The Heartland

For several days now I have been in Columbus, OH, a city that has managed to preserve the rich architectural diversity of its various decades of development and prosperity. With Ohio State University here, as well as state government, there is a stable employed middle class, both white and black. But as I drove around the city with my oldest friend, who is just days from retiring from a career in public education, I was struck by the devastation, the poverty, the boarded up buildings, all of which were decidedly African American.

The heartland has been hit by the economic recession in ways we don't see on the coasts, and their recession started many years ago. As my dear friend spoke about how unsolvable the poverty of the African American community appeared to her over the years, how by the fourth and fifth grades children were already bitter and disengaged from school and from acquiring the habits needed to become economically independent, she questioned what her contribution had been for these last twenty-odd years. Somehow she had wanted to make a difference, and she didn't feel she had. One student told her that her room, the school library, was the only nice room in the building. She wondered how that might matter.

One person cannot end racism and the legacy of race. Not Barack Obama or my dear friend. Racism is systemic and only a systemic analysis, with dedicated, heart-strong warriors fighting the despair, will help us through this mire. America's blight is race and its forlorn legacy. We have no choice but to make the hard choices by looking inside ourselves, understanding our true natures, and finding the strength and dedication to move ourselves beyond race.

The Meaning of Words

The constant assault of 24 hour news has created a world where words do not seem to have meaning anymore.

Rush Limbaugh's accusation that Sonia Sotomayor is somehow a racist turns this horrible word into nonsense. It takes the history away from the word, wrenching the hegemony that is implicit in racism apart from what racism does to make people feel inferior and less than human. Racism is about power, and making someone into an "other," with the power to enforce those assumptions.

Sonia Sotomayor is not a racist, Rush.

Rush Limbaugh should be worried, because the world of the white man is disappearing. Unfortunately for the rest of us there is nothing more dangerous than an insecure white man who believes that he is losing power and authority.

Next Steps on Gay Marriage

When the California Supreme Court issued its decision validating Proposition 8, the voter initiative, backed by the religious right, Mormons included, that ended same sex marriage in California after 18,000 same sex couples married there, the Court tried to compromise by saying that those 18,000 same sex couples had the right to remain married in the eyes of the State.

That was the blunder that made a federal law suit possible, although perhaps not strategic.

Yesterday under the banner of American Foundation for Equal Rights, the stars of the 2000 presidential battle before the Supreme Court, Ted Olsen, representing Bush, and David Boies, representing Gore, teamed up to challenge the legal reasoning of the California decision under federal equal protection and due process theories.

The American Foundation for Equal Rights was founded to bring this lawsuit. Some in the LGBT community are wary, because they perceive the fight back in the hands of California voters, hoping to convince people voter by voter that the time has come to promote measures that encourage people to commit to each other in stable relationships that carry economic benefits. They are wary because they are afraid of any Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage, even with the possible entry of Sonia Sotomayor as a new justice on the court. (The Times also reports that her views on abortion are not clear and shouldn't be assumed by the left as favorable.)

One has to ask whether celebrity lawyers from the left and the right are the folks who should be promoting a strategy to bring the issue of same sex marriage into the federal arena. Elaborate coalitions have been built among same sex advocates across state lines. As was illustrated in New Hampshire and Maine, where recognition of gay marriage is the result of legislation and not litigation, those alliances can effectively use the political system to change people's views.

Like the entire issue, the strategy might be falling across generational lines as well. Demographic analysis of Californians show one important factor: young people favor gay marriage across race and class lines. Older people do not. "First, the demographics favor marriage equality, with 18-to-29-year-olds strongly favoring gay marriage (59 percent to 37 percent). All other age groups oppose same-sex marriage, with opposition increasing the older one gets."

Older folks, lawyers included, are accustomed to using the courts to rectify wrongs. We will have to see whether these two celebrity lawyers are playing the Ann Coulter versus Bill Maher let's attract attention with our cleverness game or truly willing to spend the time and political capital necessary to bring the issue before the US Supreme Court and win.

Town Meeting

Ironically on the same day that President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Puerto Rican Supreme Court justice, the Town of Oyster Bay held hearings on whether to enact an ordinance that would make it a violation for anyone, meaning Latino day laborers, to solicit work on a public street.

Residents of nearby Locust Valley had been complaining that twenty, thirty, forty Latino men stood on the sidewalks, stopping traffic, loitering, and scaring the neighbors while they waited for landscapers, builders, and other contractors to pick them up for the day. These residents were afraid, because these men are unfamiliar to them. Just having large groups of anyone hanging around is an annoyance, they said. Everyone was trying to be polite at the meeting. It wasn't anti-Latino, it was anti-loitering, but those ordinances have all been declared unconstitutional.

The men who sat in the town meeting were young, quiet, respectful, and certainly didn't look dangerous.

The residents wondered why these men didn't use the shape up site located in the next town over. I left the meeting at 10:30 before I heard the reason why they didn't. Perhaps it is because they lived in Locust Valley?

We can't make Latinos go away by making it illegal to secure employment. Certainly the residents of the homes where the men congregate have legitimate concerns about the impact of these men standing around all morning. However, why not just move the men to a shape up site in Locust Valley?

I must admit that the Town Supervisor tried to articulate both sides of the controversy in a crude and patronizing way. He wanted the Latinos in Locust Valley to have an organization so that he had someone to negotiate with. He claimed to be willing to open a shape up site. Everyone acknowledged that local governments were being forced into solutions to a failed federal immigration policy.

These kinds of local ordinances merely escalate hostilities, criminalize Latinos, and push underground further their isolation. Communities that work out solutions based on understanding, well, isn't that the way to go?

Memorial Day

Yesterday my daughter and I went to the New York City Ballet, and before the performance, wandered around the Upper East Side in search of fun street crafts. That's when we saw them: young men and women in uniform enjoying Fleet Week.

Our country is at war and certainly looking at their faces close up, we both understood that we send children to fight our country's battles.

They were so young, no matter how white their uniforms.

Last year I grabbed my camera and went into town to photograph Oyster Bay, NY's annual Memorial Day parade. I asked permission to take the images of people, saying I was an amateur photographer. Lining the main street, which is not called "Main Street," were the residents of this small hamlet, some of whose families have lived here for generations: white, black, Hispanic, old, young. The residents of the assisted living center, with a memory unit, sat outside with their attendants. People brought their children and their dogs. Oyster Bay has two volunteer fire departments; they are around the corner and down the block from each other. I've heard different stories as to why, including that one was Protestant and the other Catholic. The parade was short, our country was at war. Only one veteran of the current war in Iraq wore anything to indicate that he had fought there. Most of the veterans were from Korea, when I toured the American Legion Post, the men complained that the Viet Nam vets rarely came to the Post. I spoke with a World War II vet who was seated in a lawn chair in the shade.

We are still at war although under the leadership of another president. I don't think I want to go to the parade this year. I think I just want to hand water my garden, weed out the far right side in preparation for planting the sun flowers I have growing in pots, and pretend for a day, just a day, that things weren't set in motion eight years ago, if not before, that brought out the utter worst in our country and in our leaders. We allowed those leaders--George Bush and Dick Cheney--to do reprehensible things in our names. President Obama, I suspect, has learned just how reprehensible our treatment of the men held in Guantanamo Bay was, making anything looking like a trial for their crimes nothing like a trial at all.

So although I thank the men and women who are sacrificing their lives and youth for our country, I still deplore that they are and despise the men who brought us to this moment in history. Dick Cheney shouldn't be on television; he should be in prison for war profiteering and failing to uphold the constitution of the United States. George Bush shouldn't be retired in Dallas, but condemned because of his failure to understand the nature of the job of president, the structures of government, and the history of this nation. We shouldn't be making waterboarding into a bet between television pundits, but remember that we tried and convicted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding during World War II. This isn't a day for fireworks and parades, it should be a day of national mourning.

The Brothers Bloom

Independent film often suffers from a common flaw: indulgence. Someone apart from the writer-director needs to be in the editing room, and then, well, then independent film will be just fine.

The Brothers Bloom is delightful, from writer-director Rian Johnson, but for there being just one too many cons. It's quirky, beautifully shot, perfectly acted entertainment with an array of stars who appear to be having a lot of fun.

After too much boys blowing things up, it was refreshing that all of the explosions in The Brothers Bloom were the work of Bang Bang, the seductive, mysterious, and silent and female Japanese side kick played impeccably by Rinko Kikuchi.

This is a tongue in cheek story a team of con men, two brothers sent from foster home to foster home, escalating the severity of their crimes as they age. The film opens as we visit some of those homes and we see the beginning of the cons: Stephen, played by Mark Ruffalo, is the older brother and the brains. Bloom, played by Adrien Brody, is the nervous younger brother who hooks the mark and sets each con in motion. Stephen writes Blooms life for him. That's the theme.

Adrien Brody has chosen odd and interesting films after winning the Oscar for Best Actor in The Pianist: Darjeerling Limited, Cadillac Records, Hollywood Land. I respect him for that. He gives great screen kisses, his eyes are captivating, he looks fantastic in clothes, and this film is about him, about his development, how he falls in love with Penelope, his final mark, played by Rachel Weisz. Brody brings such tenderness to his role, humor, sexiness, and in one scene around a red apple on a street cart, and it's not a spoiler, what happens on his face is why Adrien Brody is such a phenomenal actor. Each character is a character, whether it is Penelope, a hermit rich girl who can do everything but drive a car, The Curator played by the massive Robbie Coltrane, or the sinister Diamond Dog brought to the screen by Maximilian Schell.

Much of the film is shot is Prague where I traveled last fall so it was fun to see all of the familiar places, and Prague is itself a beautiful, medieval city not often seen in American film. And it's really Prague. I don't think St. Petersberg was really Russia, having seen Serbia listed in the credits.

I must warn you that my husband did not like the film, finding it much too slow, but he is accustomed to watching boys blowing things up. The other couple, Leslie and Rebecca, like me, found it entertaining, not perfect, but sufficiently entertaining to recommend The Brothers Bloom.

It's the kiss, what a kiss!

Boys Blowing Things Up

As someone who missed Star Trek the first time around, I recall the fun of skipping my Marriage and the Family class in college to get high and watch old reruns in the later 1960s. I was a big Spock fan, so wild myself that the idea that logic might be able to calm me seemed, well, calming.

I never got into the sequels, mostly because I never remember what night or which station shows play on, and still to this day do not know how to program a VCR, TiVo, or whatever comes with our cable service now.

I'm a Luddite when it comes to audio visual equipment.

This week I attempted to watch two boys blowing things up movies: Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond adventure, and last night, Star Trek.

Neither made any sense to me. And I'm not the kind of person who requires a straight narrative. I read a lot of out of sequence literature, see many plays that play with time and space, and have a high tolerance for fantasy.

Although visually beautiful, even my husband who can watch just about anything that blows up, Quantum of Solace was edited without regard to coherence. Actually, the only thing that made sense was the burn marks on Camille, the "Bond girl's" back. (She is gorgeous and was played by Ukrainian born Olga Kurylenko.) (Spoiler alert!) While the hotel was blowing up, I called out for Denis Leary from Rescue Me to get there! (Now that is a television show worth watching: funny, cynical, brilliant like The Sopranos in mixing humor with drama. )

Going to the movies now requires a half hour of commercials, not just previews, which I love, if you want to get a good seat. We watched a lot of boys blowing up things so when Star Trek actually began I was already exhausted. Maybe I was getting my explosions mixed up, but frankly, I only got the main part of the story: how Jim Kirk meets up with the eventual Enterprise crew--Uhura, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov. And the bad guy was a Romulan. And there was some romance, too, and of course, rivalry. Sulu is played by the actor John Cho who is the "Harold" in the "Harold and Kumar" series of high times films. And Eric Bana, the heart throb from Munich, plays Nero, the insane, heartbroken Romulan.

And the real Spock comes in and out of the plot whenever he wants to.

Which brings me to two other boys blowing things up: Dick Cheney, who thankfully no longer has his finger near any red buttons, and Barack Obama who does. As John Meacham said last night on Bill Maher, it seems like Dick Cheney is really having a continued argument with those members of the Bush administration--Stephen Hadley and Condi Rice--who insisted that the torture and paranoia of the first Bush term be stopped in the second Bush term. Cheney is arguing against what happened when some sense of lawfulness returned to the conduct of war. He isn't really fighting with Obama, but it seems that no one is getting that. Cheney is a desperate man, one who understands that unless he politicizes the "war on terror" he will be indicted. As it is, he may never leave the US again.

Not Missing Anyone

Sitting in the garden, watching the plants grow daily in the long-delayed spring, I am wondering whether the problems facing our world--global warming, food insecurity, water depletion, energy needs, political instability, religious ferment, viral infections, toxic chemicals, human trafficking, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and just plain ignorance--will ever be solved without full participation of everyone.

Maybe the reason why the world is so screwed up is because in many countries, half the population is prevented from participating in any decision-making because they have a vagina.

In other countries, access to education and opportunities are limited by class, or the color of one's skin.

Perhaps we wouldn't be where we are if we were all allowed to speak and everyone knew how to listen.

Let's Get Rid of the Word "Terror"

This morning I woke up to the news that four men, some of whom were Muslim, were arrested for "aspirational" plans to target synagogues in New York in a terror attack.

I'm very wary.

When did law enforcement get involved with the alleged plotters and how did their involvement help bring the plan closer to fruition? It's called entrapment and it's too common with these kinds of investigations.

And why on earth would police brief Rep. Peter King, a robust Muslim-hating politician, who has rebuffed repeated invitations to visit with members of the mosque located in his own congressional district, opting instead for accusations that any mosque harbors militant terrorists?

Which leads me to this request: let's get rid of these phrases "war on terror," "terrorist attack," and terrorist, too. These words are hyperbolic and don't communicate ideas, but emotional responses that turn off thinking. Yes, we have a problem. Yes, there are some people who want to destroy our way of life, but that isn't terrorism. It's political opposition that uses techniques that introduce instability and insecurity. That isn't terror. That's life. Random acts of violence are about as much a part of life as random acts of kindness and always have been.

I'm reading Columbine by Dave Cullen, which unhysterically examines what happened in that Colorado high school when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on students and teachers that April day in 1999. It wasn't a feud with the jocks, or satanic worship; it wasn't a bunch of misfits, or the trench coat mafia. It was a psychopathic young man, Harris, and a very depressed and angry friend, Klebold, who fed off each other. It's called a dyad in psychology. Psychopathy is neither insanity nor sanity, but a category of human behavior based on a total lack of empathy, superiority, and the thrill, like drug addiction, accompanying early acts of violence. Eric Harris killed because he felt superior and wanted an audience. Kleibold hung around for the ride.

Added to the motives of the killers themselves was enormous incompetence of police, who could have prevented the incident that killed twelve children and a teacher, along with the suicides of Harris and Klebold, the ineptitude of journalists, and the crazy impact of twenty-four hour news cycles. That wasn't terror. It was our own children turning onto themselves and others with many opportunities to stop them although regrettably not to stop the disease of psychopathy.

Fear makes people stupid, so let's stop using Dick Cheney's vocabulary and start speaking realistically about the people who don't like America, no matter who they are, what religion they practice, and what they look like.

A Gathering of Women

Last night a group of women met over cups of tea and sweet cakes to listen to each other. We were quite a mix. We discussed domestic violence, especially as it affects immigrant women. For some it isn't the actual violence, although certainly the threat of it is always looming, but the profound dependency and the fear that such dependency creates, overshadowing everything. Women without education, women who come from nations where educating women is considered a waste of time, where women can't read or write, where women are discouraged from ever leaving the house alone, where women's children have more experience by attending school than they will ever have, it seems. What happens to these women when their husbands abandon them?

It doesn't matter what nationality. The language barrier alone, even if the woman can read in her language of origin, isolates her, makes trust building the first priority. Sometimes that trust never grows and the women disappear.

The assumption that these women are milking our system, taking from us what they don't deserve, is dehumanizing. The Department of Social Services assumes that they are lying. Women who can't read, don't know which pieces of paper to bring: proof of residency, rent stub, grocery receipts, school enrollment letters, even a utility bill. It's all a blur and they fear they will be deported, separated from their children, sent back to their countries, even if they are here legally, but returning home in shame.

Women drinking tea and sharing sweet cakes can change the world. We changed the world a tiny bit last night.

A Sucker's Market

Considering that Chrysler has filed for bankruptcy protection, which screws bond holders, and GM's bankruptcy is considered by some to be inevitable, why is the stock market rallying?

Every major index was up yesterday.

Yet unemployment remains high, and housing sales and retail sales are down while inventories are high.

Since America makes cars and houses, why is the stock market acting so optimistically?

Is it delusion, or what historians call a "sucker's market"?

That's why small investors, like you and me, eager to regain lost pensions and savings jump back into the market artificially boosting prices prematurely.

When Bank of America is told that it needs $34 billion in capital under a stress test, when those same stress tests showed that the nation’s 19 biggest banks will take on $82 billion in credit card losses in the next two years, when even cell phone companies are cutting jobs, tell me why the stock market should be so resilient.

With God on My Side

GQ magazine published on its website yesterday a series of covers used by the Pentagon in the daily international security reports, personally carried to the White House by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that included Biblical statements as captions on optimistic photographs of the initial attack on the sovereign state of Iraq.

The First Amendment establishes a nation state that neither has a religious mission nor interferes with anyone's right to practice his or her religion.

This is the danger of violating that Amendment, this is the danger of turning Iraq into a holy war, if only to manipulate George W. Bush, then president. GQ suggests a cynical manipulation at work orchestrated by Rumsfeld.

Read the story and then decide whether we must have a fair and open hearing about how the Bush administration operated.

Every time Dick Cheney opens his mouth, every time we get distracted as to what and when Nancy Pelosi was told (we all knew something was wrong when the Washington Post leaked the story in 2003), whether a court forces Obama to release the interrogation photos or he does voluntarily, whether torture was used to establish a false link between Iraq and the team who planned 911, the case is being made that we have to create a structure and process for learning who, what, where, and how.

Sorry, Christine, I wanted to write something light and gardeny, but the news this morning, after a wonderful dinner last night, well, I couldn't help myself!

10 Things To Do Before I Die

As on many Saturdays, we went to see two plays yesterday, a matinee and an evening performance, with our theater buddies Stu and Ginger. The matinee was "God of Carnage," a satire about manners and marriage, starring Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, and Marcia Gay Harden. Written in French by award winning playwright Yasmina Reza, who won a Tony for Art, and translated by Christopher Hampton, God of Carnage is up for six awards this year, including best play and best performance by an actor and actress for all four of its cast members.

The project was brought to Broadway from London by Gandolfini who claimed Friday night on Charlie Rose that when he saw it, he thought it wouldn't be a stretch for him to perform. He found otherwise once he recruited Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden, and later Jeff Daniels to join him.

The play is full of surprises, outrageous physical humor, and for ninety minutes one gets to examine two marriages. Although not as insightful as Edward Albee at his best --Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Goat: Who is Sylvia?, God of Carnage is good theater, not spectacular theater, but good theater that is entertaining, full of humor, and performed impeccably, especially by Marcia Gay Harden. The direction by Matthew Warchus prevents the play from feeling like television situation comedy, using silence and missed beats, so that it isn't as easy to watch as the small screen, and good, because live theater should not be replicating small screen, its form or its timing.

Ginger' comment was striking: The audience wanted to love the play, because of its cast and nominations, so it was a bit eager. Which is why we often avoid the hits and scrounge around for less known theater where audience expectations are fewer, and we can scrutinize the play and performances with a fresh eye. Many times I don't read any reviews before seeing a play. That was unavoidable with God of Carnage.

We walked up Broadway to 2econd Stage's Uptown theater on 76th Street where we have often been disappointed, except for a play Animals Out of Paper by Rajiv Joseph, extended through last summer because of the delicacy of the writing and superb performances by Atkarsh Ambudkar, Kellie Overby, and Jeremy Shamos. (His new play Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo, just opened in LA.) Mostly we have been disappointed by self-indulgence, especially since the theater is badly in need of a renovation and the seats have lost their plushness, which lends itself to losing patience with a novice playwright. (Stu kept on taking off the armrest from his chair last night as a running gag during intermission.)

Although still in development, and in need of a major edit, 10 Things To Do Before I Die by Zakiyyah Alexander is a wonderful play, and Ms. Alexander is an extraordinary playwright because of her ear for authenticity and her fierce desire to speak the truth. Like most emerging writers she needs an editor.

Let me say it this way: 2econd Stage Uptown presents plays that are still in development, which is what makes the theater sometimes dreadful or like last night, vital, exciting, and yes, still in formation. Ms. Alexander is Yale educated and currently on the faculty of Bard College, which means she knows structurally what she is doing. She is a talent to watch, and we will be looking for the next version of this play.

The opening scene of this play is perfect, absolutely, positively perfect. Natalie Venetia Belcon plays Vida, the older sister, an eight year veteran, teaching theater in a New York City public school. She is an extraordinary presence on stage; she is big, she is beautiful, her voice commands, and all of her scenes work, in part because of her talent. They also work because the playwright has honed her role so well. We like Vida, we admire her, we are surprised by her complexity, her neediness, her sensuality. And her scenes use the difference between television and live theater well: her monologues in front of her class are magnificently performed, timed, nuanced. Natalie Venetia Belcon: she was in Avenue Q and she will be all over Broadway throughout her career. (She doesn't include Law & Order in her credits yet!)

One of her students, Jose, a Dominican kid from a family of screamers, is played by Kyle Beltran, another incredible talent, a skinny, tall, not particularly handsome young man who takes his place on the stage and makes you listen. He will be a star, too. Which is another reason why the role of Nina works so well. The men in her life, including her lover, Andrew, played delicately by Dion Graham, are complex, distinct, human, and by the time they leave the stage, we understand them. There are no characters who are unlikeable anyplace in this play. Ms. Alexander is writing about vulnerable, fragile, confused people; she is writing about us, no matter the color of anyone's skin.

The character of Nina, the younger sister is more troublesome, not because of Tracie Thoms' amazing performance, but because this is where the play needs editing, desperately. Unfortunately Nina is a blocked writer, and I have to admit that there's something too narcissistic about the character of the blocked writer in theater, film, and books.

Her role is just too overwritten, with much of the dialogue repetitive and too ordinary, especially with her live-in boyfriend, Jason, played by Francois Battiste, whom we just saw in The Good Negro at the Public Theater, another play by an up and coming African American woman playwright, Tracey Scott Wilson.

(Or you can read my review.)

Nina's role is just too murky still, which is where the play needs some work. We concurred that the playwright would get rid of the hallucinations scenes, they aren't necessary, and contract the subtext about what it means to become an adult black man in American society, a subtext that is very important and interesting, but it drags too much. Once Nina's role as the younger sister develops, so will Jason's, and together their conflict will be very real and dynamic.

10 Things to Do Before I Die is still in preview. Consider it if you are a true theater goer, otherwise, wait until Ms. Alexander has it perfected. I suspect she will do just that!

And Now For Something Completely Unexpected

I'm not going to write about torture, the CIA, the photographs, or military commissions. I'm not going to write about Dick Cheney, Michael Steele, or what Jeff Sessions is up to. Nancy Pelosi isn't getting a sentence from me.

I'm going to write about "Every Little Step," a heart-wrenching documentary about the casting of the revival of A Chorus Line.

We were six of us who went to see the film last night. All of us had seen the show the first time around. One of the couples, Stu and Ginger (our theater buddies) have a daughter who was a dancer on Broadway, so they understood immediately the vulnerability, passion, commitment, disappointment, and glory of it all. The rest of us quickly joined into the emotional chaos of too many dancers in a room, all wanting to be the character they had played in the mirror growing up, always wanting to be in A Chorus Line: Val, Cassie, Christine, Sheila, Paul, Connie.

There wasn't a dry eye among us.

It took over a year to cast the show. Three thousand candidates were screened--professionals with Equity cards and amateurs wanting a break.

I saw A Chorus Line in preview in San Francisco. I didn't really like musical theater then, preferring edgy obtuse drama instead. But "Dance Ten; Looks Three," which everyone knows as "Tits and Ass" always stayed in my head.

There is a wonderful story about that song, but I won't be a spoiler.

And watching "Every Little Step" made me appreciate how innovative and authentic A Chorus Line was. Michael Bennett brought together eighteen dancers, the gypsies, with a jug of bad red wine and a reel to reel tape recorder. They spoke about their lives, about their lives in theater. Then he took those tapes, had them transcribed, and with Edward Kleban on lyrics and Marvin Hamlisch writing the music, Bennett conceived the play. The script itself was written by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante. Bennett choreographed the play, along with Bob Avian, who is the director of the revival. Joseph Papp, then the godfather of new and exciting theater, offered a workshop and even paid everyone $100 a week to continue to work on the play. It was the first play to be conceived and developed this way. A Chorus Line was nominated for twelve Tony's, won nine, and as awarded the Pulitzer Prize for theater.

Prepare to cry. Prepare to be deeply touched by these talented, hopeful dancers. Prepare to listen to the script and lyrics with the memories of when you were young and so eager to be a star.

Distraction

Are the Republicans distracting us on the issue of torture by claiming that because two Democrats were in the know as to what the CIA was doing that no one is entitled to really know what happened?

What is the difference between authorizing a technique after reading one of Jay Bybee's or John Yoo's Office of Legal Counsel memos where the means of "enhanced interrogation" were laid out, let's face it, it was torture, and being told in a meeting under wraps of security clearances that "enhanced interrogation" techniques were being used?

Frankly, we all knew that someone was torturing in the name of the American people. Information was leaked to the press, the Washington Post specifically, in 2004. Does that mean we are all complicit and therefore, we aren't entitled to full investigation, disclosure, and prosecutions, if appropriate?

This week in testimony before Congress, a former military interrogator, Ali Soufan, claimed that it was the private contractors who came in and without the experience or the understanding upped the ante on how to get information out of detainees.

He considered them thugs. That makes this entire mess even more compelling. Now we have to know, because if it was the privatizing of intelligence work that destroyed the system, we have a lot of cleaning up to do, by getting contractors out of the business of keeping us safe for democracy. Like everything under the Bush administration, private trumped public, and with it all of the rules of the constitution and decency. Leon Panetti, Obama's head of the CIA, has already announced that only CIA agents are allowed to interrogate detainees now. However, Congress immunized private contractors from liability!

I can understand why Obama is saying no to the release of the images of what really happened, claiming they would merely inflame sentiments, provide more recruiting materials for young radicals, and consequently, harm the troops. He is commander in chief.

But watch Jon Stewart's take on the complexity of transparency and truth from last night's show. Especially with regard to the discharge from the military of yet another Arabic translator, Dan Choi, because he is gay. That's 54 discharges of Arabic translators because they are admittedly gay. As Stewart reminds us, at least Dan Choi and the other translators would understand what someone was saying after being waterboarded!

Same Sex Marriage and the Need for Security

Every day on my way to work I pass a reservoir that is home to a pair of swans. Every spring they build a nest. And yesterday when I drove by, the two swans were gathered around six signets, tiny, gray, and vulnerable. I eagerly await the first day each spring when I get to see the babies, reminding me that although I might be way beyond child-bearing age, the cycle of life continues all around me. It's a humbling reminder.

There might have been a time when birthing babies was the primary reason why human beings hung out with each other. Unlike those signets which will be on their own by the end of the season, human beings require sustained care for many years. That accustoms us to being in a larger group, nudged here by a parent, a grandmother, there by a friend, later by a herd of peers.

We need each other desperately.

Our brains don't work well unless we are in nearly constant connection with other humans.

There is a reason why Ted Kaczynski became the unibomber.

This inability to be among living humans made Jeffrey Dahmer a serial killer.

Which brings me to same sex marriage.

Especially in this stressful, shamefully individualistic society, we need each other. We need each other and to find a mate, no matter what gender, race, age, or nationality, and to gain that ability to nest together makes so much difference. Why it makes us human!

Couples have each other to help solve problems, to nurture children and grandchildren, to provide care, and to share income. Are we nuts? Why shouldn't we shelter these relationships? Like all spiritual connections, when they work, they provide our communities with stability.

In New Hampshire today, the legislature and the governor came up with a compromise on same sex marriage and he will sign the modified bill. I urge everyone to write to his/her legislator, in Maine, in New Hampshire, thanking those men and women for their votes, in New York, in DC, and urging the other public officials to do the right thing: we need each other because we need to love.

Inequality

There has been inequality in this country since the very beginning when Europeans arrived with indentured servants who had to work off the cost of their passage to the New World, then enslaved men and women, and later their children, borne on ships from Africa, often via the West Indies, first slaves for a period of time, then for life.

One hundred and fifty years ago there was emancipation, but Abraham Lincoln only freed the slaves living in the Union-controlled areas, hoping the news would cause insurrection in the Confederacy, and that the issue of slavery would keep Europe out of America's civil war.

The US fought two world wars with segregated troops.

In 1944, Irene Kirkaldy, a young black woman who was recovering from a miscarriage wouldn't get out of a seat on a bus headed across a state border. She kicked and screamed while being taken off the bus, arrested by a state trooper. Her case was one of the first modern civil rights cases to reach the US Supreme Court. The ruling was that interstate transportation could not be segregated by law. I had the great pleasure of meeting Ms. Kirkaldy, but her mind was already fading. She shared her scrapbook with me over a glass of iced tea in her home in Roosevelt.

The aftermath of inequality by slavery is the inequality of wealth. Not just class, but wealth. Institutional racism has allowed white people to accumulate stuff to pass onto their children. Until recently home ownership was the key to this accumulation for the working and middle classes. That dream disappeared for many as greedy mortgage brokers lured homeowners-- white, black, and brown-- into using their homes as ATM machines for cars, vacations, and consumer spending, instead of using them as piggy banks for college educations for their children and retirement.

Yesterday the Pew Hispanic Center released a new report that shows home ownership decreasing more drastically for blacks and browns than for whites in this post-subprime meltdown.

"The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for whites."

"Overall, the ups and downs in the housing market since 1995 have reduced the homeownership gap between whites and all racial and ethnic minority groups. However, a substantial gap persists. As of 2008, 74.9% of whites owned homes, compared with 59.1% of Asians, 48.9% of Hispanics and 47.5% of blacks."

"At the same time, blacks and Latinos remain far more likely than whites to borrow in the subprime market where loans are usually higher priced. In 2007, 27.6% of home purchase loans to Hispanics and 33.5% to blacks were higher-priced loans, compared with just 10.5% of home purchase loans to whites that year."

Many of the African American homeowners who purchased subprime mortgages at higher interest rates could have qualified for regular mortgages, but someone's greed sold them the higher commissioned mortgages instead.

Inequality exists because of racism, discrimination, and unregulated markets that prey on people just because of the color of their skin.

Inequality exists despite the fact that our president is a man of color.

There is no such thing as post-racialism in America. Not yet. Not without a helluva lot of work to do.

Boobs and Boob Health

A few weeks ago a dear friend called to tell me that she was attending the funeral of another friend who died of breast cancer.

I paused. I didn't know the woman who had died. But I tried to think back to when I had last had a mammogram.

"Something good, Arlene, has come from this news. I will call and make an appointment for a check up."

When I did, I asked the staffer why I hadn't received a post card reminding me to make an appointment. That was what had been happening for twenty years since I passed that marker, forty, when mammograms for women "at risk" become annual events.

"We stopped sending them out," was her response. "A cost-cutting measure."

On the day that my breasts would be misshapen into dorsal fins, a great line from comedienne Elayne Boosler, I found out that I hadn't been to the radiologist in two years.

Today the Washington Post reports that nationwide mammography is down, enough that it warrants an article in a major newspaper. "A Declining Tendency."

In addition to questions about the efficacy of mammograms, do they only find small tumors that would not ordinarily be life-threatening, yet are treated as such, there are these factors: cost, fear of pain, and inconvenience.

I would have had my annual mammogram if I had had a reminder, as I had always gotten one. When I was leaving, another staffer told me the office was going to start sending post cards out again. That I was able to get an appointment almost immediately suggested that the cost savings of not sending out post card reminders had caused a serious decline in the number of patients.

And this was new, too: no one gave me a breast exam and no one read my films there. Instead I have to wait two weeks for a letter in the mail sent simultaneously to my doctor and to me. I guess it's time for me to find a new radiologist.

Did America Just Get Smarter?

John Medina is a neuro researcher and the author of Brain Rules, a sensational book about what we know (very little) and what we need to know (an enormous amount) in order to understand how the human brain works. The book is cleverly organized and has a corresponding website so that after one reads a chapter, there is an interactive segment to help remember, since memory is often reinforced by repetition and a switch in how one is processing incoming information.

The chapter I am currently reading (on my Kindle while I work out) is about the impact of stress on cognition. Stress makes us stupid.

Adults experiencing high levels of stress performed 50% worse on certain cognitive tests. Children perform even worse. Any school teacher who has watched an A student descend into failure knows that something is happening at home. Stress pushes people into depression, too, another ailment that makes us stupid by shutting down entire aspects of human creativity.

"Stress alone is neither harmful nor toxic," according to Medina. Allostatis is the word to describe this state. How our bodies reaction to stress depends on three factors that affect the allostatic load: the type of stress, its length, and severity.

Now let's go back to the post-911 Bush era. Do you recall? Constant and relentless stress caused by incessant, strategically timed warnings that the next terrorist attack was just around the corner. And we believed them, because they had failed to prevent the first attack, something the Bush administration officials always failed to acknowledge.

Enter President Obama with his cool, precise tone. My goodness, the President reminded us to wash our hands and to keep our sick kids home from school during the week-long type A H1N1 influenza scare. (It worked, too! People acted responsibly, and the flu didn't spread as virulently as one might have expected.)

He didn't add to the crisis; he was cool. We can blame cable news for the hysteria, not the President.

So yesterday, being Mother's Day, I declared a moratorium on Sunday news shows and obsessive website reading, because I had gotten to this chapter in Brain Rules. And I knew Dick Cheney was back on the airwaves again, trying to scare us. This man who was virtually invisible during his term in office, sequestered in secret bunkers, making more and more money on his investments while descending into his paranoid state, can't get enough air time now that he is free from the stress of being in office.

And we know why! He is afraid of investigations and prosecutions. He dodged the Valerie Plame investigation, but he can't dodge the responsibility for torture.

Mother's Day: On a lighter side! Did you see "Dicks in the Box," an off-color and delightfully funny video done by Justin Timerberlake and Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live sometime in the fall. They did a sequel Saturday night called "Motherlove" in honor of Mother's Day. Watch them in order and laugh! That's a great antidote to stress, by the way.

Thanks to my daughter for sending me the link as a Mother's Day present!

The White House Correspondents' Dinner--How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People

Wanda Sykes was the comedian this year at The White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the sitting president gets gently roasted and then he turns and does a little routine on the press, fellow insiders, and himself.

Remember the year when Stephen Colbert really roasted Bush II and all the talking heads on Fox were screaming that he was impudent and went way beyond the line of propriety?

There are three segments to this year's Dinner program.

Wanda started off pretty tame with jokes that were respectful and fun.

Then in the second half, she went after Rush Limbaugh in a way that he will twist and turn into weeks of continued diatribe on his radio show.

"I can break Sean Hannity by giving him a middle seat in coach."

Finally President Obama got the microphone. He first prodded Michael Steele, chair of the Republican National Party, who was in the audience, reminding him that the RNC is not eligible for a bail out and that Rush Limbaugh is not a troubled asset.

Larry Summers recently asked if he could chair the White House Council on Women & Girls.

The New York Times Blog has some more of the jokes, if you just want to read them.

OK, Michelle's arms were in site lines, Joe Biden's gaffes, and some fun was had. But nothing like what happened when Colbert did his performance. Take another look at that if you want to get sentimental for a time when the president was the laughing stock of the world, although frankly, I prefer it this way.

Trains, Why I Love Trains

My first long train ride was coming from Miami Beach back to New York. My father who wasn't a great planner, OK, he was a ridiculous procrastinator, had managed to get our family down to Florida on my first airplane flight. The plane left at 10:00 at night from "Idlewild" and my mother made my sister and me wear "twin" outfits with gloves. But my father waited so long that he didn't have a way for us to get home. Finally he located four train tickets, but without sleeping arrangements. So I didn't get to experience the Pullman Car, sleeping in my seat instead, very uncomfortably, but we did eat our meals in the dining car.

Despite that first experience, I love train travel. My daughter and I took the train to Washington DC several times when we visited national sites, especially the Smithsonian American History Museum, and my favorites, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. In China a few years ago, we took the train from Beijing to Xian, overnight, in "hard seat" accommodations, which meant six to a sleeping car on a very thin mattress. On Monday I'm taking the Acela from New York to Washington DC in just three hours.

You might not know this, but today the country is celebrating National Train Day.

The celebration includes honoring the men who served as Pullman Porters. As humiliating as their history might be, Pullman Porters were the backbone of the black middle class. George Pullman hired only Southern black men to work the luxurious train sleeping cars, believing they would be subservient, and most importantly, they would never see the wealthy men who often misbehaved on the trains sometime later in social situations.

What happened on the train, stayed on the train.

The Pullman car was introduced in 1867. The porters began unionizing in 1925 as the first African American union, and by 1937 they had signed a collective bargaining agreement. Originally they were paid a pittance, and received tips. But despite being called the generic "George" or "Boy," these men became the grandfathers and fathers of America's civil rights giants. The first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and California's ubiquitous politician Willie Brown (he controlled the California legislature as majority leader, then became mayor of San Francisco due to terms limits) both descended from Pullman Porters.

When Rosa Parks was arrested, she called E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter and leader of a local chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who worked with one of his employees to help start the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. Nixon called local ministers, one of whom was the novice Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to an NPR program aired yesterday on "Morning Edition," these men who often suffered the humiliation of racism, watched the rich and successful and brought home to their sons and daughters the dream of an education. They saved their money and made college a priority. Read or listen to the remarkable story told by 93 year old Frank Rollins about how he combatted racism later in the day on "All Things Considered.

Now I will probably read Larry Tye's Rising from the Rails: The Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.

Especially to contrast it with White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won the Man Booker Award and I just finished. In both books, although one non-fiction and the other fiction, eavesdropping on the rich is the theme. For the porters, the men learned that education was the key to success in America. For Adiga in India, although success comes from learning from the rich, growth of an admirable character certainly wasn't a factor. I highly recommend White Tiger.

The Devil is Celebrity

Americans can barely read and write, so it seems like the best employment option is celebrity, especially if one has really messed up.

Take Bristol Palin, the unwed daughter of Sarah Palin, and a mother herself. With her infant on her lap and her telegenic father seated next to her, she espoused "abstinence only" on morning talk shows this week, just months after she told Fox News that abstinence doesn't work. Quite obviously, with a child in hand, and inarticulately, I might add.

At the same time, Levi Johnston, the estranged father of Bristol's child, was admitting on Larry King Live that abstinence doesn't work. Duh!

Who wants to listen to them? They are high school drop outs who didn't use birth control, and are now fighting on separate flat screen televisions. But there is the lure of celebrity.

Yesterday Joe the Plumber decided to leave the Republican Party in another inarticulate explanation. Although he said that he was leaving because he couldn't take all of the spending, he added that he didn't support spending cuts in "defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid -- which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits."

He was a featured guest with Congressional staffers as a political strategist. He is an unlicensed plumber, let's not forget that! But he was a celebrity!

Elizabeth Edwards can't get out of the spotlight either. She has written a book and is on the humiliating book tour speaking about the betrayal of her husband, John Edwards, who had an affair, one that lasted longer than a one-night-stand, while running for president and she was ailing from breast cancer. And is that baby his? Ah, the lure of the microphone, the attention, the clothes, the narcissism!

And finally there is Dick Cheney. The guy hid out during the eight years he was vice president and now everyplace you turn on the conservative spectrum of radio and television, there he is, Darth Vader himself, defending his administration and criticizing Obama for cleaning up the mess. Can't come out of the limelight, eh, Dick?

How did this happen! At least Molly, the wayward cow who ran away from the slaughter house got the real reprieve: a quiet life on an organic farm in New Jersey with a steer who loves her. And hopefully, we will never hear about her again.

Disaster Capitalism Across America

Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine," was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night and brought her analysis to the TARP right front and center. Click here for the clip.

According to Klein, who also writes for The Nation, once again we are taking enormous amounts of public money to bail out private interests, i.e. the banks, the very richest, because they made a series of very bad private mistakes.

When comparing the amount of money spent on the banks with the amount of money being spent on helping individuals, and the reticence in helping individual homeowners adjust their onerous mortgages, we should be appalled. Add to that those governors who are refusing to take portions of the stimulus package to pay for additional unemployment insurance -- Rick Perry from Texas and Bobby Jindal from Louisiana, to name two -- and our heads should be spinning.

Who is claiming that Obama is really calling for socialism in his health care and jobs stimulus package? We already have redistribution of wealth, but from the public to the private sector, in the TARP. Think about it. Three trillion or more has actually gone to the banks from the Federal Reserve and TARP.

Who We Really Are

This last election was what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intended, although I am still not ready to give up this most effective civil rights statute.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, this last election, November 2008, had the most diverse electorate ever--nearly one in four votes cast came from a person of color. "The nation's three biggest minority groups--blacks, Hispanics and Asians--each accounted for unprecedented shares of the presidential vote in 2008."

In twenty years, the percentage of white voters reduced from 84.9% to 76.3%. "The white share is the lowest ever, yet is still higher than the 65.8% white share of the total U.S. population."

African American voters increased significantly from 9.8% to 12.1%, which is up almost a third. Hispanic voters doubled in twenty years, from 3.6% to 7.4% in 2008. Most importantly, black voter turnout nearly equaled white turnout: 65.2% for blacks and 66.1% for whites. The upsurge was mainly due to a rise in black women and young people voting.

Download the entire report from the Pew Center for Hispanics.

Unfortunately, although President Obama was elected, we are not yet in a post-racial society. We cannot avoid the painful and long history of racism that infects almost every aspect of our culture. White people might want to believe it's over, as we watch this extraordinary man lead our nation through this perilous time. However, from the perspective of people of color, the lines of respect, the opportunities, and the confluence of race and poverty are constant reminders that we ain't there yet.

And take a look at Alexandra Pelosi's documentary film "Right America, Feeling Wronged," her HBO film and you will see just how brazen and strong this racism is.

That's why we have to challenge ourselves to be intentional in reaching out to create opportunities for all of us to get to know each other. Eric Holder was right, although the media was wrong in how they portrayed his speech before the Justice Department on race. Take a look at it and see whether you are ready to be couragous.

Good Riddance

My friend Susan flew in from Vancouver to help another friend Nina throw out all of the stuff she has collected over the years to make room for a less cluttered life. Susan, trained as a teacher, has avoided the classroom for many years. She started a business--Good Riddance--in which she helps people discard and organize after living too many years in a consumer society. "Making room for living well." That's her slogan.

Susan is exploiting the worst of our buying sprees. She and her partner Heather offer courses in how to make money from your own junk, and poignantly, how to move your mother and father into assisted living without breaking their hearts, and yours when you throw out their stuff. Having emptied my parents' home after my father died five years ago, I understand what happens when you ship too much of their stuff into my home so that now I have multi-generational stuff cluttering my home. I even have an object in the Good Riddance Virtual Clutter Museum.

There is even Cluttermania, the Musical Revue, which is how Susan hopes to make her money, performing now before assisted living audiences, corporate functions, and women's groups. Someday, Cluttermania might be on Broadway, well, at least off-off Broadway, or Las Vegas, if it ever revives.

Susan has this business because we are not a sustainable society and it doesn't look like we have the determination to get there despite the dire warnings of global warming. President Obama, in an interview published this weekend in the New York Times magazine, is speaking about radical change. After the Recession doesn't mean a return to normal.

"It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy. On each of these things — you know, things aren’t so bad in the eyes of a lot of Americans that they say, We’re willing to completely try something new. But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future."

Read the entire interview and how Obama wants to unclutter our lives of the wasteful, and reorganize our economy.

Now back to Susan: I drove her back to North Shore Towers, a very large apartment complex where many octogenarians live. When we drove up to the security gate, the guard waved us in without issuing a parking permit or calling up to her mother's apartment to verify our identity at 11:00 on a Sunday night. The guard looked into the car and saw Susan, still slim, still attractive at sixty. "Just dropping off," and he waved us in. Susan was in shock, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Post script: We might not be able to afford more clutter, but these guys certainly can. Look through the highest paid CEOs for 2008, and notice how white and male they are!

The Next Supreme

At his press conference last week, President Obama described what he is looking for in a new Supreme Court nominee: The process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as president. So i will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook, it is also about how are laws effect the daily realities of peoples lives--whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome and their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with peoples' hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes. I will seek someone who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our Constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process, and the appropriate limits of the judicial role....

The emphasis added comes from Talking Points Memo.com.

Obama's emphasis should be on a young, experienced, vital, intellectually powerful, articulate, and not a compromise, but a bold appointment.

Obama should not bother being bi-partisanship. Look at the Elena Kagen vote for Solicitor General! Former Dean of Harvard Law School and the vote was still unprincipled: 61 yeah, 31 nay. Only 7 Republicans voted for this highly competent candidate to represent the United States in appearances before the US Supreme Court.

In by-gone years, not all nominees to the Supreme Court had judicial experience. Take Earl Warren, former governor of California and an Eisenhower appointment. One of his first decisions was Brown v. Board of Education, written without footnotes and legalese, because Chief Justice Warren understood how important it was to have the decision printed in every newspaper in the United States. He wanted the language and reasoning to be accessible.

And there was William Rehnquist, who never served on a court before his nomination by Richard Nixon as associate justice. Rehnquist had served in the Justice Department during the turbulent anti-war years, when surveillance of students, laborists, and other protestors was rampant. there is even evidence that he might have lied at his confirmation hearings as to his role in opposing the overturning of state-enforced segegation in Brown v. Board of Education when he was clerking for Justice Jackson.

Supposedly President Obama is looking for another woman since only Ruth Bader Ginsburg is currently serving. Elena Kagen would be an excellent choice, but the likelihood of having two Jewish women on the high court seems impossible.

Everyday Rapture

Just before the lights went down, my friend and theater buddy, Ginger, asked: With "rapture" in the title, do you think the play is about religion?

That's what happens when you are a theater subscriber to 2econd Stage, Playwrights' Horizon, Signature Theater, New York Theater Workshop, New Theater, Public Theater, and Atlantic Theater Company. We know which theater to attend but rarely know too much about the play, its actors, or director, unless there is a lot of buzz. And we often see plays before they open, which decreases the likelihood of buzz.

So it was last night. In the afternoon we had seen a dreadful, amateurish play with a memorable cast not performing memorably. It will remain unnamed.

Jordan, my husband, is far less patient with live theater. He doesn't enjoy picking out a few lines of a specific performance, a soliloquy, a portion of a scene, or the dynamic between two characters. He wants holistic, satisfying entertainment. He was nudgy after the afternoon disaster.

The lights go down and what unfolds in "Everyday Rapture"? A musical comedy which isn't supposed to be called a musical comedy, but a comedic play with music, about a Mennonite!

A terrifically talented and engaging actress Sherie Rene Scott, sings, dances, and with wry comedic timing tells the story of her life, growing up in Topeka, Kansas as a half-Mennonite and leaving Topeka on a "rumspringa." Like the Amish, Mennonite children at 16, are encouraged to experiment and explore. Before committing to a life within the community, teens are given an opportunity to taste the outside life. For most, this means a tentative foray -- a trip to the local movie theater, or driving lessons. But for some, like our heroine Sherie Rene Scott, the experience is all about sex, magic, and New York City.

The play opens with a cleverly constructed, recurring joke about a rabbi who handed Sherie Rene two pieces of paper: one says--You are a piece of dust. The other reads: The world was created for you.

That's the tension for a Mennonite, a religion that requires humble quiet living among god's other creatures without machines or even buttons. What happens if a young woman is not satisfied just singing to Jesus, but wants to live her life inside a song, more likely one made famous by Judy Garland. At times, because the play was co-written with Dick Scanlan, Sherie Rene seems like a gay man caught in a woman's body. But that just adds to the fun.

Do not expect a coherent story. This is episodic theater. Just sit back and relax. This is entertainment based upon a personal struggle that has been enhanced with two fabulous back up singers, a live band, and meticulous direction that moves this 90 minute musical theater quickly and with lots of laughs.

It's running at 2econd Stage, through May 31st, and with type A H1N1 influenza, bank stress tests (going public on May 7th), the bankruptcy of Chrysler, the impending bankruptcy of GM, and the unpredictable stock market and the dimming hopes of retirement for my generation, you deserve to have 90 minutes of delight.

Gender Bender

There is a profound change happening in America. For the first time in our history, women are better educated than men and women are more likely to be the breadwinners in families.

In 2006, female science, health and engineering graduates outnumbered males 56% to 44%. The bachelor's degree-level fields of study with the highest percentage of female graduates were health (86%) and psychology (77%). The recent bachelor's degree fields of study with the highest percentage of male graduates were engineering (78%) and computer and information sciences (77%).

Overall, women earned 58% of all bachelors degrees and 60% of all masters degrees in 2006. The reason: Women appear to have much lower drop out rates than men, in both high school and in college. Among whites, women outnumbered men in college by 1995-1996. Although the number of men entering and graduating from college is rising slightly, the recruitment of women has resulted in steady increases in both the numbers and the percentages.

The disparity between women and men seeking college degrees is greatest among African Americans--60% of African American college students are women, only 40% are men. Among Hispanics, the gap is only slightly smaller--57% are women, 43% are men.

Yet despite the fact that more women are graduating from college than men, male recent graduates still make more money than women: $2.92 less an hour on average.

That wage differential makes sense only if engineering and information sciences are the highest paid areas.

This gender gap extends to unemployment during this economic downturn. According to the Center for American Progress, women are now the breadwinners because more men are losing their jobs than women. Male-dominated job areas are the places where jobs are disappearing: manufacturing, construction, and transportation.

What does this mean? In the area of legal education, there is a move to end tenure, or at least make job security issues more flexible while we are in this economic mess. But this move to end a practice that has established independent scholarship and academic freedom within law schools comes when despite the fact that about half of the students in law school are women, 60% of tenured law faculty are men, white men at that. Law is power, and white men still control.

100 Crises, 100 Cars

The affect that President Obama projects is that none of the things CNN is shouting about are really crises--foreclosures, bank failures, type A H1N1 influenza, Chrysler's bankruptcy, GM's impending one, Iran, Iraq, the revival of the right wing in Israel, North Korea, and now he is faced with appointing a new member of the US Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.

That's why I do take the time to watch him when he goes on television, as I did Wednesday night, during his press conference.

We are in a crises, however, no matter how cool the president manages to appear. America, as Bill Clinton once said, manufactures houses and cars. Right now, America is doing neither. And to just ramp up production of these commodities by making credit more available will do nothing to end the serious threat of global warming.

So this confluence of crises might be one of those opportunities the Chinese speak about, but only if President Obama strongly steers us there: to restructure our economy to sustainability.

In 1974 we were suffering from inflation and a recession brought on by the oil embargo. I left New York and moved to San Francisco to start my career as a young lawyer. San Francisco's economy was robust because it was based on small businesses--restaurants that were adopting the Alice Waters' outlook of eating locally grown wholesome food, small law firms that had specialty niches (My firm only did plaintiffs' antitrust class action work. We were terrible at most everything else.) The Napa and Sonoma Valleys were being planted with vineyards and boutique wineries were blossoming. The first video rental stores soon sprouted up; there was no Blockbuster then. And of course, in garages all through the Silicon Valley, computer hardware, the Macintosh, and software were being developed by geeky guys.

Saving Chrysler and GM, and reviving the McMansions market, isn't the future for America. Will we be able to accept that? Our individual status has been linked to how much we consume for almost our entire history. It began before the Europeans arrived here. Where I live on Long Island, the Mattinicock tribes wore so many strands of wampum, early European explorers might have misstaken them for mollusks. Ostentation seems to be in the rich top soil that once supported the local farming that fed New York City.

Now mega-farms with cruel pens holding hundreds of thousands of animals, supply the dead carcasses that get quick frozen and shipped around the world. In those pens of hundreds of thousands of animals, weird viruses mutate, hence type A H1N1 influenza. Our acts have consequences.

We have to change, and what I so admire about our new president is that he is thoughtful, that he surrounds himself by very smart people, and as we learned from the debate about the release of the torture memos, he likes to listen to debate, but unlike Bill Clinton, he makes a timely decision after digesting the information.

My head aches just thinking about how much information he has to digest and how many decisions he has to make. But it isn't just him. As the myth of Obama fades a bit, as we see through our own illusions, it's time for us to engage so that our democracy is fueled by an informed and articulate electorate. We can do it.