Twice Chai

The Balabusta is turning thirty-six tomorrow.

There's a story about the Besht I recall from somewhere, that a crazy lady came up to him at a marketplace and told him that he would have great powers, but that he couldn't reveal then until he was thirty-six. He told her to keep quiet about that.

I doubt the Balabusta is going to be quite that big, but I do have some hope that this will be the year in which I grow into some of what I'm supposed to be and do. We shall see.

In the meantime, still job hunting. Also, Mr. Bluejeans Sr. is having some health problems--tehillim, rosaries, prayers, white light and good thoughts gratefully accepted. I'll give more details if I get permission.

Hope everyone had a glorious Fourth. The Balabusta and the Balebos celebrated by watching part of the John Adams miniseries. Much fun!

The Preacher and the Naked Bicyclists

I was heading home from work on a fine Saturday afternoon, when I decided to pop up out of the underground before getting on BART, and go sample some perfume at Sephora.

As I emerge from the Powell Street BART Station, I realize that there is a street preacher, perched up on the molding of Forever 21, yakking through some kind of amplifier. He has a big sign about the blood of Jesus with him, and some friends handing out little tracts, and he's ranting on about Gay Pride, specifically the rainbow flags that go up on Market a month before the parade. We're misusing the rainbow, which is a sign from God. Do we even know what 'queer' really means? Etc. I walk by with a stone-set face, and storm into Sephora, thinking about how Jesus never took time out of his busy schedule to yell about a gay pride parade, when people were sick and hungry in the community around him.

Some time later, I come fragrantly out from Sephora, and head back to the BART station. Preacher still up on the moldings, still shouting. But as I approach, something new enters the scene--about thirty people on bicycles, naked except for their bike helmets, pedalling toward Market Street through the Powell Street cable car turnaround.

The preacher spots them, and turns his sermon to them. "You should be ashamed!" he yells. "Going around naked in public! Go home and put your clothes on! Be ashamed of yourselves!"

The bikers, of course, are loving the attention, and pedalling like mad. The crowd is cheering for them as they merge onto Market and streak off happily toward the Mission.

Apparently they were part of the World Naked Bike Ride.

I did wonder if the preacher had a religious leg to stand on in regards to them. Now, he didn't say that what they were doing was irreligious, he simply told them to be ashamed, but it occurs to me that nowhere in Exodus or Numbers does it say "Thou shalt not bike around town naked as a jaybird."." Nudity, in scripture, is mostly seen an expression of humility, or vulnerability, which would fit nicely in with this group's concern about environmental damage.

I love San Francisco...

Israel in the Gardens 2009

A lovely day was had by all. Well, by me. My parents decided to stay home, and my husband would rather have a root canal than listen to Israeli pop and watch me do activisty things, so I headed out on my own.


There was food: I ate spinach burekas, and a felafel arrangement the size of my head, and watched as the health inspection people had their annual fight with one of the felafel booths about whether everything was sufficiently refrigerated. Fought my way through the mob at Flying Felafel, where the whole experience is authentically Israeli.


There were vendors: I looked at children's games, and jewelry stands, and interesting tallitot, and stacks of Shalom Sesame DVDs.


There was music: I watched a troupe of teenagers in folk-dance costumes bounce around to Israeli songs, including a Bollywood-inspired number. There was singing. There was a gay Israeli pop star.


There were approximately a bazillion small children running around screaming in English, Russian, Hebrew and Chinese.


I checked in with some organizations. JIMENA was out, so was Hadassah, and BlueStar. BlueStar was very excited because they had a plane coming to fly around overhead with a banner saying WE STAND WITH ISRAEL. This was very nice and cheerful. In past years, the planes have said unpleasant things. (Those planes, obviously, were not chartered by BlueStar.)


And, there were protesters, although not nearly as many as we were fearing. Across the street from Yerba Buena Gardens, on the steps and the sidewalk in front of St. Patrick's Church, were a scattered line of representatives of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and QUIT. Frankly, I was expecting something grander. After all, they sent out this:



Kind of looks impressive, no? It wasn't.


Best sign over there was a banner that read "Lesbians Support The Palestinian Uprising". This is one of those things that just makes you blink a lot, but there they were. Apparently, the IJAZN people were specifically irritated that Ivri Lider, the singer who was the star of the IitG entertainment, is gay, and per IJAZN, "Queer people reject this exploitation in the service of a racist state." Well, queer people except for Ivri Lider, and all the gay San Franciscan Jews and their loved ones, lounging on the grass listening to him sing. They were, I daresay, having a better time than the IJAZNers. Plus, they got burekas and felafel.

I joined the banner line on our side, grabbed an Israeli flag, and waved for a while. The opposition gave up around two-thirty, and wandered away. In the meantime, I got to meet a number of people previously only known through e-mail and blogs, and generally enjoyed myself.

After a felafel break, I decided to head across the plaza and check out the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which I had not previously seen. Very nice place, saw a display on Chagall and the artists of the Russian Yiddish/Hebrew theater, enjoyed myself a great deal. New piece of knowledge: I had been aware that Sholem Asch wrote a play called "God of Vengeance", but I had not been aware that it had a lesbian theme. In 1922. Quite cool. Banned in New York. Gawd I love the Jewish arts.

Headed home, very relaxed. A nice, nice day.

Curley's Wife's Name

This is the second year I've taught John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, and for two years now I've put a wacky little question into my final--what is Curley's wife's name? Why?

Curley's wife is known only as that. I ask students to give her a name, both to give her some dignity, and also to express their ideas about this woman--the only woman on the ranch, known by the men to 'have the eye' two weeks after her wedding, married to a bully, isolated, capable of flashes of warmth, flirtatiousness and downright meanness.

Some students see her as the floozy Steinbeck said she wasn't--one boy last year named her 'Holy Water Girl', "because everyone touches her". Some see her as an ordinary girl and call her by simple, wholesome names. Some give her the names of movie stars, to reflect her girlhood dream.

One of my students says she should be called Hester, after Hester Prynne, because they're both accused of adultery, and unfairly vilified.

And one of my students just blew me away. Her name, Rivka G. writes, should be Soledad, because it means 'solitude' in Spanish, and is symbolic of her aloneness. And of course, although Rivka didn't mention it, Soledad is not only a girl's name, but the nearest town to the ranch in Of Mice and Men.

Wow, this kid is good!

Frida

Last night, the Balabusta settled down with Frida, the famous Salma-Hayek-as-Frida-Kahlo biopic-as-soft-porn extravaganza that was treated as a revelation from heaven by all the Balabusta's Frida-worshipping homegirls when it came out, and which she had nevertheless managed to avoid seeing until last night. When Netflix delivered it into her hands, and she settled down and enjoyed.

Some things about Frida:

1. Salma Hayek is a very, very, very pretty woman, much prettier than Frida Kahlo actually was.

2. The movie is also very pretty. Lavish color, hot people, and of course, Frida's over-the-top Mexican folk-costume clothes.

3. The politics are very meh. Soft-pedalled. And if I was Mrs. Trotsky, I would ice-picked Frida.

4. When Frida first demands Diego Rivera's opinion of her work, she tells him that she has to make money to help her family, and that she can't afford to waste time being a vanity painter. Years and years later she's living as Diego's wife/muse, and has sold four paintings. It doesn't quite add up, unless she meant 'help my family until I get married to a Communist painter'.

5. The scene where Rockefeller confronts Rivera about his portrait of Lenin on the Rockefeller Center fresco was much cooler in Cradle Will Rock. ("Leh-neen STAYS!")

Now, the thing about the Balabusta and Frida, besides the fact that her work was DROOLED over by all the girls I went to college with, and I actually like Rivera's much better, is this--I had always been told her father was Jewish, and I always counted her as a yiddishe kuzine, although I wished she'd give it a bit more of a nod in her paintings. Actually, it sort of annoyed me. Yet another Jewish woman running around the twentieth century, without a nod to the Jewish world...

I remember, for some reason, being irrationally offended by some woman ranting on in an essay in Colonize This! about white girls being obsessed with Frida, with her woman-of-color unibrow, because she is so exotic to us, so wild and untamed...riiiiiiiight. And please note, as evidenced above, that the unibrow actually comes from the Hungarian side of the family. I don't have five pairs of tweezers for no reason, zeiskeit.

Anyway, after all, it turns out that Mr. Kahlo probably wasn't Jewish. (The unibrow, however, seems to be authentic.) So, hmmph. There it is.

Prop. 8 Stands, So Do Existing Marriages

Back in the fall, when I started at St. Dymphna, several families at our very Catholic school were planning weddings.

I got to hear about one of them during the freshman orientation. The uncle of one of our freshman girls was going to have a formal wedding to the man he'd been with for some years. She was thrilled, because she was going to be in the wedding party. This meant she got to wear a long dress, and heels, and her mom had said she could wear her hair up and get her makeup and nails done professionally. Oh, and also she was going to get to do one of the Gospel readings, which was nice, but obviously not as nice to a fourteen-year-old girl as professional makeup and wedding cake.

More casually, I got to hear about the wedding plans of another gay uncle, from his nephew, who was also going to do a Scripture reading, but had no plans to get his makeup done. It was that nephew who breezed into class on the Tuesday California voted Proposition 8 into law, and told me that his uncle and the uncle's young man had gone to City Hall Monday afternoon and gotten married, on a hunch that they should do it while the doing was good. The formal wedding was still on, but they had the paperwork.

I'm glad the existing marriages stand legally. I feel sad for the people left in the cold, angry at how hard this is. Who profits if people who love one another can't get married?

I don't know if the court could have done anything else legitimately. But I hate this precedent. We get to vote now, on who gets access to legal rights? Whooo, boy. Not a good idea.

I'm glad Shimon's uncle got married in time. I wish it hadn't been, as a man on the news this morning said, a limited time offer.

American History Rethunk

I've been reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams since, I think, last fall--I started reading it, and then stopped, and then started from the beginning, and I actually think I may finish it this week. It's filled in a lot of my knowledge of the Revolution, and is generally interesting, but the parts I have found most intriguing have had to do with the Adamses' attitudes about slavery. They were staunch anti-slavery folks, these Massachusetts Puritan types, and McCullough gives some interesting insights as to how this affected their world view, for example, mentioning Abigail's fear at one point that the war effort will fail because the colonies have permitted the sin of slavery.

Much later in the book, when the Adamses are living in London, Abigail goes to see Sarah Siddons as Desdemona in Othello. (MA puritans though they may have been, the Adamses liked theater, and since there were none in Boston, living in Europe was a chance to rock out.)

McCullough writes:

To Abigail, Mrs. Siddons was brilliant but miscast as Lady Macbeth. It was
in Othello, as Desdemona, that she was "interesting beyond any actress
I had ever seen."

Yet to read of Desdemona in the arms of a black man was, Abigail found, not
the same as seeing it before her eyes. "Othello was represented blacker than any
African," she wrote. Whether it was from "the prejudices of education" or from a
"natural antipathy", she knew not, "But my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw
the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona." Othello was "manly, generous,
noble" in character, so much that was admirable. Still, she could not separate
the color from the man.

What I find fascinating is that she tries to, and feels disturbed that she can't. I suppose I'm projecting later ideas about race onto poor Abigail Adams, but I find it both interesting and informative that an eighteenth-century American woman (granted, one with a rock-solid anti-slavery bias) would feel bothered by the idea that she couldn't be open-minded enough to feel comfortable with interracial romance.

Apparently, while Thomas Jefferson was shuttling his kids around Europe, his daughter Polly ended up staying with the Adamses in London for a while, along with the soon-to-be-infamous Sally Hemings, who was at the time fourteen and non-infamous. Abigail was somewhat thrown off--she thought Sally was far too young to be taking care of Jefferson's daughter, and she'd never had a slave living under her roof before or since. One wonders what she made of it when the Jefferson/Hemings scandale later hit the papers.

Bishop's Holiday

I get a four-day weekend, because in addition to Memorial Day, the school is having a 'bishop's holiday', an extra day off from school granted to the kids by our local bishop as part of the celebration of St. Dymphna's patron saint's feast day.

It feels good.

I've been to two job interviews so far. One mediocre, one pretty good, I thought.