Blaxploitation pj's

So today, I had a brilliant idea: since the drive back from our weekend away took longer than expected--we crossed the city limits after lunchtime, shortly before my husband had a meeting at work--I asked him to drop me off at the elegant hotel facing my office so I could dash into the ladies' room, change into my work clothes (conveniently stuffed in our suitcase, since we'd left town straight from work) and sashay over to the office. Part A of this plan went off without a hitch, although one hotel employee--wearing black tie and standing beneath crystal chandeliers with his hands behind his back--raised an eyebrow at what I was wearing.

But the ladies' room was locked.

So I spent the next twenty minutes wandering around the financial district wearing purple pajama bottoms trimmed with pink lace, and a blaxploitation t-shirt. Well, it's actually a Black Joe Louis and the Honey Bears t-shirt featuring the singer of that band wearing 70s pimp shades, sandwiched between two scantily-clad mamas with glorious towering Angela Davis afros. So, not an actual blaxploitation movie t-shirt, but close enough--you can tell from the official Black Joe Lewis Valentine's Day cards, which say "Bitch, I Love You," what the basic vibe is.

If I had consulted a fellow attorney as to the wisdom of crossing the threshold of my workplace in this outfit, I would have been advised in the strongest possible terms to call in sick, or throw $600 on my AmEx card for a random skirt and shirt at Saks (that Place Where People Shop Only if Their Views on Money are Totally Alien to My Own), or... do whatever it takes, but do not enter the workplace in that outfit, not even for the three minutes it would take to get to the ladies' room. So my wandering in the financial district brought some questions to mind:
- Why do so many businesses downtown not have public restrooms?
- Why do I dress like a crack baby when I travel?
- Is it a good idea to change clothes in the bathroom of the McDonald's widely known as a drug market, where dealers openly sit at tables plying their trade? Probably not. Dammit.
- Statistically, what are the chances of running into the managing partner in the elevator? It doesn't happen very often. But how often? And if you factor in the chances of running into a partner you work with? And what if he or she is escorting clients to a meeting...? Dammit!

So. Yeah. I was a little late to work.

The Gist Street Reading Series

Want to know what to do this summer? Here ya go: the Gist Street Reading Series Annual Cookout Extravaganza. Find out more at my post at Fiction Writers' Review.

Lawyer Lunch Adventure #1

The scene: a busy, gritty city street. On a wide dirty sidewalk I am walking to lunch (at 3PM--busy day). It's overcast, and chilly for May. I've got nothing but roast chicken on my mind.

The characters: me, looking incredibly square in my wool overcoat and glasses. Some homeless people, not looking square at all--if I had to pick a shape, I'd say they look squiggly. Various young African-American people looking very street: the guys in do-rags and baggy clothes, the women with hair extensions that echo the plumage of tropical birds and jeans that appear to have been spray-painted on. One of these men is hanging out on the sidewalk holding up a gold necklace, which evidently is for sale.

The moment: two men are ambling up the sidewalk that I'm ambling down. I glance at the one nearest me, and vice-versa; we make eye contact. And I realize, Holy shit, that's [name removed for legal reasons], my pro bono client's ex--which is to say, that's the felon with a warrant out for his arrest, who everyone thought had left the state. And I think, Fuck, I hope he didn't recognize me. And due to my paranoia on that point, I don't turn around to get another look at him, which makes me one of the more useless witnesses in American legal history when I dial 911 on my cell phone:
Me-Hi, I just saw [name removed] at [location]. There's a warrant out for his arrest, so I thought I should call.
911 Operator-Okay, thank you, ma'am. You say he's at [location]? What is he wearing?
Me-...Uhhhh...
I ultimately was able to inform her that he was wearing, quote, "casual clothes." Well, that narrows it down. I could've described his face in detail--it is, as they say, burned into my memory--but a description of the exact slope of his jaw is, I guess, not useful to the cops out on patrol.

The aftereffects: the sight of him startled me so much that my eyes remained stuck in the "wide open" position for the next half hour.

World's Saddest Time Sheet

Time Sheet:
Leave work early upon hearing that my pro bono civil client, "Sherrie," had just been convicted in her criminal trial and immediately remanded into custody; comfort "Sherrie" in jail and begin making arrangements to take care of her children, finances, etc.; comfort her weeping fiance and assist him with practical issues; visit her public defender to see what went wrong and if there is any possibility of an appeal


Twelve older white jurors convicted a poverty-stricken black single mom of a felony for an act of self defense that didn't seriously hurt anyone.

Oh god.

Most Blood-Curdling Movie Ever Made

It's awards season again. There's no category for this in the Oscars or Golden Globes, but I think I'm qualified to determine what is the most spine-chilling movie ever made: I've seen thousands of movies from every continent, and I once had a long relationship with a Frenchman, greatly increasing my understanding of refined emotional torture. So here's my Munch-inspired statuette, which can only go to this: La Tourneuse de pages, by Denis Dercourt. It came on today while my husband and I were eating lunch. We watched, mesmerized with horror, until the end--at which point a woman's sanity, family and career had been quietly but purposely destroyed by this polite, well bred and outwardly obedient teenage girl:
American horror movies with their slashers and screaming co-eds have nothing on La Tourneuse de pages. In American horror movies, everyone knows that the villain trying to kill them is a villain trying to kill them--the only suspense is when and how, and in what order he'll go through his victims. Yawn.

But in La Tourneuse de pages, the woman whose life is destroyed doesn't know (and will never know) what hit her. She thinks that she went insane. She thinks that she became obsessed with the teenage girl she hired as a live-in babysitter over the school holidays, scared the girl away by telling her she loved her, and destroyed her own marriage and career over that impossible, irrational love. Nope. Everything that happened was purposely engineered by the girl, as vengeance for something the woman did to her when she was a child--an event the woman doesn't even remember; when they meet again, the woman doesn't recognize her and the girl doesn't refresh her memory. She simply destroys her entire life, so subtly and with such restraint that no one involved would ever be able to pin the blame on her; then she leaves.

No American could ever make this movie--not even George Cukor, who made Gaslight. It could only be French, or maybe Japanese. (I also dated a Japanese guy when I was in high school, so trust me on this.) Want emotional sadism at its most nerve-shatteringly subtle and restrained? Want revenge so exquisitely awful that the victim and everyone they care about thinks they did it to themselves? Then what you want is French or Japanese.

Prayer Answered

It's been almost two weeks now.
We did it.

It's still overwhelming. What do you write? What is there to write, when more than half a century's effort--or, really, the effort of more than two hundred years--finally pays off? My mother was half my age, still a teenager, when she and a quarter-million other people marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King. She remembers the word going around in the days before the march: Everybody make sure you dress nicely. If there's anybody who doesn't look nice, that's who the reporters will photograph--they're trying to make us look dangerous, dirty, abnormal. My mother marched on Washington in a wool dress and pearls, and nearly fainted in the sweltering August heat.

Twenty-five years later, when I was still too young to vote, I volunteered for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. That was twenty years ago.

I walked into a friend's office on the morning of November 5th so we could rejoice together, since we'd both spent Election Day pollwatching, and she was wiping tears from her cheeks. She's African-American, in her mid-forties, with two kids in grade school. She said, "I finally feel like I am a citizen of this country." And she said, "For the first time, I can look my kids in the face and tell them they can be anything they want." And she said, "We haven't just been watching Obama. Uh-uh. We've been watching how you folks"--i.e., white people--"react to Obama. That's what's been blowing our minds. Do you realize 67% of young voters voted for him? Sixty-seven percent! And that's who's gonna be interviewing my kids when my kids get out of school and need jobs!"

Two days earlier she'd said, "They're gonna steal this election. They're gonna steal it from us." But they didn't.

It's almost two weeks later and I still can't watch that "American Prayer" video without crying. The farthest I've gotten so far is to the part where Martin Luther King says, "I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

We as a people: not just one race, not just one generation or nationality, but one people. That video is my people. We are the people who have been fighting, forever, the fight Tom Robbins once described:

"The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men.

We all have the same enemy.

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized."

- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

American Prayer

This is absolutely glorious.
Barack the Vote, everybody.