Book Review: Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
by Vincent Bugliosi


Vincent Bugliosi is an acclaimed criminal lawyer and author, best known as the Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted the Manson family and for the fascinating book that followed called Helter Skelter. He’s written numerous other books, including Till Death Do Us Part and The Betrayal of America, but Bugliosi's role as a television prosecutor in the 1986 simulated British trial against Lee Harvey Oswald is less well known. Yet, this performance firmly established him as an assassination buff, with a strong leaning against conspiracy theories.

In this mammoth 1,648 page book, with 1,000 additional pages of references on an accompanying CD, he aspired to debunk those theories and to conclusively establish Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone shooter in the tragic death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas. (For those who want the five minute recap, watch Bugliosi on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JktLkQbtVbE).

Bugliosi addressed a variety of allegations about the murder—that both Oswald and Jack Ruby (the man who shot Oswald 48 hours after the assassination) were hired by either the mob, Secret Service, CIA or Cuban exiles; that there were actually four or five shots at the presidential motorcade, not three as the Warren Commission claimed; that the home film taken by Abraham Zapruder had been tampered with; and that Oswald was a poor marksman and never could have succeeded in killing the president with his inadequate rifle.

Let's look at some of those claims and what a few of his critics have to say about them.

Historically, according to Bugliosi, the mob has almost always used their own men, in pairs or with backup, but not alone. The few times that they deviated from this rule were to kill other mobsters, usually hiring young, poor black men to do so. Bugliosi argued that no one cared enough about mobsters, or sadly, about young, disenfranchised black men for this to have provoked much of an investigation. The likelihood that the mob would have hired two novices like Oswald and Ruby seemed ludicrous to him. Also, there’s an unwritten rule among the Mafioso that they don't kill law enforcement and when they do commit public executions, they make sure not to get caught! They certainly wouldn't have shot somebody in an open space right in front of a room full of police officers and reporters the way Jack Ruby did.

The CIA would have rejected Oswald as an emotionally unstable loner with a long history of Marxist tendencies. He never would have qualified as an agent for them because they couldn’t have relied on him to follow orders, Bugliosi argued. More importantly, Oswald was a fierce supporter of Fidel Castro. Why would he have collaborated with the CIA, who had tried to take down Castro in the Bay of Pigs? Some conspiracy theorists say that Oswald was actually quite right wing, not left, and that he was only pretending to be a Marxist. But that would have made him an exceptional actor having "pretended" to be someone he wasn't for his wife, mother, brother and anyone else who knew him, right back to his teenage years.

The number of shots fired is a more complex issue, as is the location from where they were fired. Conspiracy theorists claim that the bullet that killed Kennedy went through the front of the head and out the back of his skull, blowing his brains out. If that were true, a shooter would have had to have aimed from the infamous grassy knoll, a small hill along Elm Street in front of the motorcade. But The Warren Report stated that there were only three shots: the first one missed, the second one hit the president in the back and the third one was the fatal head shot. Supposedly, the second bullet went through the back of JFK's neck, exited through his throat, proceeded to hit Governor Connally in the back, injured his shoulder and right wrist in flight and exited through his thigh.

One can see why this scenario has been referred to as the "magic bullet" theory and why it's so hard to comprehend. Adherents to the JFK conspiracy notion, as well as many current history textbooks, place the governor directly in front of the president in the limousine. If indeed Connally had been sitting in that position, the single fatal bullet could not have hit Kennedy and then moved in such a seemingly twisted trajectory to injure Connally. However, Bugliosi stated emphatically that the governor was not sitting directly in front of the president, but rather in front of him and slightly to the left. That would have enabled our single bullet to follow a straight-line path and hit both men the way it did.

One problem with The Warren Report is its size. The original 888 page report was followed by 26 volumes (more than 50,000 pages!) of supporting documentation, thus making it virtually impossible for the average person to read. Bugliosi felt that this was unfortunate because he extolled the exhaustiveness of the report. But covering every angle and aspect of the assassination was both the report's strength and, by limiting its critical findings to a small number of intrepid readers, its weakness.

The movie JFK: The Case for Conspiracy by Robert Groden alleged that there were four or five shots, which would have necessitated a second shooter, probably operating behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll. The Case for Conspiracy showed actual footage of the president and his wife arriving in Dallas and driving into Dealey Plaza, and stated that 80% of the witnesses heard a shot coming from the grassy knoll, whereas Bugliosi insisted that only four out of 494 witnesses heard a shot from that direction. Everyone else confirmed that the shot came from the Texas School Book Depository, where Bugliosi believed that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots in succession. (One thing to keep in mind here is the notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony, which has been repeatedly demonstrated by social psychologists.)

In the Groden movie, which used contemporary footage, Connally is sitting directly in front of Kennedy. Why can’t we see with our own eyes what Bugliosi says happened? Because this was the ‘60s and it was an amateur home movie. The quality of all the various videos taken that day—including the film by Zapruder, who was standing closest to the president during the shooting—was so poor that even close-up shots made it difficult to discern what happened (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-cri43ttTo&feature=related). As well, the car passed right underneath a large metal sign to the Stemmons Freeway, slightly before the shooting, further impairing our visibility.

As an example of the poor resolution of the film, Groden made a case for a "Black Dog Man" standing up on the grassy hill behind the picket fence, but when he focused in on the image, all I could think was, "Good grief! Where’s my magnifying glass? Or better yet, my telescope!" It would have taken extraordinary vision and imagination to have distinguished a human face on that film. What was disconcerting, though, in this movie, which was not even mentioned in Reclaiming History, was that Groden interviewed a number of doctors at Bethesda Hospital who either treated Jack Kennedy in the emergency room or performed the autopsy. And when he showed many of the physicians, as well as a nurse, the autopsy pictures, they all said that those were not the original photos. Groden concluded that someone had altered the original x-rays.

But Clint Bradford (http://www.jfk-info.com/groden-1.htm) discredits Groden's reputation by saying that Groden testified at the O.J. Simpson trial, stating that he had neither photographic credentials nor a high school education; made his living by studying the assassination and acting as a tour guide on the motorcade route; suffered several strokes with subsequent memory loss; and stubbornly refused to recant his testimony about a photograph of O.J.'s shoes, insisting that the picture had been tampered with when 30 other photographs reflected the same shot.

Bugliosi didn’t evaluate The Case for Conspiracy; however, he spent an enormous amount of time examining the 1991 blockbuster hit JFK by Oliver Stone. JFK followed the life of Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney who became obsessed with the idea that multiple shooters had been hired to eliminate Jack Kennedy in order to advance the war in Vietnam. In 1969, Garrison fingered local businessman Clay Shaw as a participant, with no evidence whatsoever according to Bugliosi, who claimed that Garrison changed his story and his target frequently after Shaw was proven innocent by a jury in less than an hour—54 minutes to be exact. It was perfectly clear to the jury that Garrison had persecuted an innocent man. A key witness, Perry Russo, who was left out of the movie altogether, apparently made his accusations about Shaw’s involvement under hypnosis, and Garrison, through an assistant, had tried to bribe at least one witness to supply false testimony. A number of critics believe that Stone played fast and loose with the facts in JFK, but unfortunately, it became a huge hit; thus, the idea that the Warren Commission had committed the biggest cover-up of all time became imprinted in our cultural history.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested that Oswald was a lousy marksman and had an inferior weapon. But Bugliosi said that Oswald actually won marksmanship awards in the Marines for above average shooting—he was good but not an expert—and that his rifle was perfectly workable. Some believe that Oswald never had the time to fire off three rapid shots with that type of rifle, but both CIA simulations using Oswald's actual gun and CBS simulations using the exact model of Oswald's gun have proven that it could be done in even less time than it took Oswald.

There are some conspiracy buffs who think that the Zapruder film was spliced because certain frames were missing. Bugliosi explained that Life magazine damaged a few frames accidentally after Abraham Zapruder sold them his film, but wisely he had made several other copies, which were not damaged. Ergo, the missing frames are still available and nothing out of the ordinary occurred in them.

What we do know about Lee Harvey Oswald, Bugliosi stated, is that he owned the rifle, his prints were on it, there were three bullet casings with his prints on them on the sixth floor of the Book Depository where he’d been standing, and he was a Marxist who opposed American government. That’s Bugliosi’s story and he’s sticking to it. But there are those who vehemently disagree with his ballistic interpretation, like James DiEugenio.

In his article, "Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and Bugliosi's Bungle: A Comprehensive Review of Reclaiming History", which is a lengthy but worthwhile read, DiEugenio disagreed with just about everything that Bugliosi suggested, including the extent of Oswald’s shooting ability; the price, make and serial number of Oswald's rifle; and Oswald's ownership of the gun found on the sixth floor. Claiming that the rifle was the central piece of "evidence" in Bugliosi’s case, DiEugenio summarily dismissed his argument as woefully lacking (http://www.ctka.net/2008/bugliosi_review.html).

And in "Review of Reclaiming History: A Closed Mind Perpetrating a Fraud on the Public," James H. Fetzer stated that Bugliosi took a prosecutorial rather than scientific approach in his reasoning. Bugliosi had four basic premises, which Fetzer claimed were all erroneous: one, that a single bullet could have gone from Kennedy's body into Connally's as it did [Retort—the solitary bullet theory is anatomically impossible]; two, the shooter was on the sixth floor of the Book Depository [the wounds couldn't have been sustained with a downward motion, thus, the shooter needed to be lower down in the building, such as on the second floor or out on the knoll]; three, he used a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano [the bullets that hit the president and the governor were high velocity and a Mannlicher-Carcano is a low velocity rifle]; and four, the shooter was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald [yet Oswald was seen within 90 seconds of the shooting downstairs in the lunchroom so he couldn't have been on the sixth floor]. Fetzer, instead, postulates several shooters and probably six shots. (http://www.blackopradio.com/fetzerreview.htm)

Fetzer also believes that the Zapruder film and the autopsy x-rays were altered, and that another brain was substituted for the president’s. In addition, Fetzer supports the idea that the US federal government masterminded the 9/11 attacks.

Reclaiming History implores readers to use common sense. Bugliosi is convinced that people just can’t keep secrets, and for government agencies, including Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and future President Gerald Ford, to have conspired to prevent the American people and the rest of the world from knowing what happened to Jack Kennedy, and then for not one of them to have spoken a word about it, including a deathbed confession, for 46 years, says it all.

In addition, Oswald died leaving $183 in the bank. If he had been a paid marksman, who paid him and how? And if he was bought off, why did he shoot the president with a $12 mail order rifle? Why not provide him with not only an excellent weapon but also an airtight escape route afterwards? Was someone there to pick Oswald up after the dirty deed? No, he was wandering the streets alone, waiting for a bus. And it would have been rather sloppy of the CIA or the FBI to have allowed their main hitman to have been interrogated by the police for almost 48 hours before he was killed. If a government agency hired Oswald to kill Kennedy, they most certainly would have picked him up in a secure vehicle immediately afterwards and driven him to his death.

Lastly, Bugliosi said that the motorcade route going down Elm Street and passing the Book Depository was only established four days before the assassination, which would have seriously undermined a collaborative plan. For weeks beforehand, Oswald had applied for different jobs because he didn’t like the Depository, and the night before, instead of staying in and making contact with his "connections," he went to visit his estranged wife Marina to beg her to return to him.

How can we know whose "facts" are correct? It’s hard to ascertain the whole story without reading The Warren Report and many of the major pro-conspiracy and anti-conspiracy books, examining the film evidence and x-rays, having a medical background or consulting with medical experts, and otherwise expending an inordinate amount of time on the project. However, when alleging a cover-up of such magnitude, the burden of proof is on the accusers. Where is their evidence? Just because they pose questions that may never be answered doesn’t mean that there was a massive conspiracy. Often times when presented with an overwhelming amount of information, one must resort to Occam’s razor, which states that the simplest explanation, requiring the least amount of suppositions, is usually true.

Bugliosi made numerous excellent and compelling points. The entire Kennedy family accepted the lone gunmen theory, including Jacqueline, the late RFK, Teddy, and JFK’s now deceased son, John Jr.; the latter even agreed reluctantly to talk to Oliver Stone to discuss his movie and walked out of the meeting disgusted. If even one Kennedy had been dubious of the Warren Commission’s findings, surely they would have used every ounce of their impressive political muscle to call for an inquiry, which none of them ever did.

Aside from the length of the book, one criticism that I have of Reclaiming History is that Bugliosi is clearly self-righteous and condescending towards anyone who doesn’t share his point of view. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly and believes that all conspiracy theorists are just that.


References

Bradford, Clint. "JFK Assassination Research Materials: Robert Groden and OJ." (http://www.jfk-info.com/groden-1.htm, accessed May 18, 2009.)

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, WW Norton, 2007.

Bugliosi, Vincent. "No Evidence for JFK / Oswald Conspiracies." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JktLkQbtVbE, accessed May 12, 2009.)

Groden, Robert. JFK: The Case for Conspiracy, Delta, 2003.

"JFK: The Assassination Movie." (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/jfkmovie.htm, accessed May 4, 2009.)

"JFK." Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_(film), accessed May 8, 2009.)

DiEugenio, James. "Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and Bugliosi's Bungle: A Comprehensive Review of Reclaiming History, Part 1, Questioning the Prosecutor's Case." (http://www.ctka.net/2008/bugliosi_review.html, accessed May 9, 2009.)

Fetzer, James H. "Review of Reclaiming History: A Closed Mind Perpetrating a Fraud on the Public." (http://www.blackopradio.com/fetzerreview.htm, accessed May 14, 2009.)

Stone, Oliver. JFK, Warner Home Video, 1991.

Von Pein, David. "Re: James DiEugenio versus Vincent Bugliosi (and David Von Pein)." (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/10311d20ec887ac?pli=1, accessed May 9, 2009.)

"Warren Commission." History Matters. (http://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/contents_wc.htm, accessed May 12, 2009.)

"Warren Commission." Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Commission,
accessed May 9, 2009.)

Mad or Bad?

According to PBS Frontline, there are over one million mentally ill inmates who will be released from prison in the United States within the next 18 months; the majority of these will not be able to function outside of a supervised environment, and will therefore be rearrested, after either causing havoc or harm to themselves or others.

We have similar problems; Corrections Canada cites research from 2004 that suggests "about 11 per cent of newly arriving prisoners had a mental disorder in 2004, compared with about seven per cent in 1997." And Capital News Online claims that "in 2007, 2,219 male inmates and 133 female inmates were identified at admission to federal institutions across Canada as having mental health problems, which marks an increase of 71 per cent and 61 per cent respectively since 1997."

Why do so many offenders have mental health problems? Well, to begin with, there was a strong civil rights movement on behalf of psychiatric patients back in the 1970s. In a well-intentioned attempt to better serve these people in the community, rather than to warehouse them, perhaps for a lifetime, the patients were deinstitutionalized. Theoretically, this could have been a good thing if the appropriate community supports had been in place, but they weren't.
As a result, many people with mental health issues, particularly those with psychotic features such as paranoid schizophrenics and those with bipolar illness, often stopped taking their medication when they weren't in the hospital. This is easy to understand because sometimes meds need to be administered three times a day. That's hard enough for a high functioning person to manage and extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone who doesn't have the skills to carry around a daily planner, a pillbox, or to make appointments in advance with the doctor and the pharmacy to refill prescriptions.

Often the mentally ill are arrested for small infractions initially, Frontline states in two fascinating documentaries on the plight of the mentally ill in prison: The New Asylums (2004) and The Released (2009), both of which are available to watch in their entirety online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/released/view/. They may steal something at the 7-11 or commit a robbery or break into a house because they're convinced that bin Laden is there or someone is trying to kill them. Since long-term psychiatric care and rehabilitation are a thing of the past, these people are frequently jailed and then put into minimum security. They don't often do well there, having difficulty following orders or simply feeling too agitated and restless to comply with a strict regimen, and may increase their aggressiveness or violence, forcing the system to put them in maximum security. And, of course, the penitentiary is not equipped to deal with anyone who is suicidal, self mutilating or hallucinating.

Sadly, one of the best ways for someone with psychotic episodes who is breaking the law to get help is within the institution rather than the community. This has to change. Otherwise, there will be a continual revolving door of the mentally ill, who clearly do not belong in prison, going back and forth. Frontline interviewed several of these people, notably black men, who did very well inside the penitentiary but instantly decompensated when they were released because they stopped taking their meds, lost them or ran out, and ended up being homeless. When someone is homeless, they can't receive Social Security benefits (or welfare and disability in Canada), and things predictably go from bad to worse.

What's the solution? "We need to have something that starts from the intake, the assessment, even to the community release," said Dr. Francoise Bouchard, Director General of Health Services for the Correctional Services of Canada.

True enough. But we also need adequate community resources and psychiatric care, diagnosis and treatment to help those with mental challenges, and prevent them from entering the penal system in the first place.

Sigrid Macdonald
Ottawa, Ontario

Death of a Salesman -- Male Suicide Is All the Rage

Recently I watched a television version of the all-time classic play Death of a Salesman. I was struck by its continued relevance today, in this time of economic uncertainty when so much pressure is still applied on men to be successful providers.

As you may remember, Willy Loman, our anguished hero in Arthur Miller's tale, was a salesman who covered seven states in the New England territory. He drove for miles, suffered from great loneliness and isolation at times, but always had to approach his clients with a smile on his face. He had to pump himself up every day when he looked in the mirror, telling himself that he was the best, he was going to make it big time; for sure, he would make a million bucks! Except that he didn't.

In every way, Willy was an ordinary man who tried to convince himself that he was extraordinary because his occupation required him to do so. What he was selling was not so much a product as himself. And if he failed, he couldn't admit it because that would be admitting weakness when Willy was a typical macho man of the 40s. But how much has that changed?

The main beneficiaries of the gender revolution of the 60s and 70s were women, not men, and rightly so initially because women had to be brought up to par (we're still not there in terms of pay equity or equal representation in Congress and Parliament, as top CEOs of companies or studying for Ph.D.s in math, science and engineering. But the focus for several decades has been on improving women’s lives by meting out greater penalties for sexual harassment, domestic violence and sexual abuse, and this emphasis has been at the expense of neglecting male issues such as Willy's.)

When we first encounter Willy, he’s having a nervous breakdown. He keeps crashing the car and his faithful wife Linda discovers a hose in the basement connected to the furnace. She knows that he’s trying to kill himself but she can't bring herself to talk to him about it because she's afraid she'll hurt his ego. And Willy can't talk to his wife about his fears because it would be emasculating. (Although women suffer depression more often than men, men are far more likely to commit suicide for a variety of complex reasons, starting with the fact that they don't seek medical help; they don't confide in others because they need to keep up a sense of bravado; they have higher rates of alcoholism and drug addiction than women [but women are catching up]; and most importantly, they choose more dramatic methods such as hanging and shooting.)

Men are particularly vulnerable to suicide during periods of unemployment. At the age of 63, Willy had been placed on straight commission and his salary had been slashed by a company that he’d worked for for 35 years. When he complained to the new CEO, the son of the original owner -- a boy who Willy had known all of his life and even named -- Howard shrugged him off. “Just business,” he explained. “Nothing personal.” “Get yourself together!” So much for loyalty, dedication and reward for a lifetime of hard work. Willy was no longer producing, consequently, he was disposable.

One thing that I noticed this time around that had escaped me during previous readings of the play was that Charlie, a mere acquaintance of Willy's, offered Willy a job but he refused to take it because of his pride. Willy was too good for the $25 a week job. He was a salesman through and through and he was better than that. He needed his old job back for the sake of his self image; anything other than that was simply charity or beneath him.

We all know the ending to this sad story: Willy kills himself so that his family can collect $20,000 in insurance money. His sons, one a full-time Lothario and the other unable to commit to any sort of decent job, view their father's death differently. One sees it as the end of the American dream and his realization is liberating to him. He will no longer strive to be perfect or extraordinary. He, Biff, will be perfectly happy to be just like everyone else. The other son, Happy (who is anything but), is more resolute than ever to carry on his father's illusions about life and what it means to be a man in this society.

In these troublesome times, with tens of thousands of layoffs and people literally losing the roof over their heads, how many more company men will decide to make the final exit? In Britain, five times as many males between the ages of 15 and 34 kill themselves as females. This rate drops a bit and then rises dramatically from the age of 65 to 75. According to the World Health Organization, Canada is ahead of the United States in terms of male suicide at 21.5 men per 100,000 people compared to 5.4 for women versus 19.3 men per 100,000 and 4.4 women in the US [http://fathersforlife.org/health/cansuic.htm].

When suicide is the third leading cause of death in Canada, followed only by cancer and heart disease, and men outnumber women four to one, why isn't this considered a national crisis? We don't need the deaths of any more salesmen! We need to encourage true sex role equality, where we say that we want men to be open about their feelings, from sorrow to rage, and we mean it and don't ridicule them behind their backs. We need to reduce the pressure on young men who are trying to find themselves professionally and in the work world, and let them know that they don't have to be perfect or support entire families without contributions by their mates. We need to stop thinking about men as the ones who are violent and privileged – men as the problem --and realize that the traditional male role is just as confining as the female role, and in some respects, it's worse.

In his book The Myth of Male Power Warren Farrell argues that only men are drafted in North America; men may well be the greatest perpetrators of violence but they’re also the largest number of victims of violence; men work in many occupations that are physically dangerous like firefighting and construction; and men suffer domestic violence at equal rates to women, although women are far more likely to be seriously injured or hospitalized when a man hits them. And something is dreadfully wrong when our young men, the next generation, our greatest resource, have already decided at 25 that life is too difficult and painful to bear.

Happy March 8! It's International Women's Day.

Congratulations to us. We've made such strides in the 56 years I've been on this planet. Women in equal numbers in law and medicine. Women in the Supreme Court, women in the legislature and a woman who almost became president of the United States. Yahoo! But there are areas where we still fall behind: hardly any women in the math and sciences, lack of equal representation in Congress, the oppressive beauty ideal that continues to plague mainly women but also men in some industries, and the things that we do to ourselves in relationships.

In the last week, I've written two short articles about women who remain in bad relationships. This was partly sparked by seeing so much of Rihanna and Chris Brown in the news but also because I wanted to do something for IWD to send out an empowering message.

sigridmac

Smart Women Being Stupid

Back by Popular Demand – Smart Women Being Stupid, Part Two

Recently I wrote about women who were attracted to the wrong men, and I discussed one woman in particular that I knew who was drawn to a criminal. I received so many comments about that short article that I decided to write a slightly more in-depth sequel, asking the question “Why?” Why do perfectly intelligent, often well-educated, decent women who deserve so much better fall for men who are abusive? Worse, why do they stay?

In the 90s, the explanation was battered women’s syndrome. The women had been psychologically tortured and beaten down to such an extent that they were no longer able to make good decisions. They were afraid of their abusers, and often stayed for financial reasons or to keep the family together. Some of this may still be true but it doesn’t cover all women by a long shot, and it doesn’t get into the psychological factors that drew them to the wrong men in the first place.

What could possibly make a bad-ass boy look good? Well, to begin with, sexual chemistry is paramount. We can’t really help who we’re attracted to – it’s just automatic. What we would hope is that if we find ourselves attracted to someone who may harm us, we’ll have an internal alarm that says, “no way!” And then we’ll lose interest. But some women don’t have that alarm. The bad boy is sexually appealing, perhaps because he acts more overtly sexual; he may be more flirtatious, charming or lustful. He may make the woman feel wanted physically in a way that other men don’t because he doesn’t mind crossing lines.

The bad boy’s behavior may start out being something minor. Perhaps he just seems nonconventional. He’s not afraid of authority. He bends the rules or makes his own, so he comes across looking like an alpha male when in fact he’s just defiant or self-centered.

Some men are drawn to the chase and often prefer a woman who plays hard to get or acts like a bitch (and men are also abused. Domestic violence statistics now reflect an almost equal number of men being hit or hurt physically or emotionally by their partners, although women continue to be more likely to be seriously injured or hospitalized by male violence, largely because of their smaller physical size.) Even though they’ll deny that this is true, some women have the same tendencies to go for that guy who appears distant or unavailable. None of us is particularly interested in a drooling puppy dog or anyone who comes across as even remotely desperate or lonely. If a man acts aloof, or is very attentive sometimes but standoffish and distant other times, the healthy response is to think, “This guy is definitely not for me.” The unhealthy response is to start humming “I’m Going to Make You Love Me” by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

Likewise when the relationship starts to go bad, particularly when a man has already hit a woman or injured her the way Chris Brown hurt Rihanna. Those of us watching that sad drama unfold kept rooting for her to leave him and stay away. Don’t go back, I was shouting at the TV. Press charges! I don’t care if he’s 19 years old, he’s probably not going to change. But no matter how hard I yelled, she couldn’t hear me.

This may be true of the women in your life. In my last post, I said speak up if one of your friends or family members is involved with someone who could seriously harm them, but that’s not always effective. We can talk until we’re blue in the face but adults will do what they want to do. Women don’t leave for many reasons. Aside from obstacles with money or children or actually fearing for their physical safety (which is not extremely common, by the way. It is unlikely that your male partner will murder you like my friend Louise. She was killed by a man who had already been in jail for killing another woman so he was a criminal. And women are not killed in huge numbers by their partners. This is a misconception.)

The main reason that a woman stays with a guy who hits her is that she still loves him. She remembers when he was different and when things were good between the two of them. He begs on bended knees for forgiveness, and tells her it will never happen again. She wants to believe him because she wants it to work out between the two of them, even when the rest of us can see that’s not gonna happen! And that he never was the guy that she thought he was early on in their relationship because he was only putting his best fake foot forward.

All of this is compounded if either party uses drugs or alcohol to access. Drinking and drugging impair our judgment, and predispose women to choosing men who also drink and get high – a great pair. Two people who aren’t thinking right and who’re living in a purple haze. Drugs act as great disinhibitors and if a guy has any violent tendencies, whatever control he had over them is likely to lapse when he’s drinking too much.

What role does self-esteem play in this picture? Clearly, someone who is involved with a guy who beats her, or breaks her jaw, can’t feel very good about herself, but which came first – the low self-image or the bad relationship?

When a woman can’t or won’t leave an obviously dangerous situation, I think the best way to treat that is the way we do with addiction. Loudly and strongly voice opposition to the behavior, but offer warm and loving support to the person. Condemn the act, but let that friend or sister know that you’ll be there for her to help her get out of the quicksand. Have a family intervention or a group of friends get together and tell this person that she’s putting herself in harm’s way. Recommend a good counselor to help her work through her issues related to relationships in general, all of which will be very individual.

And remember, it’s not her fault -- blame is futile. It’s judgmental and helps no one -- but it is definitely her responsibility to get out of a toxic relationship. And if we love her, we’ll extend our hand and stand by her every step of the way.

For International Women's Day -- Empower Yourself by Choosing Your Relationships Carefully

Smart Women, Dangerous Choices

Some women are attracted to bad boys. They may be alcoholics, married men, or men with an attitude like Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire, or James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. The worst type of bad boy is a convict or an ex-con and sad to say, there are many women who fall for these men. Why is that?

It may be that a woman likes an element of danger in her relationship. She could like the idea of taming the beast. So she chooses a man who’s rough and tough, or brags about his infidelities because she believes that she is going to be the one woman who will make a difference in his life. She will be the one who will make him faithful. She will be the one who gets him sober. She will be the one to change him.

That kind of thinking can be very dangerous. An acquaintance of mine fell in love with a prisoner. She was a member of my David Milgaard support group. While the rest of us were working to free David Milgaard, a Canadian man who had been wrongly convicted of murder and spent 23 years in prison, my friend, Louise Ellis, worked tirelessly to get a guilty man out of prison.

Louise met Brett Morgan at Milgaard's Supreme Court hearing in 1992. Morgan was a "jailhouse snitch"; he claimed that he shared a cell with a man who confessed to killing a woman that someone else was doing the time for. Louise admired Brett for coming forward. His motives seemed altruistic at the time, so she introduced herself to him after the hearing. They exchanged addresses and began a correspondence, which culminated in a passionate affair.

Brett was in jail for killing a woman in Edmonton. He had been charged with manslaughter and only served eight years out of his ten year sentence, thanks to Louise spending her hard-earned money to get him the best lawyers in town. How did he repay her? Brett went to live with Louise when he was released from prison. Nine months later, she went missing. I was part of a search team that went looking for her. Her remains were discovered in Wakefield, Québec three months following her disappearance. Morgan had strangled her after she intimated that she wanted to leave him. He was convicted of first-degree murder, but he never served out his term because he died of hepatitis C in prison.

Was Louise Ellis a fool to have taken a chance on Brett Morgan? Some people think so but I disagree. Louise was a 46-year-old freelance journalist. She was bright, pretty, spunky and spiritual. She was a dynamic person and a social activist. Louise gave Brett a second chance in life. She believed in him and he was convincing — I know because I met him. Louise wanted to save Brett. She tried to play Florence Nightingale and it cost her her life.

In the past, women were often held responsible for their own misfortunes when they met violent ends. If a woman was out alone at night, wearing a short skirt in a bad neighborhood, and she was attacked or raped, people would shrug and say, "She asked for it." We now recognize that archaic attitude blames the victim.

What can we do about this tragedy without blaming the victim or judging these women for their actions, but at the same time holding them responsible for making bad choices? We can all encourage the women that we know and love to take a hard look at the men that they’ve chosen as partners. Do these men have a temper? Have they ever struck a woman physically? Are your female friends constantly choosing men who have glaring flaws, hoping and believing that they can change them? No one changes another person. The only time that anyone changes is if he or she decides to do that for his or her own reasons.

We all have daughters, sisters or colleagues who might benefit from our advice, even if they don't want to hear it. Women who are consistently attracted to the wrong men may need counseling. Or maybe they just need to know how valuable they really are, and that it’s not worth the risk to be involved with a bad boy.

If we manage to save one life by speaking up, it's worth it. I'm sorry that I didn't voice my disapproval about Brett Morgan more emphatically to Louise Ellis. Perhaps if I did, she might be here with us today. By the time that she considered leaving him, it was already too late because that’s precisely when certain men become dangerous. Think of Nicole Brown Simpson. Neither Nicole nor Louise realized that they needed police protection after they told their spouses goodbye.

On a larger scale, women's magazines and Hollywood movies need to recast their male heroes. There's nothing sexy or romantic about an ex-con or a tough guy like Chris Brown. A goofy, kindhearted man like Ray Romano on Everyone Loves Raymond is a lot more attractive than Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire. If we can get that message out globally, we could save some women and their families a lot of heartache.

Sigrid Macdonald is a longtime feminist and social activist. She is an editor, book coach and the author of two books including D'Amour Road, which is dedicated to Louise Ellis.

Visit her at www.sigridmacdonald.blogspot.com.

LIZ AND GREG DO IT AGAIN AND WE'RE DEFINITELY INTO THEIR MOVIE!

Several years ago, I picked up the book He's Just Not That into You with disdain and embarrassment. I thought for sure that it was going to be really stupid and I didn't want anyone to see me reading it! I was wrong on both counts.

First, He's Just Not That into You is an extremely funny book, which is one large step up for the writers of Sex and the City based on their last movie. Not into You was born in the office when Greg Behrendt noticed that all kinds of foxy, sophisticated, and otherwise intelligent women that he worked with were trapped in relationships that were going nowhere -- or worse, they were pursuing men who were treating them badly. Not into You was a phrase that Greg coined to kindly break it to these misguided women that the men they were panting for were never going to come through. If he's not calling you, if he's not sleeping with you, if he's not marrying you, guess what? He's just not into you! Married Greg teamed up with fellow colleague, and single woman, Liz Tuccillo, to impart the message to the masses.

But is this really true? The book took a very black and white position in terms of gender roles. What about the guy who is really shy? Afraid of commitment? Just too broke to take you to dinner at the moment? "Not into you" seemed to be a trite and dismissive way of looking at complex issues, despite the kernels of truth at the core of its message.

And it was clearly geared towards women, and biased in their favor. Women were foxes -- awesome creatures just waiting to be discovered -- and men were insensitive brutes, but the reality is more complex. We've all known women who are greedy, domineering, overly possessive, unfaithful and just plain nasty.

The movie seemed to recognize many more subtleties than the book, perhaps because of all of the criticism that the book received for being one-dimensional; the movie was nothing of the sort. It's humor was absolutely stellar and I laughed out loud pretty much throughout the whole thing, except for the sad and dramatic parts, which were well developed. We saw so many different types of people in relationships -- the wide-eyed young girl who meets a married man and thinks that he's going to leave his wife for her; the equally naïve female who goes on a date and gets the message all wrong, thinking that it went well when in fact the guy never plans to call her again; and a couple in a serious long-term relationship that is satisfying to both of them except that he doesn't want to get married and she does.

I won't offer any spoilers here in terms of who hooks up and stays together and who doesn't, but I will say that the ending has a strong positive message that it's okay to be by yourself if your relationship isn't working out, and it's okay to make compromises within relationships -- in fact it's essential, as long as you're not compromising something that is critical to your own well-being. But as much as I thoroughly enjoyed this lighthearted flick, I was left with a lingering question as to whether or not it was sexist and portrayed men badly. It also seemed as though gay guys were just thrown in as a token, politically correct measure, but their relationships weren't examined at all, which was too bad because everybody, gay or straight, encounters signals that they can't quite compute in relationships, and He's Just Not That into You offers an interesting road map.

Interviewing Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Author of Mrs. Lieutenant

Hello everyone,

Today I will be interviewing Phyllis Zimbler Miller, author of Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel, a fascinating tale of four Army wives in Kentucky during the 1970s. Mrs. Lieutenant was nominated for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. And Phyllis is also the co-host of the Blog Talk Radio Show, Your Military Life.

Welcome, Phyllis.

Why did you write this book?

I’d wanted to write this book ever since the spring of 1970 when my husband went on active army duty during the Vietnam War and I became a new Mrs. Lieutenant.

Only six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that time in 1970 just as the women’s liberation movement began was a unique time in the social history of women in the U.S. The juxtaposition of young officers’ wives facing the fears of their husbands being sent to Vietnam and, at the same time, having to adjust to getting along with women of different racial, religious, geographic and class backgrounds offered a compelling story.

What took 38 years for this story to be published?

For almost 20 years I did nothing about writing this story. Then two female producers optioned the story for a film. When they couldn’t get anyone in Hollywood interested without having a book first, I started writing the novel. By the time I’d written the first draft, they had moved on to other projects. And then followed almost 18 years of learning to switch from writing as a journalist to writing as a novelist.

And then no one would publish the story. One rejection I got was that the story was outdated because there was no longer any racial prejudice in the U.S. Another rejection was because the four women had to meet through their own jobs, say at a law firm, and not through their husbands.

Thirteen months ago I had an epiphany — I was too old to wait for someone to say yes to me. I decided to self-publish — because I knew there was a market for this story.

Did you have to buy hundreds of books yourself in order to self-publish?

Self-publishing today has so many more options than in the past. I contracted with BookSurge, now owned by Amazon, to publish the book as a print-on-demand book. I only had to buy as many books as I wanted to buy. Then people who want the book can order it through Amazon, and most of these people probably don’t know it’s a print-on-demand book.

I’d like to add that I had the confidence to self-publish my book partly because of two things: One, I’d taught copyediting at the college level and I’d always been a stickler for correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, so in this respect I thought my book was ready for publication.

Two, for years friends read the book manuscript and liked it, but everyone kept saying something was missing and no one could figure out what. Thus I hired a book consultant to read the manuscript and figure out what was missing. And he did. Something seemingly so small but so important — a clear timeline so that readers could easily follow the story as each chapter is told from the POV of one of the four new officers’ wives.

These two elements — good editing and good editorial story advice — convinced me that my book was ready to see the light of day.

What about marketing a print-on-demand book?

I’m the co-author of the Jewish holiday book, SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION, which first came out from a division of a major publishing company in 1992. At that time, I and co-author Rabbi Karen L. Fox had to do all the marketing ourselves. Thus I was prepared to market my novel myself. And what I quickly learned was that the Internet has leveled the field in many areas.

In June I took a virtual book tour through PumpUpYourBookPromotion.com, which arranged for me to “visit” numerous blogs. From this experience I gained valuable knowledge about how to market MRS. LIEUTENANT. And at the same time I dove into social media in order to promote the book. I took class after class about effectively using social media for business.

How do you use social media to promote MRS. LIEUTENANT?

After joining numerous book sites and social media sites, I’ve learned to concentrate my efforts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I connect with people on these sites and share valuable information with them. I also offer copies of my book to help promote a cause of their own. Currently the website TheTwistedSisterhood.com is offering a copy of my book as a prize in a drawing of site members who submit a 500-word essay about themselves. And I arranged for the other two prizes through my contacts on social media sites.

In addition, I’m now sharing book marketing information at my site http://www.queensofbookmarketing.com/. I even sell a Special Report on using social media for marketing books. The report takes newbies to social media by the hand and helps them over the threshold to this new world of possibilities. I know that, after book authors are given a start in this arena and see the possibilities, they’ll be able to come up on their own with even more ways to utilize cyberspace to promote their books.

What audiences have you found to be the most interested in MRS. LIEUTENANT?

Women book bloggers of any age have been very receptive to this story of four very unlikely women bonding in difficult circumstances. For younger women who knew nothing about the Vietnam War era, they find this story a window into a time their parents or grandparents talk about. And for women, as well as men, who lived through this turbulent period — they respond individually to looking back at a period that they may not have thought about for a very long time. For one former army wife, this story brought back difficult memories she thought had been buried forever; for a young woman blogger, the story brought her closer to a deceased father who would never talk about his time in Vietnam.

It sounds as though your book has really had an impact on its readers. I can understand why. For those who want to find out more about Mrs. Lieutenant, please visit Phyllis’s blog at http://www.mrslieutenant.blogspot.com/, and don’t be shy – leave a comment. Or search for the book on Amazon. An excellent read.

Thanks so much for sharing this info with us, Phyllis. Sigrid Mac

Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerac -- seeing what we want to see

Recently, I watched Dateline about two families whose lives intersected when four college kids were killed in a highway accident and one survived. The hospital or the coroner mixed up the identities of two of the young women, so that one family received a call saying that their daughter had died (when in fact she was alive), and the other got a call that said their daughter was in a coma (when she had actually died). The family of Laura Van Ryn went to the hospital every day for 5 1/2 weeks and took care of the person in that bed before they realized that it wasn't their daughter.

Admittedly, the circumstances were difficult. Whitney Cerac , the woman who Laura's family took care of all that time, had a serious head injury and couldn't tell them who she was, her face was badly swollen, and she was in a neck brace. Still, Whitney Cerac was a full 4 inches taller than Laura Van Ryn (!!!), had different colored eyes and wore a belly ring. Yet 100 people visited her and didn't realize that she was not Laura, including her boyfriend of three years.

The first thing that occurred to me was how much we often see what we want to see, despite evidence to the contrary. The other is that we see what we're *told* is there -- like the Stanley Milgram experiment back in the 50s or 60s on obedience to authority where he found that college kids were likely to follow orders and administer electric shocks to other students when authoritative figures told them it was okay. In this case, it's not so much obedience but rather acceptance -- if the hospital says this is Laura, dammit, it must be Laura! Also, Laura's family never went to identify the body. They just accepted what the hospital said about her being dead.

It was an eye-opener although I'm sure that those of us reading about this would think that it could never happen to us because we'd be smarter than that, but how do we know?

Instead of the Ceracs and Van Ryns being mad at each other, they've become best friends and co-wrote a book about the story called Twist of Fate. They seemed very religious; I was thinking the whole time how I would sue the ass off the hospital big time and I was waiting to hear Matt Lauer discuss a civil suit, but that was never mentioned once in a two-hour episode; that part of this very tragic story was refreshing!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23849928/

Sigrid

Clapton: the Autobiography

Those who are looking for sensationalism and all the pomp and glory that go along with being a rock god may be disappointed in Clapton: The Autobiography. Some people think that Eric Clapton came across as shallow in this memoir and that his behavior over the years, particularly to women, was despicable. I didn't see it that way at all.

I think Clapton was remarkably candid in relaying the details of his life -- the good, the bad and the ugly. He didn’t spare himself any embarrassment, starting with his awkward childhood as the illegitimate son of a woman he believed to be his sister, and moving on to his continual, restless yearnings for something more, in both his professional and personal life.

Mesmerized by R&B and blues from pre-pubescence, Eric became bored with the Yardbirds as soon as they made it big: partly because he felt they were selling out and not making the pure sound that enthralled him, but also because whenever he got what he thought he wanted, he no longer wanted it. This was evidenced by his lifelong yearning for Pattie Boyd, which ceased to be pleasurable as soon as she left his good friend George Harrison to marry Clapton.

Always wanting what he couldn’t have, and never wanting what he actually did have, was a Buddhist recipe for disaster. Combine that with the heady lifestyle of a rock star, and the pitfalls and perils of an alcoholic/heroin addict, with a long-standing history of depression, it's a miracle that Clapton is still alive to have written this book.

The book was a fascinating journey through British rock history and American blues beginning with Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Ray Charles – and other less well known R& B artists, whom Clapton worshiped—and moving on to the Beatles, Stones and British Wave, with whom he was significantly less impressed. At times, Clapton came across as a bit of a musical snob, but I think that’s because he was brutally honest about what he liked and didn’t like, and essentially, he’d always been and remains a blues purist. He definitely led a fascinating life and I loved the references to bands we never hear of anymore like Leon Russell and Moby Grape, who I saw at the Fillmore East in NYC; however, I felt sorry for Clapton throughout most of the book.

He was clearly a brilliant, tortured perfectionist who was miserable for many decades while he made other people happy with his amazing repertoire of sounds. But the story has a happy ending. Finally, after all those anguished years of craving Pattie, he moved on to find a woman with whom he’s truly happy, and produced several children after the tragic death of his young son Conor, which left him reeling.

Did he have character defects or traits that were less than admirable? You bet. But I’ve yet to hear people rave about heroin addicts who were such great guys – respectful, considerate and so much fun to be with. Clapton also seemed mystified by many of his own actions, after living so many uncomfortably numb years. But what I admired most about the man and the autobiography were his humility and sincerity; he really tried to make us understand who he was and his storytelling was quite personal, as though he were talking to me one-on-one and saying, “Please understand. This is the way it was.”

Much of Clapton: The Autobiography reads like a step four, or rather step eleven – continuing self inventory, and maybe that’s why he felt capable of writing his story now – because he’s finally reached a place of peace, found "a place to live... in the presence of the Lord," where he no longer feels restless and dissatisfied.

sigridmac

READ CHAPTER 1 OF D'AMOUR ROAD

CHAPTER ONE

“Imagine discovering that your husband is a bigamist," I exclaimed, as Lisa and I donned our jackets to leave the ByTowne theatre.
“I'd kill him," Lisa retorted, as she put on her headband to brace the frigid wind.
“You'd have to stand in line!" I replied, as we forced our way through the large crowd that was waiting for the second feature.
The ByTowne was an old theatre with a wide screen, plush red velvet curtains, and hard uncomfortable seats. The seats were so low that I felt that I was leaning back in my own private jet, waiting for takeoff. But the movie house specialized in foreign films. As a result, it attracted a faithful cult audience.
We had just seen My Architect, a docudrama produced by Nathaniel Kahn, son of the late Louis I. Kahn. The senior Kahn was a well-renowned architect from Philadelphia. He had designed a number of impressive buildings including the town centre in Bangladesh, and the beautiful Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. The movie depicted the son's search for the father that he had never known.
At his funeral, colleagues were shocked to learn that Louis Kahn had not one but three wives simultaneously. He had fathered three children with different women and only saw young Nathaniel when he could sneak away from his official family. Nathaniel's longing for his father was captured perfectly in one breathtaking scene where he rollerbladed through the vast and empty courtyard of one of his father's buildings overlooking the Pacific.
An older woman with long unkempt hair was standing in front of the Days Inn. She looked weathered and carried a tin cup.
“And you call yourselves Canadians!" The woman shouted when people passed by without giving her money. I dropped a loonie in her cup and she gave me a weary toothless grin.
Lisa stopped to light a cigarette in front of a store called All Books. She leaned on a table. It was overflowing with used books with campy titles like Soul Centered Astrology and Killing Rage.
Lisa's match kept going out, thanks to the steady stream of snow that was falling. It was early April. This was probably the last snowfall of the season. Two men ahead of us were discussing the film.
“I really liked the play on words," the younger man said. “I mean, I. Kahn. Icon! Do you think that his fate was sealed by his name?"
“Oh, absolutely," his friend replied. "Look at all the children named Jesus in Venezuela. See the way they're prospering?"
“Maybe they'll get their reward in the next life," the first speaker declared.
Lisa and I laughed. “Do you want to go to Nate's?" I asked. We invariably went to Nate's Deli for a snack after our monthly excursions at the ByTowne. It was hard to say which we enjoyed more, the food at Nate's or analyzing the movies.
Occasionally, we’d vary our routine and walk down to Tucker’s Marketplace, a restaurant in the ByWard market, which had an immense buffet. But tonight, the roads were slick with freezing rain and the wind was gusting at 30 kilometres an hour, so I didn't feel much like hiking all the way down to Mother Tucker’s.
Lisa nodded in agreement. “Follow me,” she instructed, as she grabbed my arm and walked across the busy avenue.
“Lisa!" I screamed, to no avail. She was an incorrigible jaywalker whereas I always dutifully crossed at the corner.
Rideau Street was dark except for the flashing lights above the theatre. About one kilometre west of the Bytowne, Rideau became Wellington Street, which housed the Supreme Court, the elegant Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel, and the Parliament buildings.
The centre block of the Houses of Parliament was destroyed in a fire in 1916. All of the Houses had been rebuilt using a Civil Gothic design except for the library. The buildings were warm and ornate with gargoyles, stained-glass windows, and an ornamental fence. Parliament Hill stood on the south bank of the Rideau River just below the swirling waters that explorer Samuel de Champlain had called La Chaudiere, meaning “The Cauldron.”
The Hill and Confederation Square were impressive, and were often displayed on postcards for tourists. This end of the road was old and run down in comparison.
Lisa and I opened the door to 316 Rideau Street and walked up the short ramp. The smell of fresh bagels and cheese blintzes was tantalizing.
Nate’s Deli was famous for its smoked meat sandwiches. The atmosphere was homey and somewhat schizophrenic. Clearly, the store had been an old-fashioned delicatessen years ago, but a modern annex had been added to convert the deli into a restaurant.
We passed mouthwatering displays of candy, juice, gourmet salads, and cooked meat. A waitress with honey coloured hair, tied up in a bun, seated us at the back in a booth. One wall of the restaurant was covered in glass mirrors. Next to it was a large poster that said "You don't have to be Jewish," which made me smile.
We took off our coats and I brushed the wet snow from my forehead. Lisa's dark brown hair gleamed under the yellow lights. She was wearing a tight pink sweater, which showed off her cleavage, snug Guess jeans, and a delicate gold cross. I felt dowdy in my sweatshirt and baggy jeans. The men at the table next to us craned their necks to stare at Lisa.
Although we had been best friends since our late teens, I was always struck by her stark and simple beauty. Lisa was everything that I was not. She was tall, angular, and shamefully thin with a spontaneous, impulsive, and charismatic personality. Her life was full of drama, even though she had been sober for five years, and worked full time as a drug and alcohol counsellor at a small centre downtown called "Straten Narrow."
I, on the other hand, was imminently predictable. I worked as a nurse in the short term rehab unit of a local hospital. I’d been married to Mark, a Professor of Cultural Anthropology, for 15 years, which barely legitimized our 14-year-old son Devon.
The words that were most often used to describe me were "dependable, loyal, and hard-working" – polite euphemisms for "boring." In the past, I had taken pride in those descriptions, but recently, I had been feeling dull and disenchanted with my life. I was approaching 40. Just thinking those words sent a shiver down my spine.
Turning 40 sounded as appealing as being a prisoner in Abu Ghraib. Dead Woman Walking, I mused to myself. I was already sprouting grey hairs and had been making frequent trips to my hairdresser, Chan Juan, to have her colour my hair darker. My hair was an odd shade of henna at the moment, but I couldn't change it since I had coloured it four times in the last two months. It now had the texture of a Brillo pad.
I had heard the argument that 40 was the new 30, but I suspected that the phrase had been invented by someone in her fifties. If I were lucky enough to live until 80, that would mean that I was already halfway through my life. What had I done with it? Where was I headed? I could be hit by a bus or develop breast cancer, like my mother, who died when I was 10.
Every day at work, I saw people whose lives had been derailed by accidents and illness. Maybe I only had 10 or 20 years left. What was I to do with them? The faster I approached the big 4-0, the more I envied Lisa her relative freedom.
Lisa had never gotten married. She’d had a succession of boyfriends. “Cereal” monogamy, she joked. "They stay for breakfast. Then I kick them out in the morning.” Her tone was flippant but I knew that Lisa wanted stability in a relationship as much as anyone else.
When she was doing cocaine that was impossible. She was involved with one loser after another including men who ended up in jail, disappeared for days at a time, and stole money from her. One even slept with her cousin.
After she finished rehab, Lisa went through a long period of voluntary celibacy to get herself together, and to consider the qualities that she’d like to have in a mate.
Eighteen months ago, she met Ryan at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. He seemed like a bad bet to me. At 36, Ryan had been clean for three years and attended meetings regularly. According to Lisa, some people go to meetings but don't actually work the steps, which involve taking one’s own inventory and making amends to those one has wronged. Consequently, the half-hearted members do not have good sobriety.
Ryan was different. He devoted himself to the program, completing one step after another. However, he had a history of physical abuse. Ryan's last girlfriend left him after calling the police several times during their domestic disputes.
I had cautioned Lisa about her involvement with Ryan but she believed in him. Her whole life revolved around addiction and recovery. To have doubted Ryan would have been tantamount to questioning her entire career, as well as her own recovery.
She was like a televangelist since she’d joined AA. Of course, I’d never say that to her. Obviously, I preferred her clean and sober to drinking and snorting white powder, but I didn't really understand her need for the program.
We were both partyers back in our university days but for some inexplicable reason, Lisa crossed a line in her drinking. Alcohol became something that she had to have and it changed her personality. Her grades went down the drain and she was often evicted from bars for being too boisterous, but the next day she’d have no recollection of what she had done.
After Lisa realized that she had an alcohol problem, she went to the Addiction Research Centre in Toronto, since we were going to school at U. of T. She received out-patient counselling at ARC and they encouraged her to go to daily meetings.
One night, Lisa brought home a quiz and waved it in my face. "Look!" she said. "Here's one test I passed with flying colours. It says I'm in Stage Two alcoholism. Scary! Stage three means I'm ready for the asylum. People lose jobs, marriages, and become institutionalized at that point."
I grabbed the quiz and studied it with interest. I decided to take it myself. Lisa had no objections but she was surprised when I scored high enough to qualify for Stage One alcoholism.
"Oh my God, Tara. You need to get into the program!"
I had no intention of joining the Bible thumpers and no real worries about my drinking either.
"We'll save a seat for you," Lisa had said at the time but it never proved necessary. I got pregnant with Devon when I was 24. It was easy for me to quit drinking during the pregnancy. Afterwards, my alcohol consumption dropped drastically. Who can take care of an infant and continue swinging from the chandelier at the same time?
On one hand, I knew that alcoholism was a disease, but I couldn't help wondering why Lisa couldn't cut back her consumption by herself, the way I had, by using more discipline and self-control. Sometimes, I wanted to scream when she talked endlessly about her meetings and used those little clichés: easy does it, one day at a time, live and let live.
Shut the hell up! I wanted to say. It seemed self-indulgent that Lisa spent 24 hours a day dealing with addiction. It was bad enough when she had a job as an assistant at Nortel and went to meetings every night. Now that she was a bona fide alcohol and drug counsellor, addiction was all she talked about. She was a full-time naval gazer.
And I was a disloyal bitch of a friend to think those things about her. I knew that. Tara – loyal, dependable and resentful as hell.
Lisa was aware of my disapproval. She sensed that I wasn't thrilled with her job and was disappointed that I never gave the thumbs-up to Ryan, although I understood her attraction to him. Tall and lanky with dirty blonde hair and athletic good looks, Ryan had always been a ladies man. He worked as a landscaper in the summer and plowed driveways in the winter, when he worked, which was not all that regularly.
I suspected that he was a lazy bastard, who preferred to live off Lisa. They’d been living together for about six months and I wasn’t eager to hear the latest details about their relationship.
We opened the menus, which said "Nate’s – where famous people come to eat." I’d never seen anyone famous in the restaurant but I always kept one eye open for Matthew Perry, Dan Aykroyd, and Kiefer Sutherland to stroll in. Apparently, Kiefer went to a Catholic boarding school in Ottawa as a teenager.
I ordered roast beef on rye with coleslaw, fries, and a dill pickle. Lisa religiously followed the Atkins diet. She requested the “Quick Burger Platter," which consisted of a cheeseburger with bacon. She wanted the coleslaw but asked the waitress to hold the potatoes. We both ordered decaffeinated coffee.
Decaf: a public announcement that we were too old to drink caffeine after dinner. We may as well have requested Maalox or Metamucil. Next it would be the senior citizen discount. I sighed.
"Still persecuting yourself with the American Heart Association Diet?" I asked Lisa, feeling the heavy weight of my thighs as I shifted my legs under the table. No wonder she was so thin but I could never give up carbohydrates. Even if men stared at me open-mouthed, I refused to part with my rocky road ice cream.
“Works for me," Lisa retorted.
“ I don't know how you can stand to live without bread and your mother's pasta. That's not to mention what that diet is doing to your arteries and your kidneys," I said.
“It's great, the food plan. Who else would let you eat an unlimited amount of cheese, steak, and bacon?" Lisa asked. “Atkins used to have a desert of macadamia nut butter that he mixed together with whole cream."
“That probably killed him." I shook my head. "Eat up. It's your funeral."
We had this conversation regularly. I could tell by Lisa's expression that she was tired of my ongoing lectures. Years of being a nurse and a mother had made me a nag, constantly worrying about other people's health, and righteously telling them what to do to improve it. I also had 15 pounds to lose. Obviously, my jealousy of Lisa's appearance had reared its ugly head. I apologized hastily and changed the topic.
"Getting back to the flick," I said, “wasn't that a great line when one of Kahn's colleagues said that we all have some sort of secret to hide? Mark and I just rented a movie called Normal, which dealt with a different theme, but it was kind of similar. A couple had been happily married for about 25 years. Then one day, the man announced that he’d been born in the wrong body! He wanted a sex change but he didn’t want to leave the marriage. It was really well-written and starred Jessica Lange, but I can't remember who played the guy."
I thought about how attractive Lange had looked in the movie. She was old. I now defined "old" as anyone who was older than me, and "young" as anyone who was younger than me. Lange had to be at least 50 or 55 and she was still gorgeous. That buoyed my spirits until I remembered that I didn't remotely resemble Jessica Lange, who had undoubtedly been a knockout in her thirties.
“Kind of like Boys Don't Cry, except with a happy ending," I continued, "because eventually the family came to accept his desire to be a woman. It was hard to imagine how the couple could stay together – that part was implausible – but it was better than watching the protagonist being gunned down like Hilary Swank."
“And what does that have to do with bigamy?" Lisa asked, as she bit into her cheeseburger.
"Both men were deceitful! The Jessica Lange character spent decades with a man who never told her what he was really thinking. How well do we know each other? Does everyone have deep dark secrets?" I waved my arms, so that Lisa would know that I was including the other patrons in the restaurant.
"I've lived my whole life as an open book. What you see is what you get or it used to be." Except for my deep-seated resentments, I thought grimly. “But with my birthday looming in the distance, suddenly, I don't know who I am anymore or what I want. I don't even know who I want, but I can't see myself growing old with Mark."
Alanis Morissette was playing softly in the background. She was quite the local celebrity. Both Lisa and I liked her music, and respected her dedication to the people of Tibet.
Two guys in their twenties sat down at the table across from us. They were flamboyantly gay. The Asian woman with them had the words "Fag hag" written across her forehead in red ink.
Hearing Alanis must have made them think about Tibet, too, because they started talking about the Dalai Lama's upcoming visit to Ottawa, and whether or not Prime Minister Paul Martin would agree to meet with him. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, was as popular culturally as a rock star. The trio was arguing over how the Dalai Lama could refer to himself as solely a spiritual leader, without any political affiliations, when he had spent his entire life in exile, working for the independence of Tibet.
“It’s an outrage. Almost 1.2 million Tibetans have died from starvation, imprisonment, or murder since the Chinese took over. Surely, that constitutes genocide but the United States, the world's self-appointed policeman, does nothing to stop the slaughter,” the woman declared.
"The States turns the other cheek, so they can maintain their billion-dollar trading relationship with China," her companion replied. He was wearing a yellow baseball cap on backwards, a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt, and large baggy pants with balloon figures on them.
Alanis had stopped singing. Melanie Doane was now crooning, “You leave a lot to be desired.”
"Speaking of Mark, this song could have been written for him," I said, returning my attention to Lisa.
"Could’ve been written for any man," Lisa said. "Don't be crazy, Tara! You're still an open book. You're as transparent as pantyhose: the same today that you were in university. You're just having a midlife crisis. And what's this big secret of yours? Your huge crush on the clerk at the grocery store?”
Lisa laughed. "My God, even Devon knows about that! He says you're always weirding out before you go into Loeb, stopping to put on lipstick in the car or to comb your hair."
"Devon said that?" I felt embarrassed. I thought I had been discreet. How could I tell Lisa that it was so much more than a crush? This boy had taken over my thoughts. My brain had turned to mush. It was as though there was a hole in my head that had always been there, just waiting to be filled with thoughts of Alain.
I fantasized about him day and night, wondering what it would feel like to run my hands through his crisp black hair. At least Alain had hair.
Mark’s favourite expression was "hair today, gone tomorrow." His hairline had been receding for years and he had started growing a beard to compensate. Mark had tried Rogaine, acupuncture, and brewers yeast in a vain attempt to restore his lost locks. He lived in baseball caps but fortunately, he was not the type to shave his head.
Alain's hair was alive with little spikes. He had a brush cut and I pictured him applying gel to his hair every morning after his shower. Then I thought about him naked and embracing me: on top of me, inside me, all over me. Graphic images of devouring the supermarket boy left me feeling giddy, and prevented me from concentrating on my work at the hospital.
When I was giving out medications, I was imagining how much hair Alain had on his chest. Did he have hair on his back, as well? That didn’t appeal to me. Or would he have a smooth, muscular, and relatively hairless chest? Could he keep it up for hours, the way young boys do? Was he a cuddler or did he like to roll over and fall asleep after sex?
These were the pure and professional thoughts that preoccupied me as I dispensed Cipro to my 101-year-old patient, who was recovering from pneumonia. It’s a miracle that I hadn't poisoned him yet by giving him one of my female patient’s hormone replacement pills.
The intensity of my desire for Alain shocked me. It had been so long since I’d had any sexual interest in Mark. We’d never had a passionate relationship. Our connection was based more on affection and compatibility than lust. After years of marriage, our sex life was about as exciting as watching the Weather Channel. I knew exactly when and where Mark would touch me, and how many minutes he would allot to lovemaking.
Moreover, Mark had a strange habit of talking throughout sex. He would talk about everything from current events to work to telling me jokes.
Mark and I had been so young when we got married. I remembered watching Lisa suffer heartbreaks with her "bad boys." She seemed fatally attracted to the wrong men. I swore that I wouldn’t make that mistake. Mark was decent. He was faithful, brilliant, and kind-hearted. I could count on him and that was important to me.
We had much in common in our youth. Our parents had been classic left liberals, who had ardently supported the now nearly defunct New Democratic Party. Both Mark and I were active members of the NDP, and we used to love the same authors like Stephen King, John Grisham, Ann Rice, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Crichton.
Now he likes Mordecai Richler and Michael Ondaatje, and you can't pay me to read their works. Like Elaine on Seinfeld, I almost fell asleep during The English Patient. Nor can Mark tolerate my favourites like Carol Shields, Amy Tan, or Philip Roth, who he thinks is "too American.”
American. He says the word in the same disparaging tone that one would use to refer to the kitty litter box in the kitchen.
"What about King and Grisham? They’re American." I protested.
"Yes, but I'm over them now. I'm only reading Canadian fiction and listening to Canadian music.”
“That should leave you lots of free time," I replied, when Mark first made that idiotic announcement.
Lisa was American. Mark often said to her, “I won't hold that against you," but his joke fell flat with me since I knew the depth of his antipathy towards the States.
Lisa grew up in New Jersey with her first-generation Italian family. When she was 18, her father decided to join his brother in the restaurant business in Ottawa. The family moved here and set up a fabulous restaurant called Enzo’s on Preston Street. Although she’s lived in Canada for two decades, Lisa has retained her Jersey accent and still views herself as American, whereas Mark prefers to see her as an Italian immigrant, which is a step up in his mind.
It’s hard to pinpoint a particular time when my relationship with Mark began to go sour. It may have started when he began to spend more time sitting on committees, and working on his research. His area of interest is comparative religion and he has studied aboriginal people in Manitoba and Quebec. His current fascination involves the role of religion in organ transplantation. Mark hopes to publish a book on the topic, thus, he’s been spending countless hours behind closed doors working on his manuscript.
We had also begun to argue over the right way to raise Devon, who had become an avid rapper, with an attitude that was almost as big as the ring in his nose. Recently, Devon came home with a tattoo on his arm that said, "Rot in Pieces." He claimed that he was only copying Eminem.
What kind of a role model is Eminem? I’ve been a feminist all of my life. I’ve taught my only son to respect women, yet he idolizes and emulates a punk with bleached hair, who sings songs to his daughter about how nice it would be to cut up her mother, and put her in the trunk of the car. How am I supposed to react to that?
Mark said, “Just relax. Devon's going through a phase and it’ll pass more quickly if we don't make a big deal about it. If we get upset, he may become increasingly attached to Eminem and Fifty Cents, or whatever the hell his name is.”
I suggested taking Devon with me to a meeting of WAR, Women Against Rape, a small group that I belong to, which has educational and political components. We give lectures in high schools to raise awareness about sexual assault. Although some of the members of WAR have become a bit too radical for me, essentially, I'm proud of the work that we do.
Mark thought that the group was hostile. He didn't like the name of the organization but I believed that we needed a dramatic acronym to get people's attention. Mark was opposed to me taking Devon to a meeting. He thought that WAR was full of man haters.
Women haters were okay. Devon spent hours every day listening to records that referred to women as "bitches" and "ho’s." I wanted to temper that with some reality. Let him hear real girls talk about what it was like to be sexually or physically assaulted.
TV Ontario has an excellent series on Sunday night called "Renegadepress.com." It’s all about issues that teens deal with, from meeting strangers on the Internet, to bullying to racist attitudes towards Native American kids. I tried to get Devon to watch with me but it was a losing battle.
"He's a kid, for God's sake. Why would he want to sit at home and watch TVO with his Mum?" Mark asked in an exasperated tone. He believes that Devon's fascination with violence on television and in music is normal for young boys, and will not provoke him to act dangerously or irresponsibly. I disagree and now I have two problems: one with Devon and the other with Mark.
Not only do Mark and I argue most of the time, but he is also constantly irritating me. For example, he has a habit of repeating a story a dozen times, always prefacing it with, "I don't know if I told you this." And I want to die laughing at his pronunciation of the name Zdeno Chara, defenceman for the Ottawa Senators. Mark invariably places an emphasis on the wrong syllable.
Worse, he acts as though he knows Chara and drops his name in conversation regularly because he stood behind him once in line at Home Depot, and got him to autograph a piece of paper for Devon. Since that fateful day, Mark has acted as though he and Zdeno Chara are best friends. He rambles endlessly about how tall the hockey player is – 6'9" standing and 7 ft. even in skates – as though this information is not common knowledge to any viewer who doesn't need a magnifying glass to see the screen.
Mark also has an annoying habit of joking with bank tellers, and gas station attendants, then turning right back to me and reverting to his serious self.
But it can't really be these trivial things that bother me about my husband. I suppose that my resentment stems from the fact that our love for each other has died, but neither one of us is ready to face that fact, rife as it is with unpleasant consequences for our lives.
“Alain is not a grocery clerk," I said indignantly to Lisa, defending my lust object. “He is the assistant manager of the meat department."
"Oh, excuse me," Lisa replied, grinning. “Now who's the snob?" she asked, referring to my lack of enthusiasm about Ryan's landscaping job. "At least Ryan is old enough to vote."
Alain was 24. Lisa knew that perfectly well. She was just goading me.
"But I assume your fantasy man has his high school," she added and winked. I looked blank, not catching her reference.
“You remember the B & E kid? She was one of my clients. Had a long procession of asshole boyfriends. Then one day she met someone new. She kept bragging about him. Said this one was a keeper because he had his high school, and didn't have a criminal record!"
Lisa had spoiled the mood, comparing Alain to the paramours of the B & E kid. I had wanted to tell her that Alain was rapidly becoming an obsession. I had increased my trips to the grocery store and doubled our meat order, much to Mark's chagrin, claiming that I was entertaining. Alain must think that we have a lot of barbecues.
I was conscious of my clothes now when I went to the supermarket, and tried not to go shopping after work when I knew that he wouldn’t be on duty.
Sometimes, I called his house just to hear the sound of his voice on the answering machine. I was careful to call from a pay phone or to use the *67 function in case he had call display. I had become Stalker Mom and it scared me.
Not only had I memorized Alain's work schedule, but also I was forcing myself to listen to a double album by Pearl Jam because Alain loved the band. Listening to Pearl Jam was about as much fun as studying for a physics exam. I found them to be bleak: funereal even. Their CD was called Lost Dogs and had one cheerful title after another like "Sad,” "Down," "Alone," and "Fatal." These boys made Pink Floyd look like optimists. Then suddenly, almost at the end of their second CD, the band let loose with their rocking hit of the cover song by The Cavaliers, “Last Kiss.”
Thank God for that song, so that I had something positive to say to Alain about his music. I couldn’t bear the idea of him thinking that I was ancient, matronly or clueless. I barely knew the boy but having him like me was so crucial to my self-esteem that I was studiously analyzing his likes and dislikes, so that we would have more in common. What was next for me? Midriff tops, hip hugger jeans, and liposuction?
I had become Jack Nicholson. For years, I had admired Nicholson's talent. From Five Easy Pieces to The Crossing Guard, he was an amazing and versatile actor. But once I heard him on television and he sounded like a dirty old man – a buffoon, really – going on about young girls and his new wife, who was in her thirties. WAR had no respect for middle-aged men who traded in their older wives for newer models, although this was a time-honoured tradition.
Women who went in search of men 15 or 20 years their junior would look even more shallow and pathetic. The only older women who took young lovers and didn't look ridiculous were the rich and famous like Demi Moore. Dazzling Demi could have anyone she wanted but that didn't prevent Jay Leno from having a field day, mocking her relationship with Ashton Kutcher.
I was a carnal being. My needs were not being satisfied at home. I was just going through the motions with Mark when we had sex, and the only way that I could get excited was to think about Alain. Lisa was wrong in assuming that I might not act on my fantasies, but she seemed uptight tonight, and I had lost interest in confiding in her.
"Come on, Mary Kay Letourneau. Give me the dirt about the grocery boy," Lisa said.
"Mary Kay who?"
"Letourneau! You know, the teacher from Washington State who had sex with her 13-year-old student. They had two babies together and now they’re getting married. So there's hope for you and the meat man."
"Goddamn it," I snapped. "You should think about ordering fries next time round. You have all the sensitivity of cement.”
"It's not the diet," Lisa sighed. "I'm a bitch. I know it. It's just that, um, I don't know how to explain this." Her voice trailed off. Lisa fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes.
"Shit," she lamented, remembering that she couldn’t light up in the restaurant. She flagged down the waitress and ordered another decaf. "This is just between us. I don't want you telling Mark."
"Lisa Campana, you’re not listening to me! I can barely talk to Mark about the movie we just saw let alone anything intimate."
"Oh, Tara, I'm sorry. I'm spaced out tonight. I've been wrapped up in my own problems. My period is late. I haven't had it for almost 10 weeks. I took one of those, you know, tests from the drugstore and it said that I'm …"
Lisa couldn’t finish her sentence. She brushed away her bangs. It was a nervous habit that she had adopted when she was unable to smoke. "The doctor confirmed it yesterday."
"Lise!" I took her hand across the table. "I don't understand. I thought that you and Ryan were trying to get pregnant."
"There's more," Lisa said, removing my hand from hers, as she began playing with the silverware. "Remember my slip?"
"Yeah," I said slowly.
Lisa was just about to celebrate her fifth anniversary of sobriety when she fell off the wagon, and got plastered in January. She’d had a difficult time getting through the Christmas holidays, which had involved extra parties and temptations. One day, she was depressed about Ryan's unwillingness to get married. He claimed to be committed to her and wanted to have children, but he had an aversion to the institution of marriage.
Lisa had been listening to an old song by the Pet Shop Boys, which reminded her of her party days. It was that simple. The memory provoked a craving for cocaine and her depression made her vulnerable to its calling.
"Well, I don't really know what I did that night. It's kind of a blur. I blacked out and was in the mood for Indian food. I do get tired of Atkins! Especially, I miss food with sauce and rice. And I was crashing big time from the coke, so I was ravenous. Anyway, I was in some bar on Merivale but I must’ve left there because the next thing I knew, I was in an Indian restaurant stuffing myself with tandoori chicken. A guy at the table next to me got to talking. Then it’s a blur. All I remember is being in his apartment, putting my clothes back on, and him asking if I was okay to drive." Lisa's voice was barely audible.
"You went home with a complete stranger?" I was incredulous.
"You might want to say that a little louder," Lisa replied. "I think the guys at the back table missed it. Oh, and you should have said black stranger.”
"Black? I thought he was Indian."
"He was, but he referred to himself as a black man. And if this is his baby, it’ll be black, too! You think "Mr. I Don't Want to Get Married" will be happy about that?"
My head was spinning. Lisa hadn’t wanted children in her twenties but when she hit 35, her maternal drive erupted like a volcano. She had often said that even if she didn't have a partner, she wanted a baby. Now that she was sober, the slip notwithstanding, she was perfectly capable of raising one by herself. She would want this child but there was no telling how Ryan would react to the news that it may not be his. What if the baby was born white? If she told Ryan, would Lisa have ruined her relationship with him for nothing?
Worse. She had kept this from me. She had not trusted me enough 10 weeks ago to have told me about the encounter with the stranger when it occurred. Not that I could have done anything about it but I just assumed that Lisa and I told each other everything. I thought that she viewed me as her closest confidant and yet she had been worrying, and feeling alone all this time: all because of my judgmental attitude.
"I don't know what to say. I feel so badly for you! You have some tough decisions to make. Are you going to keep the baby? Will you tell Ryan? What about the Indian guy? Pregnancy should be a happy time, especially at our age. I mean, it's not like we’re teenagers, desperately trying to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.” I paused.
"I also feel terrible that you hid this from me. We're best friends. You can tell me anything. I didn't mean to be so critical about Ryan or your relationship. I've been a real idiot but it's only ‘cause I want the best for you."
"Stop apologizing, already! I lead a crazy life compared to you. You're an old married lady. You don't understand the singles life, let alone the complications of the life of an addict. We've always been different that way but it hasn't affected our closeness. Yeah, I admit I didn't want to hear your moralizing, which is why I never told you about the guy – whose name I don't know, so I could never find him – but also I didn't tell you because I didn't want to make it real.
“I didn't want to say it out loud. I didn't even tell my sponsor. Pregnancy was the last thing on my mind! Ryan and I’ve been trying for so long, with so little success, that I never wear my diaphragm anymore. That leads me to believe this isn’t Ryan's baby since the timing is just right for my slip." Lisa took a large gulp of her coffee, which had become cold.
We stared at each other. Finally, she suggested that we get the cheque. I’d wanted to order the cherry cheesecake with coconut, but I always felt like a glutton eating desserts in front of Lisa. Moreover, I had lost my appetite listening to her story, and it was obvious that she was keen to leave.
I asked if she wanted to come back to my house to talk in private. She shook her head. She wanted to go home. It was after 10 p.m. and we both had to get up early in the morning. We walked out of Nate's on a sombre note. Our lighthearted evening had turned deadly serious.
Lisa had parked in the underground lot at Loblaws whereas I’d been lucky enough to find street parking. We hugged goodbye and I told her to call me the next night.
"You can always count on me, Lise. I may be a smug married but I still love you. And I think that you'll make a great mother. Just send the kid out for adoption when he or she reaches puberty." I smiled. She returned my embrace, but her black eyes were vacant when I looked into them. Lisa lit a smoke and walked off in the opposite direction.

Hope I Die before I Get Old -- a Book Review Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Following prostate surgery, 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman is left both impotent and incontinent. There's a possible solution for the latter but none for the former, leaving our sex-obsessed protagonist in a state of bittersweet agony when he becomes infatuated with a young woman who has swapped homes with him, along with her husband. Predictably, Nathan fantasizes about Jamie and Roth creates two different types of dialogue -- one that Nathan has with her in real life and the other that he has with her in his head, or rather in his journal.

The young woman is contrasted with Amy Bellette, the lover of Manny Lonoff who Nathan found entrancing when she was a young girl in The Ghost Writer. He coincidentally encounters the adult Amy in Manhattan; he's shocked and saddened by her terrible appearance and the toll that brain cancer has taken on her.

Meanwhile, a brash young journalist friend of Jamie's contacts Nathan, determined to solicit his help in writing a biography of Lonoff. This "bio," Zuckerman soon learns, consists of a dreadful exposé about a supposed sordid incident in Lonoff's life. Nathan launches into a long diatribe with his long-lost friend Amy about what constitutes good literature and questions the right of authors to peer into the private lives of other authors. He goes one step further, suggesting that book groups and classrooms should stop analyzing books (I don't think Nathan would appreciate this review, which I just crossposted on Amazon !!!), but he certainly poses interesting and important questions for us to consider.

Having been a rabid fan of Philip Roth's for the last several decades, I read as many books of his as I can. This one was good -- not fantastic because it dragged on in certain parts, but he did a beautiful job of describing the way that the body eventually gives out over time, but the heart continues to hunger for love, passion, recognition and the ability to make a significant contribution to the world.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go to the Hairdresser

Yesterday I spoke to a friend of mine who's having a terrible time with her mother. Her mother has Alzheimer's and is starting a rapid decline, which is heartbreaking for my friend and so sad for me because I've known them both for a decade or more. We talked about her mom for about a half hour and towards the end of our conversation, she casually mentioned that she had colored her hair ORANGE.

Allow me to say that my friend is not a punk rocker! She is just not an ORANGE type of person, so I knew there was a problem. When I probed further, she said that it was like a Lucille Ball red but then she'd put something else on top of that which had turned it orange, and now she was searching for yet a new color to add to the mix.

I was thinking of all of the Benadryl cream that I had to put on my poor scalp when my father had leukemia. During a period of a year or so, I colored my hair brown, added reverse highlights, bleached it back to blonde, and cut it off in a "short, chic" cut that made me look as though I had just enlisted in the military. By the time my dad died, I was almost bald!

It was just a distracting coping mechanism. I couldn't control my world and there sure as hell was nothing I could do to help my father. It was so awful to watch him, a medical doctor, suffer mercilessly through 30 transfusions. Every time he'd have one, I'd look in the mirror and think there was something wrong with my hair. It was an area where I could take action. And then when my hair looked horrible, I could obsess about it and make new plans to fix it.

I gave this characteristic to Tara, the main character in my novel. So if you wonder why she's a little odd, it's because she lives by the philosophy, "hair today, gone tomorrow."

Sigrid Mac
Author and Editorhttp://damourroad.blogspot.com/

MEET ROBYN DEMBY -- AUTHOR OF WHAT THE STORYTELLER BRINGS

SIGRID: Welcome, Robyn. Thanks for being here.

ROBYN: My pleasure.

SIGRID: Can you give me a description of your novel, What the Storyteller Brings?

ROBYN: Sure, here's a brief summary: Meet Rosaline, a young girl in high school who calls herself the storyteller. Every Tuesday, she and her friends meet in her room for girl talk. Then they move on to more exciting things like storytelling. In these tales of adventure, she even uses real life characters like her friends and this boy on which she has a crush. In one story, fifteen students get kidnapped. Her listeners keep coming back for more as they wonder what will happen as the women are herded through the woods like animals. It’s all just for fun at first, until bad things and people begin merging into reality—like one of the kidnappers. Now, Rosaline must get to him in her story before he gets to them in real life.

SIGRID: Sounds fantastic! What an original idea. What inspired you to write The Storyteller?

ROBYN: This novel was originally written when I was fourteen. It was my fantasies about a boy I had a crush on written down in this orange notebook that I would carry around with me. Every week, I would write a few pages and bring it to school where my friends and classmates couldn't wait to see what would happen next. They’d get mad whenever I showed up at school without an added chapter!

Ten years later, after joining the Air Force, I received a phone call from my sister in Virginia. She found a box of short stories and other English assignments in my old room. She began reading them to me over the phone and suggested that I do something with my writing. So the next time I went home on leave, I went through that box. I ended up coming across that old orange notebook, and as a twenty-four year old looking back on what she wrote as a fourteen-year old, this adventure about getting kidnapped with my crush sounded like a low budget movie. As I dusted off the old pages handwritten by a “love sick” teenager, I decided that with some major revisions, I could rewrite that book and submit it for publication.

Although the contents of that orange notebook weren't originally about a storyteller, I thought back to when I would get threats from my friends when I didn’t bring it to school. That compelled me to insert a character who had her friends come over for storytelling hour. I kept the part about her getting kidnapped with her crush. As I continued to copy the pages from that notebook into my word processor, I asked myself, why not have situations in her stories merge into their lives and see how they handled them?

It took about fourteen years to get that novel to where it is today, and even now, I still compare myself to the storyteller. She says that once she begins telling her stories, she never knows where it will take her. The same is with my writing. Once I start typing, my imagination takes control and propels me into some surprising places. That’s what happened with my novel as I detoured from the rest of that orange notebook and let my imagination lead me. What the Storyteller Brings sounded like the perfect title for a girl who, through her stories, wreaked havoc into the real lives of those around her.

SIGRID: Having read the book, I can see how it could have taken that long to develop. It's a moving, complicated, really enjoyable tale with suspense and a moral. Do you have a particular message for young girls in their relationships?

ROBYN: Yes I do, and it’s a message I am very passionate about. The negative consequences of sex extend beyond sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Emotional baggage also involves its pain and suffering. That is my main message in general. My novel illustrates a very ugly side to premarital sex and girls need to know from the beginning the kind of behavior that can propel them into a vicious cycle of failed relationships. What gets girls in trouble is that just like the character, Rosaline, they like affection, cuddling, and the idea of having a boyfriend. They let their fantasies run away with them as they let boys tell them they are satisfied with cuddling but too often, most boys are just looking for sex. I don’t feel that this makes guys some separate evil entity; it’s just that they’re more sexually charged than girls. The problem with girls is that they think they can control a situation when they are alone with a guy and things begin moving in the wrong direction. Girls have this false sense of trust in themselves and sometimes in the guy as they think they can stop things before they go too far. Sadly, this false sense of trust pushes them into sex.

What I’d like to say to young girls is this: Sex is a powerful force in our lives and is not to be taken lightly. Abstinence gives us the power to take charge and not let the consequences of premarital sex control our lives. Women of all ages need to stop sending mixed messages and take responsibility for our actions. Recognize sexually charged situations in time to move away from them. Cuddling, making out, or doing things you feel will satisfy a guy is not telling him no. It’s telling him that you will eventually have sex with him. Show him through your actions when you’re not ready for sex. Even if it may involve breaking up with him, say no and mean it—don’t dance around it!

SIGRID: I hear you, woman! That's controversial advice nowadays because so many teens are sexually active. In many ways, this is a fallout from the women's movement which advocated free love and equal rights for women as well as men. I've always believed that SHOULD be the case; however, in reality, men and boys in particular are built different biologically. They also seem to be more into the game, the hunt, and once the hunt is over, might wish to move on. That's painful enough for grown-ups but devastating for 15-year-old girls. What you're recommending is a set of behaviors that will protect young girls from being hurt. Actually, your message is very much like that of a book geared towards adult women, The Rules. It can seem kind of old-fashioned at first, but at heart, its main goal is for females to attain relationships rather than one night stands or end up in situations where they might be used, and for them to feel good about their involvement with guys rather than lie awake at night crying on their pillow over some guy who said he would call but didn't.

Do you have plans to write a sequel?

ROBYN: My fingers are itching to get started on the sequel! It’s not only because What the Storyteller Brings just hit the market and it’s still fresh in my mind, but it’s also because there is so much more that has happened to Rosaline that I couldn’t contain it all in that first book. I already have the first twenty pages written and must warn my readers that drama is jumping from the first page—so strap on your seatbelts! Even though I’ve begun already, I have to pause as I work on the finishing touches of Triangle of Revenge, which will be released in the winter or early spring of 2008. Also fiction, this novel is about a pastor who fell away from the church when tragedy compelled him to turn his back on God. Then I expect to complete the sequel to What the Storyteller Brings in the fall of 2008.

SIGRID: I can't wait. I enjoyed the first book so much and the Triangle of Revenge sounds awesome too. Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview, and I'd like to inform my readers that Robyn Demby is a native of Chesapeake, VA. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Religion from Mount Olive College, North Carolina. Retired from the Air Force, she currently resides in Goldsboro, NC where she writes full time. What the Storyteller Brings is available on Amazon.com, so grab your copy now. Also, you can visit Robyn on My Space at http://www.myspace.com/demby6. Don't forget to add her to your friends’ list.

D'Amour Road has been accepted by the Braille Institute

D'Amour Road has been accepted to be part of the permanent collection of the Braille Institute. I'm very excited about that because they are selective about the books that they put on tape and they don't accept everything by a long shot.

Also, my sister is visually impaired from a degenerative retinal condition called retinitis pigmentosa and she has never been able to read my book. Once it's on tape, she'll be able to hear it and offer her criticism ;-)

Unfortunately, they can only put it on tape cassette rather than CD because they give a certain type of cassette player to the blind and visually impaired. I would have preferred it on CD but I'm thrilled that people with limited or no vision will be able to hear my story about female friendship, midlife crisis and unrequited love.

Sigrid Mac

New review of D'Amour Road by the author of Equal Partners

What I liked about D’amour Road

I finally managed to find the time to read D’amour Road. The book is well written and carefully edited. But of course I would expect nothing less from Sigrid Macdonald. What I want to include here is the outstanding features. They are not listed in order of importance.

1. The story unfolds in Ottawa and surrounding areas. As an Ottawan, I found myself in a familiar environment. If you’re not from Ottawa, the book may tempt you to come and pay us a visit.

2. Without apologies, the author serves us a “slice of life.” It’s all there: addiction; unrequited love; greed; entrapment in an unsatisfactory job, marriage, etc.; confronting middle age and of course our own mortality; our obsession with looks and youth; and many other human flaws.

3. The book kept my attention from the first sentence to the last. I was tempted to peek at the last pages; good thing I didn’t. I would have missed out on a really surprising resolution.

4. Dialogues are never easy for a novelist. But Sigrid makes it look easy. The dialogues are vivid; the characters seem to be talking in my presence, like in a play.

5. The epilogue is unusual. It includes the “About This Book” as part of the book. It reminds us that reality and fiction are not clearly delineated. A clever device; I am sure the author won’t mind if she is imitated.

6. The novel opens a small window into the female mind through which males can peer! Other female writers have done that; but it was done quite effectively in this case.

7. The book does not mention it, but Evolutionary Psychology (E.P.) figures prominently here . E.P. deals with old instincts that we still carry from our primitive days. The woman who starts a relationship with a former prison inmate, or an abuser, is responding to an instinct as old as the world. In primitive times a woman chose the toughest male she could get. She had a better chance of surviving if her mate was as vicious as possible. Hers was a world inhabited by frightening beasts and even more dangerous humans. While not needed anymore, such an instinct is acted upon by some modern women. E.P. applies to men as well but in different ways.

Roland Ezri, author of Equal Partners
http://www.equalpartners.ca