Writings, Revelations, and Other Nonsense

Here I post a weekly diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2012.

The most fabulously incredible thing is happening in Brattleboro, it’s called the Desha Show, a talk show interviewing people who are living in their sweet spots.  So, if you were ever wondering why doesn’t the spot I’m in feel sweet?  Well, you can find out how others got to their sweet spots on the air with Desha Peacock as hostess extraordinaire.

The show just this second launched its fourth episode featuring Ayda Robana, culinary chef to the stars and owner of Om Sweet Mama’s in Santa Barbara (where else?). On other episodes she has interviewed Cirque du Soleil performers and wild comic book writers and my goodness absolutely anyone who has shot for the moon and landed among the stars including ummm a novelist/editor you might know, but I won’t mention any names.

This particular show is cut through with scenes from the Desha Show fun-raiser, the absolute highlight of everyone’s summer, a sparkling celebration under the cradle of a quarter moon right here in my own hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont.  Piles of artists and performers and writers and fans came from as far away as California, and the lawn was decked-out in shabby chic décor that would have made Rachel Ashwell proud. We all drank watermelon mojitos and beautiful people milled around everywhere.  Ayda cooked grilled shrimp and lamb meatballs and hundreds of other delectable tapas while Red Heart the Ticker played a sexy set and then House of Wolves lullabyed us before he ran away on his European tour. He really does sometimes lullabye, it’s very sweet spotty.

Everyone there was living in his or her sweet spot at least for that night.  And while I was standing with Margie Pivar admiring her splash-of-pink dress and talking about her screenplay which was just this minute picked up in Hollywood, I thought how my grandma Maggie would have loved this party, wearing a fancy shift on a summer night with an open bar at her side. As we know, Maggie wallowed in her sweet spot and was friendly with all the other 1940s sweet spotters, and I just had to run right home and dust off the diary and the blog, which has been in deep deep remission (a topic for another time) and finally finally finally check in with Grandma Maggie on Saint Mark’s place as she drinks her champagne and eats her coconut cakes and to say thank you thank you to all you sweethearts (and sweet spotters) who dare to stop your busy lives and follow her…

Click here for the  Desha Show!  And then like it on facebook! Why not?  Or hang out with
Red Heart the Ticker and House of Wolves right here…

PS happy happy to my bestie Lauren Myers who’s birthday just happens to be today, and who I would absolutely and no-doubt-about-it die without…

What Was Grandma Maggie Doing on November 3?

Got hair done.  In evening over to 35 West 10th for dinner with Fred Rodell and wife, they’re living in his mother’s house, very charming little place with fine, book-lined living room and oriental rugs.  Fred is on Fortune now (I am pretty sure this is Frank Sinatra’s Rocky Fortune Radio Show).  A slight, dark youth, and I liked him. His wife, Gerry, used to be a receptionist in Gifford Pinchot’s office, is cute and cooked dinner in a brown velvet dinner dress with no back wearing over it a frilled yellow apron.  Other dinner guests were Arthur Mann and his wife.  First time I met Arthur’s wife, I disliked her on sight and proceeded to become more and more irritated with her (grandma!).   She looks a little like Constance Collier (gorgeous woman who didn’t age well and played Cleopatra to Beerbohm Tree‘s Marc Antony in the early 1900s) with a red bob and the weirdest Scottish accent I’ve ever heard, like a Frenchwoman with an impediment.  She said you couldn’t get a decent meal in New York, nothing compared to what you could get in London!  She had a terrible chip on her shoulder and she and I quarreled about food, Dickens, Huxley, and general aspects of NY until I finally deserted her after dinner and so did everyone else except Gerry.  Good dinner of steak and peas after soup, salad, fruit and cheese served on the most beautiful plates.  Then coffee and brandy in lovely little cut glasses in living room.  John Chamberlain and wife came in and Peggy Chamberlain is going to have a baby in April so we talked baby.  Am dying to know what Edith thinks of this.  Was surprised as they’ve been married twelve years and ad impression she and John not so likely to stay together.  (Charlie Hogan said to have gotten same impression of Rodella).  After Chamberlains arrived, a guy named Hurling who has just come on Time after having had his own office in Washington as freelance correspondent.  Liked him.  Fred said he felt suspicious of Dewey (47th gov. of NY and Republican presidential hopeful who strongly supported the death penalty), didn’t like his looks, felt he show-off and would turn out to be crooked or something.  Had really exceedingly pleasant evening and walked home about midnight through nice evening.

Here I post a weekly diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2012.

Monday, October 17, Brattleboro, Vermont

The people on Wall Street are cold, so I just sent some money for sleeping bags for the protestors in their dandy little plastic handcuffs.  In general I believe in the religion of revolution. I’m going through one myself right now, which comes on the heels of a tremendous amount of pain. And pain, I’ve figured out, is really the only way the spirit or society can get us to revolutionize. That mediocre place of mild satisfaction is an anesthetic that does violence to the soul.  This makes revolutions confusing.  We can all wish we were braless and high in the 60s but we forget Kent State has been called a massacre, and that era was full of deaths including a very peace-loving man named Martin Luther King Jr. It’s interesting to me that this revolution comes almost ten years to the day after someone else threw a bitter and very violent type of their own revolution at that end of New York and perhaps this is all happening now because we didn’t wake up then, we just padded ourselves with a tremendous amount of fear and moved on.

This revolution is particularly hard because we live in the techno age where just about any fat Wall Street cat can be your friend on facebook, especially if he has a blog he wants you to read.  Back in the day when America was in revolution against those funny-speaking blokes across the pond, the rich people were just figureheads in palaces with diamond headdresses.  But this revolution is not so clear.  I, too, have stocks I am hoping will bounce back, and I adore my broker, one of my very close friends makes his money working for a hedge fund, and it’s easy to hate Newt and Perry, but on the whole I sort of love my politicians.  I’ve been at parties with my governor, and Obama and Michelle seem like the couple next door that we keep forgetting to invite for dinner.  It’s all very incestuous and hard to figure out. A straight line of hate say for someone like Noriega or Hitler or a queen who eats cake is easier.

Of course the techno age might not be as random as it seems. The lines to who we are protesting might be more concrete than we think.  If you google: What Do the Wall Street Protestors Stand For, you get that eery feeling that suddenly big brother or the Pig of whatever literary reference you are making actually has a clear face: the first ten posts are from Fox news, The Global Christian post and other religious right poopskies.

The biggest challenge these folks have to the movement is the idea that these folks don’t know what they want.  That doesn’t bother me at all because I know from personal experience that’s the way revolutions start. Revolutions are emotional.  They often don’t begin with clearly thought out agendas, they begin with a feeling of dissatisfaction, then anger, and finally with desperation. Only then do goals begin to emerge. A wife doesn’t calculate her divorce. First she feels depressed, anger builds, she gets pissed off, she throws her wedding china, and then she sits down and decides she wants the house and the dog.  In hindsight it looks like those hippies, hopped up on LSD with peace signs on their foreheads, were just ending a war in Vietnam, but really they had to sort through  a bunch of things that were wrong back then: our black brothers needed to be able to sit at the lunch counter with us, women needed more rights, we needed a complete turn-around of post-war values and we were tired of being made to fight a terrifying war in southeast Asia.

I dare say a clear agenda is starting to emerge on Wall Street. The nurses who marched last Wednesday want a financial transactions tax, others are protesting the injustices of the foreclosure crisis, still others are looking at work place discrimination and more at student loan debt.  Librarians and teachers are out there, so you really can’t doubt they’ll come up with some reasonable requests. As in most revolutions, it’s the middle class that finally has the means and the intelligence to organize and say what they need.

Over here in Brattleboro, where it’s legal to burn your bra and bare your breasts, where art is everywhere and people grow armpit hair and shop at the co-op, we’re all cheerleading the revolution.  Me, I’m starting a revolution of my own. Right now it sort of looks like lazing around in my pajamas doing nothing. Fox News would have a real field day with that, but I have faith that revolutions have their own energy and their own agenda.  As soon as we manage to say aloud we want change, the universe miraculously springs into action.

And that brings us back to my grandma Maggie, as it always does.  I’m sure she would get a huge kick out of the folks on Wall Street with their homemade signs.  Not that she was opposed to Wall Street, she made a little fortune picking stocks out of the newspaper for fun, but she’d like the energy, the pizzaz and rara of it all. She’d probably go down there in her velvet housecoat and feed them all champagne.  She’s in NYC right now as a matter of fact, way back in 1937, when the world was about to enter it’s own scary revolution of sorts. Let’s go to Saint Mark’s place and see what the heck is happening down there in the Big Apple! And if you want to send a sleeping bag to someone on Wall Street, here’s the donation address: http://nycga.cc/donate/.  One sleeping bag is only twenty bucks. The price of a good pizza and a Vermont brew at our very own Fireworks.  Whatever you do, whether you are a tea party fanatic or a Wall Street protestor, don’t live a life without revolutions, however minor and pointless they seem at the time…

March 5, 1937 Saint Mark’s Place, New York

Uptown to lunch with Bobbie Sutton who is running around arranging the entire stock for branch of one of the stores in Cavendish which is to be opened in Asheville–entire stationary and cosmetics, that is–and afraid may forget toothpaste or some such item.  Took evening coat back to Russkes to be shortened. Bought nursing brassieres at Beats– $1 each for exactly what Wanamaker’s charge $2 for.  Home by bus and saw Edith trotting home from Hearn’s liquor store with package of bottles under arm. In evening Creighton and Bertha Anne came down, taught them to play sticks which they seemed to enjoy.  Bertha Anne brought three copies of Spur in which she put announcement of baby’s arrival. She has article in it and also does the shopping column in front.  Looked sentimentally at baby.  Told about Edith saying, “Why, we couldn’t have  baby. We would have to take down all our books!”

Here I post a weekly diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2012.

Brattleboro, Vermont, September 1, 2011

Oooooh, how time flies when I’m not with my grandmother and thank you one thousand times for asking about her all these long months when I just couldn’t blog blog blog her diary and my life…  As you probably know, I was passed out with Lyme disease for almost the entire year, and I am just now opening my eyes like Sleeping Beauty, except she’s blonde, to the kiss of the prince, which is, of course, life and everything it brings including the aftermath of mean Irene, which rocked our gorgeous state this past weekend.

Many of our neighbors, in the wake of rising rivers and torrential rains are trying to piece their lives together again.  Much of the landscape no longer makes sense.  Whole villages washed away, and we are just now catching our collective breath and trying to bail out neighbors.  VermontSover.net is doing a matching grant for people who would like to donate money to help Vermonters in need. The money is going to the VT Foodbank , a very good group. And Sover.net will double your money if you give to them.  You can call in your donation by phone (877.877.2120, option 4) or send a check (please indicate that it is a donation for the Foodbank) to Sovernet, POB 495, Bellows Falls VT 05101. Mother nature tends to teach humility in devastating ways.

We love you Vermont, thank you for holding us in such majestic power, may we rebuild quickly with the help of our communities.  Here’s to hoping a visit with my grandmother on Saint Mark’s will add a little levity to our steps, right now, she’s in March. There are never any hurricanes in March and if I could just crawl into her diary it would be four days before my birthday. Let’s crawl in together and watch her hired help wash her clothes with a washboard in the bathtub, we can be glad Hitler’s dead.  Oh my…   XXXXOOO  stay high and dry until next time…

Maggie Duffield, St Mark’s Place, New York, March 4, 1937

Lunch with Edith over at Charles’s, pleasant gossip.  Home for afternoon.  Grace doing washing in bathtub with washboard she bought for purpose, kneeling prayerfully on the bathmat. Then uptown by bus and to dinner at Bleek’s with M.  Arthur Mann had a drink with us and discussing story he on when LaGuardia called Hitler “brown-shirted fanatic” said effigy of should be in chamber of horrors at coming World’s Fair here in NY and Germans terribly incensed, calling LaGuardia Talmudic Jew (one of his grandmothers was Jewish) procurer, NY gangster and otherpretty names.  Then up to Rivoli to see Roland Young in movie by H.G. Wells, “The Man Who Could Work Miracles”– message seemed confused, but Roland Young grand as usual and we took childish delight in miracles.  Also a Mickey Mouse.  Home by taxi through light rain.  Fine first evening out, felt very gay.  Began mystery story by Dorothy Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon, which M renting from  Clarissa who renting from Stern’s for 3cents a day.  Fed baby and listened to F.D. speaking over radio from Victory Dinner in Washington and he gave the Supreme Court such a lashing, while baby sucked, saying third of people ill-nourished ill housed etc.. now and we must do something about it now and everything did to help poor declared unconstitutional.   Swell speech and so dramatically and effectively done. Splendid day!  By the way, bathed baby for first time myself and we both lived through it.  Also gave M. cold serum which harrowing as usual though not quite so much so.

Here I post a weekly diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2012.

I actually liked Eat, Pray, Love.  I had to be dragged to it, kicking and screaming, by one of my very best friends in the whole world, Barbara Campman, who looks like a lovely sprite, makes profound art and keeps a magnificent garden, among other things.  I pulled hard for The Kids Are Alright, but Barbara won because she said I’d get to see Bali and Italy, and so there I was in a darkened theater amidst a pack of senior citizens (I’m not sure why?), and there was Julia Roberts and that boy who played Sean Penn’s lover in Milk.  “He’s delicious,” I whispered to Barbara.  “He’s too pretty,” Barbara whispered back.  “They’re all too pretty.” 

Casting was a bit of a problem.  No matter if you frizz out Julia’s hair and put her in frumpy ashram clothes, she’s still almost abnormally beautiful.  But the man with three teeth was perfect and the guy who calls her groceries was painfully believable.  I loved the architecture of Italy, the chaos of India and the lush beauty of Bali.  The film hit me hard with nostalgia. How many times had I left a lover and a life and headed off to Sri Lanka and India, Panama and Mexico, Mississippi and the southwest, to find myself or to find other people who would change my life? How many times had I used travel as a drug, to see everything new again, to remember the vastness of the world and my tiny place in it, to get drunk on smells and sounds and accents and cultures that were so different from mine I felt turned upside down and shaken out? 

But the nostalgia didn’t turn into longing because at the end of the film the narrative affirms that sometimes our journey toward truth involves getting on a plane and heading out, and sometimes it means staying in one place and journeying to the interior within.  Nowadays, for various reasons, I am rather still in my life. Sometimes all I do is stare out the window at the sun sparkling off the river, the red-tailed hawk circling, the leaves on the mountain showing their silver undersides and the marsh turning golden in the falling light, and think how lucky I am to be alive.

When I got home from the movies, I ran into the bedroom and hopped on my husband’s lap and kissed him a million and four times. “It was so romantic,” I told him.  “You would have hated it.” And then I jumped on the bed like it was a trampoline because the movie gave me a happy feeling inside and because I’m a grown-up, so I can. 

I guess Eat, Pray, Love has hit such a nerve (whether you hate it or love it, the nerve is still there) because it shows how one woman changed her life.  I know it’s easier with a fat book advance to go off and figure out how to be happy, but the fact is, people do it without that.  I had a favorite English teacher in high school who was about 5’2 with gigantic plastic glasses and 1940s hair. She spoke rapidly, like an auctioneer. “Because,” she said, “I have so much to tell you about literature and so little time.”  She didn’t care about grammar or spelling, she just wanted us to write, as fast as we could, the truths we learned from Dickens and Austen, from Melville and Alcott.  “Look it up in the big dick,” she used to tell us when we didn’t know a word. And then someone would go to the back of the room and flip through a gigantic Webster’s that was heavy as a tomb.  Mrs. Garber used to be a nun.  I thought about that a lot the year I had her for English.  It was a revelation.  Things change, I told myself. Absolutely anything can happen. 

We need testimonies to this, we need to witness other people’s journeys.  That’s why it’s so important to write blogs and diaries. Which, as usual, leads me to my grandmother. Thank you, Maggie, for typing your own journey on the old Corona back in 1937 in New York when maybe it wasn’t so so easy to hop a plane to Asia and find a new life. And maybe you didn’t even need to.

I love this post of hers, personally.  I love to think of Oysters being expensive at 35cents a dozen and thinking about having to depend on newspapers for news of something like the Spanish War because there was no internet, and I especially love thinking of a coconut cake as a little bride… I’m off next week for a little retreat so see you around the 20th until then, enjoy the journey, tralala….

March 3, 1937, Saint Mark’s Place, New York

Food very high now, string beans, 25cents a pound, peas, 23, Beef 39, oysters 35 cents a dozen.  Grace says no cheaper even on First Avenue.  Katherine down about five o’clock with Dale, then M. came bringing Walter Schwinn who is on month’s leave of absence before tooling off to Washington to look for a job.  Katherine had fun with baby, held gingerlly for a few minutes, showed to Dale, watched it eat.  Fine dinner, black bean soup, lovely glazed roast ham, coconut cake that looked like a little bride in white mousseline.  Dale sold another story to Redbook which K. says is one of his best.  K. told me Thyra* was very unahppy and at loose ends in L.A. but wants everyone here to think she’s having a whirl and everything is perfectly o.k.  Doesn’t miss Young, particularly, but does miss man to love and give point to life.  She told K. about practically futile efforts to find out how Spanish War is getting on, no news in papers, and when she called up L.A. Times one evening when a little tight could get very little out of “foreign news editor” either. Discussed Russian trials*.  All company finally left about twelve after elegant evening.

*Not sure if this might be the writer, Thyra Samter Winslow, who separated from her second husband in 1927 (thus her affair with Young) and left New York in 1937 to go to Holywood to work with Columbia, RKO, and later with Warner Brothers and NBC.  When this diary was being written, she was working on her screenplay, She Married Her Boss.  Her magazine publications included Century, American Mercury, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook. She also wrote for The New Yorker, then a new magazine of the Jazz Age, and a book was published as a result of her New Yorker publications entitled, My Own, My Native Land and published by Doubleday.  Later in this year in my grandma’s diary, Thyra comes back, which follows Thyra Samter Winslow’s journey also. The description of her in her biography claims she was “restless, witty, independent, shrewd, kind, utterly mendacious, and sometimes completely dishonorable, and yet she is remembered most for her charm.” Which is just how she appears in grandma’s diary.

*The Russian Trials: Once Stalin had defeated Trotsky’s Left Opposition, he turned on all his opponents, including his allies on the Right. The victory of the apparatus was to culminate in the infamous Moscow Trials of 1936-38 where the ‘Old Bolsheviks’, including Trotsky, who led the October Revolution, were accused of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, murder, and collaboration with fascism.  It doesn’t sound much different from today. Except, ahem, no one went to trial.

Here I post a weekly diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2012.

Recently Nell Curley did a fabulous little write up about blogging with my grandmother in the Commons, and I realized that I have abandoned my poor grandmother, there she is back in Manhattan with her screaming baby and her pretty velvet housegown in the raw cold of early March while her very selfish granddaughter has been frolicking in the country completely ignoring her blog blog blog. For a month every summer Peter and I run away together to a fabulous house in the middle of nowhere with a view of Monadnock Mountain and stonework that makes you feel like you just got dropped off in Scotland, there are soaring ceilings and a master bedroom with fireplace and a loft just especially for taking a tub.  Peter has his eyes glued to the binoculars the whole time and gossips voraciously about the families of turkey and deer and whatever else happens to stroll through the fields, and I loll around in the gardens picking herbs and popping tomatoes in my mouth.  We kiss under the apple trees in the orchard and sleep till noon. It is all very luxurious and when I come home I feel just like a spoiled brat.  But I also miss it a little, the casbah is more of a winter abode, and we’re having another heat wave, in case you haven’t noticed, so I am naked with the fan directly in front of me. To cool myself off I just think about our dear Maggie, all bundled up in wintery New York.  Let’s go see what that city girl is up to. My grandmother was a fabulous stock broker for herself so these tiny little dividends when she was 27 are just the beginning… Mothering might not have come so easily, since she thinks sticking the baby in the bathroom to sleep is a briliant idea, but I won’t make any judgements just yet because I might do the same thing if my baby screamed endlessly.

March 1, 1937

Baby woke up about two thirty and yelled so M. had bright idea of putting him in the Reback bassinet and sticking that in the bathroom so we could get some sleep whether anyone else did or not.  Worked like a charm. Went and got him a little after five,fed him and left bassinet by bed off he went to sleep.  Doctor’s bill came, beautifully engraved, for $250.  Also three dividend checks were in the mail for me: Royal Bank of Canada: $9.50*, Rey Met: $6.25, Am Bs Sh: $6.30 trotted to bank and cashed.  Paper full of stories about sit-down strikes in ten cent stores, telegraph offices etc… Gig news is that steel workes have got raise and C.I.O. is recognized, first time a union has been recognized in this industry.* To Esposito’s* for fowl . Another fight with baby over bottle.  He doing the fighting and Grace and I laughing at him.  In late afternoon Rose and Harry arrived with toy. Harry on wagon (I’m glad someone is in the wagon in my grandmother’s posse!) so had bar set up for him on mantle with grape juice, coca cola and large bottle of buttermilk surrounded with ice in silver bucket.  Stuck nobly to the Coca Cola with a drop of buttermilk for dinner.  Harry talked about getting a contract with Life and how he got signed the same week with Daily News. Bed about eleven. 

*Royal Bank of Canada now sells for about $50 with dividends of about 50cents a share. 

*In January 1937 the CIO affiliated United Auto Workers (UAW) initiated a novel “sit down” strike against General Motors in which striking workers in Flint, Michigan, stayed inside the factory instead of picketing outside. When General Motors demanded that the state militia turn out the strikers, setting a deadline many feared would bring bloodshed, the governor calmly declined to send any troops. In early February General Motors fully recognized the UAW. When Chrysler followed a month later, only Ford remained an antiunion holdout.

*Pursuing the “American Dream” Giovanni Esposito moved from his hometown of Naples, Italy to New York City. Originally launching his business on Mulberry Street Giovanni was forced to close it and return to Italy in 1924 to aid in his country’s war effort.By 1933 Mussolini’s continued rise to power forced his return (with his family) back to New York City. It was in 1933 that Giovanni Esposito and Son’s was founded. as a fresh meat and poultry butcher shop in the same Hell’s Kitchen-New York City location where it stands today.