Hard song

It surely shouldn’t be so surprising that the daughter of the man who taught Frank Sinatra how to sing and Gene Kelly how to dance (or was it the other way around?) is poised on the brink of musical stardom.
And why not?
Why should a complete and utter lack of ability, training, talent, pitch, range or rhythm preclude such a career move?
I’m poised I tell ya – poised.
It all began yesterday with an early morning audition for a radio commercial; I went in knowing neither the product nor the pitch. (Not as much of a drawback as you may imagine: they give you a script, they tell you how they want you to read it, they record it, they shout “Next!” Nothing simpler. Just keep moving. And forget validation for your parking… or your performance, frankly.)
But I was surprised yesterday morning as the receptionist at the studio handed me the script to see it printed on the page in what looked like stanzas.
“Poetry, eh?” I thought as I shrugged off my coat and sat down to read the script and await my turn at the mike.
But anyone could see it wasn’t poetry. It was a song. A song I recognized; two verses, a chorus and a ‘bring it on home’ flourish of a finish.
There had to be some sort of mistake.
“There has to be some sort of mistake,” I said to the receptionist, my voice thin with rapidly growing anxiety. “I’m not a singer. Did they tell my agent they wanted a singer? I am not,” I paused for emphasis, “a singer!”
“No, no,” she calmed. “They want real people – people like you.”
I just looked at her. I didn’t know her – she didn’t know me – so how could she possibly understand just how ‘real’ I really am? How could she – or the casting agent – possibly gauge just how much ‘real’ the producer and recording engineer were prepared to be bombarded with when I went into the studio and started being ‘real’ at the top of my lungs?
No false modesty here. Besides writing, I pay the bills with voice recording. I was the voice of CTV for three years, the voice of the Life Network for another three, and over the years the voice behind countless hundreds of commercials selling everything from fried chicken to Fords. You have probably heard me tell you that if you know the extension of the person with whom you wish to speak, please enter it now, or press pound to return to the main menu, or nine to hang up. And thank you for calling.
Oh – and have a nice day.
I have a nice voice. Real nice.
But I cannot – not one note – sing. I mouth the words to Happy Birthday to You, rhubarb and mumble my way through hymns and Christmas carols, and never, ever sing in the car unless I’m alone with the windows tightly rolled up, saving any actual singing for the shower (where I do actually sing) grinding and creaking my way through the Top 40 with a sound approximating a cheap, untuned violin played by a toddler with a broken whisky bottle.
I’m really that bad.
I suck. I stink. There may be someone who sings worse than me, but if there is, I surely don’t want to hear them.
Whatever genetic talents were passed on to me by my father (who confided his musical mentorship of ‘ol’ blue eyes’ and ‘ol’ happy feet’ when I was six... and who would lie to a kid?) the actual singing gene was left unspliced, rendering me tune-free and tin eared – and happy that way. I’m fine knowing my limitations.
What I am not fine with is sharing them (recording them! for eternity!) with strangers. There’s knowing your limitations – and then there’s exhibiting them, loudly, with the potential for ‘sharing’ them with potentially millions of innocent citizens.
I could feel the flop sweat starting to trickle, I felt warm – too warm, open a window somebody, please! warm – and was just beginning to consider ways and means of getting out of there with the minimum of humiliation and the maximum of speed (I just couldn’t think how to credibly break my ankle without at least a stair or a step, or a reason to climb on a chair and deliberately fall off) when the producer came in and called me up and walked me back to the recording studio like a French aristo dragged through the streets of Paris to the guillotine.
(Curses – not a slippery area rug or even the teensiest of uneven floorboards from which to launch myself hospital emergency room-ward.)
I was feeling nauseous by the time he set me up at the music stand, adjusted my mike and handed me my headset. (Are you getting a picture of just how bad this was going to be?)
Back in his own safe (safe!) little booth, the producer told me he’d play the musical track for me a couple of times so I could hear where the verses began and when the chorus came in; I ignored it – I had just enough time to shoot a prayer heavenward before the engineer asked me for my levels and launched me musically hellbound.
After all, I didn’t need to listen to any lead track; I’d heard this tune a million times – each and every time I’d watched Singin’ in The Rain.
“Good mornin’, good mornin’,
It’s great to stay up late,
Good mornin’, good mornin’ to you!”
…and so on.
Singin in the Rain. Great movie. Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and… Gene Kelly.
Gene Kelly!
Was it possible? Could this be a sign of some sort? Gene Kelly? Student of my father? (Odd, as my father was born more than 20 years after Gene, but – geez, have you never heard of child prodigies? Infant prodigies? Embryo prodigies?) And Gene, let’s face it, when compared to his dancing and acting was actually pretty crap as a singer.
And I am crap as a singer! (Granted, a whole different, appalling level of crap – but crap none the less.)
“When the band began to play,
The sun was shinin’ bright.
Now the milkman’s on his way,
It’s too late to say goodnight!
So……..”
I started to feel a little better. The nausea waned ever so slightly, my heartbeat regulated, the little hairs standing straight up on the back of my neck went from attention! to at ease.
I took a deep breath, adjusted my headset, nodded at the producer, waited for his hand signal, then I belted that song into that mike!
I experimented with key changes and tones and volume – I may have executed at tremolo – I sang like some warped, oblivious-to-their-abilities contestant on American Idol. I even, so help me God, stuck out my arms and waved them around a little bit.
I sang and I sang.
Then I sang it again. Three times altogether. And each time, my confidence grew. It was complete crap – but it was my crap. They wanted real – and they got it. And I didn’t care. And I brought it home with a flourish.
I wafted out of the studio and floated down the hallway to the reception area, where three other women were taking off their coats and staring at their scripts, and clearing their throats and fingering their collars like they’d suddenly gotten unbearably tight.
I smiled at the assembled women, slipped into my coat, grabbed my bag and as I was about to bid farewell to the receptionist, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what product or service this musical mess was supposed to be selling.
“So what was all that in aid of?” I asked – though I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I got it, I just cared that I finally got it. I had discovered a new skill – one that could take me heaven only knew where. Singing badly – with verve! With passion and excitement and tremolos! Me! Singing!
“Viagra,” the young lady replied, looking up at me with a sly smile.
Oh. Okay. Now I want it. I want it bad. I won’t just be in on the joke – I will be the joke!
Viagra. Priceless. My cocktail party icebreaker requirements are taken care of for the next decade.
So it’s on fellow crappy singers. I’m sitting by the phone, waiting for my agent to call. Hoping and praying and humming “Good mornin’, good mornin’!”
And I’m thinking of taking up dancing…

Driven to despair

On the front page of my newspaper today, the photograph of a smiling unarmed Canadian soldier mere minutes before he was attacked by an Afghani man who screamed “Allahu Akbar!” before plunging his axe into the officer’s head.
Tomorrow the front page of my newspaper will no doubt be imprinted with a photograph of the Canadian soldiers who died in the light armoured vehicle accident last week in Afghanistan and whose remains are being shipped home today.
It’s days like these when the revulsion for ‘Mission Accomplished’ reaches near-critical mass, and the impotence many feel at the prospect of being able to affect any change in the seemingly endless madness born almost exactly three years ago feels endless in itself.
The only subject that really captures my interest nowadays (apart from my own issues, actions, problems, obsessions, rejections, repressions, regressions, regrets, worries, compulsions, concerns, memories, fears, fantasies and finances – is it really so surprising I can’t find a moment to bathe the dog?) is the vast, oceanic reserves of anger against the Iraq war that appear to be building up and spilling over all around the world.
So far as I can tell, everybody lives wrong.
Trust me on this: they certainly drive wrong. Sometimes I wonder if this is where the anger is seeping out.
I’ve written before about my (to me) shockingly swift transformation from traditional ten and two, well in advance signaling, driving manual suck-up, and all-round world class rules-of-the-road obeying driver, to raging, red-faced, road-rage-aholic over the past couple of years. It’s become practically instantaneous.
I can be bopping along (singing a song) contemplating a job well done, or one imminently begun, happy as Colossal squid in a world full of the smaller Giant-variety, and in moments be near-apoplectic with fury if some other driver should attempt to cut into my left lane from his ill-conceived stuck-behind-a-parked-car position on the right.
(Don’t try to kid me; you knew there would be parked cars. You knew there would be bottle-necking at the traffic lights. You further knew that there would be some slow-moving, oblivious folks, complacently driving in the slower left hand lane, who would either inadvertently provide you with an entrée to squeeze in front of them, or graciously wave you on. Not today buster. Not here, not now – not me.)
I am one of those people. The ones who speed up when you try to cut in. The ones who watch the changing lights like a race car driver waiting for the flag to drop so should there be any advantage to changing lanes, I’ll have leapt off the start line and passed you before you could say ‘bitch on wheels’. I drive (when provoked) like a teenaged boy, or a bitter man with a small penis.
Or an American President armed with the kind of advisors and intelligence that have placed the world in the grim marathon of death that shows no signs of abating.
(Don’t try to kid us; you knew that the reports of Iraqi possession of WMDs were inflated if not completely wrong. You knew there would be anger if you drew the world into the war. You knew there would be death. You further knew that there would be some slow-moving, oblivious nations who would either inadvertently provide you with an entrée to squeeze them in with you, or graciously wave you on. So you did. Then, now – you.)
Not so long ago while waiting to turn left across a busy thoroughfare onto my own street, after flashing her lights, honking her horn, and revving her engine, the woman stuck behind me finally pulled out from behind, drove up beside me and with a look and in a tone that were chilling in their ferocity, let me have it.
“Why don’t you turn at the lights,” she screamed. “Bitch!”
With a zoom and a squeal she was off and gunning toward her next appointment with antagonism, and I would have followed her – chased her down – to explain in words of very few syllables (most of your best swear-words only ratchet up the syllabic quotient when compounded) exactly where I lived, expressly why I was turning precisely there, and explicitly where she could place her concerns if she didn’t like it.
Until I realized it would be exactly, expressly, precisely and explicitly like screaming at myself. Pointlessly.
The thing is, in virtually all other ways, in all other situations, I am as gentle as a kitten – or at least as passive aggressive.
(I won’t pee in your shoes, or drop small dead animals at your feet – the worst I’ll do is ignore you or treat you to a look of withering disdain – but I won’t even be catty behind your back.)
I am in all ways but the one, the very image of the average North American, taking it on the chin, accepting the government’s every concealment, cover up and outright lie with a “Well, what’re you going to do?” shrug and eye roll. Still.
Even though somewhere between 35,000 – 100,000 people have died since the war began on March 19th, 2003.
Those numbers are comprised of the civilian dead estimated between 28 and 32,000 individuals, (these are the numbers of people reliably reported dead – British medical journal The Lancet estimates the body count as closer to 100,000 Iraqi civilians) and the American dead now standing at 2,297. Add another couple of hundred coalition troop deaths, and you arrive at the population of a small city.
Only a few people would have to move out of Berkeley California, Pueblo Colorado or Charleston South Carolina to approximate the number of deaths the Iraq war has wrought, and not a few folks would have to move in to Sarnia or Sault Saint Marie in Ontario, or even Kamloops or Nanaimo BC in order to achieve the same results.
And the wounded. The wounded.
In numbers representing American wounded alone, the estimates stand at between 15 and 48,000 troops.
A further 8 to 10 percent of combat troops are said to have been treated for psychiatric or behavioral health issues.
The number of Iraqi wounded is impossible to assess. There’s no doubt the number is enormous. As for their psychiatric or behavioral problems, who could guess, when US general Mark Kimmet’s helpful advice to Iraqi citizens upset at seeing innocent civilians killed by collation troops on their own telelvision screens was: “Change the channel.”
Meanwhile, a Canadian soldier with a hideous head wound lies in critical condition in an army hospital in Landstuhl Germany, and, as the result of a road accident far from the treacherous streets of downtown Toronto, the bodies of two Canadian soldiers, victims of the road accident in southern Afghanistan last week are to be flown home for burial today.
Sometimes (all the time) I think my road rage is misplaced.
But sometimes I think it’s the only place I have to put it.

President McCheese

Today’s New York Times features an editorial so ‘duh’ in its subject matter, the only reaction I had upon reading it was “Uh, right. And?”
Coming out against selling junk food to toddlers – hardly blowing the lid off misanthropic advertising – was the theme for the editorial that once again reiterates the message: healthy food, good… unhealthy food, well, bad.
Maybe.
“Many health professionals now fear that junk-food advertising to toddlers and pre-teenagers is contributing to soaring rates of obesity and diabetes among the young.”
Gee, ya think?
And if so, where were you last Wednesday?
Over a couple of weeks when the Vice President shot a man point blank in the face, when Brownie, the erstwhile Director of FEMA appeared to tesify at the senate hearings and took precisely no responsibility for the disaster that was the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Katrina – even blamed his boss and the guy who hired him, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff – and when death by cartoon has reached an all-time high, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the President’s speech on health care delivered at the headquarters of one of nation's leading saturated, hydrogenated, and trans fatty acid-pushers went walkies as far as the media were concerned.
It’s come to this.
Where was the editorial breast beating and finger wagging?
Where was the sarcasm and amused horror emanating from Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich at the NYT?
Where (oh where) was Jon Stewart?
Out to lunch one suspects. How else to explain such a dropped donut.
The day: last Wednesday, February 15th.
The place: Dublin Ohio, headquarters of hamburger chain restaurant Wendy’s.
The agenda: President Bush’s speech unveiling the value for lower-income Americans in choosing ‘Health Savings Accounts’ (HSAs) over traditional health insurance in which employee and employer each contribute monthly co-payments.
The breathtaking irony seems to have escaped Bush, his handlers and even the media; either that, or they’ve simply become so deeply and everlastingly cynical, that the notion of promoting health care alongside one of the root causes of what is universally considered to be the nation’s biggest health challenge (sky-rocketing obesity rates linked to the consumption of unhealthy, processed fast foods) isn’t worth the trouble it takes to grimace and shake one’s head.
That same breathtaking irony is further stretched to near-suffocation when one attempts to tot up the product placement value of setting up the President of the United States as a shill not only for a new corporate health care dodge, but for hamburgers, fries and shakes.
Further, people were so caught up in salivating over the Vice President’s accidental shooting of a friend – a red herring if ever there was one; despite the wow factor of envisioning a gun-toting Cheney so transfixed by blood and murder he couldn’t even pause long enough to miss a human as he fired away at the penned quail, the real issue was when, how, and by whom the facts were disseminated – that other news items quickly fell by the wayside.
Much as I find the veep loathsome, corrupt and, frankly, simply terrifying to look at (I really don’t think life gives you a phiz like that unless you actually earn it) the shooting was clearly an accident; had Cheney owned up to it, apologized for it and reported it to the President and the country, why need anything more be said?
(The fact that the facts were immediately obscured, shrouded, laundered, spun-dry and rendered sanitized for our listening and viewing consumption was the angle that finally hoisted the correct outraged eyebrows some days later. It is in fact the real achilles heel of this administration; obsessing over the way in which information is delivered to conceal what is actually being delivered should be forever remembered as the hallmark of this presidency. That and the fact that they can actually make a wounded man apologize to his attacker; what, is he like, Canadian or something?)
But how on earth does the New York Times expect to rescue even a single babe innocently gumming a ribless McRib into submission when they allow such a patronizing exercise in contempt by the President to slip by?
To an audience full of Wendy’s employees, describing America’s health care system as “The best in the world” and pushing health savings accounts aimed at the poor and underemployed (and designed to remove the onus for making health care contributions from corporate America) the President took the well known, tried, true and trodden tact of setting himself alongside the average Joes – in direct opposition to the big-time, big hat, citified democrat critics who would likely oppose his plan – in encouraging minimum wage workers to sign on.
“It’s kind of basically saying ‘If you’re not making a lot of money you can’t make decisions for yourself,’ Bush told the Wendy’s staffers. “That’s kind of a Washington attitude, isn’t it? ‘We’ll decide for you if you can’t figure it out yourself.’ I think a lot of folks here at Wendy’s would argue that point of view is simply backwards and not true.”
I think the folks he’s talking about are the ones wearing the thousand dollar loafers – not the ones in the paper hats and hairnets.
The President went on to make the analogy that HSAs were really no different from the Wendy’s menu – that in the same way they offered choice: “At Wendy’s you can choose between a quarter-pounder and a salad” the President pointed out, (in one fell swoop both confusing Wendy’s with MacDonalds and making the single reference to healthy eating that was made that day) whereas the HSAs offered Americans the opportunity to purchase their own health care account.
The President chose not to mention that the high-deductible catastrophic coverage would require an individual to spend at least $1050 and a family at least $2,100 on medical expenses before the coverage actually kicks in.
The fact that such an initiative benefits Wendy’s more than its employees is apparently just so much more ketchup on the fries; since 2005, Wendy’s has already reduced its health care spending by inducing some 9000 of its 40,000 employees to sign on for the accounts.
Bush’s position is that the accounts will make people more conscious of the money they’re spending for health care, which will ultimately help drive down the nation’s health care costs through competition.
The trickle-down (ooze down?) theory designed to save the nation’s bacon (double cheeseburger) on the backs of those who can least afford it, once again.
The saddest fact is that in order for the poor to participate in a high-deductible plan like HSAs, they’ll need to carve even more off already stretched budgets, necessitating economies in spending, resulting in cheaper groceries, less fruits, vegetables and fresh – expensive – healthy foods, driving them back into the gaping maws of the cheap and fast junk food joints where accumulations of fat, salt, chemicals and empty calories will contribute to clogged arteries, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and obesity.
I think the New York Times is wrong. I think advertisers and their agencies are pikers compared to the real danger threatening the wellbeing, health and lives of Americans – you’ll recognize him: he’s the one in the thousand dollar loafers selling hamburgers at Wendy’s.

Pussy footing

Another red letter day for the forces of disinformation (uninformation?) as Toronto radio station CHFI (98.1 on your FM dial) announced they will not be running advertisements for breakthrough playwright Eve Ensler’s latest offering The Good Body.
It seems said advertisements in quite logically promoting the author as the creator or the much lauded The Vagina Monologues, necessarily makes mention of the word ‘vagina’.
Vagina.
Quoth station manager Julie Adam: nevermore.
Turning down some $20,000 in advertising revenue to guard the tender sensibilities of her listening audience, Adam, Program Director and General Manager of CHFI said that though she had heard the event was fabulous, and that she, herself, personally, was a woman who had no trouble saying “that word” (taking enormous care to not actually say ‘that word’) the mandate she claims she is charged with – family friendliness – makes it impossible for her to put anything on her radio station that parents might feel uncomfortable with.
“You use a word like that,” explained Adam, “and the next thing you know they’re asking, ‘Mommy or daddy, what’s that mean?’
“If you want safe,” she continued, “CHFI is your station.”
Really Ms Adam?
Safe?
Safe from the danger of marauding sexual organs? Rampaging penises? Breasts set on taking over the world? Vicious vulgar vaginas?
As scandalous as a Victorian piano leg obscured by neither drape nor pantalette, it would seem that the mere mention of the word ‘vagina’ is enough to arouse unspeakable dread in the heart of a radio station manager circa 2006.
What nameless fears are aroused by the word vagina? Is it the word? Is it the vagina itself?
Is there something wrong with vaginas?
If we’ve learned little else in recent years, we must have at least grasped that children need to learn about their bodies to learn about themselves. Telling a little boy he has a penis or a little girl that she has a vagina is but the very first step in giving them the words they need to know themselves, their bodies and their boundaries.
Implying there’s nothing shameful or disgusting or embarrassing about their bodies by making the words acceptable empowers children to use those words, to tell anyone who might wish to touch them or hurt them or take advantage of their youth or their innocence or their ignorance that they know what they have – and they know it is fine and good and it is theirs.
Telling someone not to touch your wee wee or your pee pee or your hoo hoo carries somewhat less power than telling a molester to take their hands off your vagina.
Educators agree how important it is to teach children as young as toddlers – at whatever age they are able to say the word vagina – the appropriate names of their body parts; parents and children need to have a shared vocabulary, if for no other reason than that children will be able to explain exactly and explicitly whatever happened to them should such a tragedy take place.
If a child is too shy or ashamed or ignorant to even describe what happened to them, that’s not safe.
Using real words shows respect for a child – and for their body. Using the appropriate words distinguishes between sexuality and silliness and shame. Using the appropriate words is, what’s the word… appropriate.
I don’t expect CHFI to teach children about sex or sexuality or what they should know, or how they should be told or when. But neither do I expect them to take a stand that sends a message that has another meaning altogether. A message that essentially says that the word ‘vagina’ is unfit for public discourse.
It’s that constant message – the one that tells little girls that the most intimate parts of their body are something secret, something hidden, something wrong.
It’s not absence of message – as a vagina is not an absence. It’s a presence – as a vagina is a presence. But unlike a vagina, it’s a nasty, dirty presence – a message of shame.
Vagina, vagina, vagina.
Oh say it radio station manager. Or if you can’t say it, at least don’t take part in hiding it and implying there’s something wrong with the word by refusing to allow it to be said publically in an entirely appropriate context.
Go see The Vagina Monologues. Go see The Good Body. Learn something about the vagina. About the body. But quit suggesting you protect your audience by being part of what makes children unsafe.
There's something shameful here, but it's not a vagina.
Let’s make vaginas safe for everybody! Step one: say it.
Vagina.
VAGINA!

Girl Without a Pearl Earring

Running completely counter to my normally unerringly accurate political predictions, the Liberals have lost the election.
I can relate; I lost an earring today.
Beautiful. Got the pair in Barbados – a long swirl of delicate spiraling silver ending in a lovely little Mabe pearl – and I lost just one of them.
It drives me crazy because apart from the grrr factor, I still have the one sitting here solo on my desk, becoming ever more precious and valued by the moment, teasing me with its smug, self-satisfied thereness. Somewhere is its mate – in the middle of the road, crushed under some careless boot or oblivious car, lying obscured under some restaurant table, or perhaps glinting delicately (and oh so beautifully and preciously and finally) in a trash bin at the Business Depot where I stopped in this afternoon (happy – I was happy then) to mail a letter and look at the pens and pencils.
(I like looking at brand new pens and pencils. I rarely have any at hand. Can you guess why?)
And it also drives me crazy because in the larger sense, this is what I do; I lose things, I break things, I bump into things, I knock over things (usually glasses – full, natch) I crash into things (five broken baby toes tell the sad, sad story) and I forget things, usually crucial sorts of things. Important directions, appointment dates if made more than a week in advance, people’s names (hideously rude and embarrassing) and ‘where did I put my keys?’. The phrase itself should have a trademark symbol next to it, so ubiquitous and classic it is to my daily perambulations.
(This is why I’m fit; it’s not the five day a week workouts or the relatively healthy diet. No, it’s running around, back and forth, up and down the parking lot steps, into each closet, rifling through coat pockets, looking for those stupid, stupid keys.)
My friend (with whom I traveled to Barbados) crashed headlong into the glass door that separated the lanai from the living room on Monday, shocking me into silence. I neither comforted her, nor fetched ice, nor looked for blood or bruises – I was too busy staring at the offending glass door, wondering what she was doing in my place. Wondering why she had suddenly taken on my job, doing the comical Three Stooges/Marx Brothers pratfalls, banana peel slips and crashes headlong into closed, unforgiving doors that has been my inadvertent shtick since first I tripped over a roller skate and fell headlong down the concrete steps outside our house at the age of five.
(Really, you should see these earrings – correction: earring – never before have I possessed anything so poignantly, perfectly lovely. I realize it now. And unless I get a call from the restaurant or the office supply store, chances are, I never will again.)
This isn’t the first single earring I’ve lost. The first I remember was a diamond stud I lost about 20 years ago when I was living in the South of France; it must have rolled under the bureau, or down the drain in the shower, because I know I had it when I went to bed the night before. But even so, for years after, in countries all over the world, I would fumble through purse linings and coat pockets (winter coats!) thinking: maybe, maybe my fingers will light on it one day and bring it gleaming and twinkling and back into partnership with the single stud I still own and still keep tucked away in the back of a jewelry box. Maybe – maybe in Bizarro world! Surely not in this one.
I lost two single earrings in the backs of cabs on the same visit to New York a few years back. In one of those cabs, I also left my burgundy paisley wool Ralph Lauren scarf that went with everything I ever owned and a few things I still aspire to. I think about that scarf. And I occasionally look at those two lonely, single earrings – the intaglio that made me look at least two levels more sophisticated than I really am, and the small silver burnished silver Me & Ro dangly earring that still makes my stomach churn thinking how perfect two would be.
I was taller wearing those earrings. Prettier and smarter and the sort of person who doesn’t lose everything that isn’t nailed down or too heavy to lift.
I missed an appointment once that can still make me quiver with loss and mortification more than 20 years later. (My mother used to call them: "those moments so shameful, they can keep you warm on cold winter nights.")
I had written some segment ideas on spec for a breakfast television show in London when I first arrived in town and couldn’t get arrested as a disc jockey. Nothing new now, but back in 1984, my makeover segments and fashion and decorating tips (designed to be packaged and sponsored) were still pretty fresh. To my surprise – seriously, I didn’t know anybody… I got the producer’s name off the credit roll at the end – the production secretary called to say the Big Name producer would be happy to meet with me within the next 10 days on a specific day and at a specific time. I was dizzy with excitement and anticipation, imagining the future that lay before me, practically decorating my new career girl corner office in between selecting and rejecting dozens of outfits to wear on the day of The Big Meeting.
The day before The Big Meeting I got very grown up and decided to call to confirm my appointment and was surprised to receive such a frosty reaction from the production secretary who took my call.
“Yes, hello, this is Jane Wilson – I’m just calling to confirm my interview with Mr. X tomorrow at two?”
“I’m sorry Ms Wilson,” said the chilled to below zero voice of Ms Production Secretary. “But that appointment was for today at two. We were wondering where you were.”
“But, no, wait, that’s impossible! My appointment is for Wednesday the 22nd. I have it written down here…”
“Today is Tuesday the 22nd,” replied Ms P.S. “Today was the day.”
“But – oh my God – I’m so sorry! This is horrible!” I was beside myself with embarrassment and remorse; I couldn’t tell the days of the week? “Please – may I please re-schedule the interview? Any time – I’m just so sorry, I can’t think how…”
“I’m afraid Mr. Big Name doesn’t have any time available for the next few weeks,” she said with total lock-down finality. “And we’re not taking any meetings for the next few months. I’m afraid you’ve missed your chance,” she added, her voice suffused (or so I imagined) with contempt and patronizing dismissal.
Then she hung up.
I wrote the producer the most craven, apologetic, spineless begging letter I could compose, and sent it off, expecting nothing and receiving just that.
It was hard to forget or put out of my mind. It was just so clownish and pathetic and stupid and there was no one – no one – I could blame besides myself. The memory was cringe-worthy and to this day I can conjure up those feelings of futility and sheer gobsmacked horror at having blown such a great opportunity so completely and thoroughly.
(There is a footnote to all this though; about a year later while I was living and working in the South of France, a note from the Big Name was forwarded to my mailbox. In it he apologized for being so late in replying – he was only now going through his correspondence he said – as he had been fired from Channel Four a few weeks after our proposed (and disposed) appointment. They were good ideas he said; keep working on it, though sadly, he wouldn’t be the one who would produce them. Nice eh? I still feel sick about it though…)
Since then I’ve lost a pair of unusual pink cotton casual pants I picked up for a few bucks on a weekend trip to Montreal. (I called them my happy pants. They were. Happy. Then. Not so much now.) I’ve misplaced a black Benetton cardigan that was totally ordinary but fit perfectly. Perfectly I tell you! I’ve lost at least a half dozen more single earrings, a crazy hat (vivid purple crushed velvet on one side, poisonous chartreuse printed silk on the other – and it’s reversible!) a couple of love letters I can still more or less quote from memory, a handful of boyfriends and two parents.
It’s amazing I still have so much stuff left.
And despite the occasional painful twinges of frustration I feel at each of the losses and accidents and disasters (I am now thinking of tracking down the lady at the tiny, anonymous little jewelery kiosk in Holetown Barbados to see if she can send me a replacement earring – damn the cost!) I am truly conscious of the importance of being able to let go of things – of not letting material stuff control my emotions or upset my equilibrium.
My mum taught me that.
A few months before she died we were celebrating what would be our last Christmas together. I remember she was wearing the pretty cream coloured blouse with the ruffled collar I had given her that morning and apart from looking tired and much too thin, she was enjoying the dinner and the family and the fireplace and all the beautiful twinkling gleaming family heirloom stuff that came out on only very special occassions, admiring the table we had set while she was napping earlier just the way she would have set it: the large balloon wine glasses, the red bordered hunting print place mats, the best silver and the china she had inherited from her mother. 1900’s Limoges china, simple and beautiful, with just a narrow strip of burnished gold bordering the dinner plates. She treasured that china – we all did – as one of the few really nice things her mother had been able to pass down to her.
I was clearing the table, hurrying to get it done so we could all sit down again together, shoes off – as is my toe-smashing tendency – and as I went to go down the two carpeted steps that led from the dining room to the kitchen, my stockings slipped on the rug and I went down with a bang and a gigantic crash. Seven dinner plates were shattered beyond repair.
I just sat there, the wind knocked out of me thinking how devastated – maybe even angry – my mother would be. So careless! So stupid! So precious.
I was already crying when she reached me. She just knelt down and said:
“Don’t cry – don’t be upset. They’re just things. It doesn’t matter – they’re not people. Come on, get up, let’s see if you’re okay.”
I was. And so was she.
I have what’s left of the china and I haven’t broken another plate, though the few chips they’ve acquired over the years don’t upset me as much as they might. I’m okay. They’re not people.
I hope Mr. Martin is okay too.

Oh, the humanity!

The internet, in case you hadn’t noticed, has changed everything. And by ‘everything’ I refer of course to access to embarrassing celebrity photographs.
Finally a little balance is entering the picture; a picture that since the beginning of time (or women’s magazines, whichever) has been airbrushed, shaded, re-thought, re-drawn and altogether re-imagined, re-presenting women as something akin to Superwoman.
Superwomen - with superskin and superthighs and superboobs.
Inhuman beauty – the excruciating standard of the new millennium.
So the reality is essential I find. And this isn’t a New Year thing, a resolution thing – it’s an essential thing, because in eleven days I am going on holiday. To a beach and bathing suit place for eleven fun-filled days of sun and sand and sucking in my stomach. Hence the need for embarrassing celebrity photographs. Because (and here’s another thing you wouldn’t necessarily know if the internet had never been invented) after scanning the various appropriate websites with even the most cursory of glances, no one with any sense would worry either a tittle or a jot about less than perfectly taught abs, or slightly jiggly glutes or even somewhat wobbly pecs.
Celebrities, we’ve come to see through regular navigation of the world wide web, are just as imperfect (and sometimes excruciatingly more so) as thee and me.
Tabloids you say! Rubbish I reply – because the typical tabloids are notorious for upping the unreal photographic ante with all sorts of exaggerated and photo-shopped visions and versions of worst case scenario famous folks who though human, are regularly presented alongside Batboy, surefire cures for cancer and the woman who gave birth to her mother. Its unreliable evidence: when I go looking for celebrity deficiencies I want mine hot, fresh, real and ready for their close up.
Celebrity justice internet style.
Just last week, I was considering adopting a fourth level vegan diet (you don’t eat anything that casts a shadow) when I stumbled across pictures of Tara Reid’s tummy on The Superficial. Billowing, bumpy and bizarrely puckered and pooched, it seems a botched liposuction treatment has repackaged the starlet and placed her in a container a few sizes shy of the contents.
I smile and pick up a potato chip – I have a better body than the erstwhile star of ‘Taradise’. A better tummy, much less weird non-balloony, unscarred breasts, not to mention the fact that I spend most days sober and wear underpants beneath my skirts. Compared to Ms Reid, I am as shapely as a Victoria’s Secret supermodel and as modest as Queen Victoria enshrouded in the darkest of widow’s weeds.
I am a babe. Compared to Tara anyway.
Encouraged by this initial, enormously satisfying research, I plow on through Awful Plastic Surgery. And here self-esteem goes into overdrive; I note that in comparison to the high-priced celebrity surgical shambles depicted, my lips look like lips… my nose looks precisely like a nose… and my bottom and nipples… are right where I left them.
Heaven. I am thinking of taking up pole-dancing and nude modeling.
Creating a monster you say? No, I reply – I have more than enough insecurities, obsessions and hard-earned humility to counter any unattractive over-weaning self-satisfaction.
Besides, just thirty seconds spent with a photo of Angelina Jolie – a mere ten seconds with one of Charlize Theron – and I am back to the whimpering, gibbering bundle of anxieties of yore; the girl who was thinking they should bring back the Bathing Costume circa 1920… the one that comes compete with bloomers, knee-length skirt, black cotton stockings and full-length sleeves. Oh – and sensible hat.
It’s a see-saw. One minute you’re gloating over Kirstie Alley, the next you’re groaning over Jessica Alba. On the one hand you’d feel confident going toe to toe with Britney Spears, on the other, you’re not sure the planet’s big enough for both you AND Gisele Bundchen. Not and leave you with even a shred of self-assurance that is.
I remember a story about an Elizabeth Taylor sighting, sometime around her Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf days.
“Oh my God, look - there she is,” says the middle-aged lady to her companion. “I remember when all I wanted was to look just like her!”
“Congratulations,” replies her friend. “Now you do.”
So I’ve come full circle. I no longer wish to compare and contrast myself with celebrities good or bad. I don’t wish to feel better because somebody else is falling to bits – or because somebody else got put back together with what looks like a few parts missing. And I don’t want to deride myself by odious comparisons to people who though spectacularly beautiful may also have achieved a particular look with the help of make-up, surgery and digital technology.
I want to be my own judge and critic and cheerleader.
I am going to Barbados and I am going to wear a bikini and I am going to know I am just as good as any famous movie star.
After all, I’m human. Excruciatingly.

K-9 Krunchies

You know that thing where you hear a word or a phrase or an idea seemingly out of left field and suddenly you’re hearing it everywhere? Here’s mine: people eating dog food.
And no, I’m not referring to the sad, almost clichéd, tragic elderly-ladies-and-others-on-welfare-eating-food-designed-for-animals-because-it’s-cheap (though I think that’s pretty much cat food, if clichéd memory serves) but rather humans choosing to eat dog food – because they like it.
Now just because this is new to me phenomenon-wise doesn’t mean I’ve never heard of such a thing. My brother was renowned in our family for trying every type of dog food, wet or dry, treat or medicinal, that came through the door.
Pedigree Chum, Gravy Train, Milk Bones, liver snaps, Gaines Burgers (remember those?) Alpo – everything. He drew the line at rubber bones and chew toys, but other than artificial dog toy stuff, he was pretty much open to everything dog diet related. But that was more than twenty years ago, and like every little brother, mine was a certifiable creepy nut.
(I myself ate a few Good Boy Choc Drops – licked one, then scarfed the rest truth be told – but only because they actually tasted like chocolate; like large, slightly dry Hershey’s Kisses. One hopes they weren’t actually made of chocolate, but even if they were, no matter: I had saved our pets from toxic chocolate poisoning through pure greed. I’d like to tell you I was prescient, but really, it was nothing more than gluttony.)
Anyway, years go by and this week my book of choice is Augusten Burroughs’s autobiographical ‘Running With Scissors’, (hilarious and horrific, just like the jacket copy promises) and I come across a passage where Burroughs is shamed into joining his weird surrogate family in snacking on Purina Dog Chow.
“It was surprisingly tasty,” he reports. “Nutty, slightly sweet with a satisfying crunch.”
Then, apropos of nothing (it’s that out of the blue phenomenon working again) someone mentioned to me their habit of gorging on Kibbles ’n Bits back in their college days. The perfect dorm snack that no one else would steal out of the communal kitchen – but that was just the upside; the real purpose of the purchase was because he LIKED it. Kibbles ‘n Bits.
And I am left sitting here wondering if my brother Chris wasn’t messing with me all those years ago about how “delicious, yummy – come on, you’ve got to try some” the food destined for Charlie, Pip, Sadie and Chloe was. Maybe he was purposely using reverse psychology: he may have been ten, but he was a smart little creepy nut.
Maybe the big secret was that all that tinned gourmet dog food and delectably crispy, crunchy kibble really IS tasty. Maybe he was trying to keep it all for himself. Or, more likely, attempting to maintain his title as weirdest Wilson. No mean feat…
So yesterday I’m at the pet store picking up a little homeopathic arthritis remedy for the dog. (And a little was all it was – it cost a fortune for a tiny bottle; but do I want to sleep through the night unaccompanied by yips and twitches? I do. The cost of uninterrupted slumber? $27 plus tax. But as they say in the credit card ads, the end to sleep deprivation? Priceless.)
I take a lot of stick from people who think I spoil my dog. The truth is, she’s kind of exceptionally cute and small and purse-puppy-ish. They think I treat her like a tiny human, but the fact is, she’s just good value personality-wise. I like hanging around with her and playing with her and even though I put coats on her in the wet and in the winter, I don’t dress her up, or stick little hats on her, or buy her exceptionally pricey toys or treats. Honestly, I treat her like a dog. So I’m a little nonplussed by all this gourmet dog crap.
So there I am, lined up at the till, looking at all the impulse purchases dotted around the counter, more now that the holiday season is here, and trying hard not to get sucked in by the plush reindeer antlers, and tinselly collars with jingle bells, and Santa caps of all sizes – with ear-holes and without – that cost a little too much to be believed, but are just cheap enough to make you waver. And I finally succumb to a small packet of Christmas cookies – in gingerbread man, Christmas tree and wreath shapes. They’re adorable. And the dog demonstrably has a chronic pain disorder and they’re only $1.50. They’re really too pretty to waste on a creature who will lick things off the bottom of my boot, but after all, it’s Christmas and so on and so forth.
Waiting to pay, I take a sniff of the biscuits and am surprised to discover they don’t smell musty or meaty, but cinnamony and spicy and altogether exactly like real gingerbread cookies.
“’Scuse me,” I say to the harried woman behind the counter. (If this shop is any indication, dogs will be having a breakout Christmas this year. Makes you feel a little sad for the Jewish and Muslim pets; though G-d knows, I wouldn’t doubt there are plenty of kosher and halal treats available to the dedicated dog fancier.) “But are these for people or dogs?
“I just wondered,” I continued, “because they smell absolutely delicious.”
“Both,” she mumbles, trying to get the overloaded Interac machine to accept my bruised and wilting card. “People are always trying their dog’s food, so we’ve started making the treats animal and human-friendly. We’re selling loads.”
I’m not surprised. I simply would not be able to tell the difference. By smell that is; you can fool me, but you couldn’t make me eat something displayed at muzzle level, next to the rubber squeak toys and the desiccated liver chunks and hard and greasy pig’s ears.
It would appear however that I am on my own. All over the internet, and hung and stacked throughout pet stores and specialty dog-bakeries throughout the GTA, are human-friendly pet snacks. Not surprisingly, there are even a few high end outlets that sell (and sell well) a whole line of candy treats for man and beast.
“At last, a snack people can share with dogs – and vice versa!” goes the slogan for the snooty online gourmet treat merchant that sells all manner of delectable dog treats:
Dog/People Truffles: 25 for $25; Lickety Splits Dog/People Carob Sticks: 12 for $12; Turtle Dog/People Treats: 4 for $15; and Woofy Pop Popcorn for people and their pets: 3 microwavable packs for $8.
I won’t bother commenting, I’ll just let you do the math.
So we get home and I remove her faux Burberry overcoat, unbuckle her red collar with the initials ‘LW’ outlined in diamante, and measure out a dose of the arthritis-relief medicine. I take a sniff – fascinated now to see if pet remedies also come in dog-friendly flavours – and gag at the viscous brown liquid that smells like a cross between rotten eggs and dog poo. If I could manage it, I’d pinch her nose for her, but I just pry open the gaping maw and squirt the stuff in.
She seems okay, she licks her lips and looks up brightly, clearly hoping for more. Good dog! Truly, the stuff was shudder-worthy, so I tear open the packet of Christmas dog biscuits and offer her a small wreath to snack on before dinner.
She takes it gingerly, as if it was a favour to me and stands there sort of sucking on it ruminatively, before dropping it on the floor. She gives it one desultory lick, before turning around and trotting off into the bedroom, toenails clicking happily on the smooth parquet.
I pick up the biscuit and give it another sniff. Cinnamon and ginger spice. Very nice, very Christmassy. Still a dog biscuit.
Later, I go to join her in the bedroom, but I can’t find her; she’s in none of the usual places – sprawled on the chaise, curled up on a pillow on the bed. I check the bathroom, under the desk, then I spy her in the back of the closet.
She’s licking the bottom of my boot.
Priceless.

Pretty much over

I heard a remark on the radio as I was driving around town this afternoon.
Listening to CFRB (I only listen to Talk Radio now – as a former disc jockey I find it all but impossible to just listen to music – I can practically hear the format under the tunes, and can almost guess which songs the producers will play to take them exactly to the hour, the quarter or the half; it’s distracting is what I’m saying) I heard John Moore suggesting to his guest the Prime Minister that the election, with not so very long to go, still pretty much hadn’t gotten underway.
The Prime Minister had to pretty much agree.
I was relieved. Because as far as thinking about the election myself – considering the issues… listening to the candidates… deciding just exactly how much of a wally Steven Harper is this time around – I haven’t exactly been engaged in the process. My mind has been elsewhere – and unlike years past, this time around I really don’t care.
Of course I don’t mean I don’t care I don’t care – I mean I think “it’s going to be okay”I don’t care; I think that barring some unforeseen major trauma, we’re looking at another Liberal minority or bare bones majority, so I think status quo-wise, everything should remain pretty much, well, status quo.
And I don’t think it’s as a result of that haircut that leads the Conservatives – and I don’t think it’s because the Prime Minister has turned up the scintillation factor, exhibiting heretofore undiscovered reserves of charm, or even because Buzz Hargrove had a meltdown and fell in mad, passionate love with the Liberal party all of a sudden. I think it’s because there are larger issues in play and for the first time in my lifetime, considerations outside our country which may well contribute to the biggest influence on the vote.
There’s just a little too much far right nuttiness out there and consciously or sub, I believe Canadians will not want to contribute any more to it by voting in another conservative-type government that has on more than one occasion flirted with some of the issues and obsessions that have so shockingly distracted the President of the United States and his practically frothing-at-the-mouth Far Right Christian supporters.
The Prime Minister and former PM served themselves, their party and their country well in one thing at least: in making clear in issues as diverse as softwood lumber and same sex marriage – not to mention defining Canada’s non-role in the Iraq war – that they were taking a different tack – and by doing so sailing against the wind and the world’s greatest superpower.
The current PM – and future, I predict – has made his most judicious moves in distancing himself and us from the true evils that beset America in the 21st century. Removed as it may seem from the fistfights and dust-ups that blow up over differences in opinion over the future of private health care, the directions the parties see for a myriad of policy issues and the stand each takes on the issues of personal morality and conduct, the war and its ethos seems to fascinate and terrify Canadians as much or more than American voters.
The Liberals will be voted in again because we trust them not to belly-up to the Republican President; it’s as simple – and as complex – as that. There’s a balance that needs to be struck, as ethereal as it is real, that won’t allow for more right whingeing in North America.
The majority of us get it, I believe, get what it has taken several years and multiple deaths and a few (finally) publicly revealed cock-ups for the majority of Americans to get: that the President and those who serve him are as corrupt and wicked as the wickedest of ‘evil-doers’ they swore to take down when they led as much of the world as was theirs to weasel into the so-called War Against Terror.
In a world more beset upon by terror than ever before, the worst part – or the best, depending upon your point of view – is that though the realization has cost the lives and resources and goodwill that it has, it is based less on the actual war and more on the way in which the President and those closest to him have reacted to any criticism of the war.
As Frank Rich wrote recently in The New York Times, the Administration is on the run – and heaving the most pathetic of non-explanatory bombshells in their wake.
Rather than respond to the recent kafuffle stirred up by Representative John Murtha (D-Pa – and former proponent of the war) who called for an early exit from the war in Iraq by joining the debate on “… how our troops might best be deployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism”, the President’s men (and women) moved in like attack dogs seeking the jugular, instead of guard dogs protecting the people, attacking their critics and impugning their characters.
Why no discussion? Why no reasoned explanation? Why call a decorated Marine veteran and hawkish Democrat (and recognized unofficial spokesman for the troops) a coward, (from Republican Congresswoman ‘Mean Jean’ Schmidt: “…cowards cut and run, Marines never do”) or proclaim, as did Vice President Dick Cheney, that anyone who suggested that the Iraq war was entered into on a lie was dishonest and reprehensible, and “… are engaging in revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.”
(Frank Rich injects a hint of much-needed humour – not to mention uncanny accuracy – into the discussion by comparing Cheney’s over-the-top defensive bombast as reminiscent of the misanthropic Mr. Potter of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life”, he sounded, says Rich “… but one epithet away from a defibrillator.” Beautiful. Right – Potter… or maybe in the Canadian version, Conrad Black; though to be as vocally grandiloquent as his Lordship, Cheney would have to step up not only the wounded disbelief, but the verbal impenetrability factor as well. So far, I still more or less understand the Administration – the words, if not their true meaning.)
The new line from the White House – note: presented with neither shame nor chagrin - is that if it IS true that the war was entered into based on false information about WMD, they were just ONE of the suckers that bought into that theory. Just one of the unfortunately mislead… really no different from anybody else.
Problem is, some of us remember.
This is the problem with the US – they allow themselves to be distracted by this rubbishy legerdemain, forgetting the things that we as Canadians do not forget.
I remember the debate in the UN. I remember Canada, amongst other countries, begging the US to allow weapons inspectors to finish their job, a job if you recall, that at that point had not found anything yet. A job that Hans Blix suggested would take just a couple more weeks.
I remember Colin Powell looking as though some unseen hand had been shoved unceremoniously up his bottom, forcing him into pathetic puppetry as he parroted the words the backroom boys had bullied him into proclaiming, telling the UN Assembly that America, with or without them, would be moving on this the greatest menace to US security since 9/11 – a grave danger threatened from a quantifiable enemy.
I remember the threatening tone with which the US torpedoed the UN.
I remember the constant subtle and not-so-subtle references to 9/11. I remember as the pursuit of Osama bin Laden faded and the search for Saddam Hussein took centre stage. I remember the move from Iraq to Afghanistan measured in weeks, the move out of Iraq still potentially many years.
Until recent months the President and his men (and woman) could depend upon their supporters to take what was given them (‘Mission Accomplished’; 9/11 + Saddam = justifiable war on Iraq; detractors = traitors; torture = effective interrogation) with neither complaint nor question. Now that the numbers are shifting (approval ratings: Bush – 36%; Cheney – 27%) the White House is discussing troop withdrawal as if they’d invented not only the term but the practice.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I believe the President and the Republican Party should be on notice that a substantial portion of the western world and the G-7 nations are viewing the United States with the same awkward embarrassment as would a room full of guests forced to watch their host drunk and with his fly undone, slacks heading south.
There’s a growing sense that enough is enough – it’s time for a sobering shape-up to occur.
(Zip up that fly, slug down some black coffee and get with the program. And by the way, quit inviting your crazy friends over: they’re eating all the snacks, interrupting all the intelligent conversations and spilling blood-red wine all over the carpets and furniture.)
Put simply: we’ve had it – and Canadians are not going to run the risk of sending a mixed message when a clear one is needed the most.
Here church and state are separated. Here we view war as last ditch retaliation, not preemptive first strike. Here we don’t debate the need for universal health care – we argue the delivery of it. Here we tend to vote liberal, and we tend, if not to like it, then to appreciate the message it delivers on our behalf.
Campaign not yet begun?
I believe the campaign is over.

The value of nothing

Canadian Supermodel Linda Evangelista famously refused to get out of bed for less than $10,000.00 a day.
The minimum wage for Canadians (on average) is $7.19 an hour. The highest lowest minimum wage is paid in Nunavut ($8.50 an hour) the lowest lowest minimum wage in Newfoundland ($6.25 an hour).
According to March 2005 Parade magazine, the median weekly wage for an American is $638.00 (half earned more, half earned less). The median salary for men was $713.00; for women, $573.00.
R.O.B. Magazine detailed a few salary and wage figures not so long ago that painted an interesting picture of Canadian compensation.
Bank of Montreal Chairman and CEO, Tony Comper, earned $900,000 in salary in 2003, plus a $1.4-million bonus. Even with the generous speculation by the article’s author that he works 15 hours a day, six days a week, 12 months out of the year, his take-home still averages out to a whopping $491.00 an hour.
A bank teller on the other hand, typically earned between $10.00 and $15.00 an hour, which at the high end averages out to $28,860.00 a year. If you can get fulltime hours.Increasingly, bank-tellering is becoming a part-time job. The low end is getting considerably lower.
Ontario plastic surgeons billed an average of $267,389.
Ontario's ophthalmologists and dermatologists pulled in $376,999 and $355,469, respectively.
The highest-billing specialists in Ontario were heart surgeons, who commanded an average of $448,911 in fee-for-service payments.
A General Duty Registered Nurse of the Ontario Nurses Association earned between $42,413 up to a maximum of $63,785 in 2002.
In the world of high tech, entry-level computer operators start at between $30,000 and $45,000. But help-desk support staff, the human punching bags of high tech, receive considerably less renumeration for being yelled at all day: salaries start at $31,000 and top out at $58,000.
Toronto Transit Union Local 113, says that drivers average, with overtime, $52,000 a year. At the high end, 3% earn $70,000, but according to the spokesthingie who provided the figures, that means they "never go home."
A Toronto Police officer makes about $70,000,
Most Canadian teachers with bachelor's degrees earn $33,000 to $60,000. None of it is tax-free; and they can't deduct home computer depreciation and office supplies.
(Out-of-pocket expenses are considerable-Canadian teachers spend about $430 of their own money on supplies. A British Columbia teacher fares worse; their province's average is $1,095 a year. Maybe that's why 40% of B.C.'s new teachers leave the profession within five years.)
A fulltime ballerina makes about $570.00 per week.
A reasonably successful opera singers is lucky if they make $25,000.00 a year after expenses.
No matter how enthused Gerrge Costanza might have been about his alter ego architect Art Vendelay, architecture, while it may pay big bucks eventually, is a profession with a long apprenticeship. After many years of post-secondary education, interns make between $27,000 and $45,000 a year. Associate architects with a small firm can make $50,000; associates with a big firm can make $130,000. Senior architects earn between $39,000 and $75,000. It’s not going to put them in a palace
An executive chef's salary ranges between $40,000 to $90,000, depending on the reputation of the restaurant and the chef. A good waiter in the same establishment, in a good year, earns around $40,000, tips and the minimum-wage hourly rate combined.
The best job I ever had paid about $4000.00 an hour. I worked mere minutes a day for a relatively outrageous annual salary. I had that job for three glorious years.
The worst paid job I ever had was painting a big old barn ‘Big Old Barn Red’. It took a high school friend and I about a week and I think we earned less than $50.00 each. Of course those were American dollars, so adjust your opinions suitably upward please.
These days I charge about $75.00 an hour for writing (for government and corporate clients) and get paid between 35 cents and a couple of bucks a word for magazine or newspaper publications.
But the most important thing I do doesn’t pay a penny, though at the risk of sounding hearts and flowers (and violins – why not) corny, the compensations are priceless.
So it’s not the ‘nothing’ that bothers me; it’s what I’ve recently come to realize is a nearly complete lack of value placed upon what I and other volunteers do.
I’ve been volunteering regularly for more than ten years now. I began at the CNIB reading tons of newspaper and magazine copy for Voiceprint, the ‘audio newsstand’ that broadcasts top national, regional and local stories from more than 100 Canadian newspapers and magazines for the blind, vision restricted, the elderly, or those with problems of literacy or learning difficulties.
I was there for three years. It was a lot of work – reading for a couple of hours straight is a throat-drying, yawn-inducing (you have to remember to breathe properly) strangely exhausting activity, but I can’t tell you the number of times people recognized my voice from this; far more than when I was the voice of two high profile television networks.
The technicians who recorded, edited and broadcast the material were all blind. I’m still not entirely sure how they did it; this was years ago – far before voice recognition software – or any software for that matter. They did it the old fashioned way: by ear and by hand.
After that, my voice a little raw and overworked, I joined up with the Distress Centre for three years. After extensive training and much role-playing through frighteningly well-acted suicide calls, I was accepted as a counselor, speaking with anyone who called in – suicidal, depressed, lonely, shut-in, drunk, handicapped, mentally unhinged, abusive or angry. We were an equal opportunity listening post.
We had to beware of the phone sex callers (cheapskates who would telephone ostensibly to discuss an upsetting sexual problem of some sort or other, but really to get their rocks off) who were often difficult to discern from the legitimately sexually troubled, until their breathing changed and their conversation became erratic. They tended to hang up with a cheery toodle-oo as soon as their needs had been met, sometimes right in the middle of what we might have thought was helpful listening. When they were done, they were done. We tried to catch these calls early, but were always careful not to cut someone off precipitously; genuine sexual problems were legitimately discussed by some of our most anxious and troubled clients. We were there to listen, and if we were occasionally taken in by a caller, (or grossed out by a genuine client) it was simply the price we paid to ensure that everyone who needed it got a fair and sympathetic hearing.
I received precisely one happy call in all the time I was there – from a woman who got engaged late, late at night and had no one to tell until a more appropriate hour, so she called me at 3 AM to share.
A much more typical call would be from someone suffering mental, emotional or physical symptoms that effectively cut them off from society. Lonely, slightly mad, tearful, drunk, stoned or even furious, they’d call from home, from the hospital, or from a payphone in a locked-down ward at the Clarke Institute. Just calling to say hi – or to ask if any of us sitting there in the near dark, softly-lit call room at a hidden location in downtown Toronto could think up a single reason they should carry on. Sometimes we tried to answer the unfathomable, but mostly we listened and befriended and suggested that perhaps one more day wouldn’t be so bad – and the one after that… and then we could go on from there. They could call whenever they needed us.
Suicide was the rarest type of call, but the calls came. It would be nerve-wracking when a suspected suicide would be at the other end of the phone, calling from the platform of a subway station, contemplating when they might jump, or ringing in from home, half-drunk and nearly passed out from an incipient overdose. We were like flight attendants trained in emergency measures who spend most of their time providing comfort and warm reassurances for their passengers (we of course had no sandwiches or tiny little packets of peanuts) but every now and terrifying then, strapping on the life vests and preparing for a crash.
The Distress Centre was an amazing place. We did not have call display, nor were our phones equipped to follow up a call with STAR 69. Clients had absolute anonymity.
We could ask a caller where they were, or try to get their permission to put a trace on their phone if they were becoming incoherent or slipping into unconsciousness, but we were never allowed to meet the clients or take part in their lives away from the phone room on the second floor of the small out-of-the-way downtown church where we took the calls.
We didn’t, for the most part offer advice, or suggestions, or attempt to psychoanalyze the callers in any way. We were simply there to listen, and by listening we befriended.
I would have and could have gone on at the Distress Centre for years, but after three of them, the strain of the overnight shift (we did three daytime and one overnight, midnight to nine shift per month) got to me; it took me ages to compensate for the disruption in sleep, no matter what I did, and the 4 AM blues were beginning to get to me, so I decided to try something else for a while.
I’ve been doing ‘something else’ for four years now. The somewhere I do it is a big hospital in downtown Toronto, famous for its top notch care, cutting edge surgical treatments and life-saving, internationally renowned research.
It’s an enormous place – so enormous, it could take daily shifts of five to ten volunteers, seven days a week simply to direct patients and families around its convoluted hallways and wings to the vast number of clinics and nursing units.
It takes hundreds – more than a thousand people – to support the patients and the variety of comfort and respite programs the people in Volunteer Resources man at no cost to patient or taxpayer.
(There is a budget for the department and four salaried professionals that direct the programs, train the volunteers and cheer us all on, but it’s minimal: splashing out for a sandwiches and fruit punch reception once a year to honour the individuals who donate hundreds of hours a year, for year after year is about the extent of the budgetary possibilities.)
And we’re not Candy Stripers or nice grandma ladies – not that there’s anything wrong either – but the senior citizens are outnumbered by the young and middle-aged professionals and smart as paint students who bear no resemblance to the volunteer of yore: there’s very little pushing of tea carts around. (Precisely: none.) And similarly, though there is plenty of reading to the younger patients, there’s a lot more video game playing and pet therapy and Battleships than The Three Little Pigs.
My colleagues are project managers and account supervisors from top Fortune 500 companies. They’re medical students and teachers and freelancers of all types and stripes. There are a couple of nurses and social workers. We have a retired high school principal (with a practiced gimlet eye, and a warm smile) a top software designer, a government consultant, a lawyer, an executive leadership coach and people who want to spend time usefully as they transition from one career to the next.
Most of us are women and most of us have fulltime jobs or class schedules. Most of us want to be with the patients, but some people feel their gifts are better used away from some of the more upsetting or emotionally charged bedsides, so they fill in in administrative or home-based placements.
We’re just grateful they take part.
It’s a dynamic, exciting, fully-engaging experience that is incomparable to anything else – and would register less value if it were compensated.
That’s really how we feel.
But to discover that because we aren’t paid and our contribution cannot be easily quantified, we aren’t valued beyond a general indulgent condescension, is a blow that is hard for volunteers to take.
We’ve become increasingly aware that volunteers have not been figured into the ongoing strategy planning and brainstorming that accounts for every other position, placement and department in the hospital, and is creating the ‘vision and value statement’ for the next five to ten years.
We’re not there. Not mentioned, not made use of, not factored in, nor accounted for. Our gifts of time and expertise – whether it be for baby-cuddling, game-playing, crafting, reading, pet therapy, hand-holding, shoulder-to-cry-on offering, errand-running, respite care providing, teaching, baby-sitting, computer programming, individual program creation, training, mentoring, organizing, heavy-lifting, traffic-directing, smiling, entertaining… and listening – always listening – is not even mentioned in the presentations, or supporting documentation, or the pages of overview material. Volunteers themselves were not included in the questionnaires distributed everywhere else. With the exception of a very few low-paying clerical positions, volunteers are not considered ‘internal’ for hiring practices, no matter how many years they’ve contributed, no matter how many volunteering or even professional awards they accumulate, no matter their real-world credentials.
But the administration and the board of directors and the foundation that raises extra funds and the friends of the hospital and the corporate sponsors and all the others that receive salaries and compensation to perform their functions and responsibilities for the hospital don’t ask us questions or listen to us if we speak. And they don’t know, beyond the most cursory understanding, who we are and what we provide.
And they should – because our stories are interesting.
Besides my direct interaction with the patients, I am involved in interviewing and selecting candidates to take the training in anticipation of being accepted and becoming a volunteer. I’ve learned that the quality of the people who apply to do this unpaid work with such enthusiasm and commitment are for the most part, there is no other description – extraordinary.
(Privacy issues make it necessary to generalize or exclude any identifying details.)
Yesterday I spoke with three applicants.
The first applicant, a woman in her early thirties was a recent immigrant to Canada. Her English was excellent, her qualifications and experience helping others extensive, and her reason for waiting a couple of months before applying for a volunteer position was that she had been recovering from a lengthy, extensive, life-altering, intensely painful facial surgery.
She looks fantastic now. And she can’t wait to begin. She feels she can relate to patients in pain – she feels she can help by understanding.
The second candidate was a student in her early twenties who had, she told me, been anxious for some time to join the volunteer ranks at our hospital. She told me she had been in a terrible accident some years earlier, knocked over in the street, critically injured; she had been completely paralyzed, brain-injured and on the brink of death. Through the long months and years of recovery, she remembered particularly the volunteers who had become a part of her life – the people who relieved her boredom and kept her company through many lonely days and nights, the individuals who had become a surrogate family - and who she felt she owed a debt of gratitude to. This was the hospital she had spent so much time in; this was the place where she wanted to return.
My third and last interview of the day – and I was already on an emotional high from meeting the first two – was a young woman also in her twenties, also a university student.
We went through the standard introductory questions about her desire to volunteer, her expectations and the qualities she might bring to the position. I was trying to decide which area of the hospital might suit her best and she helped me out by telling me she was studying medicine and was considering a career in pediatrics; she wanted to know how she would feel particularly being around children in pain – if she could cope with the notion of surgery in infants.
“I know the deal from the other side,” she informed me. “I spent a lot of time in a hospital as a child.”
It turned out she’d been in a horrific car accident at the age of five that had killed one of the passengers in the car and had seriously injured her mother and sister. She herself had been comatose for a week, her sister for considerably longer. There were many more weeks of recovery and surgery and months of rehabilitation, but she was fine now – an athlete of some considerable success (and even a little bit of fame) and in between full time classes and a busy sports team schedule, she hoped we’d accept her as a volunteer and allow her to squeeze some of her spare time into our program.
Would we? We would.
The point is this: these women are not unique. As special as they are, there are others with similar stories to tell; people who know the smell of the hospital from the under-side of the sheets in a long-term care bed. They know the boredom and the terror and the loneliness and the pain and the appalling food and the endless days followed by longer nights.
They know what it’s like to see families frozen in agony and fear. They know what so many of even the doctors and nurses don’t know: what it’s like to be helpless and sick and at the mercy of strangers who probe and stick and cut and prod and squeeze and rip and who might have to leave mid-procedure to attend to an emergency. They haven’t just seen patients’ bodies exposed to the elements, they themselves have been exposed to the avid eyes of strangers who never look into their own eyes, but who will know them in ways that even their most intimate relationships will never, and should never achieve.
They are the very best of volunteers.
And they are three more who will join our ranks and disappear from bureaucratic sight because though they will be able to provide a depth and level of understanding and care for vulnerable patients and their stressed-out families, they will receive no salary and so their contribution will amount to nothing.
We need money for more training, more staff and the resources to recruit even more volunteers. We need workshops on bereavement and depression and how to listen effectively.
We need money for training and education of the other healthcare professionals in the hospital so that they can make better use of this enormous, dedicated, resourceful, talented and committed resource.
We need for people to know that the value of volunteering isn’t in the physical health care that volunteers do not and have no business providing, but for the priceless humanity they bring to sick rooms and clinics and isolation wards in a hospital where besides family and friends, they are the only people who enter the room with no agenda to hurt or prod or inject or study or interrogate or frighten, or even to bring appalling food.
We’re there for the human part of them that needs company and fun and distraction and attention and a reminder that they exist as a whole person, and not just as their illness or injury in isolation.
Not being friends or family, they don’t have to comfort us or protect us – from awful information, or even just from their depression – and they don’t have to put on a brave face, or even an interested one. They can even tell us to go away without worrying that we will be hurt or dismayed. Because if we are, they don’t need to know.
This is not a polemic against the health professionals – the doctors and nurses and other front line hospital staff who would probably be thrilled to have the time to sit with a patient and keep them company, allay their fears, hold their hand or cuddle them if they’re crying. But with cut-backs and lay-offs and downsizing and outsourcing, they simply cannot.
And someone needs to do it.
But until a genuine value is placed on work that isn’t paid, the role of the volunteer and the contribution they make will continue to be devalued. Being unquantifiable and non-revenue producing is starting to affect the range of activities we can perform and the array of people being drawn to the task.
We don’t want our heads patted, or our contributions praised, or to be favoured with some meaningless award that allays the responsibility for those whose job it is to weigh and measure where resources will be allocated and the direction in which patient care is going.
We just want to work and to take part and to help the patients and families who need simple human interaction when they are at their most vulnerable. Without taking volunteers into account and without valuing the contribution they can make and the service we provide, the programs and quality of volunteers we can recruit are going to begin to deteriorate.
And the loss may be incalculable.

Are feminists necessary?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was all over the Sunday news shows last weekend, plugging her latest effort: 'Are Men Necessary? When sexes collide'.
Personally, I like Maureen Dowd - a not entirely universally shared opinion. The President is reputed to have a pretty stiff loathe-on for her, and word is, former President Bill Clinton has crossed her off his Christmas card list as well. Interestingly, she claims Bush-the-Father is something of a fan; their bantering and edgy, teasing flirtation a long-standing tradition between the two.
And that's what I like best about her: a liberal who takes appropriate shots at her own side should their hypocrisy rise above generally agreed-upon nausea levels, a Democrat who can find common ground with the political enemy.
The question is, with her new book (already firmly affixed on the New York Times bestseller list) can she find common ground, or even a reason for existence for the gender enemy? The short answer is yes; the longer answer (the: 'but what does it all mean? answer) is somewhat less clear.
What is clear is that adversary or no, she does indeed love the enemy.
Dowd points out, in language and with examples no sentient woman can deny, that the women's movement has arrived in the 21st century somewhat off the rails... missing a wheel or two, or at the very least experiencing a chronic flat tire on the road to absolute equality.
Where once we sought to compete, now we want to be Jerry Maguire 'complete'.
Dowd is considerably older than I, but she clearly began her journey in much the same place I did: that is to say, with expectations equal to her hopes, and trust that the natural order would naturally favour a recognition of the undeniably worthy status of women unquestioned in our hearts. How could it not we thought, living in our own buffed-to-a-high-luster skins, several generations into votes for women, only slightly off-put by the failure of the ERA, striding through the 60's and 70's (Dowd) and the 80's and 90's (me) with the world at our fingertips and the support of our gung-ho mothers close behind.
I think Dowd and I share another root cause for similarity in outlook; a similarity of opportunity that kept our eye off the prize (or focused elsewhere, same dif) in the earliest days of our careers.
As a writer (Dowd) and a then broadcaster (me) we were already occupying pretty rarefied ground; when you have a position even nominally in the public eye, even slightly celebrified (when somebody knows your name) you're already treated better... your opinions sought and noted... your pay packet considerably fuller than those of your contemporaries.
"What's wrong with everyone," I remember thinking. "Why are they whingeing about opportunities and equality? They should do like me and work hard and ask for what they want and show up with a smile on their face."
This was what I really thought, I am embarrassed to admit, completely ignoring the fact that as a disc jockey or television presenter, I didn't actually work all that hard (relatively speaking) and as a young, white, English-speaking somewhat attractive woman, I didn't have much to battle against within the limited range of my pseudo-celebrity.
It didn't occur to me then - and not for quite a few years - that no matter how well I was personally doing in my own little world, equal ease of access was not always on offer to my peers. And in the larger sense we had all sacrificed the larger view whilst dreaming our Mary Richards dreams. (Cute clothes, a cute apartment of our own, a cute job at WJM)
I remember when the penny finally dropped. I was dating this guy, who was even in the late eighties/early nineties bemoaning affirmative action hiring, and stating with that certainty that only the simultaneously miffed and privileged can achieve that women had not already arrived, but were in danger of taking over the workforce. Or at least the part that he was interested in.
"Look at your industry," he said. "There's Pamela Wallin reading the evening news - spreading the word across Canada from as vaunted a position as anyone could ever want. See: women have got it made; they've got nothing to complain about anymore."
"Pam Wallin is reading the weekend news," I replied. "The traditional primetime ghetto for women. She might fill in for the anchor from time to time, but she's just the one occupying the 'Girl' chair for the time being."
He wasn't convinced.
"That's still Prime Time," he said. "Women everywhere get to see her as a powerful person. And that's the measure."
The problem begins. This guy is deciding what the measure of success and satisfaction is for women and young women on the way up.
"Okay," I said. "I accept that things could be worse. (He makes a face.) But in the scheme of things, she's nowhere! There isn't a single woman in a position of power on the board of directors of the network. The only female VP is in charge of Human Resources - another traditional pink collar present from the powers that be."
I began picking up a little steam.
"But there's not a single woman making a decision about what programming is being purchased or broadcast. No women signing any cheques that represent the direction or destination of serious resources, No real decision makers in any positions of any power whatsoever."
I'd like to report that my argument (entirely accurate at the time by the way, and pretty much as described: I remember it vividly) swayed him and made him question his long-held opinions and prejudices, but truth be told, he simply veered off into Margaret Thatcher/Golda Meir territory and I, not wishing to makes a scene/create a fuss/ get him mad, let him go down that twisty pointless path.
Will we still be hearing twenty years from now about the two powerful women who once ruled nations? Even when not a single successor has succeeded?
Time will tell.
But what time has told in the four decades or so, and as Dowd suggests in her book, is that women themselves have done an about face, abandoning not only the movement, but even the word 'Feminism'.
(It's icky - and boys won't like you if you say you are one. They'll ask you if you shave your legs, or wear a bra, or hate men with every fibre of your being. And then how will you get a date to prom?)
The combined power of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution just wasn't enough, or didn't have the staying power necessary to keep the momentum going. We don't - or won't - elect women into the highest echelons of power; we don't - or won't - cough up equal pay for equal work. Still. And we don't - won't has nothing to do with it - band together with our gender to make demands, not for supremacy, but simply for equality.
What's going on? Why did we stop? What's the current status quo?
Dowd relates with anecdotal evidence the mood and modality of young women today. They reject the old feminist movement for its singularity - for being so one-note and punitive. And for not appreciating that some women - even women who want to succeed - resent being told that pretty clothes and high-heeled shoes and appreciating certain male attentions run counter to achieving male-style success.
I get it. I agree with it. I've always been a 'lipstick feminist', with just enough confidence and self-esteem to decide even way back when that I could define the sort of feminism I wished to pursue. It didn't actually occur to me that the day would come when calling someone a feminist (of any stripe) would be tantamount to calling someone a butch-dyke, man-hating lesbian Commie.
So alas.
So now we come to the present, and having lost a lot of steam as we swayed back and forth between desiring economic equality and the right to be mothers or executives or bimbos or any other damn thing we pleased, we've now lost a certain amount of momentum - and a certain amount of certainty.
What do you do when you only have 'Girl Money' (an actual new term: it means not having the sort of money one would refer to as boy money - i.e. a goodly amount) and the boy of your dreams asks you out to Susur or the Four Seasons? Do you pull out your mortgage agreement and calculate the cost of acquiring a second on it, or do you sit back, relax and enjoy as your paying host offers you seconds on dessert?
It's a conundrum alright - but only for women over forty. For our younger sisters, it's a confusing reality. How do you play and fight with the enemy? When do you put on ladies-who-lunch gloves, and when do you drop the gauntlet?
For Dowd - and I admit, for me - the most disappointing result of the defunct feminist movement is the argument it made and sold, the argument we accepted and bought: that the best thing about being a feminist was that you could be as smart and equal and ballsy as you wanted and you could still enjoy the attentions of men.
For Dowd apparently - and for me, definitely - the upshot is that the men we wanted to attract were more likely to be attracted to women who weren't interested in competing. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it takes all kinds, which was one of the dropped balls of the feminist movement - but as Dowd writes, she has come to realize that men find her 'draining'. For myself, I've heard 'exhausting'.
The irony is, I feel the same way.

Death car for cutie

Okay – I’m one of those annoying people who name their cars. Precious? Sappy? Sentimental? So?
Sylvia (a fourteen year old silver Mazda 323) simply feels like a pet – a pony or a donkey or a really large and dopey dog – and I just know she performs better for me for my recognition of her unique character and dauntless spirit.
Perhaps if I had a Range Rover or something sleek and sophisticated and expensive and gorgeous I would be too cool to name it – perhaps start calling it my ‘automobile’ or my ‘motor car’, but until that transformative day, I’ll likely be scooting around in a grayish silver five-speed hatchback, that while she sucks at acceleration, maintains a nimble handle-ability even at high speeds. Even as much as 120 k!
Not every Mazda 323 has a character, but mine does.
Purchased off the gay equivalent of the proverbial little old lady who only drives on Sunday (my guy was a fit and eco-conscious anorak-wearing homosexual, who for the most part eschewed the car for the exercise benefits of the ten speed) Sylvia was born (rolled off the production line) in 1991 and slipped into her own slip in my underground parking garage sometime in 1995.
She came in perfect, top notch physical condition – every button and toggle responding, her windshield wiper fluid filled to bursting, her antifreeze topped off, an oil change and tune up in her recent past. And to top it all off, Sylvia cost a mere $2000.00.
(Okay – interesting aside: I just nipped downstairs to take the laundry out of the dryer and stopped to pick up my mail... ‘Grand Touring Automobiles’ has sent me a personally addressed invitation to test drive an Aston Martin DB9, Jaguar XK-R, Range Rover Sport, or “…possibly a Bentley Flying Spur. Whatever your selection we will be pleased to assist you.” I’ll bet. I might just take them up on it, if only to see their faces when I alight from a Japanese car. Yeah – that’s the thing that will raise their eyebrows…)
Look: ten years with no car payments, minimal insurance with my spotless driving record, and never a flat tire or a break down. She parks on a dime and a tank of gas lasts weeks. The best $2000.00 I ever spent. Why wouldn’t I give such a splendid performer an affectionate name?
She’s not the first car I christened. I had an ancient British racing green Mini I called Martini – she looked like an olive – and a navy blue Toyota I named Lola. (She was a Corolla.) Both of them terrific cars, both unbelievably dependable and resilient… both I remember with great affection.
But Sylvia – well, she’s just been around so much longer, has seen me through the ups and downs and vagaries of a life less ordinary, and she’s captured my imagination in a way that demands a tribute or a recognition of some sort: a thanks-for-a-job-well-done something or other, anything really to mark what looks like potentially her last year of service to a grateful owner.
Because she’s faltering a little –just a little here and there – but in ways and areas that signal a deeper malaise.
Her springs are no longer springy. She goes over speed bumps even at a snail’s pace with a jarring bump – and no recoil; when we’re down, we’re down. She’s reluctant in first, dithery in second and downright obstinate in third. (Fourth and fifth are still smooth so far – but there’s not much use for fifth, or even fourth, with Toronto downtown gridlock the way it is.)
Her muffler – as recently replaced as last year – is no longer muffling very much of anything. (Don’t ask me where I put the receipt or guarantee from Midas – do you know where it is? No? Well, neither do I. Those things are for losers and little old ladies I always say… and of course for idiots who never dream a return on merchandise might be a possibility…)
A gallant gentleman leapt out of his car at a stop light the other day to inform me that my left brake light wasn’t functioning – and I am able to see on my own that her front right headlight is not all that it could, or should, be either.
A black day – and a black eye for Sylvia.
The trunk will not open from the outside, which to be honest is really the only satisfactory or useful way to open it, and her windshield wipers really only glance across the windshield these days. I snapped the key off in the ignition a few weeks ago (what do they make those things out of – pressed tinfoil?) and with just one ignition key left, when the man from the locksmith’s finally jiggled out the snapped off piece and asked me if I wanted him to make me another, it wasn’t just the outrageous price that made me say no.
I think we may have reached a tipping point of no return.
Which is not to say that something cannot be salvaged from this downturn in mechanical health: the hatchback lock should be able to be fixed, the windshield wipers replaced (I read somewhere that some people swap them for new twice a year – luxury!) the front and back lights replaced or mended, the muffler traded in, the dent in her bonnet knocked out, a little Rustoleum sprayed here and there and – ta da! – I’ll have an elderly, wheezy, un-air conditioned car, with seventeen pairs of sunglasses silted here and there around and under the seats, enough change dug out from under the floor mats to actually make all the repairs, and a mien that has gone from sporty and energetic to dejected and exhausted.
She really isn’t silver anymore – she’s a careworn tattle-tale grey.
I won’t drive her to the friend’s cottage now, and as for road trips to Ottawa and Montreal? Long faded dreams my friends. She will remain town-bound until they hook her up and haul her off; a downtown car with trips planned for no further than further downtown.
A pal in the movie business offered to blow her up next time a car needed to be blown up in a scene, suggesting such an explosive send off was tribute in itself. But it’s just too violent an end for such a loyal and dependable old friend.
I’d like to see her hauled off to a chop shop where she can provide much needed parts to other damaged cars. I myself am signed up as an organ donor, I see no reason why she cannot be a parts donor: there are certainly many little bits and pieces of her that are still in working order – steering wheel, ashtray, cigarette lighter and rear view mirror are all still in almost pristine condition. And her ownership and insurance papers have never been out of the glove compartment – quite possibly the neatest of all of her various and handy compartments.
I will drive her for a little while longer – but I know that day is coming: the day when I wouldn’t let Sylvia herself, if she were a person (or a pony, or a donkey or a big dopey dog) travel in her anymore – because she just isn’t safe.

White Hot House

I saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago one of those great old black and white movies that for one reason or another become hailed as classics of the cinema – inspiring everything from remakes and parodies, to actually becoming part of societal discourse and jargon.
The Bad Seed was the film, and corny as it was, there was also something truly sinister in its portrayal of the little pig-tailed sociopath who nearly drives her mother mad as she tries to figure out if her offspring’s conscience-challenged murderous behaviour is the result of nature or nurture.
Without giving anything away I can tell you that the fictional film mother feared nature, but in the down to earth world of thee and me, a child being identified as good or bad seems to fall pretty much to the nurture argument these days.
Though it’s nothing new to argue the odds; it is a dependable truism that each succeeding generation bemoans their current generation of youth.
“Kids today!” goes the endlessly repeated opening salvo. “When I was a kid, we…” (choose from: a) respected authority, b) took responsibility, c) were maybe a little wild, but basically good deep down, d) were nowhere near as spoiled! Or e), f), g) and so on) fill in your own indignant complaint of how easy it is now compared to how hard it was then, or perhaps something closer to issues of indulgence, self-centered-ness, ‘dream world removal from real life reality’ – you know the drill.
And perhaps, sensitive new-age soul that you are, you’ve been involved in conversations that actually recognize how inevitable you sound, how plus ca change you appear, how just like your parents and theirs before them and so on and so on; still, you insist, this time and with THIS crop of underage citizens, there is a difference. The world really has changed – circumstances (familial, social, economic, legal, moral) have altered to a degree that Something! Must! Be! Done!
But I have a different beef, an alternate concern – a separate anger. My question is, “forget the kids - where are the adults?” Where are the bona fide grown ups that used to run the world and the family and provided the sense of safety and right and wrong that used to be adhered to as often as it was railed against.
Have you noticed? Do you wonder if the real change of the times is not so much in our youth as in our adults? And in particular, of those who are at least nominally the chief decision makers and society leaders that in days of yore, represented all that was responsible, hard working and wise.
Sure, sure… corruption, dishonesty, venality and even criminal stupidity have been and no doubt always will be hallmarks of a certain dependable proportion and percentage of politicians. Certainly anyone who reads history cannot fail to acknowledge the generous sprinkling of the mad, bad and the wildly and demonstrably wicked. But is it me, or has society descended to an all time lower than worms low in selecting and electing those we’ve chosen to represent us in all things worldly?
The top news story today – and every day for the past two weeks, or so it seems – has been about a guy named Scooter.
I am far from the first to note the utter ridiculousness of such a name for a senior White House official, but it bears repeating for all that. Scooter.
SCOOTER!
I don’t care if it was his dear old Dad’s nickname for him, it makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever that it hearkens back to some dim and distant part of his storied past and his baseball abilities that were likened in some fashion to some other similarly goofily named baseball-playing soul. I just don’t want anyone near the Oval Office, the Situation Room or the panic button, whose name sounds more appropriate for a guy wearing a hat with a propeller. It isn’t seemly – but more than that, it indicates something about judgment that when combined with his vaunted position just doesn’t jive.
‘Scooter’ doesn’t even sound like a lying, deceptive pawn of evil; he sounds like he should be making a soap box racer in the garage or watching Saturday morning cartoons in the basement rumpus room, or helping his Dear Old Dad (Dod?) put up the storm windows – not leaking the name of a CIA spy to his minions in the media.
“Scooter’s been indicted!” must have been the near-unbelievable wedding of words communicated to the extended members of the Libby family (Grandpa Stinky, Auntie Skipper, Cousin Hootie…) a couple of ill-starred weeks ago. And since then, nothing’s been the same.
But still, no grown-ups emerge.
No responsibility from higher up is taken. Not even from Scooter. Beyond Scooter’s mouthpiece claiming that the outrageous charges will disappear following a vigorous defense, it’s business as usual at the White House, with republican dependables hitting the Sunday morning talk show circuit and adjudicating it ‘out of the question’ that Scooter’s boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, will feel any prosecutorial heat from the nation’s most recognizable (not to mention Special) Prosecutor.
But is it true? Is it so? Is there a possibility that someone is going to finally call the leaders – rather than their lackeys to task?
It’s possible.
After all, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hasn’t charged Cheney Chief of Staff Libby with the considerably more difficult to prove underlying crime of deliberately naming CIA operative Plame, but rather with five counts of lying, including lying to a Grand Jury, making false statements to federal investigators, and obstruction of justice.
Libby’s lawyers made a big point around the fact that he would not take a deal – who was offering one? – but would plead ‘Not Guilty’, and let the chips fall where they may.
Let them. However hard it may be to prove perjury when some of the details and alleged conversations took place a couple of years back, Scooter made the mistake of being very clear from whom he suggests he heard the gossip about Joe Wilson’s wife and that person, he claims, was unfortunately one of the most respected names in television journalism, Tim Russert. And Russert is beyond clear – to the point of having proof he wasn’t even around, when he was supposed to have whispered the words “Joe’s wife is a spy” into Scooter’s shell-like – and in his manner and comportment, makes Libby’s accusation all the more specious.
So what’s a poor Vice Presidential Chief of Staff to do? Fall on his sword, or so goes the conventional wisdom. Protect the VP, the big P, take the heat, the sentence and the can tied to his ass with all the aplomb he can muster and wait for the Presidential Pardon… which he’ll likely have to wait for until the end of Bush’s Presidency so as to maintain whatever shreds of dignity the Leader of the Free World and his most senior aide are still clinging to like grim and inevitable death.
Should there be any shreds left in the three long years ahead of all of us.
And still I ask, where are the grown ups? Where are the people making the really tough decisions – like standing up and admitting to cutting down the cherry tree, or manufacturing intelligence on WMD’s or even ‘fessing up to trying to discredit former Ambassador Wilson by going after his wife.
(And if that isn’t indicative of the adolescent school yard bully mentality operating in the highest echelons of power, well, one has to wonder…)
Tough decisions are being made and an immense amount of loyalty is being demonstrated, but it’s to all the wrong people; to protect what is looking like an increasingly corrupt and dishonest administration and to continue to obscure the facts surrounding one of the biggest and most expensive (certainly if you include human life) boondoggles of all time: the war in Iraq.
Americans are not being protected, Americans are not being informed and Americans are not being respected.
Genuine American interests are not being looked after.
Americans are being governed by a modern day version of elderly Bad Seeds – and being led down a particularly weedy garden path whilst being told everything in the garden is lovely.