Father's Day--Remembering my Dad

he died in 1994, and there is not a day passes that i don't think of him, and miss him.  he had flaws, god knows, and my brother Warren and i speak of them often.but mainly we speak of the enormously good things about him, and one of us ends up saying, 'i'm just grateful he was my father.'  this is a picture from the 1950s, maybe early 60s, when he was a model ['a male model??" people would ask in amazement, and i would try not to snap, 'no, he's a female model, can't you see?'' his disliked modeling, having chosen it  to pay for the acting jobs he kept trying to get, and kept with it because you don't change professions with a wife and 3 young kids to support.  but he'd likely have hated anything else even more: at least this wasn't 9 to 5, every day, five days a week.  and it's hardly a coincidence that warren and i both ended up as freelancers.  pop was the one who first helped me try to understand human evil, and though no activist himself, his compassion for people was my first step toward activism.  not because it was 'politics,' but because it was about human beings, it was about caring.  once when i was very young we were at the beach, and some teenage kids had dragged out of the water a very large but harmless fish, and were beating it with boards that had nails in them.  i was horribly shy, but too upset not to confront them, screaming at them and crying.  they laughed at me, and pop gently pulled me away.  'you shouldn't interfere, they might try to hurt you,'' he said softly, but the tone in his voice and look in his eyes were pure pride.  his little girl was fighting for justice, even toward a fish being tortured.  he loved that i joined the civil rights movement, the anti war movement, the women's and gay movements.  having been in theatre, he had a lot of gay friends who became family friends, beginning when we kids were too young to know about sex and which kind was 'good' or bad.' i somehow understood that these men were couples like mom and pop, or single friends with specific personalities, so by the time i learned about homosexuality it seemed pretty routine to me.  my brother keith one day in the car said something about 'faggots,' and pop stopped the car, turned around to keith, and said, very softly and calmly, 'you do know when you use that word you are talking about uncle walter and ti and paul and other people you love.'  keith looked startled, and that was how he learned about homosexuality.  he also introduced me to P.G. Wodehouse novels, and to reading as a pleasure: he would often stop off at a charity place called the Opportunity Shop in Manhattan, and pick up second hand books for himself and for me.
this was meant to be brief, and yet it seems only a tiny bit about this man who shaped my life and beliefs.  but i do hope he is somewhere now where he knows his kids still love him, and dream of him, and know that if there is an afterlife we'll find him there, and all will be well....

my oldie but goodie on Henry viii

reading more on Henry's wives, specifically the new bio of anne bolen, and decided to give a plug to my 1980s  DIVORCED, BEHEADED SURVIVED, about all the wives.  remarkably, though it was never much of a seller, they've never dumped it, and it's still around.  i think it's really good!  wanted to add a photo of the cover but [a] it won't scan the whole cover, no matter what i do, and [b] when i had the same problem getting it to facebook, 2 of my friends separately sent it and looks beautiful.  but blogspot doesnt think it's a picture, presumably b/c it also has words, and won't print it here, which seems ridiculous.  so if i've captured your interest, you'll have to check it out under the title, and there you'll see a wonderful picture of the book.   [hint: in the book, i show anne bolyen as a victim of what we now call 'sexual harrassment,' or even 'stalking,' and offer pretty good evidence for why, whatever henry's problem with anne of cleves, she could NOT  have really appeared ugly to him in her picture.]

so if you're looking for some cool summer reading, check my cool book.

this advertisement has been endorsed by me.

Another Gorgeous Baby

the practically newborn son of my dear castle colleague Rene Pijles---wonderful expression!

Review of ''The Fosters''

ABC Family network sounds like it should offer Disney-wholesome fare, like the Hallmark Channel.  And indeed, it's owned by Disney.  But although Disney's contract with the original owners requires that they air the right-wing fundamentalist '700 Club' at least twice a day, the rest of the programming is far more varied.  The newest show is a summer series called "The Fosters."  In many ways,  it sounds like a standard  wholesome TV show.  A couple, conveniently named the Fosters, is raising a collection of kids--adopted, foster, and in one case the biological son of one of the Fosters.  And in its opening episode, it sounds like a Hallmark Channel show: all the kids have various troubles which the parents work hard at helping them solve.  The catch--and it's a great one--is that the Fosters are a loving, happy, hard-working lesbian couple.  So far, we haven't seen the Foster moms in bed or even in heavy kiss-reasonable for a pair with fulltime jobs and seen always surrounded by a bunch of kids.  At the same time, they don't come off as your average straight couple in semi-drag.  For one thing, they're biracial as well as gay.  For another, there's a slight but definite sexual chemistry between them.

The opening episode plot itself was fairly unoriginal, but the acting was good, and it will be interesting to see how the show plays out over the summer.  ABC is predictably getting furious letters from the right-wing groups pushing ''family values,''  which are presumably being destroyed by this pleasant depiction of good, happy lesbians creating family for battered and abandoned kids.  I think the rest of us should watch and support the show. It's as good as 90 percent of network television, and certainly there's no other network where the heroes are a biracial lesbian couple.  That is very original--and very important.

Great Baby Picture

my former students have the most adorable babies!  this is my student lisa's baby with her husband [lisa's, not the baby's]. lisa had waited till she and her husband felt it was the right time to have a baby, and that smile makes me thing they were right!

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Memorial Day--what are we Remembering?

Once again,  we are offered an opportunity to glorify war.  Sad, sad, sad that young people have died in war, and will continue to do so.  Some were heroes, some villains, some neither, like most human beings. Why they fought in wars varies as much as the people themselves---drafted? poor and needed that steady employment? truly believed in the cause? all of the above, i'd think, and a lot of other noble, ignoble, and ordinary reasons.

Did they die for Me, as the propaganda insists?  Maybe in World War 2.  Maybe many soldiers  since then have truly believed they were dying for the rest of us.  But I was born at the end of world war 2, and the wars fought in my lifetime have done nothing for me or anyone else i can think of, except for the rich  and powerful of every country. Soldiers  killed and died. Civilians simply died--from invasion, from toxins in the air [and i remember Agent Orange when i remember war], from starvation when their lands were gutted. Soldiers who survived the war, who survive today's incredibly lingering wars, came home with physical and emotional traumas that have ruined their lives, often creating suicides that make them no less war victims than those killed in battle.

so yes, i will remember those in the military who died in war--whether they were Americans or not, allies or 'the enemy.' and i will remember the thousands upon thousands of ordinary people who died in, and of war in its aftermath. I will remember hiroshima and nagasaki. i will remember pacifists jailed and beaten for refusing to fight. i will remember phil ochs, who sang the songs we needed to hear in the 1960s--"I Ain't Marchin' Any More."  I will remember the blessedly-still-with-us Pete Seeger, who continues to sing for those of us who oppose war.

And i will remember--roll out the drums, folks; the lady's gonna say a bad thing--a young movie star who opposed the war and who recognized the humanity of all people, including those whom the US government was killing.  So she posed in Hanoi with North Vietnamese soldiers--young men, who, like the young men that were attacking them--were fighting for many reasons and who might well die in the fighting.  Jane Fonda was condemned mightily at the time, and has remained condemned for it ever since.  She sat on a large cannon, where someone had placed her, and attacked the war [not the US soldiers] on Vietnam.

That she has chosen to apologize for this again and again in later years saddens me.  But i remember that she once defiantly insisted on the humanity of those soldiers, those frail human beings who would die defending their country just as the american soldiers, then and now, have died in the belief they were defending theirs.  I will remember those soldiers too, sitting with the famous movie star around that cannon, that ghastly death machine.

And finally I will remember--I have no choice but to remember--a young  American man who was drafted and went to fight in Vietnam, although, miraculously, because he was a good typist, never had to fight.  Instead, he lived out the war in relative comfort, next to an area the U.S. government was spraying with a "harmless" substance they said would kill crops, but not people [though how people with no crops were meant to eat was never explained]. Only as it turned out, it wasn't harmless, and countless numbers of Vietnamese died of an incredible array of diseases caused by that substance,  called Agent Orange.  So did many, many Americans who returned, apparently safely, from that war.  Was my brother's cancer decade or so later caused by his exposure to Agent Orange?  We'll never know, but it's certainly likely that such a toxic substance played its part in his disease.  He was sure by the end of his life that this was case, and his widow received some of the compensation funds reluctantly paid by the manufacturers of Agent Orange.

Keith died proud of his sister, the anti-war marcher, and urged me to continue the fight against the war. Thus [as we all mourn our own dead first] I write this, knowing i will change nothing; that as I write, Americans and Afghanis and Iraqis and so many others around the world, are dying in wars that need not happen--I write this now because over thirty years ago, Keith asked me to keep protesting.  So i protest, i mourn...and i remember.

The Rag that LIves in the Tree

It’s been there ever since

I came to live here, seven years ago

And who knows how much longer before?

Each year it grows grayer and less defined.

I think it was once a shirt, from the bits of shape

It still holds--a child’s shirt, most likely.

Grotesquely cloudlike, it changes with the wind:

 hammerhead shark one day, a flirty

girl dancing wild at a party.  Too much to drink,

I tell her, and she smirks  at me.

Today the rag is formless, except for its  bottom edge

[(a sleeve, it must have been), that alone mimics the motions

of the lighter leaves. 

It seems like a mouth, with neither

face nor head to balance it: a mad, insensate ghost

chattering endlessly to itself

among indifferent leaves.