But Mom, Why Does all the Food Wiggle?

Thanksgiving with the Old Aunts

Many people have happy memories of childhood Thanksgivings.  Not me.  From age eight (the first after my family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin) to sixteen (my last before college), Thanksgiving was at best tedious and at worst an ordeal. 

The reason is simple.  Thanksgiving was never at our house.  Instead, it was held at one of my old aunts’ homes, usually at the ones who lived in Menasha, six miles away.  All professional women (three teachers, one nurse) according to their era’s options, they were bright, loving ladies who adored my mother, their first niece.  My maternal grandmother was the oldest of five sisters (and lived in Illinois, so she didn’t have to attend these holiday get-togethers); my ‘old aunts’ (who during the time I speak of, were probably in their fifties) had children later.  These children had the foresight to live far enough away from their parents that their Thanksgiving presence was not mandatory.  My mother’s was, and that meant my father, my little sister, and I were also required to attend these dreary gatherings.

I suppose they weren’t dreary to my old aunts, to their husbands (also middling professionals), perhaps not even to my parents.  My father, as the ‘young’ man in attendance, was always the bartender; his hefty old fashioneds kept the adult spirits high and conversation flowing.  My mother, as the much-loved niece, was fussed over and consulted on all matters culinary.  To her shame: she was a pretty good cook, and the old aunts definitely were not.  But they fluttered around whatever little kitchen was that year’s staging ground and produced, collectively, the worst Thanksgiving meals ever.  For example:

A festive gelatinous ham

It was an old aunt tradition to have ham, not turkey, for Thanksgiving.  And by ham, I don’t mean anything succulent; I mean the kind that came in a tin can with a tiny key on the side, packed in jelly, with the consistency and color of denture paste.  The aunts often tried to tart up the ham with pineapple rounds and toothpicked maraschino cherries (left over from the old fashioneds).  All that did was add more layers of jiggly ick to the main course.

Then there were the ‘molded salads.’  Read: jello concoctions in various degrees of horrid.  The old aunts thought that adding mayonnaise to jello, or mixing veggies with canned fruit, elevated the shimmying mounds to cordon bleu status.  Uh, no.  On occasion, there was a fairly simple jello creation, like lime jello with pears, that was base-line edible.  But not often.

Jello molds were ubiquitous, and bad

The worst wiggly wonder was the omnipresent tomato aspic.  What can I say?  This dish was certainly a Soviet plot to bring the United States to its knees and to borsht.  When one of the old aunts got kitchen-creative, she added sliced boiled eggs to this abomination.  Even my mother’s ‘shut up and at least try some’ demeanor softened in the face of tomato aspic.  And by dessert time (glutinous pumpkin pie), that demeanor disappeared.  My sister and I were free to leave the card-table set up for those who couldn’t fit in the uniformly small dining room.

And go . . . nowhere.  Although my old aunts’ houses looked different on the outside (one Georgian stucco [!], one Tudor cottage, one stone Colonial, one wood siding Colonial), they had virtually the same floor plans.  First floor: decent-sized living room, small dining room, small kitchen, maybe a half bath, maybe a porch of some sort.  Second floor:  who knew, as we weren’t allowed upstairs, but probably three bedrooms and a bathroom.  In other words, we children – and my sister and I were always the only children in attendance – were confined to the first floor, where there was no refuge, no place to read a book or play.  It was almost always too cold to go outside.  So we would find a corner of the living room to huddle in while the adults enjoyed their postprandial cigarettes, chatter, and ‘yes-dear-I-wouldn’t-mind-another-small-one’ drinks.

  

A holiday-sustaining Old Fashioned

I don’t think any of the old aunts had a television.  One, at least, had a basement, but it was off-limits because it was full of that uncle’s ham radio equipment.  Plus, the 50s and 60s did not have the Thanksgiving football broadcasts of today, so watching the Packers slog it out in the snow wouldn’t have been an option anyway, even if there had been a kid-friendly basement rec room.

So.  No turkey, no football, no fun.  As I got older, I tried to join the adults’ conversation – both to be polite and to stave off terminal boredom.  One year (I must have been in high school), that turned out to be a huge mistake, and it also turned out to be the most memorable Thanksgiving with the old aunts.

I should explain that whereas the old aunts were vocal, opinionated, and for their time and age progressive ladies, the old uncles were pretty taciturn.  One was seriously hard of hearing, one was always tipsy and incoherent, one never said anything, and one was dead.  During the Thanksgiving I’m now referencing, the always-silent uncle decided to speak up.  About the nascent civil rights movement.  And his contempt for the . . . well, you can fill in the blanks.

As a self-righteous teenager, I was not only appalled but also felt called upon to argue with him.  Truth be told, probably to yell at him, thereby violating years’ worth of family Thanksgiving protocol.  I remember with trembling clarity how angry I was, mostly because I believed he was terribly wrong, somewhat because I had never really heard him express an opinion before (and this was his opinion? really?).  Also I might have been so extremely tired of these Thanksgivings that I embraced an opportunity for drama, although it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Tomato aspic should be banned before heroin, plastic bags, and transfats

Whatever the causes, I was shaking with rage; a cattle-prodded tomato aspic could not have quivered or excreted more hot melt-down than I did.  My father, experiencing a momentary lull in bartender duties, took my arm and led me away.  We sat on the bottom of the stair steps (the farthest away place that house offered), and he tried to calm me down.  What he said was basically:  you’re right, and you’re right to be angry.  But this is not the right place to show it.  Your uncle will not change his views, and you will upset your family who loves you, most of whom don’t agree with him anyway. When we get home, we can talk about ways you might put your convictions to better use.

Today, I treasure the empathy to me, and to my older relatives, my father showed.  I also wonder whether it was altogether correct.  Aren’t there some times when politeness is trumped by . . . righteous indignation, for instance?  Yet his intervention also made me more aware of what I owed the old aunts (and old uncles):  appreciation for their love of me and my family, appreciation of what they achieved despite the Depression, appreciation of how they were not all, or not always, in thrall to prevailing bigotries.  Negotiating the wiggly room between standing up for what you ‘know’ is right and backing off because of good manners or localized realpolitik has haunted me all my adult life.

And I still wonder if my mother was correct in telling my sister and me to eat (or at least not complain about) the queasily undulating footstuffs served at those Thanksgivings.  Couldn’t she have exercised some influence over the menu? 

Kim Kardashian's Butt Performs . . .

. . . Race, Gender, and Art History

Oh yeah.  And celebrity.  Which is why I was definitely NOT going to write about this.  I mean, other than giving a bottomless pit of opportunity for creative photochopping (and bad backside puns), what’s there to say?  That Kim Kardashian West (or her mother, or her publicist) demonstrates absolute genius for content-less self-promotion?

Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art had to weigh in.  The Met’s clever tweet of a 6,000-year-old steatopygous Cycladic figure made me think about KKW’s shameless publicity ploy in somewhat different ways.  By connecting the soi-disant internet-breaking image to an ancient statue of a fecund woman, the Met opened the door to considering the KKW photo in art historical contexts, which also mean socio-cultural contexts. 

Jean-Paul Goude, “Carolina Beaumont” (1976), "Kim Kardashian Champagne Cover" (2014)

We can start with race.  That the photographer Jean-Paul Goude copied his own 1976 shot of Caroline Beaumont (and referenced his contorted shots of Grace Jones) doesn’t say much about KKW’s own views about performing race.  Nor does the fact that she doubtless knows next to nothing about the centuries of visual stereotypes she mimics.  Most notorious is the case of Saartjie Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman exhibited in Europe as ‘The Hottentot Venus,’ whose supersized buttocks and large genitalia were seen as atavistic links to the great apes.  Then there is Josephine Baker, ‘The Bronze Venus,’ whose banana dance was the toast of jazz-age Paris.  Hip-hop culture has re-exhibited the stereotype in a positive way, if valorizing big-booty-shaking women is considered positive. 

“The Hottentot Venus” (1810); Josephine Baker, “The Bronze Venus” (1925);

Reality TV personalities Joseline Hernandez and Porsha Williams at the BET Hip Hop Awards (2014)

Kim Kardashian West is certainly aware of this last mode of performing race.  After all, she’s married to Kanye and has appeared in his music videos, most notably the ridiculous ‘Bound 2,’ in which her seemingly nude self is being bonked on a bike.  Like other members of her family – notably her father – she likes to bling out her celebrity cred by hanging around with famous black people.  As far as I know, Armenian does not equal ‘black’ anywhere on earth except possibly Turkey; nonetheless, KKW has self-fashioned into a cartoon of the hypersexualized black woman. Or perhaps race is secondary to female hypersexualization itself.

LeRoy Neiman, “Femlin,” created for Playboy in 1955; Camille Clifford, a model for ‘The Gibson Girl,” c. 1905.

Maybe that’s the point of her relentless out-there-ness:  she’s performing gender in a way so blatant that one can overlook it, rather like the big letters on a map.  I’ve seen some comparisons to the Barbie Doll, but those don’t seem apt – Barbie does have a big chest and a wasp waist, but her bottom resembles an anorexic white woman’s slatty rear end.  Closer may be the Playboy ‘femlin,’ whose hourglass figure harks back to Gibson girls and other corseted ladies.  And we can go back and back through art history, from Ingres’ “La Grande Odalisque” to Aphrodite Kallipygyos to the Venus of Willendorf . . . from Baule spirit spouses to Ukiyo-e courtesans to Indian apsaras.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “La Grande Odalisque” (1814); Aphrodite Kallipygos, Roman copy of Hellenistic original (c. 100BCE); the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ (Austria, c. 25,000BCE)

Baule spirit spouse (early 20^th century); Kunisada school shunga print (early 19^th century); Apsara, Uttar Pradesh (12^th century)

These images are male representations of ideal, or satirized, female sexuality.  When women artists (at least in the 20^th century) have confronted the subject, they’ve tended to focus on female genitals, either through formal and symbolic correspondences (see Georgia O’Keeffe’s vulvaform flowers), through disturbing juxtapositions of female stereotypes (see Meret Oppenheim’s “Object,” which grafts Venus in Furs onto a feminine tea cup), or through assertions of female worth as child bearer and culture bearer (see Judy Chicago’s “The Birth Project,” an installation that acts as a visual midrash on the Biblical creation story). 

Georgia O’Keeffe, “The Blue Flower” (1918); Meret Oppenheim, “Object” (1936);

Judy Chicago, tapestry from “The Birth Project” (1985)

21^st-century women artists are more likely to confront and invert traditional male representations of the feminine, bringing to the forefront the patriarchal politics that ‘normalize’ such representations and the gendered gaze that produces them (see Tracy Enim’s “This is not happiness” or Laila Esaydi’s revisionist “La Grande Odalisque,” where the courtesan’s body is veiled with Arabic calligraphy).

Tracey Enim, “This is not happiness” (2011)

 Laila Essaydi, “La Grande Odalisque” (2008)

Except under a greatly expanded definition of performance art, Kim Kardashian West is not a woman artist nor does she seem to be aware of – or care about – the art historical/cultural contexts her image evokes.  Well, why should she?  She’s laughing all the way to the bank . . . rather like the contemporary artist she (as image, as object) most closely resembles:  Jeff Koons, the master of glossy sensuality in an age of mechanical reproduction and profit-driven corporate aesthetics.  For only $20,000, at Neiman-Marcus you too can buy a limited-edition zaftig pop-art fertility goddess, complete with a bottle of premium champagne.  It’s cheaper to buy a copy of Paper magazine.

Jeff Koons, “Dom Perignon Balloon Venus,” limited edition figure, 2013

Why Democrats Lost: Feral Grumpy Cats Edition

The Power of the Scapegoat

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favor, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“By yourself you can do nothing here.  Have you noticed how tightly we shut out strangers? . . . [We] would reject you in the end.”  Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed

Last week I wrote about how grumpy the United States electorate seemed.  (http://debsbookblog2194.blogspot.com/2014/10/herding-grumpy-cats.html) Last night that grumpiness manifested itself in all its perverse glory.  Despite the Republican party having an approval rating lower than toe nail fungus, it swept almost all contested races – and some that pollsters thought were securely on the Democratic side of the ledger (hello Maryland!). 

Early this morning, I woke up crabby, with a mild hangover and a typical after-party mess demanding attention (thank god, however, for friends who joined me in debacle-watching and making an otherwise depressing night a lot of fun). Usually I watch some of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” while I shake out the sleepy seed; today, I watched five minutes and turned off the TV.  Not in the mood for blather about the elections, I read a book, cleaned up a little, napped, and thought about the election results.  Not what they may mean for the future – more gridlock, some sort of immigration deal, drastic deregulation, stalling on judicial nominees, total grumpy cat fight over the 2016 presidential nominations (here I’m including Hillary Clinton’s now more precarious run . . . the Clinton magic didn’t bippity-boppity-boo any candidates to victory) – but why endemic grumpiness yielded these results.

Republicans have been adept at what Tolstoy identified as the “easy” manipulation of blame.  For the past six years, opponents have connected President Obama with everything wrong in the country and in the world, be it Benghazi or Boko Haram, Hurricane Sandy or the Carolina Hurricanes’ bad NHL record. The damned-if-he-does-damned-if he-doesn’t illogic (see, for instance, the issue of bombing Syria: Obama is at once too timid, too bellicose, and too late) oddly strengthens the blame claim.  Analysis, discussion, and judgment don’t matter; neither, evidently, do actions and outcomes (see, for instance, the improving economy or lower gas prices).  What’s important is that whatever makes people unhappy, fearful, defensive, confused, or angry is the president’s fault.

Once the president is established as the FUBAR poster child, the next step is also easy.  Identify every Democrat with Obama.  Forget any positions or policies that may differentiate candidates, and confine campaigns to asserting fatal contamination by that horrible failure who incomprehensibly still occupies the White House.  This tactic certainly worked on November 4, and it worked in large part because the Democratic Party bought into it. 

Why did this year’s Democratic candidates run from the real accomplishments of the Obama presidency, not to mention from the president himself?  Why did the U.S. electorate do the same? 

Perhaps the best-known painting of the (biblical) scapegoat, the noble but sentimentally unresisting animal conceived by the Victorian artist William Holman Hunt (c. 1855).

As I was thinking about these questions, I remembered an early play by Wole Soyinka.  The Strong Breed centers on the scapegoat, both on his human individuality and on his social and ritual function.  The figure of the scapegoat, of course, has appeared in cultures throughout the world; Soyinka combines Greek traditions (the scapegoat as the pharmakos with power to sicken and to cure), Christian traditions (Soyinka’s scapegoat is named Eman[uel] and has distinct Christological overtones), and Yoruban traditions (the scapegoat is identified with the deity Ogun, who tried to bridge the abyss between the human and the divine).  In so doing, Soyinka creates something approaching a universal scapegoat, a man who tries to evade his sacrificial destiny but finally and willingly accepts it.

Whereas most scapegoats expiate the sins or misfortunes of their own community, Soyinka’s scapegoat can fulfill his destiny only among strangers.  He himself must be the outsider, the alien, the specter of otherness.  The host group (Eman’s new village, where he is a teacher but always an interloper) can only rid itself of its self-generated “curses” through eradicating a stranger, a rather homeopathic remedy for the estrangement the group experiences from its own lost cohesion. 

This play suggests a reason for the success of the obama-damna-slambama blame game played during this recent election. Barack Obama has been defined as a stranger . . . usually incorrectly and often prejudicially so (a Kenyan, a Socialist, a Communist, a radical Islamicist).  Even putting all this nonsense aside, Obama IS different than the traditional U.S. conception of a president:  he is a non-white, un-schmoozy, coolly intellectual man with a global upbringing that opens him to global sensibilities.  His supporters, who have celebrated these differences, can also run from them, as November 4th demonstrates.  As a socially and politically constructed stranger (a construction that he himself has helped build), he is easily ‘rejected in the end.’

No point in history is ‘the end,’ however.  The ‘hell-no’ Republican caucus may self-destruct, world crises may recede for a while, and history itself will keep revising and reevaluating Barack Obama’s presidency.  For now, though, he’s the scapegoat – in all its knee-jerk, quasi-religious, change-resistant, wagon-circling power – for the country’s anxieties.  Which is why, I think, the Democrats lost.

Feral cats -- probably all cats -- will cannibalize their own, plus anything else that presents itself as food.  They don't even have to be grumpy.

[Note:  obviously, I wrote this yesterday.  Computer problems prevented me from posting it until today.  Also, I have merely poked at the complexities of Soyinka’s The Strong Breed;  those who’ve read the critical literature (as well as the play itself, of course) will recognize that including Holman Hunt’s painting implies recognition of, if not complete agreement with, many informed readers’ problems with the work.]

Herding Grumpy Cats

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off to the Polls We Go

Just yesterday, a rocket blew up on the launch pad and Jose Canseco emulated Plaxico Burress by accidentally shooting himself.  Last week, a gunman murdered a Canadian soldier, a fourteen-year-old boy opened fire in a Washington State school cafeteria, and a hatchet-wielding extremist attacked four policemen in New York.  Elsewhere, women are executed for killing their rapists in Iraq and Iran, a landslide kills hundreds in Sri Lanka, Ebola continues to rage in West Africa, and Kim Jong Un resurfaces for a photo-op at a North Korean orphanage that houses no orphans. 

Today, Russia is reported to have cyber-attacked the White House, the head of the Secret Service prostitution probe is himself tied to prostitution, and Sarah Palin announces she wants to run for public office again. The United States elections are still six days away, and we are drowning in negative ads and gasbag predictions. No wonder everyone is grumpy, for reasons profound and trivial.  I’m so grumpy that I’m posting illustrations of cats and Disney characters, neither group being one I find particularly endearing.

GRUMPY

There’s a new barrage of polls showing that the U.S. electorate:  dislikes President Obama, despises Congress, hates gridlock (but also believes that compromise is tantamount to spinelessness), and thinks the country is ‘going in the wrong direction.’  In other words, it’s in an extremely grumpy mood.  So are the candidates.  It seems that not only are the campaigns almost exclusively negative; they are meanspiritedly, nitpickingly, mendaciously so.  Further, we who live in ‘swing states’ are the displeased recipients of constant telephone calls from various groups trying to push us into voting against someone or some position.  After the twelfth call from the Karl Rove American Crossroads PAC, I ended up screaming at the somehow unperturbed automated voice to stop harassing me . . . grumpiness having morphed into rage. 

The only suspense in this cranky miasma is the percentage of voters who will actually vote in order to register their bad temper versus those who will stay home and complain about the results they had no hand in producing.

SLEEPY

Another thing that makes me grumpy:  this election season isn’t really very entertaining.  Two years ago was a hoot, a-bristle with loopy politicians making insanely ridiculous pronouncements (remember Todd Aiken’s legitimate rape?  Herman Cain’s manly man’s pizza?  Mitt Romney’s binders full of women? Michele Bachmann’s defense of carbon dioxide?  Ah, good times . . .).  This year is downright boring. 

Countrywide, Republican candidates resemble alien abductees whose mind-control implants make them repeat the identical slogan – “A vote for [insert Democratic opponent’s name] is a vote for Obama.”  When Democratic candidates try to do the national referendum thing, it’s also consistently shorthanded through mentions of “the do-nothing Congress.”  And, except for hog-castrator Joni Ernst of Iowa, there aren’t even colorful characters.  In my state, for example, we did have an absolutely crazy candidate – Greg Brannon, who ran against fluoridation and food-stamp slavery.  Unfortunately for North Carolina’s political merriment quotient, the surviving Republican Senatorial candidate is as amusing as burnt toast while the Democratic incumbent is dutifully dull.  (To be fair, she does brandish some actual issues that at least bring a certain amount of concreteness to her campaign in an otherwise vaporous political atmosphere.) 

Yes, there’s still Rick Perry stumbling around somewhere, but he’s not running for office at the moment.  I know it’s too much to ask for the return of the spatially and temporally challenged Dan Quayle (“I love California; I practically grew up in Phoenix.”  Or: “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history.  I mean in this century’s history.  But I didn’t live in this century.”), but can’t we do better than monotone incantations about ‘growing good jobs’ and ‘getting things done’?  In today’s news environment, where a politician’s misstatement or malapropism becomes an existential crisis, probably not.  Yawn. 

DOPEY

The problem is that downright willful stupidity is not funny any more.  There’s too much of it.  Certainly among the electorate itself, about 30% of which believes that it’s time for an armed revolution, that gay people can and should choose to become straight, that President Obama is a Muslim, and that another war in Iraq is an excellent idea.  In addition, about 30% of our fellow citizens cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a world map, 20% maintain that the sun revolves around the earth, and more can name the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of our government. 

But let’s not let politicians off the hook.  Congressman Phil Gingrey (Georgia) maintains that immigrant children from Mexico and Central America can carry Ebola over our ‘unprotected’ southern border.  Rep. Louis Gohmert (Texas) holds that caribou enjoy the warmth of oil pipelines but that foreign aid to China will make that country sell us food with dogs and cats in it.  Governor Jan Brewer (Arizona) claims that “life begins from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” And whereas Gov. Paul LePage of Maine believes that climate change will be good for his state, most other oil-funded politicians either deny that it’s happening at all, falsely argue that there’s no scientific consensus about it, or – when asked directly if they believe that climate change exists -- weasel out with the ‘I’m not a scientist’ dodge.

DOC

They may not be scientists, but they sure can be medical doctors . . . whether it’s male politicians pontificating on women’s health or ambitious governors ignoring public health professionals’ advice and confining medical workers returning from West Africa to makeshift quarantine yurts. 

It’s shameful how Ebola is being tricked out as a campaign issue.  Ironically, ‘Dr.’ Rand Paul is among the most egregious, stating that the Obama administration’s devotion to ‘political correctness’ has warped its decision-making about the disease, worrying that ‘whole shiploads’ of American soldiers may become infected, and (no doubt relying on his self-certified expertise as an eye doctor) disagreeing with the head of the Center for Disease Control about Ebola’s transmissibility.  Lesser lights are content with blaming the president for lack of leadership on the issue, although some (with a worried glance toward 2016) also blame the State Department’s lack of vigilance.  Speaking of 2016:  Governor or should we say Doctor Chris Christie (New Jersey) – he of the big, tough quarantine decree – is now engaged in an unseemly verbal battle with the woman he clapped into an isolation tent, evidently trying to rebuild his image as an oversized Joe Pesci who don’t take no guff (or advice) from no one, no how.  Show the respect, will ya?

SNEEZY

These maneuvers would not work without the bloated public panic Ebola has engendered in the United States.  I’m too grumpy to go into the irrational fears and counterproductive actions this panic has caused, particularly irritating when considering the very real horrors the disease has brought upon Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.  One example will suffice: despite overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary, some people are convinced that Ebola has ‘gone airborne,’ or soon will, making it as catchable as the common cold. Suggestion:  invest in whoever makes those fashionable surgical masks favored by the Japanese.

Although condemned as tasteless, Ebola-themed Halloween costumes may be a good thing, as they suggest that not everyone is quaking in their Tyvek suits, organizing parents’ groups to ban students of Rwandan or South African heritage from attending school.  You can buy a ‘sexy Ebola nurse costume’ for only $59.99 (boots sold separately).

BASHFUL . . . Oh, sorry:  CASHFUL

Here’s where I can be grumpily bipartisan.  Both Democrats and Republicans are floating on a giant tide of cash:  small-donor contributions, millionaire-funded PACS, greedy special interests, dark money from god-knows-where.  My state has the dubious distinction of hosting the most expensive Senate Race in 2014 -- $100 million and counting.  This obscene amount of money has bought over 90,000 unpleasant ads, 89,999 of which I’m sure I’ve seen at least once.

A lot of the blame goes to the Supreme Court and the noxious Citizens United ruling, augmented by this April’s McCutcheon decision.  But it devolves upon us, too . . . as we continue to wring our hands at the influence of ‘monied interests’ while we continue to elect politicians in their thrall.  This is one of the main reasons I’m determined to vote (even if poll watchers demand my birth certificate, vaccination record, and tax returns from the last ten years) and will mostly vote Democratic . . . I truly fear what will happen if the Supreme Court becomes even more conservative than it now is.  Whatever happened to campaign finance reform? 

HAPPY

Election Day is November 4, and I for one will be happy to see it go.  Even though some races impacting control of the Senate may drag into December (or later) due to slow tabulation, lawsuits, and run-offs, at least the onslaught of political ads and political commentary will stop, as party operatives can stop herding the grumpy cats that comprise this year’s cantankerous electorate.  I’m happy to turn my thoughts to the upcoming holidays and trade non-unionized dwarfs for Santa’s elves, crabby felines for Thanksgiving turkeys.

Autumn in a Very, Very Small Town

A Real Epidemic and the Best Halloween Ever

In the summer of 1955, a polio epidemic attacked the United States, and its epicenter was Appleton, Wisconsin.  The infection rate in Appleton and the surrounding county was 128.48 per 100,000, compared with 37.55 per 100,000 in Boston, Mass., the nation's second-hardest hit area. 

My family was in the process of moving from Marinette, Wisconsin, to Appleton that very summer.  My parents prudently decided to ship me and my little sister Alison to our maternal grandparents, who lived in the tiny town of Yorkville, Illinois . . . far enough from the polio outbreak to be a safe haven.  Mom was with us most of the summer, and Dad visited when he could.  Because we had spent a week or so every summer in Yorkville, this extended visit didn’t seem unsettling: I loved my grandparents’ big house on the river, and I was happy doing pretty much nothing other than reading and playing the piano.  There were fireflies to catch and ice cream to eat in the warm evenings while the adults played bridge and whispered about illness and death.

Things changed when the leaves began to turn.  My mother left Yorkville to join my father in Appleton, to look for a house and to begin negotiating how to fit into a new town and a new life.   The polio epidemic there was subsiding slowly although the threat remained; my parents decided that their children were safer in Yorkville, at least until Christmas.  So my sister and I stayed with my grandparents, and I entered third grade.  I was seven years old.  

The main Bristol-Yorkville school building was constructed in 1888; my mother and her sisters also attended school there.

I should explain that in 1955, what we knew as ‘Yorkville’ was actually two villages separated by the Illinois Fox River: Yorkville proper to the south, and Bristol to the north.  Each micro-municipality numbered about 500 people, if you counted dogs, cats, and chickens.  So we’re talking about an extremely small town, or towns . . . so small that the only school (grades 1 through 12) was a no-nonsense brick building two blocks north of my grandparents’ house, in the more genteel portion of this bifurcated place.  The school ‘belonged’ to those of us who lived on the north side of the river (often, families like mine who had lived there for generations).  The kids from the south side were . . . well, kids from the south side.

As an entering third-grader, I needed what any third-grade girl needed – a best friend.  I found one right away, a sweet girl from a big family that lived on the south side.  To get to school, she had to walk from ‘below town’ (‘town’ was directly across the bridge that divided north from south, Bristol and Yorkville); we would join up in the ‘City’ Park a block up from my grandparents’ house and proceed the half block to school.  In my memory, walking through the park was always leisurely, a series of small discoveries (really red maple leaves that hadn’t been there the day before, a lost biscuit from a weekend bake sale).  I don’t remember much about school itself, except that on the rare occasions I had homework, I’d sneak into what had been my Aunt Mary’s bedroom – enchanting in yellow and shelves full of painted porcelain – to study at her ‘desk,’ which was really a vanity table.

This changing-venue maneuver wasn’t really necessary.  That autumn, my sister and I had moved from the back bedroom of my grandparents’ house (a somewhat claustrophobic space that used to be reserved for the ‘hired girl’) to the airy, blue-and-white double bedroom that had been shared by my mother and my Aunt Eleanor, a room that had generous windows overlooking the river . . . and a vanity I certainly could have used as a desk.  But because I was in school and my sister, just turned four years old, was not, I guess I needed my own separate space.

The bridge between Bristol and Yorkville as seen from a corner of my grandparents’ backyard; a new bridge – much less elegant – was built in 1985.

Space.  That’s what Yorkville/Bristol gave me that lovely autumn.  It’s not that I had been particularly restricted: in Marinette, when I was six or younger, I had walked unaccompanied to school (behind my house, but one had to go around the block), to my best friend’s home down the street, to the corner store, to the library on the river.  But Marinette – a hardworking town of then about 10,000, suffused with the paper industry’s sulfur smell and the demographic divisions that followed – had not been a free-range environment for a little kid.  I always knew that my town had ‘other’ places (downtown with its big department store and bars and even less reputable dives, ‘rougher’ neighborhoods where we knew no one) where I could not wander and would not be welcome. 

But my grandparents’ little town was wide open to me.  Of course, it was much smaller than Marinette; even a third-grader, with a bit of resolve, could walk from one end to the other (Yorkville then was very vertical . . . strung along on Bridge Street, from top to bottom, but only a couple of blocks wide) and feel as if she had tramped through the whole place. What I didn’t understand that autumn was that free movement in that tiny double village was also a function of local history and social custom.

Everybody knew my grandparents and my grandfather’s family.  My great-grandfather had been the town’s first lawyer and had founded a bank there.  My grandfather followed in his footsteps, and brought his college-educated bride from Wisconsin to enrich his life . . . and the town’s.  [At this point, all I need to say is: read Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street to understand this part of my family.]  Various relatives were scattered about, in town (like Aunt Alice, across the street) and on neighboring farms (like Uncle John, just outside Bristol, or other, more hazy people, like Aunt Wathena, with whom I associate osage oranges).  My mother and her sisters had been popular and eligible girls in Yorkville (my grandparents had the good sense to send them to college far away, and none of them married Yorkville boys . . . although their cousin Joyce did marry a local man who became the first mayor of consolidated Yorkville/Bristol in 1957.  But I digress). 

The point is: it was easy for my grandparents to let me go alone ‘over town’ across the bridge, to visit the library, to pick up the mail (there was then no home delivery), to indulge in a double chocolate soda at Webster’s drugstore . . . or walk to school, or even to the Game Farm (basically a fowl reserve with a few farm animals on display) northwest of the school, bordering on rich farm land.  Everybody knew my grandparents, had known my mother, and therefore knew me.  I could neither get lost nor get in serious trouble.  All the space I could possibly conceive of, there, was mine.

The original Kendall County courthouse, Yorkville, built in 1864 and reconstructed after a fire in 1887; my grandfather and great-grandfather had law offices there.

Branches became bare, and Halloween was near.  My southside best friend invited me to go trick-or-treating.  I was a reasonably well-behaved granddaughter, partially because I was a relatively self-sufficient child and partially because I didn’t want to provoke my grandmother’s sharp tongue (she was known for pronouncements such as “Alison is clumsy, but [pause in which I would wait for the rare word of praise] Deborah is stubborn”).  Therefore, I asked her permission, which – after a few acid comments about my friend’s family, who although having lived in Yorkville for as long or longer than she had, were, to her, marginally disreputable, probably because they were not white-collar folks – she granted.

I remember little about a costume (pillow sack for treats?  scraps from Grandma’s sewing basket to approximate a pirate?)  What was important was that my friend, in company with her siblings and a small gang of other southsiders, called for me at my grandparents just after sunset . . . and we were off.  Like, all over the place.  Northside, Southside, Bristol and Yorkville.  No Mary Jane, Milk Dud, or apple (yuck) went unclaimed.  When a rumor reached us that a house was giving out full-sized, real candy bars, we hit it three times.  We sat in the middle of the bridge and exchanged treats that we didn’t like for ones we did.  It seemed like midnight, or later, but it was probably nine o’clock – still fairly late for an unsupervised seven-year old – when I got back to my grandparents’ house. Playing cards in the library, Grandma and Grandpa reminded me that it was time for bed. 

Upstairs, I woke my little sister.  Alison had been too young to go trick-or-treating, so I shared some of my loot (not, I’m sure, the full-sized Hershey bars, but still . . . ).  I fell asleep feeling as if I owned the world.

Halloween many, many years later . . . students and friends, David Letterman, the Mad Monk, Wall Street crooks, the local ghoul . . .

That Halloween was almost sixty years ago.  Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful Halloweens.  When my daughter was young, it was great fun to concoct costumes from whatever was lying about – she was a particularly fetching fortuneteller, a beautiful princess, and even an adorably non-threatening pirate; I remember fondly looking in on her after trick-or-treating, as she painstakingly arranged her candy into arcane categories [size? ingredients? color? desirability?]  that marked a personal Halloween landscape. In later years, I enjoyed hosting Halloween parties for my graduate students (whose costume creativity was a source of endless wonderment), then passing the baton to the Luyendyk brothers, who’ve exceeded anything I ever concocted but let me attend anyway, and kibbutzing on the fantastic Halloween extravaganzas my sister Alison has created.

But that long-ago Halloween, when I was seven years old, remains my best Halloween ever.  Reason number one, as I’ve tried to explain, is that it was the moment in my life that I felt like an autonomous individual . . . free to go where and do what I wanted, even if only for a few hours.  I’ve also tried to explain, however elliptically, reason number two:  that it was a small, circumscribed time that affected me so deeply that I’ve revisited it over the years . . . and have realized that its pleasure was in large part a function of class divisions, social prejudices, and economic disparities, and – yes –responses to a dangerous disease. 

Yet these adult realizations, no matter how important or how true, do not take away the visceral memories of freedom, of the sheer exhilarating joy of being able to go anywhere that I could possibly imagine, which adhered to that best Halloween ever, the capstone of autumn in a very, very small town.

We’re Not In Oz Anymore . . . Or Are We?

Dorothy Must Die

You wouldn’t think the world needs another Wizard of Oz adaptation.  We already have movies, plays, Broadway musicals, comics, cartoons, games, merchandise . . . not to mention the thirteen additional Oz books by L. Frank Baum himself, the nineteen by Ruth Plumly Thomson, the three by Oz illustrator John R. Neill, and a host of others.  But we’ve got a new one -- Danielle Paige’s Dorothy Must Die.  And it’s not bad at all.

I’ll tear them apart.  I may not come out alive, but I’m going in there. 

– Cowardly Lion (MGM, 1939)

The conceit is this: a lonely teenager, Amy Gumm (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), rides a tornado from a Kansas trailer park to a grotesque, sinister Oz.  The Munchkins are enslaved, Glinda is a heartless overseer, the Tin Woodman leads death squads, the no-longer-cowardly Lion is a ravenous killer, and the Scarecrow is a mad scientist conducting infernal experiments on unfortunate Ozites.  Worst of all, Dorothy rules the realm with a conceited, amoral tyrant’s deft touch. 

Amy is recruited by ‘evil’ characters from the whole range of Oz books, notably old Mombi, a surviving wicked witch.  Amy’s mission?  To kill Dorothy.  To do this, she fights and connives her way out of various perils, and she trains with the witches in both magic and martial arts.  Part Katniss Everdeen and part Harry Potter, she’s a perfect Young Adult novel heroine – brave, smart, and moody enough to be a believable teenager – stranded in a typical Young Adult novel dystopia.

As is true with many Young Adult novels, Dorothy Must Die aims at both teens and their parents. In this case, not-so-young adults who have fond memories of the original Wizard of Oz books, and of course of the 1939 movie, will enjoy the creative twists on familiar characters and settings.  The sturdy prose, while not as cleverly sophisticated as J. K. Rowling’s, moves the plot along briskly without much of the dumbed-down syntax that can make this genre unbearable to anyone over twelve.

Of course, some people do go both ways.

– Scarecrow (MGM, 1939)

Showing the good side of a bad Oz character, or vice versa, isn’t a new gimmick (see, for instance, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked).  Danielle Paige, however, inverts almost every character while building in enough ambivalence and mystery that readers truly don’t have a clear ethical perspective or even a clear ‘side’ to root for.  Are Amy’s trainers dedicated to restoring Oz or to furthering their own dark designs?  Is the Wizard, who appears later in the novel, friend or foe?  Is Princess Ozma (readers of the full Baum canon know her well) brain-damaged or biding her time to regain power?  Is Glinda’s twin sister (who insists on good manners) a force for Ozite civility or a malevolent doppelganger?

Most of all, what are Amy Gumm’s motives?  First, of course, is survival.  But there are a lot of possible seconds, including understanding ‘home’ and reconciling herself with her dysfunctional mother . . . and personal empowerment in the face of a drab and sad life in Kansas.  In this sense, she plays against Paige’s to-this-point-despicable Dorothy, who also sees Oz as a compensatory stage on which to enact her ‘true self.’  Dorothy’s metastasizing narcissism is explored in No Place Like Oz, the ‘prequel’ to Dorothy Must Die (available only as an inexpensive e-novella); I don’t think it’s necessary to read the novella, though, to see that Amy and Dorothy are being set up as similar girls facing similar dilemmas but taking different paths.

 Going so soon?  I wouldn’t hear of it.  Why, my little party’s just beginning.

--Wicked Witch of the West (MGM, 1939)

Yet maybe they won’t take different paths.  Dorothy Must Die, which pointedly does not resolve the conflicts it sets up, is obviously the first book in what promises to be an endless stream of sequels (hey, it already has a prequel).  In fact, the next book in the series is scheduled for 2015 publication.  Moreover, the book (and/or its subsequent publications) is already under serious negotiation for a TV series.  Is a film far behind?  Or a graphic novel franchise?  Or a multi-platform video game?

Danielle Paige is in good company.  Due in no small part to Baum’s own efforts, The Wizard of Oz has become the quintessential American fairy tale, the ur-text of the contemporary U.S. Young Adult novel (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn notwithstanding), and a prime example of how a singular work of the imagination can engender a cultural phenomenon that lasts for well over a century.  It’s hard to think that Dorothy Must Die and its forthcoming progeny will measure up to the magnificent 1939 film, to the captivating musical version of Wicked, or – for that matter – to Baum’s own continuations. 

But, again, as a series, it has promise, even in the problematic (but potentially lucrative) genre of the Young Adult novel.   As MGM’s Wicked Witch of the West wisely said:  “that’s not what’s worrying me.  It’s how to do it.  These things must be done delicately . . . or you hurt the spell.”

                     Dorothy Must Die.  Danielle Paige.  New York:  HarperCollins, 2014.

                                             Hardcover, paperback, electronic format.