Tiny Tremors

  Today New York city down to Virginia had a sizable shaking, a rarity for the East Cost and unlike California where I reside, and earthquakes come with the price of being in L. A. Ironically, my very first earthquake was back in New Jersey in 1992, I was living in Hoboken and would drive home to my grandmother's house in Wyckoff, to stay with my Aunt while my grandmother had flown to Atlanta to stay with my parents over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Unfortunately, my Grandmother had taken seriously ill the last days of her stay and never made it to eat turkey. The morning she died, I had woken up in my aunt's bedroom jolted by what sounded like a truck going over the railroad tracks in the very early morning, jolted from my sleep like waking from a bad dream, to find out later we had a small earthquake. I was amused as I drove into the East Village to work on editing my thesis film in the basement of the blue building that now is a dorm for NYU, later to walk past the guard Romeo, who let me stay past closing hours to get my film done. I remember walking outside to smoke a Djarum cigarette after calling my Mom to hear my Grandmother had passed - she was in her 80's back then, so the cancer took her fast. As I walked up 2nd Avenue for a egg cream at the Gem Spa, I thought of all the Sunday family dinners we had growing up - the amount of people she prepared massive dinners for, how every holiday was another feast to wade through. I thought of how food, love, and memories are like deep crevices inside us living on forever, just waiting to be remember with one tiny little jolt. For this I am grateful.  Rock on, Gram.

9/11 : A Love Story

Dreams are often little bits of life taken in and reorganized into tiny bits of feeling, later remembered as possible clues to what may lie ahead.  Like I said, my impressions formed in me early, and my identification with my family as "New Yorkers" paramount. I grew up on WNET, the New York PBS station that became my first Film School, before NYU. I take that back, Bugs Bunny was my first film school. Anyway, I remember my teenage brain obsessed with "Monty Python's Flying Circus", the best British import to hit the U.S. since the Beatles and the Kinks. One sweltering August night after Monty Python was finished, WNET ran a series of anti-war films and documentary newsreel footage commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What I saw before me, was hardly celebratory as black and white newsreel footage showed the shadows of human beings gone in a flash were now images on the sidewalk where they had stood and breathed moments before. A naked man walked aimlessly amidst a barren landscape, where was nothing left, only smoke and rubble. Faces turned to camera one side, half melted.  Women holding children, deformed, in their arms, crying.

Sleep did not come easily that night. Images, dark and full of torment, haunted my dreams. I kicked off the sheets trying to push away the shadows where a dark fear the size of a mushroom cloud hovered over me, when a series of dreams ensued. First, I was seated on a plane with my Mother seated beside me, when suddenly several men walked up the aisle carrying guns. They passed out notes written in prose, saying we were soldiers marching to war on behalf of God. I knew we were about to die when suddenly the dream shifted, and I was looking out over the George Washington Bridge and the majestic New York skyline which was now engulfed in dark, black smoke that hovered over the lower portion of the city. I woke in a sweat, my heart pounding like a drum and ran downstairs to tell my Mother. The summer of 1973, and I quickly forgot the dreams.
Years later as I sat in my office in Westwood, on hold with United airlines trying to book a flight back to New York for a shoot I was producing, when I staring across bustling Westwood Boulevard where an advertisement for women in the Armed forces took up the entire side of the building. The female soldier seemed to warn me on some level, as I studied her stance, holding her gun out in a warning against the enemy to not come any further. I thought it was off as I waited on hold attempting to make flight arrangements for my Mother. As I was about to book my seat on United flight 93, I suddenly remembered the dreams from when I was a kid. Maybe it was the female soldier giving me a superstitcious chill, but something inside me said to me "wait".

I then put down the phone, called my usual airline of choice, Delta,and booked us on separate flights through New York's JFK airport on September 10, 2001.
Instead of on United flight 93 on 9/11.

 The morning of September 11th, I woke without the sound of the alarm, as a haze of confusion parted in small steps and the fog of traveling weeks on end lifted slowly, a soft thin veil parting past and future, on a day that would prove to be like no other. The "kitty-alarm clock" - the cold wet nose of Binky the love cat, now transported me back into my bedroom, as I look around at the cool green curtains partitioning out the September heat and mass hysteria about to erupt. I lie in stillness taking in the moment.

The heaviness of jet lag weighs down in my ankles after several weeks of living in another time zone while driving my mother around the Tri-State area, on what I called the "Goodbye" Tour" - visiting sick relatives in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, who are about to pass on. Driving highways I used to know, forced my brain to reconnect the dots, and now I lay exhausted. Even though my body was back in California, my head was still driving around New York somewhere. I woke early, as I was still on East Coast time. Just twenty-four hours before, I was taking the Lexington line downtown to say good bye to my cousin, the spitting image of my Dad and my favorite uncle Ralph, before flying back to Los Angeles that afternoon. As I navigated my way through the construction site walking past scaffolding, and vats of cement waiting to build yet another high rise, I was transported back in time. My father would take me to the construction sites and show me how the buildings were made. He leave before dawn each day to lay brick on the apartments, hospitals, and office buildings built from the 1940'S through the 1970'S - West side, East side, Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Saint Vincent's Hospital to Riker's Island, and eventually, the World Trade Towers, my Dad came home caked with crusts of cement clinging for life. A special pink gel which looked like it came from Mars, softened the caked on cement, transforming him from construction worker to father. Every day he would rise early and cross the George Washington Bridge to the other side, Nirvana, land of opportunity.

All these memories weigh heavily as I glided over the hard wood floors, heading for the phone to dial my BF, Neil, to pursue the java quest and meet at one of the laid back Santa Monica cafes. As he answered in his famous effete way "When did you get back? What were you doing there?", I also herd a warning in his voice.

"Obviously, you haven't turned on the television yet this morning", he snapped. The last time Neil had said those exact same words, John F. Kennedy, Jr's plane had just been reported missing over the coast of Martha's Vineyard.  Not a good sign.

I put down the phone and walked to the television, pressing the power button, not really wanting to know what society ill lay waiting to bum me out. The calm cool collected voice of news anchor Peter Jennings' describing how an unidentified airplane had just flown into one of the towers at World Trade Center stopped me dead in my tracks.

Images flooded me. My former boyfriend proposing in the lobby of World Trade Center. Hot dogs with my family in Battery Park. No Nukes concerts. Climbing to the top of the Statue of Liberty in St E's camp. This was a bad dream that I wanted to wake up from and couldn't.

Somewhere between Nine fifteen and Nine-Thirty A.M. time stopped. The second plane hit Tower Two. Peter Jenning's voice began to crack as he described the unfolding events. I fell to my knees, collapsing along with the buildings. Planes hitting the Pentagon. Seven minutes as a dumbfounded president refused to leave his seat before a Kindergarten class. I stepped from my apartment door, only a few miles north of LAX, where I had lived with constant jet noise every day for the past fifteen years. Except for that day.


When the news of the planes used in the attack came out and I learned United flight #93 had crashed into the ground after the brave passengers stood up to terrorists and prevented it from hitting the Capitol, I suddenly remembered the dreams and realized how it wasn't my day. As long as it doesn't touch us, we never know the depth of tragedy until it strikes our door.  

9/11 will be the day I grew up and learned home is what you carry around inside of you, no matter where you live. We are one global home.
Peace.

"A Girl's Gotta Do What A Girl's Gotta Do...do be do be do"

I was an impressionable child. Some of my best memories were of my Aunts singing off key at the top of their lungs, to "Strangers In The Night" by Frank Sinatra. While Aunt Molly and Aunt Jay crooned along with Frank, smoking Chesterfield non-filtered in one hand, sipping a Brandy Alexander in the other, those immortal words they crooned lingered in my ear - "What were the chances, we'd be finding love before the night was through?" My question, exactly.

For most divorced women thrown back into the cesspool called "dating", the search for an ideal mate becomes something akin to a quest for the Holy Grail. Here I was - Thirty-something, successful, sexy, and finally comfortable in my own skin after many years of trying on new shoes to fit an old pair of feet. The irony was, that no matter what level of success myself or my fabulously sexy single girlfriends had, the minute it came to romance, we all dropped our guard, our friends, and our panties at the first sign of interest. Why do women gave up their personal power so easily when it comes to love? It makes us turn into complete blithering idiots, saying things like  "He's my soul mate!" Personally, I was enraged at being baited by the "Love Hook" after my fifteen year marriage ended, being thrown into the bitter waters of divorce like a spawn swimming upstream, against all odds to find another mate. Even more annoying, that just like my Aunts before me, I bought the bait you could meet your "soul mate" on a chance encounter. I finally realized not only did this haunt my earliest illusions of romance, but my ideal of love had been created by a 1060's love song. Obviously,  I were in big trouble.

A Question of Balance
Granted, my twelve year marriage kept me out of the dating cesspool, until post-divorce dropped me down in the cold harsh world of Online dating. Surfing the internet for dates felt like trolling for flounder. Websites like Match.com, Zoosk, eHarmony, called out like a siren to luring me into perilous waters, where I dare not tread. Instead I played it safe on shore, waiting for the perfect "chance encounter" to be divinely ordained by the universe. As if.

Post divorce, I had been dating recently broken-up or divorced guys, which my BFF Karin, referred to as "The Walking Wounded" - they acted like kids in a dating candy store who wanted everything. Unfortunately after the sugar rush was over, they ran for the door screaming, "I'm not ready, it's too soon!". The sad thing about dating after divorce is, most women have no patience left for games. By the time the game is over, they are left sitting alone in bed devouring a box of chocolates, watching Oprah, trying to figure out what was the train wreck that just just hit me?Was it love or really lust, at first sight? The truth is, no matter how much you thought you "connected" with another person (We're "soul mates, remember?) most women go straight for the unholy trinity of expecting too much, too soon as they run for the door.

As I pondered why women make it so easy for men to play their infantile game and win, like- what makes the chase work, and why must there even be a chase? So, I chose to take a good hard look at the bodies buried in the back yard, which happened to com on a much needed vacation in Hawaii with gal pals, Karina, and Pamela, as we compared notes on the various relationships we had gone through in the past year.

"Clearly, you have to take the power into your own hands!" Pamela said confidently as we sipped our drinks poolside, the Kona sun sank over the tropical horizon.

"What does that mean exactly?" I asked, as I had pretty much resigned myself to spending the rest of my life alone and showering what emotions were left on Binky the Love Cat, who deserved it way more than some of the losers I had gone out with.

"Simple! It's all about prolonging the chase", Pamela continued confidently, "because as soon as they "get it, they're gone. So, why not make them wait until we know they are worth it, right?".

Pamela was one of my more crazier friends, she seemed to be channeling the ministry of sound advice but suddenly that stupid book, "The Rules" popped up in my head, like a bad hairband from the 80'S. Simply stated, it says, if we place too much outcome on a new relationship ("He's the one"!), we upset the balance of things unfolding naturally as a result of too much expectation and it's over before it had a chance to begin- meanwhile, the guy thinks you're moving in tomorrow and presses the Auto Freak-Out button, heading for the door. After it's over, you lie in bed for two weeks with Ben&Jerry, trying to connect the pieces of the puzzle. It's true- we've all cave in for love, but at what cost to our self-respect? What we've really lost in the end, is our balance.

The Masturbation Manifesto
 Did my friend Pamela hit the nail on the "head"? It is all about keeping your personal power, even if you don't resort to using the Magic Wand before leaving for the next date. Which leads me to ask, just how to you hold out from doing the dirty deed, when it's been longer than you want to admit? For myself, I always caved in with a really good kiss - you know the kind, where your toes curl up as you pull yourselves apart, stunned, as your spine goes "tweak" before you melt and sign him over everything you own.

I continued to contemplate this issues after leaving the girls behind on Kona, when I booked an archeological excursion to tour ancient sites of the Hawaiians on Ohahu, before heading home to Los Angeles. After hooking up with my adorable tour guide who happened to be a scientist, a surfer, and a total flirt, he convinced me into stay a few days extra in paradise to teach me how to surf and show me more of the island. We spent several days in pretend romantic bliss, showing me magical places, and teaching me how to surf in front of Dukes at Waikiki Beach, catch my very first wave, and act out my Gidget fantasy in my bikini for the crowd on the beach. For the first moment in life, I realized that these moments of perfection in life were fleeting, and in reality only happens once in a "Blue Moon".

As I returned back home, I felt my spirit renewed, as I returned to my single life complete with wonderful chance encounters dotting my solo landscape with brilliance. The "Stranger In The Night" did show up after all - and, just in the nick of time when I needed an extra dose of self confidence coupled with racy romance to hold me over until the next "chance encounter".

The funny thing about chance encounters, is that they actually happen. My "Once in a Blue Moon" scenario came true one weekend shortly after returning to Los Angeles, when I headed out to meet some friends at a country fair in an artsy community nestled in the hills below Malibu. On the shuttle up to the fair, a Joe Cool looking guy with Oliver Peoples' sunglasses, sat down next to me, and instantly, we connected. We talked non-stop making polite chit-chat while sizing each other up -it's all about the accessories for me, an x-ray into what page someone is on, and his page, looked very cool. He mentioned he had just come from surfing, which prompted my Gidget story, as I described the thrill of catching my first wave and promptly getting hit on the head with a ten foot surfboard, in the next. As we stepped off the shuttle, he gave me his number, which I put in my pocket never expecting to pull out again. But, that's the funny thing about life - just when you think something, the opposite occurs. In the midst of over a thousand people, we bumped into each other again and despite my hardest effort to not like him as much as I did, I spent the rest of the afternoon laughing at his jokes, and yes, he did pass the "Toe Curl" test, with flying colors.

I never met up with my friends that day, something I've thanked them for, numerous times. It's now eight years since Joe Cool and I have been married. We bought a house right down the road from where we met at the very spot, waiting for the shuttle to Topanga Days. Life, like the windy canyon road, is full of it's twists and turn you can't see, as we march blindly forward trusting, until the path becomes clear, unfolding before us.

For anyone out there reading, my story which is about to unfold and convince you that the minute you stop trying to make things happen, it mysteriously falls into place. So, the next time you find yourself out on a date and dancing dangerously close to doing the "dirty deed" too early in the game- remember, your personal power lies in your own hands. After all, a girl's gotta do, what a girl's gotta do... Do-be-do-be-do.