Bitchface Wins
I hate social posturing. That doesn’t mean I’m not guilty of it, but it’s like eating an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s. In the act, it’s enjoyable, but when it’s over, you are left feeling sick and guilty.
I was at a party this past weekend when a woman- let’s call her Bitchface- said, “So, you’ve lived here all your life?”
At the time, this question seemed like an indictment of and a challenge to my pathetically provincial life. I replied, “Actually, I lived in New York City, and California, and even for a time in Paris.” Never mind that that time in Paris amounted to nine weeks. The gloves were off, the sabers drawn.
Looking back on it, I realize how obnoxious I sounded. If I could have that conversation back, my response to her question would be a dignified, “Yes, pretty much.” Instead, I reacted to the implied condescension in her question- whether real or imagined- and my self-indulgent posturing pulled me right down.
Today I was obsessing about it to my wonderful and very wise friend Clarissa. “Listen,” she said, “Here’s something that will make you feel better. Remember that Yankees game we went to last weekend? My husband got into a shoving match with a dwarf.”
Of course, this involved a crazy story, equal parts horrible and amusing, but I found my epiphany lying squarely in Clarissa’s final observation: “A shoving match with a dwarf. You’ve got to be asking yourself, now, who’s the asshole?”
This past weekend, I’d say I beat out Bitchface for that title.
Bram Hanson
I was walking past the tennis courts at our pool club when I overheard a group of parents whispering about some juvenile delinquent.
“He’s a nasty son of a bitch,” said one woman “And his mother’s a pathological liar.”
“A liar? Try a friggin’ nut job. When we heard they were joining the club, we thought about quitting,” a man chimed in. “My son Tim goes to school with him and, frankly, even though the kid’s small, I mean, small like the size of a midget, Tim is scared to death of him. The kids call him Mini-Me. Not to his face, though, because they’re afraid he’s armed. They think he’s criminally insane.”
“Who is this kid?” I asked.
“His name is Bram. Bram Hanson,” he replied, shuddering.
That evening, back at the club, there was a cocktail party on the deck. Sam and I knew everyone there with the exception of one couple. As I went up to introduce myself I thought the woman looked familiar.
“Aren’t you Carol Niffenhoffer?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I went to high school with you!” I could tell she had no clue who I was. She started going on about how high school was a blank in her personal history. I told her my name.
“Oh, my god, of course! But weren’t you really fat back then?” I almost didn’t have a chance to be offended before she launched into a running discourse about her spawn. “Ben, my oldest, is going to play varsity soccer on the high school team as a freshman. That’s unheard of! Then, my baby is a gymnast. I can’t even find a coach around here who can train him. He’s that good.” He was also an A student and had his little heart set on going to Stanford. “It’s one of the few top schools with D-1 gymnastics, and gymnastics are his life. He’s already competing at the national level. All of his friends are going to Beijing.” She laughed. “I’m probably the only mother around who’s hoping my kid doesn’t have a growth spurt.”
Just then, a man walked over to her. “This is my husband, Jim Hanson.”
Mini Me. Liar. Nut Job. Hanson. “Your son must be Bram.”
“So you’ve heard of him,” she said, looking pleased.
“He’s the talk of the club,” I told her. “You have no idea.”
Tattoo
I have a tattoo. It’s on my back, near my right shoulder blade. I got it several years ago during a very crazy night with my friends. While three of them were getting their belly buttons pierced, I wanted to join them in doing something edgy and momentous and thought (erroneously, as it turns out) that a tattoo would be less painful. I dimly remember looking at a poster of Chinese characters and choosing two that seemed meaningful. The first one was “to seek” and the second was “heaven.” (My friend Claudia tells me that I have no way of knowing this, and probably the two characters are “midlife” and “crisis” and the guy who gave me the tattoo is still laughing about it).
A few weeks later, I was driving Jake and his friends Luke and Nick someplace. It was hot, so I was wearing a tank top. From the back seat, Luke said, “Wow. I didn’t know you had a tattoo, Mrs. Hurwitz.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling pretty cool.
“Is that Chinese writing?” Nick asked.
“Uh huh.”
“What does it say?” asked Luke.
“To seek heaven,” I said.
After a brief silence, Nick spoke. “Who’s Kevin?”
Name Game
What’s in a name? Nicole Kidmann, a native of Flushing Meadows, enjoyed the attention she received growing up with the movie star’s moniker. Then, while attending a Jewish Singles weekend in the Poconos, she met the man of her dreams: Keith Urbahn, of Forest Hills. “We hit it off from the start,” Kidmann says. The two found they shared a love of poker, mystery novels… and food. “We met on the kosher buffet line,” says Kidmann, who weighs just over 400 pounds.
“When I see a woman go up for sevenths,” responds the 520 pound Urbahn, “well, a guy like me pays attention.”
Like their famous counterparts, Kidmann and Urbahn were married in 2006. Later that year, when Urban checked himself into rehab, Urbahn tried Atkins, which he claims “is kind of similar.” Astoundingly, both couples also found themselves pregnant in late 2007.
To top it off, Kidman and Kidmann gave birth to daughters on July 7, 2008. “We were planning on naming our baby Rose, after my Bubbe,” says Kidmann. “But when they named their daughter Sunday Rose, and we remembered that the last thing I ate before going into labor was a hot fudge sundae, well, Sundae Rose seemed too perfect.”
“We sent Nicole and Keith Sundae Rose’s birth announcement and invited them to come visit us here in Queens,” Urbahn says. “We haven’t heard back yet, though.”
One would have to call this string of coincidences nothing short of incredible. “We have everything in common with Nicole and Keith,” says Kidmann, “except that we’re morbidly obese and not famous.”
Gone
Over the weekend, we got robbed. We went to visit some friends for several hours, during which some person or persons came in and took the jewelry boxes from both Sam’s and my dresser and made off with the contents. They put the empty boxes back, so we didn’t realize anything was gone until a couple of days later when I went to get the bracelet that Hannah had just given me for Mother’s Day.
I bet the thief (thieves?) were disappointed, because I doubt they made out too well at the pawn shop. While there were some materially valuable things, like my diamond engagement ring and some pearl and diamond earrings, most of the stuff was not precious, except to us. There were two very practical Elgin watches that didn’t work, but they belonged to Sam’s late father. There was a handmade lapis pendant and a moonstone ring made by Sam’s free-spirited sister Reva who died tragically twenty-five years ago. There was an old silver filigree amethyst necklace that had been my grandmother’s as a girl, around the time World War One began. These treasures were joined by wooden beads the kids strung in nursery school and the little illustrated book of tickets that Jake gave me when he was in kindergarten, redeemable for things like hugs and “brecfis in bed.”
For the police report, we had to make a list of what was taken. I struggled to remember. I always planned to someday go through the boxes, when I had the luxury of time and emotion to sift through the past. You don’t list memories on a police report of stolen items. While I did my best to recall the things we had, I found I couldn’t even begin to imagine what we had lost.
You Decide
On CBS radio this morning, there was an ad for one of those car donation organizations. “Turn your four-wheeled headache into a blessing for someone less fortunate.” On the heels of that ad was another, for an asbestos litigation law firm: “Asbestos. It used to be called the Magic Mineral…now, we know it as a life-threatening killer.”
Neither one quite works. Personally, I think you have to pair equivalent extremes (i.e. “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”) or establish plausible continuity (“turn idle time into a profitable at-home mail order business.”). It’s hard to believe that someone who is inventive enough to describe a car as a “four-wheeled headache” would then resort to the dated and evangelical-overtoned “blessing.” And lacking qualification, “Magic Mineral” has absolutely no connection to “life-threatening killer”-which is, in itself, a phrase fraught with obvious redundancy issues.
There is nothing I like better than an editorial challenge, so employing principles of balance and continuity, I went to work. These are the results.
“Turn your four-wheeled headache into a mobile dream catcher for someone less fortunate.”
“Asbestos. It used to be called the Magic Mineral, but medical research has since shown it to be the Dark Particle of Putrescence.”
This has started me thinking. Radio ad copy: my true calling, or lame obsession?
Caboose
Yesterday, Micah turned fifteen.
While I was running around trying to get a party together I thought about what he has meant to us. After five kids, we certainly weren’t planning on having another, and initially it seemed like anything but a good idea. But Micah is atypical. He’s not the cliché baby of the family, though we do tend to look out for him. Not that we even need to; he’s quite capable of taking care of himself. He does have a tendency to accurately assess our inconsistencies, which can be pretty humbling, but he doesn’t hold these against us. And, while he also has a variety of boastable talents, the most extraordinary thing about Micah is his complete lack of pettiness.
When he was a baby I remember people describing him as the caboose. At the time, it was nothing more than a cute expression for the last in line. I thought about that today, though, and it suddenly occurred to me that the caboose is what ultimately defines the shape of the train. That would be Micah.
Balancing Act
Yesterday, Sam and I went into Manhattan to help Hannah move from her apartment on the East Side to a new place on the West Side.
Like every trip into the city, there were surprises in store. How could we have anticipated that in Hannah’s old building, a walk-up in which she lived on the fourth floor, an apartment on the second floor, next to the only staircase, would be undergoing a total gutting? That instead of hauling load upon load of Hannah’s personal effects down four flights of stairs„ we would be hauling load upon load while stepping around plaster dust, nails, slivered piles of wood, and six guys with huge trash barrels who had been hired to do the job?
Without a doubt, the debris gauntlet made our task not merely arduous but life-threatening, but we also discovered that the workers were lovely. They held doors open for us and would pause in taking loads of rubble down until they were sure we were out of the way. This was the beginning of the defining pattern of our day- the Karmic score kept getting evened. For every bad thing, something equally good happened.
Another example: the super’s daughter came out with her little yappy dog when Sam and Hannah’s boyfriend Stefan were struggling to move the air conditioner down the stairs. The yapper and its tangled leash were directly in the way, and getting them to step aside, since the kid was only a toddler and didn’t speak English, was difficult. The timing couldn’t have been worse. When the super came out to see if Hannah needed any help, he picked up the dog and smiled at me. Turning to Hannah, he asked, “Are you going to introduce me to your sister?” Score evened!
We went to Starbucks. I was in line, waiting to order, when a rodent-faced woman shoved me aside in her haste to get to the rest room. I figured maybe she had an emergency, but as I was leaving, balancing both my coffee and Hannah’s, the same woman was ahead of me. She pushed open the door and took off, allowing it to ricochet back into me. Luckily, using my foot, I was able to stop its trajectory at the possible last second. I then nudged the door open, directly into an incoming customer.
“Oh, my God, I am so sorry,” I said.
The man smiled.” “Darlin’ don’t you worry about that. You got your hands full. You have a great day, now.” Score evened!
We finally finished, and returned to the car for the drive back to Connecticut. As we approached the Suburban, we saw a meter cop writing out a ticket. We weren’t more than a minute over the time limit. Hannah and I ran over. “This is our car!” I said. “We’re leaving.”
Wordlessly, he shook his head and continued to write the ticket.
“Please,” Hannah implored. “My parents drove all the way here to help me move.”
“Then you can help them pay,” he said.
“I can’t afford it,” she said. He just kept shaking his head.
“Come on,” I said. “Seriously, I put money in, and I know we couldn’t be more then a minute late.”
Sticking the $35.00 ticket under my windshield wiper, he said, “Now you can stay here all day.” Then he walked off.
I was stunned by his indifference. The only thing that made me feel better was thinking about the way the day had been going so far. If the Karmic balancing act held, then I was pretty certain that after he rounded the corner, the meter cop would find himself stepping directly into the path of the crosstown bus. Score evened!