," I said one night at their house for dinner, "I can't eat with that thing in the room."

"Honey," my mother said, "please shut up and eat your chicken. Daddy's seeing Dr. Rose about it next week."

Fast forward to yesterday. It was the big day. We were all finally saying goodbye to this adopted member of the family. I felt kind of sad in a way. We had never even bothered to name it. I think, had I been on my game enough to provide it with a monkier it would have been "Burton."

I called my father on the phone after the procedure had been completed.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he said jovially. "I'm great. The only thing that hurt was the fuckin' Novacaine shot. After that, it was great. Listen, I'm not trying to be a big man and say, 'Oh, it didn't hurt,' but, really, it was great. Mummy, what a nice place it was! Like getting surgery in the living room. Actually, I think it was even smaller than our living room. But very nice. Fucking comfortable chairs and sofas, tables. Like a living room with big lights. And you can go in and get a soda, you know. You don't have to sign in with some ugly nurse and go up to the fourth floor, fifth floor-- make you all nervous. Not like a shitty hospital with old fuckin' people-- men in gowns, women in gowns-- disgusting. This was very nice. Very convenient, too. Right in Devon, you know. Across the street from the Whole Foods."

You'd think he was doing a commercial for this place, if it wasn't for the profanity.

I called my mother last night to see how my father was doing.

"He's a tough patient, your Daddy" she said.

"I know. So how'd it go really?" I asked.

"He told me all about it afterwards. He told me that, when Dr. Rose saw it he cringed and said, 'Jesus, that's really big.' And Daddy told him he'd better wear goggles when he cuts it open and Dr. Rose just laughed, but, when he cut into it, Daddy said the thing exploded all over Dr. Rose's face. Daddy said, 'See?! I told you you should have worn goggles!' And Dr. Rose said, 'Oh, it's okay, I have glasses on.' He was very explicit."

Earlier in the week, when my sister and I were joking about the impending procedure (the prescription for the surgery had been up on my parents' refrigerator for at least two months, so we could all count down the days) I said that the operating room would probably resemble the audience at a Gallagher comedy routine, with curious med students and onlookers cowering under plastic tarps as they get showered with a tsunami of cyst juice. She cracked up and then we both got quiet, realizing how old we are for being able to reference Gallagher.

Today, I went into the hospital at the bumslice of dawn to get vial after vial of blood taken. My cardiologist sent me there after my stress echocardiogram in order to get my cholesterol and other levels checked. He wasn't pleased that my good cholesterol levels were low from a blood test I had done three years ago. The blood lab opens at 7am, but my father, who routinely gets bloodwork done for his own cholesterol, advised me to buck the system.

"Mummy-- listen. When you go for your bloodwork, get there at around 6:15. That way, chick-chack, you're the first one there and you'll be done faster. Don't sit around and wait with those old fucks, okay? Just get there quick, write your name down on the sign-in sheet and then, boom, at 7, it's you!"

He told me that, sometimes, he gets there so early all the lights are off and there's nobody at the reception desk, and there's no sign in sheet. I asked what the fuck do I do if I get there and that happens to me.

"No problem," he said, "do what I do?"

"What's that," I asked, "do you stick the fucking needle in your own arm and leave the blood all over the table for them?"

"No, honey. I don't. I take a piece of paper out of my pocket, and I write "SIGN IN SHEET" at the top, and I write "Name" and leave a space and, next to it I write "Time of Arrival" and leave a space next to it, and then I write my name, and I write "6:15" next to it and I sit down and read their stupid fuckin' magazines until the bitch gets there. And she comes in, you know, with her coffee and her Dunkin' Donuts fuckin' bagel. By this time, a couple other people have come in and have written their names under mine, and they're all sitting there and she looks at my sheet and she gets real pissed and she goes, "Who did this?" And I smile and I say, "I did. Good morning. I'm first."

And, this morning, so was I.