McSweeney’s

Bream Gives Me Hiccups: Restaurant Reviews from a Privileged Nine-Year-Old: Sushi Nozawa by Jesse Eisenberg

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

Last night, Mom took me to Sushi Nozawa, near Matt’s house. Except she didn’t let Matt come with us and I had to leave in the middle of my favorite show because Mom said we would be late for our reservation and that I didn’t know who she had to blow on to get the reservation.

At the front of Sushi Nozawa is a mean woman. When I asked Mom why the woman is so angry, Mom said it’s because she’s Japanese and that it’s cultural. The woman at school who serves lunch is also mean but she is not Japanese. Maybe it’s just serving food that makes people angry.

Sushi Nozawa does not have any menus, which Mom said made it fancy. The Sushi chef is very serious and he stands behind a counter and serves the people whatever he wants. He is also mean.

The first thing they brought us was a rolled up wet washcloth, which I unrolled and put on my lap because Mom always said that the first thing I have to do in a nice restaurant is put the napkin in my lap. But this napkin was hot and wet and made me feel like I peed my pants. Mom got angry and asked me if I was stupid.

The mean woman then brought a little bowl of mashed up red fish bodies in a brown sauce and said that it was tuna fish, which I guess was a lie because it didn’t taste like tuna and made me want to puke right there at the table. But Mom said that I have to eat it because Sushi Nozawa was “famous for their tuna.” At school, there is a kid named Billy who everyone secretly calls Billy the Bully and who puts toothpaste on the teacher’s chair before she comes into the classroom. He is also famous.

Mom said they have egg so I asked for two eggs, but when the mean woman brought them, they didn’t look like eggs; they looked like dirty sponges and I spit it out on the table in front of Mom, who slammed her hands on the table and made the plates rattle and so I got scared and spit out more sponge on Mom’s hands and Mom yelled at me in a weird whispery voice, saying that the only reason she took me to the restaurant is so that Dad would pay for it. Then I started crying and little bits of the gross egg came out of my nose with snot and Mom started laughing in a nice way and gave me a hug and told me to be more quiet.

The mean woman brought me and Mom little plates of more gross fish bodies on rice. I asked Mom to take off the fish part so I could eat the rice. Mom said, “Great, more for me,” and ate my fish. I like rice because Mom said it’s like Japanese bread but it has no crusts, which is good for me because I don’t eat crusts anyway. I also like it when Mom says “Great, more for me” because it seems like that is her happiest expression.

When the woman brought the bill, Mom smiled at her and said thank you, which was a lie, because Mom hates when people bring her the bill. When Mom and Dad were married, Mom would always pretend like she was going to pay and when Dad took the bill, which he always did, she said more lies like, “Are you sure? Okay, wow, thanks honey.” Now that Dad doesn’t eat with us anymore, maybe I should pretend to take the bill from Mom and say a lie like, “Oh really? Okay, thanks Mom” but I don’t because lies are for adults who are sad in their lives.

The mean woman took the bill back without saying thank you. I guess she is not sad. But she is definitely angry.

I understand why the people who work here are so angry. I guess it’s like working at a gas station, but instead of cars, they have to fill up people. And people eat slowly and talk about their stupid lives at the table and make each other laugh but when the people who serve the food come by, they stop laughing and talking and become quiet like they don’t want to let anyone else know about their great jokes. And if the people who bring the food talk about their lives, they’re not allowed to talk about how bad it is, only how good it is, like, “I’m doing great, how are you?” And if they say something truthful like, "I’m doing terrible, I’m a waiter here,” they will probably get fired and then they will be even worse. So it’s probably always a good idea to talk about things happily. But sometimes that’s impossible. That’s why I’m giving Sushi Nozawa 16 out of 2000 stars.

The Long Walk: A Column About Washington: The Undead Past by Alec Bings

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

We’ll get to Mitt Romney the Privileged Bully in a second, but first let’s talk about Butt Club. As part of the Washington Post ’s recent exposé on the awfulness of young Romney, the paper ran online his 1965 yearbook photo from elite Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Underneath Mitt’s slick, smirky photo are the future candidate’s school activities, from Church Cabinet to Glee Club. But the Post ’s scan of his yearbook picture also cropped in the activities of another, nameless student, probably whoever preceded “Romney” alphabetically. And that student, it appears, was a member of the Butt Club. I have no idea what prep school Butt Clubs are like—and Google is not exactly helpful in situations like these—but just the mere possibility of Mitt accidentally walking into one of their meetings is delightful enough for me. (What do you think Butt Club did? Do you think they had formal agendas? I have so many questions.)

In any case, if you’ve been following the political news cycles over the last few weeks, you’re familiar with the real Cranbrook story. (And if you haven’t been following the political news cycles, congratulations, you win.) The story, reported and written by Jason Horowitz, leads with a vivid recounting of Romney cutting the hair of a fellow student while other classmates pinned him to the ground. Horowitz writes: “As [the student], his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.” What’s more, Romney’s cohorts told Horowitz that Romney targeted the soft-spoken, shaggy-haired kid because he was different: “presumed” gay, as Horowitz puts it. In response to the article, Romney told Fox News Radio he didn’t recall the incident but read the reporting and is “not going to argue” with it. “High school days,” Romney added, “if I did stupid things I’m afraid I gotta say sorry for it.”

The campaign is telling anyone who will listen that it’s silly to talk about the candidate as a teenager, but the first problem for Romney is that voters are subjective and irrational. We may know in our hearts that young people make awful decisions, but Americans have long yearned for stories of presidents’ youth that seem to predict leadership. These accounts can be straight-up apocrypha—think George Washington and his cherry tree—but voters crave a story arc that justifies a place in history. George W. Bush found Jesus, Bill Clinton once shook JFK’s hand, and so on. This portrait painted of Romney as a young man describes a special breed of bully, the kind of villainous and dramatic rich kid later personified in John Hughes movies. Romney didn’t just beat up someone weaker—he organized a mob of classmates to do it. It’s one of several examples Horowitz discovered that portray Romney as lacking basic empathy for those different from him, vulnerable people like the gay classmate or the nearly blind teacher. As is true for most political stories that stick, this tale neatly fits a narrative, in this case one of a man who grew up taking for granted his immense advantages. Mitt’s countless dickish moments throughout this lousy campaign—joking to people looking for work how he is also “unemployed” after leaving the governorship, say—add up to shellac the picture of a callous one-percenter into permanence. An adolescent absence of perspective—that critical appreciation for the difficulties that most people face—can be seen today in many of the social policies advocated by the adult Romney. But now the risk isn’t merely to one member of a minority or one person of limited health—it’s all of them.

Back in the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s mouth-breathing strategist Mark Penn wrote that President Obama’s youth in Indonesia and Hawaii exposed “a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.” In other words, Obama’s personal history was a disqualification, not just from higher office but from membership in his home country. Later, Obama would face his more recent past life as a congregant of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church, which—speaking of returns to the past—deep-pocketed Romney supporters appear now to be gaming to bring back into the fold. In 2008, the chatter pushed Obama to give what this columnist believes to be his greatest speech ever. On a March morning in Philadelphia, Obama said, “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” adding that “understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.‘” Obama actually reworded Faulkner’s line, from Requiem for a Nun—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—which years earlier had been repurposed as an echoing anthem in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia, which puts the idea another way: “We may be through with the past,” characters note, “but the past ain’t through with us.”

Because, the thing is, stories about Romney being an entitled jerk matter for reasons beyond the fact that voters like story-arc narratives. When you run for president—or even for re-election as president; just search “Genevieve Cook” and “sexual warmth”—decades-old stories materialize unexpectedly. But tales of the past remind us of what truly matters: our lives today. Obama’s use of the Faulkner in 2008 was meant to suggest that America’s disturbing racial history continues to hang in our national atmosphere like so much smog, and thus cannot possibly be described as just “the past.” People in this country can understand struggles like these, or they can subscribe to the ur-Republican theory of “America: love it or leave it.” Anderson has it right: Romney may be done with his prep-school bully past, but the fear is that his past isn’t through with him. Memory can be a dangerous wasteland of missed lessons and half-apologized-for failings, but the power of our histories is that they offer up uneasy recognition of who we are now. The levees that hold back our past are often shoddily built and hurriedly raised. By embracing the full power of where we’ve been, we can realize where it is we need to go.

List: Increasingly Threatening Taglines for Beauty Products by Kendra Eash

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

“Capture your beauty with both hands.”

“Beauty—it’s yours. No matter WHAT.”

“Hoard your beauty like you’ve never hoarded before.”

“Take advantage of your beauty—and then convince it to stay the night, just this once.”

“Who’s that in the mirror? Is it your beauty that escaped from its basement cage?”

“Run your beauty off the road—and onto your face.”

“Your beauty runs deep. Six feet underground to be exact.”

“Don’t let your beauty get away. Gun it down.”

“Looking for someone? You just found her—rifling through your beauty. It’s time to cut a bitch.”

“Bring your beauty to its knees. Pistol whip it until it tells you why it’s been avoiding you all these years.”

“If your beauty isn’t in your hands—then you killed for nothing.”

“Maybe she’s born with it. Or maybe she killed her sister for it. Either way, she’s really beautiful.”

“It’s high noon—and beauty just drew its gun. But you’re faster and you riddled it with bullets. Good job, because even with the gaping holes you’re still kind of beautiful now that you put the carcass of beauty all over you.”

The Treaty of the Laundry Room by Mark Hill

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

The Republic of the Basement Suite and the Empire of the Main Floor, desiring to bring an end to all hostilities, disagreements, incidents, etc. occurring in the shared territory of the Laundry Room, and to strengthen the bonds of mutual tolerance between the two great nations, have respectively named their plenipotentiaries as Mark, by and with the advice and consent of his roommate, Steve, and Cindy, by and with the advice and consent of her roommates, Cheryl and Karen, who have agreed to the following articles.

Article I

The Republic of the Basement Suite and the Empire of the Main Floor agree that any and all laundry brought to the Laundry Room must be washed, dried and otherwise processed in a period of no more than 24 hours, beginning from the moment the laundry enters the Laundry Room, with the understanding that failure to adhere to this timeframe grants the other nation permission to move, launder, dry or otherwise manipulate the offending laundry, and that the other nation will be absolved from blame for any damages caused by these actions, including but not limited to shrinking, bleaching and the running of colors, regardless of how “precious,” the laundry is, Cindy, because if your Cowboys sweater was that damn important to you then maybe you shouldn’t have left it in the machine when you went away for the long weekend and then blamed me when it shrunk in the dryer, because it’s not my fault the instructions faded from that ratty piece of crap.

Article II

The Republic of the Basement Suite and the Empire of the Main Floor recognize that all laundry has inherent rights, and thus, regardless of any violations of Article I, no laundry will be knowingly laundered or dried on inappropriate settings, willingly ripped, torn, or otherwise shredded, or thrown on the ground when it could be placed on laundry racks or on top of the machines, and that any violation of these rights obligates the responsible citizen of the offending nation to replace the damaged article and offer the victimized citizen of the offended nation a sincere apology, and maybe a beer, but no more than that because dammit, I’ve apologized to Karen a dozen times, but she still won’t shut up about that shirt I ripped, even though I paid for another one and she can’t even prove I did it on purpose, and that if the fabric tears that easily then maybe she shouldn’t have put it in the washing machine in the first place.

Article III

The Empire of the Main Floor promises to deliver a tribute of one bottle of Tide Coldwater Liquid Laundry Detergent, and one box of whatever those sheets you put in the dyer are called, to the Republic of the Basement Suite as reparation for the unlawful seizure of one bottle of the Republic of the Basement Suite’s Tide Coldwater Liquid Laundry Detergent, in the incident known as the December Detergent Crisis, because seriously, Cheryl, I don’t care if all the stores were closed, you used up the last of our detergent so I had to go to Christmas dinner in dirty clothes, and even though they didn’t say anything, my parents were obviously disappointed in me.

Article IV

The Republic of the Basement Suite and the Empire of the Main Floor shall exchange three articles of clothing to be kept as wards, with the understanding that any violation of these articles by either nation will render the other nation’s responsibility to protect these wards null and void, and the agreement that the wards must hold sentimental, fashionable or monetary value, and not just be some old gym strip you found at the back of your closet, I’m sorry, I’m in the middle of restructuring my wardrobe, but I’ll find something appropriate, I swear.

Article V

Steve of the Republic of the Basement Suite agrees to cease folding the lingerie of the Empire of the Main Floor without a request by or the permission of the Empire of the Main Floor, in exchange for the Empire of the Main Floor’s acceptance of Steve’s statement of “I was just trying to be helpful” as lawful fact, and the agreement that any missing articles of lingerie must have just been misplaced, and so there’s no need to get the police involved, seriously, I’ll talk to him.

Article VI

If any disagreements arise regarding the intent or interpretation of these articles, or if any violations of these articles, perceived or actual, are committed, the Republic of the Basement Suite and the Empire of the Main Floor agree that the dispute will be mediated by the Kingdom of the Landlord, and that the ruling of King Landlord will be accepted as law, even though he’ll obviously be biased towards you, Cindy, since the Republic of the Basement Suite has it on good authority that you paid for your portion of last month’s rent in boob flashes.

Article VII

The present treaty shall be ratified in the span of one month after the date of the signature by the plenipotentiaries, or sooner if possible, which would be a simple matter if Karen would just take her fucking towels out of the dryer already, seriously, they’ve been in there at least three days.

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Done at Big Bob’s Brewhouse on the 23rd day of May in the second year of the Republic of the Basement Suite, the fourth year of the Empire of the Main Floor and the year of our Lord 2012.

American Policy Suggestions from a Chicago Sports Fan: How the Chicago Cubs Can Reelect Obama by Matt McKenna

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

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Just as nobody expects the national employment numbers to be particularly good this year, nobody expects the Chicago Cubs to be particularly good either. Americans/Chicago sports fans do, however, expect improvement in both employment opportunities and on-field performance in order to rationalize their optimism for a brighter future. For the un-or-underemployed, hope for a more robust labor market rests upon the shoulders of either incumbent President Barack Obama or his challenger Mitt Romney. For Cubs fans, wunderkind first-year President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein carries that burden. Fortunately for Epstein, he appears to have the full support and confidence of his constituency. Neither Obama nor Romney enjoy that same luxury, and the winner of the 2012 Presidential election will therefore likely be determined by how the employment situation unfolds over the coming months; If the rate at which people file for unemployment drops between now and November, Obama will likely occupy the White House for another four years. If not, Mitt Romney will be taking over the lease. So what can Obama do to help Americans keep their jobs and subsequently keep his own? At this point in time, not much. Obama’s reelection hopes are now subject to the whims of the economy and, perhaps more distressingly, to the Chicago Cubs. In fact, Obama’s best hope for reelection is the Cubs’ timely climb up the National League Central Standings.

2011 was not a good year for either the Chicago Cubs or America’s unemployed. Still, as the ball club ever so slightly improved over the course of last season, so did the national employment numbers. For example, on June 4th, 2011, the Cubs loss percentage hovered around its season high of 60%. On that same day, the Department of Labor released a report showing that the seasonally adjusted number of initial jobless claims rose 1.43% from where it was at the beginning of the year—not a positive sign of recovery. However, by September 24th, the Cubs had reduced their loss percentage to 56% and the BOL released a report showing new jobless claims had reversed direction, dropping 6.2% relative to the beginning of the year.

Now, it’s not as if anybody was ecstatic with the overall employment picture or the Cubs’ season; the national unemployment rate was still a ghastly 8.5% at the end of 2011 and the Cubs finished a head-shakingly awful twenty games under .500. But in the world of politics and baseball, where you are incites less passion than the direction you’re headed, and the improvements made by the team and economy were cause for cautious optimism.

The good news for the Obama campaign is that this trend of the Cubs’ shrinking loss percentage resulting in fewer jobless claims has carried over into 2012. While the Cubs started the season in woeful fashion, suffering two separate six-game losing streaks, their performance has slowly crept into the realm of near-respectability, and it is now feasible the Cubs will finish outside of the NL Central basement.

More specifically, the Cubs strong(ish) play en route to a 7-6 record during the month of May caused initial jobless claims to drop from 388,000 during the week of April 14th to 367,000 during the week of May 5th. And with the Cubs six games under .500, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in both loss percentage and jobless claims. If the Cubs can string together a few more of these winning months, they will be able to credit themselves with keeping Obama in the White House.

While President Obama is a diehard Chicago White Sox fan, it would behoove him to cheer for the Cubs this summer. Indeed, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina will likely be glued to WGN, hoping Cubs manager Dale Sveum can find a reliable, healthy closer and beleaguered slugger Alfonso Soriano can remember how to hit. If the Cubs need some extra motivation, perhaps Messina can schedule a campaign stop at Wrigley Field, giving Obama the opportunity to sing to the crowd during the seventh inning stretch. The trip to the North Side would be well worth the campaign team’s effort as the better the Cubs play, the better Obama’s chances are of retaining the Presidency.

Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs: Pictures by Teddy Wayne

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

A picture is worth a thousand words, so this is worth fifteen-thousandths of a picture. You can choose glossy or matte printing, with higher prices for four-by-six or larger sizes, and framing is available. Now it’s up to forty-two-thousandths of a picture.

Excerpts from William Shakespeare’s Battleship by Yoni Brenner

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

SCENE I
A Battleship, sailing majestically. Enter a common SAILOR.

SAILOR
Ahoy ye sailors!—friends and noblemen—
Riding ‘twixt glist’ring waves so bright and blue
That one cannot help but stand and marvel
At the resplendence of Neptune’s kingdom
And the miracle of color correction!
A Band of Brothers we are not, but rather,
A jambalaya of studs and starlets,
Drawn from ev’ry creed and ev’ry hair-type,
Selected, as if by algorithm,
To inflame the hearts and body issues
Of the prize’d target demographic.
Anon, we join this ship—this Battleship!—
With spirits high and cheekbones higher still,
Our sextants fix’d upon the one truly
Bankable star aboard this o’erstuffed vessel.
He whose sapphire eyes and manly shoulders,
Doth evoke the simple ethos of the
Heartland; belied only slightly by the
Rich Irish brogue that doth cling to ev’ry
Consonant like so many barnacles.

Liam Neeson enters, dressed as a CAPTAIN.

SAILOR
Hark! He comes! Pray don’t mention what I said
About his accent.

The CAPTAIN addresses the CREW with a barely concealed Irish accent.

CAPTAIN
Friends! Gaffers! Hang’rs-on!
‘Tis I, thy totally American captain,
Proud son of one of those states in the middle
That definitely hath a name, although
I cannot recall it at the moment.

SAILOR
Forsooth Captain, canst thou at least name the
First letter o’ the state?

The CAPTAIN shakes his head.

CAPTAIN
Alas, I cannot.

The CREW grumbles in disappointment.

CAPTAIN
But stay, friends! I come bearing sweet tidings:
For my accountant hath called and confirmeth
Beyond all doubt that mine check hath clear’ed!
And so I am honor-bound to maintain
A straight face for the next ninety minutes,
Even whilst barking generic orders,
Like “Hard to Starboard!” and “Full speed ahead!”
All of which hath been trademarked by Hasbro.
‘Tis indeed an honor to serve amongst
Such distinguish’d mariners as the guy
From True Blood, Riggins from Friday Night Lights,
And th’ pop star Rihanna—all of whom
Seem to be coated in a thin layer
Of Neoprene.

SAILOR
Er, Captain, excuse the interruption,
But art thou going anywhere with this?

CAPTAIN
Nay, my good man, not really. Just riffing.

Enter RIHANNA, THE GUY FROM TRUE BLOOD, and RIGGINS, FROM FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.

CAPTAIN
How now, Rihanna? What ho, guy from True Blood?
What news dost thou bring from the radar thingie?

RIHANNA
Ay me, dear captain! Most grievous fortune!
For we are invaded by space robots!

The CAPTAIN is confused.

CAPTAIN
Space robots? Art thou sure sweet Rihanna?
For yea, I cannot recall any such
Robots in the original board game.
Only a grid of numbers and letters,
And cheap plastic pegs with which for keeping score.

THE GUY FROM TRUE BLOOD
Thou rememberest correctly O Captain
But the gods at Hasbro hath recognized
Long ago that the Battleship brand
Couldst not survive on grids and pegs alone.
Hence the space robots.

CAPTAIN
I see thy logic.
What say’st thou Riggins from Friday Night Lights?

RIGGINS
Pray let me defer to the True Blood Guy,
For alas, I have forgotten my lines.

The CAPTAIN nods, resolved.

CAPTAIN
If Riggins concurs then it is settled!
We shall attack the space robots at once!

The CREW cheers.

CAPTAIN
Hard to starboard! Full speed ahead! Ready
The doubles! For if we are true of heart
And straight of face there is no way this thing
Cannot gross a bajillion dollars!

Exeunt. End of scene.

Gyros to Heroes: A Column About Sandwiches: The Bread of Affliction (Slight Return) by Lindsay Eanet

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

I first wrote this column back in September 2011 as a contest entry, but in the months since, it’s become strangely prophetic. As people all over the world do, my family celebrated the Passover holiday about a month ago—no burning of the leavened bread this time around; in fact, we recounted the ten plagues with beer in plastic cups. My grandfather tried his best to lead, to assign readings from and relating to the Exodus story. The word “seder” translates to “order,” and I think at that point everyone was just looking for that very thing. My grandparents could still sometimes finish each other’s sentences.

My grandmother passed away less than 48 hours after our return from DC, and so we turned right around on planes to Reagan and BWI, for three days of stretching out those same drab deli trays I described in that column. Smoked salmon, garlic bread, matzo for those still observing the festival week. We ate and tried to make each other laugh, danced around the kitchen like Muppets after the condolence callers left because it seemed like the right thing to do. It was exactly the parallel I’d mentioned earlier: Passover, the freedom holiday, a stifling affair meant to maintain tradition and stability; the funeral, doing our best to turn it into a celebration when we were all just trying to keep it together.

My grandmother knew everybody, or at least wanted to know everybody. She maintained friendships she’d had since the fourth grade. She treated acquaintances from the apartment complex and the flea market like celebrities. She also had a love for good food, which manifested itself among her relatives during the week when debating whether or not to eat the goddamn brownie (“She would have wanted us to,” tended to be the verdict.).
This all intersects in one particular sandwich-related instance.

My grandparents were driving around DC one day, when she insisted they had to go pick up a present. When my grandfather asked for whom, she replied with a name he didn’t recognize. Turns out, this woman was the manager at the McDonald’s they would go to pick up lunch after her hospital visits. That’s not to speak very sentimentally of the Golden Arches or their burgers, but my grandmother genuinely enjoyed them, up until the end, and the whole situation, in a rather unexpected way, speaks to who she was. She was on a first-name basis with the manager at McDonald’s. More than that, she valued her relationship with the manager at McDonald’s. Everyone around her was important, and made to feel important. This probably seems like a strange thing to share as an epilogue to this column, and perhaps an extreme example, but if she taught me anything, it’s to treat everyone with veneration and human dignity, to live with unbridled joy, to be on a first-name basis with everything around you. To thank the people who prepare your food. And I know you probably know these things, dear readers, but it seemed like a good time for a reminder.

So with that, I hope you don’t mind the re-run of this column. If you do, I apologize. Enjoy every sandwich.

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The Bread of Affliction

For Jews, there is no greater symbol of mourning than the drab deli tray. No weeping and wailing and somber recitation of the Kaddish, no torn cloth, no spreading of the soil can compare with the strange combination of comfort and absolute grimness of watching your relatives pile austere scoops of tuna salad onto Kaiser rolls, maybe with cucumber because the crunch means you get to feel something other than grief or numbness, and devour them with an assassin’s intensity in between the ‘it’s-so-nice-to-see-you-again-but-I-wish-it-were-under-better-circumstances.’

There’s always a hint of self-referential laughter around the pile of bagel halves, smoked salmon and sliced onions and tomatoes. “This is how we Jews deal with grief,” my friend Daniel said at a gathering for his recently deceased grandfather between bites of a sprinkled Kosher deli cookie. “We eat our feelings.” The funeral-observance deli sandwich is our version of the medieval loving cup, a two-handled vessel that required its drinker to use both hands, rendering them unable to stab those around them, except the sandwich keeps our mouth occupied, ensuring that we don’t have to speak to anyone.

The Passover ritual requires, per the teachings of Hillel, the making of a sandwich. Matzah, the dry, intestine-savaging ‘bread of affliction,’ slathered with maror (horseradish) to remind us of the bitterness of bondage and charoset, a mixture of apples, red wine, cinnamon and nuts to emulate the mortar used to build the pyramids. If made well, it can actually be quite tasty, the bite of the horseradish cut just enough by the boozy sweetness of the charoset. In a way, Passover and Jewish mourning rituals are an inversion of the other: Passover will inevitably feel regimented, somber and dwell on human suffering when it is meant to be a celebration of freedom and triumphs of spirit, whereas when a loved one dies, we try to act all grateful and pretend to focus on celebrating their life and cherishing the good times when really we’re just all miserable as hell. For two occasions so ingrained in reiterating the values of life and the ability to enjoy it, there sure is a lot of restraint in feeling what we need to feel. We let the sandwiches feel for us, when we should be less restrained.

Prior to Passover, practicing Jews are supposed to burn all the remaining leavened bread in their house according to custom. When my aunt died—heart failure at 54—my mother began purging the house of anything with gluten, anything processed, anything with sugar or simple carbs, as if trying to purify the house for some sort of ritual. For her, perhaps, the sandwich was a stand-in for grief in a different sort of way. Ascetic practices are common in mourning. Self-improvement as coping mechanism.

My grandmother took me for a beer and a burger on my 21st birthday. At her Shiva, the ritual funeral observance, my mother glared when I went to slather an extra layer of tuna salad comfortably across a bagel half to serve as the mortar for my sandwich of affliction. I was the one who didn’t cry (at least not in front of other people), the one who gave the eulogy calm and composed, Star Trek references and all, the one who kept it together. I looked down at the deli tray and remembered that birthday lunch—I wanted that experience back, the perfect one-two of Sriracha sauce and cold pale ale, the back patio in July and our tattooed roller derby bombshell waitress, Grandma having to get hers with no cheese because she couldn’t have dairy (Kosher practices were never really big in our house), everyone enjoying each other’s company. That was one of the last meals we shared together where everything was really, really wonderful. No need for sandwiches to fill the silence. No deli-tray tuna, no matter how filling, could serve as the loving cup, the stand-in for the longing for that day, that perfect sandwich and the memory to which it connects.

In times of loss, I like to recall the words of one of my favorite Jews (half-Jew-half-Mormons, anyway), Mr. Warren Zevon. When Dave Letterman had Zevon on his show, he asked the singer if there was anything he realized now that he was face-to-face with his own mortality, waiting for lung cancer to do him in: “Just how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

I wish I could say I have savored every deli turkey creation or banh mi or veggie wrap with the veneration they perhaps deserve, and I could certainly say the same about moments with those loved ones who are now enjoying company in celestial cafés. But forcing self-aware joy will not solve anything just as self-denial, particularly with Big Scary Emotions, won’t make anyone feel better. Serious occasions call for honesty, with our loved ones, with our stomachs, with our selves. Our best defense then, perhaps, is to swallow the horseradish with a smile, go to the deli tray for comfort but not as a proxy for what needs to be felt or said, and enjoy what we can, while we can, with plenty of spicy brown mustard and a pickle spear on the side. Dayenu.

List: Boy Scout Merit Badge Projects by Jerry Renek

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:59:00 -0400

Help an old lady write a scathing Yelp review about Sizzler’s lazy waiters.

Cryonically preserve and revive a sibling.

Backpack across an IKEA in four days, surviving on meatballs, marinated herring, and lingonberry syrup.

Design and build a scale model of a modern supermax prison. Test its security features by starting a laboratory mouse/hamster race war.

Volunteer 50 hours feeding slam poets.

Construct a shelter using nothing but sticks, tree sap and your father’s New Yorker rejection letters.

With your parents’ permission, build a self-aware robot capable of love. Equip it with tear ducts and laser cannons.

Learn the lore of an Indian tribe. Exploit your newfound knowledge to mock their non-Christian ways.

Compost the losers of your mouse/hamster race war.

Collect 1000 stamps without committing suicide.

Immerse yourself in the customs of another civilization, become an honorary citizen, overthrow the leaders.

Track and kill a Webelo. Use all the parts.

Run 25 feet without stopping.

Struggle with finding a truly original voice in the art world until you become a famous, respected painter. At your MOMA career retrospective in 50 years, declare all art the illusion of failed childhood dreams. As you magically levitate through the ceiling, your self-aware robot blocks the only exit, raises its laser cannons and says, “I love you. Do you love me?”

Comic Contest: We Should Have Talked Ourselves Out of It by McSweeney's

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:28:00 -0400

So, we had an idea to have a contest for comics in order to help us find a talented potential contributor for the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency website. We launched this idea with only the purest of intentions, to find someone whose work is unknown or underappreciated. We’ve done something similar for the past three years with our columnists and had great good fortune in being introduced to writers we never would have known otherwise.

What we didn’t know, but should have found out prior to launching our contest is the tradition and practice of “no spec” work for artists, designers, cartoonists, and other visual artists, and that contests of this sort are sometimes used for the purposes of exploitation, which couldn’t be further from our intent.

In prose writing, particularly in today’s day and age, while we all wish things were different, much of the work is done on “spec” and we made a very bad assumption that it would be the same in this case.

We offer this as an explanation, not an excuse, which we do not have. It was our job to fully inform ourselves of these things and we didn’t, and for that, we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We initially thought that changing the terms of the contest would be appropriate, and sufficient, but we’ve come to understand and believe that the entire enterprise is a bad idea, poorly executed.

We have, therefore, decided to withdraw the contest. We apologize again for our carelessness and will endeavor to do better in the future.

Family Practice: An Occasional Column by “Dr.” Amy Fusselman: End-of-Year Teacher Giftology: The Complete Guide by Amy Fusselman

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:46:00 -0400

You know how astrology proffers the idea that a really confusing and sometimes annoying situation—that would be individual human beings, their characteristics, and how they relate—is actually easy to figure out, and even predictable, based on one’s understanding of a Pokemon-esque system of hybrid human-animals that reside in their own special, circular universe?

Well, if you are a parent, and you have a child that goes to school, you will appreciate what I am going to give you now, which is a system through which you can understand a similarly murky state of affairs: your role in presenting your child’s teacher with an end-of-year gift.

Perhaps you already know the confusion I am talking about. Perhaps you have already spent an entire May and part of June watching in disbelief as otherwise seemingly intelligent adults pour huge amounts of energy—theirs, yours, and your child’s—into creating a gift.

The reason for these gargantuan efforts is simple: for many parents, a teacher is a combo of the Mom Who Never Loved Me Enough and the Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, parents can’t just assuage the power imbalance in this relationship the old fashioned way, by buying the teacher, say, a car. No, the gift has to be funneled through the children. And this is where you come in. So what does your May and June hold? Which of the four Class Gift Signs are you going to dwell in: Toiling Artisan, the Lion King, Weegee’s Delight, or Alcoholics Anonymous? Let’s find out.

Toiling Artisan

You know you are in the territory of the Toiling Artisan when your class mom sends an email asking for 30 paper towel tubes, 400 glitter pipe cleaners, two shoeboxes per child, a mountain of puff balls, and a truckload of other things that she could just run out to Michael’s and buy herself.

The fact that a perfectly fine teacher gift could be purchased in two minutes by any grown up with internet access, is like the Oz standing quietly behind the curtain in the Class Mom’s apartment where you will spend three or possibly four of your precious Saturday afternoons helping to create the Most Beautifully Crafted Object of All Time.

This masterwork is usually designed by a class mom who, naturally, has an artistic gift, or, even more likely, a child with such a talent. It does no good, in this situation, to casually ask a class mom if it wouldn’t be a nice idea if we all pooled our money and presented Ms. Hoffman with a generous AmEx gift card in a tasteful box, and then the people who wanted to make their own gifts or cards could make them, however they wanted, in the comfort and privacy of their homes, and give them to Ms. Hoffman themselves. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing? Something an underpaid teacher would genuinely appreciate?

The answer here is: No.

In the land of the Toiling Artisan, what is a nice thing is 28 small, poly-blend T-shirts that have been decorated with glitter glue and stick-on jewels by each child, and then given to the class mom and her henchmen (class moms always have henchmen) to slowly masticate over moonlit nights (class moms don’t sleep, a fact you will realize when she keeps sending you emails that are time-stamped 4:30 AM). The moms and henchmen will masticate the shirts into a glittery white goo, and then the children will return to class mom’s apartment several more times to mold the goo into a classically-inspired frieze of their class photo, which the teacher can then use as a coat rack in her studio apartment. Thanks Ms. Hoffman—have a great summer!

The Lion King

Do you have a class mom whose kid dances and/or sings? Then you are undoubtedly in the realm of the Lion King.

The Lion King knows only one psychological state and that state is: performance. Your own particular kid may not like to sing, may be horribly stage-shy, may vomit at the idea of public speaking, but you know what? Class Mom’s kid loves it. Now, sit down.

The question for you, having found yourself in this realm, is what part of the Lion King you are stuck in? Are you in the Lion King/Elton John, the Lion King/Julie Taymor, or the Carnivorous Combo, i.e., both?

In the Lion King/Elton John version, your class mom will compose a ditty that is the equivalent of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” The children will rehearse this unabashed love song at Class Mom’s house several more times than necessary, and if you are lucky, you can run to the corner once or twice with a sympathetic sane mom and grab a coffee, and the two of you can vow to buy your first graders a robot that does homework when they are through with this hogwash.

The song will, of course, be presented as a surprise, so as to require everyone to be conspiratorial about and sympathetic to the performance, which you will have to attend, and during which Ms. Hoffman will hopefully have the good sense to cry, or at least sniffle, before a beaming Class Mom, or Class Mom will turn into Scar and eat Ms. Hoffman up.

The other possible parts of this realm, the Lion King/Julie Taymor, or the Carnivorous Combo, in which Class Mom and her henchmen actually write a musical for your children to perform in, is too horrible to contemplate here.

Weegee’s Delight

If you are lucky, you will find that you are a denizen of the sign that is slightly less awful than the others—Weegee’s Delight. Those in the sign of Weegee’s Delight do not have to build parade floats out of popsicle sticks or perform songs or even spend that much time at Class Mom’s apartment. And Weegee’s Delight actually makes use of that incredibly efficient and timesaving tool: the Internet. Your job as parent is just to get a photo of your child, and a page of your child’s artwork, to Class Mom, so she can make a book out of it on iPhoto, for Ms. Hoffman. Not so bad, right?

The devil is in the details, though, as you will discover, when Class Mom sends you 17 more 4 AM emails about the exact size and DPI of your child’s photo, as well as what he/she should or should/not be wearing, how he should be posed, and that the material to be used for said artwork is one kind and one kind of paper only, and it must be put in a secret, unmarked, manila envelope in her child’s cubby, before the deadline, which is tomorrow.

You should be prepared, while under this sign, for the fact that your artwork and photo will be rejected by Class Mom and/or lost on its way into or out of the Class Mom’s kid’s cubby, because children, who are supposed to secretly and quietly ferry these envelopes, are not the most reliable messengers. Weegee’s Delight is like a day—or two—at the passport desk of the main post office. However, at the end, Ms. Hoffman gets her brand new passport, I mean, photo book, featuring pictures of all the kids, and a page of their magnificent drawings, and it only costs 20 dollars per parent and 40 hours of your life.

Alcoholics Anonymous

The fourth and most grim quadrant is one we shan’t speak of much here, but you will know if you are unfortunate enough to land there. Class Mom will sent incoherent emails, henchmen will glower threateningly at pickup and drop-off, a gift will resentfully be pulled together with much drama and ill-will, and Class Mom may well transfer her child to another school for the following year. See? Even in the most awful of quadrants, there is a silver lining.

And really, this is true of all the realms of giftology: whether you show it with a masticated statue, a pained performance, a tortuously cobbled-together photo book, or just old-fashioned drunken rage, a miracle has taken place: a gift that was never in the world before has been made. A teacher has been thanked. Parents who had crappy childhoods are slightly and momentarily assuaged. The wheel of giftology turns, and next spring will bring us new quadrants in a new formation.

Have a great summer, everyone! See you in second grade!

Ben Greenman’s Graphs About Charts and Charts About Graphs: Graph #28 by Ben Greenman

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:44:00 -0400

Ridgemore Day School: An Introduction by Rudy Martinez

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

Ridgemore Day School
Secular Preschool and Kindergarten (Ages 2.5-5)
Non-Traditional, New Age, Sensory, Mixed Movement

There are three rules at Ridgemore Day. As you know from the pre-introduction orientation kit, three is a number both children and parents can agree upon according to the Bailey-Wexton Method. It is the number of intergenerational understanding, a number that establishes clear boundaries, but doesn’t confine. Ridgemore is not a prison—it’s a box with three sides. Please note, none of those sides are a ceiling. And all the sides have windows. And all of the windows are open.

The Three Rules of Ridgemore Day are:

1. Lead Yourself

2. Ask WHY

- Where am I going?
- Have we met before?
- You know what?

3. Listen For Answers

These rules are introduced gradually in the classroom through a series of physical and metaphysical exploratory exercises to allow for maximum exposure and total saturation as defined by the Bailey-Wexton Method. Many of the exercises involve crayons. The crayons are soy-based, BPA-free, and hypoallergenic. A sample of any specialty papers, watercolors, or modeling clays will be mailed to the student’s home prior to first day of school. Classrooms are referred to as We Zones. We Zones are certified Safe Spaces by the North America Safe Spaces Advisory Committee.

Children ages 2.5 to 3.5 years old meet in a single room known as the Foundations Room in the newly remodeled, richly upholstered basement. Over the course of their time in the Foundations Room, students will be allowed unstructured exploratory time with non-Western healing implements including crystals, sage bundles, powdered antler, bone rattles, and ash. Scale, relational aesthetics, and shoe tying are key focus areas. Exceptionally expressive students are allowed time to dance with scarves.

The 3.5 to 4.5 year-olds meet on the second floor and are led by a revolving group of instructors chosen based on their physical resemblance and gender neutrality. Over the course of the year, children will be exposed to over seventy teachers, all referred to by the title Professor. Professor will refuse to acknowledge any claims made by students that he/she is in fact many separate individuals, but will emotionally reward those children who persist in their doubt. Non-doubting children will also be emotionally rewarded, but only intermittently and by a silent stranger who roams the halls and stairwells.

The 4.5 to 5 year-olds meet on the top floor of the Ridgemore Day building in individual chambers with floor to ceiling windows on all sides. The chambers are referred to as Me Cubes. Each child’s soundproof Me Cube provides full visibility of all other students, but discourages reliance on the crutch of language as a primary communicative tool. Instructors are absent throughout the duration of the semester, and are instead replaced by a low frequency hum piped into each cube at a reasonable volume. Me Cubes are outfitted with a Casio piano, safety scissors, pre-dulled pencils, Wi-Fi, and a nap pad. Students are bathed in eye-friendly blue light for three hours every day and provided with a wide selection of gummies for snack time.

Before graduation, each Ridgemore Day student will be expected to display proficiency in a foreign language or landscape architecture, as well as familiarity with a wide range of shapes, textures, conflict resolution tactics, facial expressions, and yoga poses.

The much lauded benefits of a Ridgemore Day School education include the constantly evolving FAQ section of our website as well as post-graduate support from a team of highly skilled and disease free Persistence Coordinators each fully equipped with the requisite fur pelts, glassy beads, encouraging posters, and non-religious chants necessary to provide students with the will to continue learning and living. Each child, referred to as a True Scholar upon graduation, will be assigned their own Persistence Coordinator whose name and sleeping arrangements must be decided upon by your family in a Bailey-Wexton approved Share Zone (Ridgemore Day can provide Share Zone compliance consultation for an additional fee).

True Scholars have gone on to attend Horace Mann Academy of Transcendence, Blakely, Ireland, Abelworth Forestry Schools, and Fillip-Rake, among other fine institutions.

Notable True Scholars include the entire cast and production crew of Twister, a president, seven sets of identical twins, chairmen of boards, and the greatest surfer alive.

This concludes the introduction. Post-introduction information kits are available to credit-approved, pre-tested applicants. Please refer to the pre-introduction orientation kit for application details.

The Chorus Boy Chronicles: The Daily Grind by Brian Spitulnik

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Around the time that Bob Bergeron’s body was found in his Chelsea apartment on January 5th, I was in my dressing room at the Ambassador, alone, transfixed by the parade of smirking faces and headless torsos popping up on Grindr.

Bob Bergeron had decided that, at 49 years old, his life and his work were a lie, no longer tolerable or sustainable. Eight months away from my 30th birthday, I had realized I’d spent my 20s locked in a series of long-term, monogamous relationships, and the period of my life in which it was permissible to be having indiscriminate sex with strangers was coming to an end. I wanted to escape a future of regrets at not having taken advantage of being young and single in New York. My solution had been to download the Grindr app to my phone, upload a picture of my own headless torso, and, by way of Grindr’s GPS system, determine who was close enough and cute enough for a hookup. Bob Bergeron’s solution to escaping the lie he had made a career of perpetuating was to tie a plastic bag over his head and leave a note for his family stating that he was simply “done.”

Though I had never met Bob Bergeron, when I read about his death in the Times, I got the sense that he had been of those well-groomed, successful guys my friends and I referred to as “fancy gays,” a brand of New York man barricaded behind pithy quips, lucrative careers, and mounding biceps honed at David Barton and Equinox. Bob Bergeron was a therapist with a reputation for relentless optimism and without a hint of depression or drug use in his history. He specialized in aiding gay men of a certain age to put their obsessions with youth to rest and embrace the remaining years that could flash by like days, decades like minutes. Bob Bergeron had been beautiful, he had achieved career goals, he had been through periods of gleeful promiscuity and meaningful relationships, he had traveled the world with friends, he had been accepted and loved by his family. The publication of Bob Bergeron’s first book, The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond, was approaching when he apparently concluded that what stretched before him, beyond middle age, was a wasteland of loneliness, an endless series of betrayals by a body that had once been so loyal to his every command, and emptiness in a career that, ultimately, he had built on insupportable truths. Bob Bergeron’s suicide note had been written on the cover of his manuscript: along with a goodbye to his family, he had drawn an arrow pointing to the title from the words “a lie based on bad information.”

The facts of aging that seemed to have so completely crushed Bob Bergeron—facts that, as a dancer, I had been acutely aware of since my late teens—were the very facts spurring me to make the most of my waning 20s and get on Grindr. Being on Grindr, for me, was about conquest; it was about knowing that I could have as much sex as I wanted whenever I wanted it; it was about freedom to let sexuality drive my actions instead of keeping me shamed, hidden, as it had in childhood (even in a loving, accepting household). Whoring around was my right as a gay man living in 21st Century New York City. If I didn’t exercise my right, I felt—and my friends agreed—I was never going to be the man I was meant to be, and though I was pretty sure I never wanted to be in another relationship, let alone get married, I was also pretty sure that I wouldn’t always have this body or this face, and exercising my right to be a slut would get more and more difficult as I got older and older.

Grindr seemed, above all else, efficient. I could look at someone’s profile and, if their height, weight, age, and ethnicity coalesced into something desirable, or at least vaguely appealing, I could message them. If someone messaged me and I found them unattractive, deeply uninteresting, or just downright obnoxious, I could simply tap the red “X” icon, and poof, that person would disappear forever.

I was very disciplined about how I conducted myself on Grindr. I had rules: I wouldn’t message anyone, I’d wait for them to message me; I wouldn’t consider anyone over the age of forty or under the age of twenty-five; I would always ask the guy I was chatting with for a face picture before I dismissed his less-than-perfect body. My rules were easy to adhere to while I was only checking messages once, maybe twice, a day. But, sometime between Thanksgiving and Chanukah, Grindr began to consume the majority of my waking hours. First thing in the morning, I’d check Grindr to see if anyone new had reached out with a “hi,” “hey,” or “sup.” During Christmas dinner with my family, I had gone back and forth (Nice abs, Thanks, you too, Can I see a face pic? Trade? Nice. What’re you up to tonight?) with eight or nine guys at once, none of whom I had any intention of ever meeting. And, with remarkable speed, my rules fell away. I was the pursuer, not just the pursued, any age was fine, and I’d block a love handle or a flabby pectoral without thinking twice.

But by January 5th, over a month after I’d joined Grindr, I still hadn’t actually met, let alone hooked up with, a single (or married) person. That Thursday night, I was finally going on my first Grindr date. I was determined: if there was chemistry—really any spark whatsoever—I was going to sleep with this guy. His name was Jared and he was an architect. He had done his undergrad at Michigan like me (Business, not Musical Theater) and gotten his Masters at an Ivy like me (Penn, not Columbia). He was an East Coast Jew like me, and, judging from his pictures on Grindr, he was very, very cute.

Jared met me at my stage door, we took the 1 train to Christopher Street, and, because the divey, bro-y bar I had planned on taking him to was packed, we went to a candle lit, claustrophobically romantic wine bar a block away. We joked that it was a little intimate for a first date, and decided we should act as if it were our third. We ordered a bottle of Rioja and I learned that Jared was working on a midtown skyscraper and liked musicals enough to come see me in Chicago. I learned he was as close with his mother as I was, and we laughed about the obvious stereotypes. He wanted to move out of the city when he had kids—we both wanted two or more—and he planned to raise them Jewish, with an emphasis on the customs and the culture rather than the Talmud and the Torah. When the last of the Rioja was poured into our glasses, Jared smiled and said, “My face is tingly. I think I’m getting drunk.” I leaned across the table and kissed him, thinking what a great story this would be to tell our two or more kids (we’d already decided to tell our mothers that we’d met in line at Starbucks, and I’d already begun to forget that it was a lie). That was when I made a new rule: I wouldn’t sleep with someone I considered relationship material until after the third date.

But during our next two dates—one at a dark whiskey bar on 10th Avenue and one at the Chelsea Piers bowling lanes—the comfort and familiarity I’d felt with Jared turned fraternal. By the time we left the bowling alley, standing too close to Jared made all the hair on my arms rise up in defense. I decided my body must have been reacting to the fact that I’d abandoned my resolution to be having constant, wild, anonymous sex. I told Jared I wasn’t ready for anything serious, hailed a cab, and left him standing open mouthed and confused on the West Side Highway.

In the cab, I felt as though I could inhale for the first time in a week. I turned on my phone, went to my Grindr account, and tapped the “Load More Guys” button. With a sound like the hiss and crack of an opening soda can, a dozen new profiles appeared. Among them, I found a lawyer named Chris.

Chris was redheaded and Midwestern, a theater major in undergrad who had given up performing and gone to law school. When I began chatting with Chris, I made sure to stipulate that I wasn’t looking for anything romantic, by which I meant I’d sleep with him if there was chemistry and annex him to the “just friends” pile if there wasn’t. We decided to meet at a pub on 9th Avenue, and, just to make sure I got across my non-romantic intentions, I wore a filthy old baseball cap, an ill-fitting shirt that didn’t cling to or accentuate my anything, and I ordered a beer, which, in my mind, was the ultimate signal that I was not out for anything amorous. I didn’t account for what might happen if he showed up and was neither hookup nor friend material, but instead a good candidate for a boyfriend, or if he was even better looking in person than in the photos he’d sent me on Grindr, both of which turned out to be true.

Three beers and two hours later, we had discussed everything from campaign finance reform to the reasons why Bernadette Peters was Bernadette Peters, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard. We split the bill, left the pub, and on the corner of 9th and 53rd, we kissed. I imagined how my brother would love that I had a boyfriend who he could have a beer with; I thought about how my parents would be over the moon that I’d found a lawyer. Sleeping with Chris before the third date clearly wasn’t an option.

On our second date, Chris and I went to a different pub, and though I worried I’d have to at some point tell him I’d get fired from my job if I showed up with a beer belly, I ordered a pilsner. After two quick hours of more beer and a lengthy conversation on why Kathy Bates is the scariest man alive, we shared a cab up to my apartment. I decided my rule about not sleeping with a potential boyfriend until the third date was really kind of stupid. I discarded that rule and replaced it with another: no sleepovers. Even though he lived in an outer borough of the city, I kicked him out of my Upper West Side apartment at three in the morning. He seemed only moderately pissed.

After our third date, Chris and I started texting whenever something funny happened or just for no reason, to see how the other’s day was going. By the fourth date, the flutter I had felt at seeing his name appear on my phone had turned to a weighted dread, and just the thought of another date with Chris made my stomach roil. But I decided to ignore my churning stomach. The sex was good, he made me laugh, and he wasn’t an actor. But then, when I found myself wanting to cuddle with him more than I wanted to take off his clothes, I kicked him out of my bed after the fifth date, told him I wasn’t ready for anything serious, and that we shouldn’t see each other anymore.

I was telling everyone I knew that I was on Grindr and letting them all assume I was doing the things I had always assumed people on Gridr did: got laid in restaurant bathrooms, in J.Crew dressing rooms, and in public parks. I fell in love with the persona I was constructing, and came to believe that persona was me, until I noticed I was really just going out on nice dates with nice guys with nice jobs. In fact, the first question I asked guys on Grindr wasn’t, “What are you looking for tonight?” My first question was, “What do you do for a living?” I wanted to want just sex, but either out of habit or out of fear that my window for anonymous fucking had already been sealed shut, I was, once again, hunting for a relationship.

I doubled down on my efforts to have emotion-free, uncomplicated sex, and headed to the Greenwich Avenue location of my gym where, I was told, the boys were prettier and sluttier than anywhere else in the city. I got on an elliptical machine and opened my Grindr app to see who was close by. A 22 year old too beautiful to be anything but a senior in an NYU acting program was 745 feet away. But 22 years old? The thought of him asking if I could pass his headshot along to my agent made me want to stab myself in the eye. I got a message from a man holding a Daschund whose profile said he was 33 but looked at least 45—and not a good 45—and was 1.8 miles away. I was beginning to think I had ventured below 14th Street for naught when I looked up from my phone and noticed a James Franco-as-Alan Ginsberg look-alike doing dumbbell squats directly in front of me. I glared at him for the next twenty minutes from the elliptical with what I hoped came across as lascivious intent. I continued to glower at him from various points around the gym over the hour that followed, and I was sure I caught his eye once or twice, but for the most part he remained focused on his workout. At one point, he looked over at me, then picked up his phone and began texting. I hurriedly checked Grindr to see if he was messaging me. I got a message from someone whose profile picture was a sunset. Perhaps he’s discreet and romantic, I thought. But when I clicked on the message, it wasn’t my James Franco. It was a picture of a large, erect black penis and a text that read, “Looking?” I tapped the red “X” and blocked the sunset penis without responding.

My James Franco left the gym. I went to get my clothes from the locker room, feeling I’d wasted a whole afternoon, but, almost out of habit now, I checked Grindr one more time. There he was, on my phone, my hipster glasses-wearing James Franco. His profile said he was 32, 5’11”, and 170 lbs. I messaged him right away.

“Did you just leave the gym?” I wrote.

“Yeah,” he said. “Were you there?”

I sent him the best face picture I had.

“I didn’t notice you,” he replied.

We continued to chat for the rest of the day, quickly moving from the basics (his name was John, he taught high school English in Los Angeles, and he was leaving New York in two days) to the very specific (he wanted to know what I was into in bed, he gave me the exact measurements of his length and girth, and he sent me several naked pictures of himself from various angles, though I told him I planned to run for office one day so I couldn’t send nude shots in return). By the time I went to work that night, John and I had set up a date for the following day. I was finally going to have my random Grindr hookup. Or I was going to fall in love, move to L.A., and spend my life sipping Earl Grey tea and discussing Thomas Hardy and Herman Melville with my James Franco look-alike English teacher.

I thought it prudent to meet John at a neutral location, just in case he wasn’t into me or I got the sense he was a serial killer. We decided on an organic juice bar near my apartment. There, he told me about the restaurants he had eaten at during his two-week stay in New York: he told me the name of each restaurant, who he had eaten with, what he had eaten, what his favorite restaurant had been, and what his favorite dish from his favorite restaurant had been. He really did look like James Franco, so I did my best to ignore the fact that I’d lost any shred of attraction I had for him by the time he got to talking about the risotto appetizer at Gramercy Tavern. But, judging by his willingness to send risqué photos from his phone to mine, I hoped he was perhaps boring in life but wild in bed.

When we finally left the juice bar, I said, “So. You want to come over?”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. No. I’m just gonna head downtown.”

I was confused. But all that texting, I wanted to say. And those naked pictures. All those naked pictures.

But instead, I said, “Ok. Is that it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”

With my afternoon plans shot, I arrived at the theater early that night. Though I’d planned on using the time to finish reading a book I’d been lugging around the city all month, I wanted to check, just quickly, to see if there were any new faces on Grindr. I stood in the middle of the dressing room, tapping pictures, responding to some messages, ignoring others. Jack, the dresser for the male ensemble of Chicago, came into the room, interrupting my absorption in a 24-year-old digital marketing director. Jack was carrying a white laundry basket filled with the dance belts and black socks he placed at each of our stations night after night.

“Jacky,” I said, moving out of his way and sitting at my station. “Do you think 24 is too young for me?”

Jack arched his eyebrow, threw his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “Christ, I’m 50 and I don’t think 24 is too young for me.”

“But you’re a hot fifty,” I said.

“Oh, bless you, doll,” Jack said. “I’m considering getting a little lift and tuck.”

I looked up at Jack. His skin was taut and tan, his hair was full, dark, and wavy.

“Jacky, no,” I said. “No facelift.”

I began telling him about the articles I’d been reading about Bob Bergeron’s suicide. Bergeron was quoted as telling friends that he felt he’d peaked at 30 or 35 when his career had been thriving, his looks had ensured constant adoration, he had been in a fulfilling, long-term relationship. From 30 to 35, he had been, for the first and only time in his life, confident and content. I wondered if I too would look back at that time—the days leading up to 30, the years spent dancing on Broadway and obsessively chatting with strangers on Grindr—as the highpoint of my life. I had been operating under the pretense that hooking up with as many people as possible was a perfectly acceptable number-one-priority for a 29 year old to have. But what if my priorities never shifted or evolved? If I still had the same thoughts—get laid, get laid, get laid—at 49 as I did at 29, and I had never found anything that could match the high of being wanted, being desired, than I can see why, yes, tying a plastic bag over my head might seem like the only viable option.

I thought about the fact that I had spent the past year or two joining in the national refrain of “It Gets Better,” encouraging gay teenagers to stay strong, to believe in the superior life they would lead once they moved away from their Podunk towns, once their skin cleared up, once they escaped the bullies that made their lives hell, once their sexuality was fully accepted by the world. But I began to wonder if the silent slogan of “It Gets Better” might have all along been, “It gets better until you’re 30 or 35, and then, baby, you’re on your own.”

I didn’t have a biological clock assuring me that, at some point, there’d be things to think about other than sex, food, the way food makes me look, and sex. But I always assumed that the minute I left show business, I would begin to care more about the loss of human life in the Syrian uprising than about the level of visible definition of my abdominal muscles. But then a man of 49, who made a life and career out of constructing a perfect lie, kills himself because his body has ceased to cooperate, become flawed, and most men in their 20s no longer wanted to fuck him.

If Bob Bergeron’s death were an isolated case, it could be viewed as one of those perplexing, senseless tragedies of a cruel, senseless world. But Bob Bergeron was just one of many men who had watched his friends and lovers die in the worst of the AIDS epidemic only to decide decades later that, in the end, the life that had been taken from all those friends and lovers wasn’t a life particularly worth living. Was that what lay ahead for me and my generation of entitled, Grindr-absorbed men? All of us, who grew up watching Will & Grace, taking acceptance and the ability to fuck liberally as a divine right? What would happen when we began to sag and wrinkle and turn grey? Would we be shut out of the community that had only been ours because we happened to be young?

It was the end of March, and the things I found myself wanting from Grindr weren’t the things I’d expecte...

Open Letters: An Open Letter to America from a Dissatisfied Immigrant by Maria Melnik

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Dear America,

When you’re born in a Siberian town that is said to be built on the bones of Gulag prisoners it’s fair to assume you have nowhere to move but up. Well, America, I’m not impressed. After ten years you have obliterated my roots and built up expectations that are completely inappropriate for an immigrant. You have sucked me dry of gratitude unless fueled by tryptophan. You have made me think that life isn’t worth living unless I have every new model of the iPhone within 24 hours, and you’ve made me believe it’s appropriate to compare the line outside the Apple store to the breadline in Stalinist Russia. You’ve made me take well-stocked grocery stores, where only the deli items are under protective glass, for granted and then somersaulted that comfort by convincing me I need quarterly juice cleanses if I want a fighting chance at staying “centered.”

One of my fondest childhood memories is getting a slinky as a birthday gift, America—a slinky! Now look at me! My disillusionment with the mundane day-to-day is only slightly alleviated by the “Stars Are Just Like Us” vignettes. This is a monster you fucking created, Dr. Amercanstein!

Furthermore, America, they’ve oversold you. When I was walking four miles to elementary school in a blizzard, nothing but my eyes exposed to the elements to guide my weary way, dreaming of fun in the sun with Mickey, they didn’t tell me that Disneyland is actually in Anaheim and that Anaheim exists for the sole purpose of housing convention centers for low-ranking Midwestern executives so that their wives can impress their friends at the PTA meeting by saying their husbands are on a business trip to California. Let’s be honest, America, if they told me that I would be disenchanted on a weekly basis upon seeing how short leading men are in real life while shopping at Whole Foods, would I have packed up my chilled-to-the-bone ass and rowed across the Bering Strait? Unlikely! Do you think they warned me that getting post-graduate education would lead to countless hours on YouTube watching FAIL videos to make myself feel better about my employment? Now there’s an opiate of the masses if I’ve ever seen one!

America, why do you mock my nostalgia re: simpler days when I was wailing “My Heart Will Go On” into a hairbrush with an undecipherable Russian accent and spending every last ruble of my allowance to see Titanic in our one, one-screen movie theater by releasing it in 3D? Why do you spit on everything my parents sacrificed by making me jealous of Snooki every time a get an insufficient funds notification?

America, you’ve been making every day a dream inside of another un-fucking-attainable dream like a set of Russian dolls before Chris Nolan ever held a pen. We get it, America, the joke’s on us. You’ll be sucking on our dissatisfaction like those generically attractive actors on The Vampire Diaries until the second coming. You may have won this round, America, but don’t you for a moment think I don’t have options. I’m sorry, have you heard of the Moon? Oh yeah, you may have made it there first but I’d venture to say that crater-filled purlieu is a prime opportunity to give redistribution of wealth another chance. Sorry, student loans, I’ve spent all my savings on a Virgin Galactic ticket. See you never, America.

- Maria

I’m the Distorted Security Code Standing Between You and This Web Page by Colin Nissan

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

Hey, there you are, I’ve been waiting for you. You probably thought you were home-free after getting this far, unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. There’s the small matter of this battle of wits to attend to first.

See, I’m like the three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades, except instead of Hades, it’s Diapers.com, and instead of a dog, I’m a dyslexic computer program with a messed up vocabulary and every goddamned funhouse font in the book. Stretched, squeezed, windswept. I’ve got gel filters that’ll render any word virtually unrecognizable and camouflage backgrounds that’ll make you want to ralph all over your laptop. So put on your glasses and get comfortable. Let’s get this typographical acid trip started, shall we?

I couldn’t help but notice you doubled up on everything in your cart. Two tubs of formula, two jumbo packs of Huggies Snugglers, even two sets of binkies—one pink, one blue. Apparently the stakes are twice as high as I thought. Maybe that’s why you just flubbed KITTEN, my layup of an opener, with a minor blur and very basic warp effect. Sorry to say but it’s only gonna get uglier from here.

Ever heard of a JYKKRWVTE? No? That’s because it’s not a real word. Not even in Iceland. I made it up because I’m not bound by the rules of the English language. I’m bound by a promise to make sure you’re not some cyberpunk purse snatcher running around the Internet like it’s a street full of old ladies with limps and mustaches. What do their mustaches have to do with anything? Let me worry about that.

I had someone pay me a visit earlier today looking to leave a comment on a blog. I’ve got nothing against a person exercising their freedom of speech, unless they happen to be a spammer pushing generic Cialis pills on an innocent gardening site. That’s the kind of first amendment breach I can’t abide by, so I spun a nice little web of alphanumeric gibberish for them to get caught in. And it was sticky, my friend. Sticky with the saliva of the law.

A while back, I remember a “guy” trying to log onto his Yahoo mail from someone else’s computer, so I laid down PHLEGM PIRATE on him with a hurricane effect and the opacity dialed down to 20%. Turned out he wasn’t a “guy” after all, he was an automated Bot on a fraud bender, and my nonsensical double zinger got his little binary panties in a bunch. Machine to machine, I will not hesitate to go Terminator 2 on someone’s ass.

Ooh, you almost got that last one, very close. You’re good. Really good. I bet you can almost taste those diapers. Listen, no matter how this ends, I like your spunk. But just remember, the more you miss, the more suspicious I get, and the more suspicious I get, the rougher this case-sensitive carnival ride gets. Next thing you know, you’re 0 for 12 and the nerves start to set in, you feel your palms sweating, a rage brewing inside you. You almost forget what the normal alphabet even looks like anymore and you can’t hear yourself think because your twins are screaming in your ears wondering where all their shit is.

That’s when you’ve got a decision to make. Do you throw in the towel? Just call it quits? Or do you shake it off, block out those cries and focus on what you need to do? A mother’s love is a miraculous thing, so let’s see if you’ve got a miracle in you right now because you’re gonna need one, or we’ll be doing this weird word waltz all night long.

Graphic Dispatches from a Recent College Grad Still Living in a College Town: Texts from College and Their Real World Equivalents by Larry Buchanan

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

List: Three Steps for Exciting Storytelling by Colin Hunt

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

1. Never say more than is necessary.
2. Leave the audience wanting more.
3.

Statement from the Chairman Regarding Recent Losses by Ben Greenman

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:01:00 -0400

We have lost two billion words. There is no way to sugarcoat this situation. Two billion words are gone. We noticed worrisome signs earlier in the year: first, hundreds of words missing from a history text or poetry collection; then, thousands gone from dozens of titles. At the time, we believed that the words would return. They did not. Losses deepened and broadened until they reached a million, ten million, a hundred million, and then finally the far more serious levels of today. We see now that our belief in the reappearance of the words was misplaced. What occurred was negligence plain and simple. This was a terrible, egregious mistake, and we now feel it is our responsibility to come before you and be forthright about what has transpired.

We do not wish to minimize what has happened—the process by which words were protected was poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored—but neither do we wish for it to be exaggerated. These losses, as serious as they are, do not affect the structural soundness of the written word. Ordinary readers should not feel concerned. We are confident that the known universe of published books will be able to absorb this loss and move on. The two billion words lost represent only a tiny fraction of the overall number of words published in the English language: roughly two percent, to be precise.

There are cases, of course, in which this shortfall is not particularly problematic. Readers of historical novels know that descriptions of battlefield events can be protracted and tiresome. Exposition runs on. Those books can certainly afford these losses; they may even benefit from them. But we are also aware of the more serious consequences: in a lapidary literary novel or a collection of short stories, a few thousand words can mean the difference between artfully compressed prose and garbled nonsense.

Take In the Room, Beside the Room by Mary Crampton. When this debut novel about a young American woman in Seattle was released last year, it was called “a triumph of voice” and “a book that insists ceaselessly upon its own truth.” It earned a second printing, which should have been cause for celebration but was, sadly, affected by recent losses. In the Room, Beside the Room lost more than three thousand words, and as a result, in the version currently on shelves, the movements and motives of the main character, Helen, are frustratingly unclear. How does she get from Kentaro’s room to the airport? The final scene aboard a Bremerton ferry has been abridged beyond comprehension. We are deeply sorry to have violated the trust of Ms. Crampton and her readers.

Some have suggested that we were forced to disclose our losses only when they could no longer be concealed. This could not be further from the truth. While it is true that we knew as early as January about losses in books such as H.A. Enniston’s Lindy Hop (three percent missing) or Michael Washburn’s Pliptopia (only one percent missing, though unfortunately that one percent included the vast majority of proper nouns), we felt, again, that it was likely the situation would improve. We were guilty of a lack of oversight, certainly, and sloppy accounting practices, but most of all we were guilty of hope.

We are not taking this lightly. Three top executives have already resigned; more may follow. We are clarifying and extending our policies for detecting irresponsible verbal management. What we want most of all is to regain the trust of readers. We insist that there was an overt attempt to defraud readers. Well, that’s an interesting development, isn’t it? That sentence should have read, “However, we insist there was never an overt attempt to defraud readers.” The words “however” and “never” just fell away. Weird. Even with them, that’s only two words missing from a published piece of nearly eight hundred words, roughly one-tenth of the overall rate of loss, though the omitted words were clustered quite close together. This should give some fair illustration of the devilishly complex nature of this problem.

We apologize, again, and we ask for your patience as we continue to conduct our internal review and cooperate with regulators.

History’s a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Millie’s Book by Robb Fritz

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

“My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.”
— President George H. W. Bush, in reference to his Democratic opponents Gov. William Jefferson Clinton and Sen. Al Gore

- - -

President George H. W. Bush’s dog was an English Springer Spaniel that George had acquired for his wife Barbara in 1987 after the death of their dog C. Fred Bush, while serving his second term as Reagan’s vice president. After he was elected president in 1988, Millie became a star in her own right; by the time of the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bush leveled the accusation above at the two “bozos” Clinton and Gore, Millie had already “authored” and published a bestselling book, entitled Millie’s Book. Ghostwritten by Barbara Bush, with all proceeds going to the First Lady’s literacy foundation, the book was actually Barbara Bush’s second such effort, having penned a similar dog book from C. Fred’s perspective a few years earlier.

After its publication in September 1990, the book caused a minor stir when it outsold Ronald Reagan’s bestselling memoir An American Life by a comfortable margin. As was pointed out at the time—albeit self-defensively by Reagan’s publisher at Simon & Schuster—it wasn’t exactly a fair comparison, since a lightweight, youth-targeted, largely non-partisan book about life in the White House told from the perspective of the sitting president’s dog was bound to have a broader audience than a former president’s dense, 748-page autobiography, no matter how popular that former president might have been.

I got Millie’s memoir from the local library and tried to combine my writing research with my parental duties by reading it to my daughter. But after fifteen pages of Millie, she said in an exasperated tone, “That dog sure does talk a lot.” After five more pages she insisted on reading another book entirely.

So, yes, it may be true that Millie is not the Jane Austen or the Jennifer Egan of the canine canon. (There are, as it turns out, a surprising lot of books told from a dog’s perspective. Among them, I’ve read The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, a bittersweet story told by the dog owned by an aspiring, yet struggling, racecar driver. And I’ve been curious to read Andrew O’Hagan’s 2010 fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe written from the first-person perspective of Marilyn’s dog Maf.)

If you’re looking to the book, as I sort of hopefully was, to grab an offhand revelation about the younger George W., you’ll be largely disappointed. He makes only brief shadowy appearances, largely as the father of the grandkids Barbara and Jenna—or “grands” as the elder Bushes refer to them—who pay a visit to then-Vice President Bush’s residence at One Observatory Circle, where a distraught five-and-a-half-year-old Barbara sends the Vice President and a coterie of Secret Service personnel out on an hours-long and fruitless search for a missing stuffed dog. (It was found behind a curtain the following day.)

Also, if you’re looking for Millie’s gripping insight into Bush’s handling of the ‘80s S&L crisis, or his huddling with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney as they strategized Operation Desert Storm—which happened to be in its first preparatory stages right when Millie’s Book was published in the fall of 1990—you’re barking up the wrong tree (and I blame that pun squarely on having read this book). Despite George’s assertions about Millie’s superior knowledge of foreign affairs, the closest Millie actually comes to describing foreign affairs in this book is her partial listing of the great number of queens who have slept in the Queens’ Bedroom, her brief examination of the preparations for a state dinner with the Australian prime minister, and her large gallery of photos near the end of the book taken with a parade of foreign dignitaries, news personalities, and Dan Aykroyd. In a pointed nod toward political kumbaya, the very first picture in this series happens to be one of Michael Dukakis, shaking Millie’s paw and conversing amicably with a smiling President and First Lady Bush.

My enjoyment of the book would probably be greater if I had actually been a fan of the elder Bush as a president—was anyone ever a “fan” of George H. W. Bush?—or had even paid much attention to him whatsoever. But the truth is he may be the only president in my adult lifetime whose administration left me almost completely indifferent.

This indifference is owing mostly to the fact that I was an undergrad at the time, i.e. completely and totally self-absorbed, far more interested in having my formerly conservative Catholic mind blown by any means possible—philosophical, musical, literary, and, yes, chemical—than in paying attention to something as tedious as politics. My undergrad years were also a curious dead zone between my “rah-rah Reagan” upbringing and my bleeding heart liberal adulthood. The only reason I even knew who the vice president was then, was because he (Dan Quayle) had a marked tendency to say memorably inane things like “(It’s) time for the human race to enter the solar system,” or “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” Ironically, America’s next true master of the mind-numbing misstatement would be none other than George H. W. Bush’s own son. Maybe Quayle brought out Poppy’s paternal side.

So, I wondered, had the first Bush been a great president and I’d just been too lost in the emotional rollercoaster of college to notice? Or was he really just kind of a boring president? Everyone always talks about the legendary presidents, the Washingtons, Lincolns and Kennedys. No one ever really thinks about which presidents of our time will turn out to be the historical Millard Fillmores or Chester Arthurs, the obscure presidents that owing to a combination of personal temperament and historical malaise fill a spot on the presidential timeline while meaning very little or nothing to anyone beyond fairly dedicated historians. In Bush’s case, he would suffer from being largely a transitional president, the leader who was in power when the Berlin Wall actually fell, despite the fact that Reagan will probably always get credit for the event owing to his speech in which he declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

By any standard Bush was a remarkably successful human being. George was invariably president or captain of every class, group or team he ever belonged to; in 1943 at the age of 18, he was the youngest pilot in the Navy at the time he earned his wings; he showed great bravery as a pilot in going on—and surviving—a remarkable total of 58 bombing runs; he turned himself into a millionaire oilman by the age of 40; and then, of course, there was his subsequent political success. But despite this unbelievable overachievement he turned out to be a curiously lackluster president, probably most remembered for waffling on the promise he made when he said, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” a waffle that cost him a lot of his Republican base.

Not even my conservative parents were crazy about Bush, both my folks considering him tepid on social conservative issues and my mom considering Barbara Bush a “battle axe.” Bush struck my parents—accurately—as little more than a political opportunist regarding their most cherished issue, abortion, and it’s true that he never proved himself to be a True Believer when it came to social issues. But they still campaigned for him, since, in their eyes, it was better to have a lukewarm Republican in office than a baby killing, “soft on crime” Democrat.

Bush was painfully aware of his tendency to underwhelm. When he learned to his dismay that Nixon felt he was “weak, soft” while serving as the chairman of the RNC, he wrote to his sons, “It stings, but it doesn’t bleed.” Reagan was reluctant to tap him for vice president because he thought Bush “melted under pressure.” Newsweek ran Bush on a cover with the headline “Fighting the Wimp Factor” the very week he announced his run for president in October of 1987. In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau depicted him as a literally invisible man, a floating asterisk mouthing voice balloons. (Bush couldn’t stand Trudeau’s depiction of him, and once said that he wanted to “kick the hell out of him.” At the same time, he invited Dana Carvey—who performed a fairly devastating Bush impersonation on SNL—to the White House for a personal performance.)

Barbara actually touches briefly on this sore spot of George’s in Millie’s Book. When Millie was named “Ugliest Dog” in the July 1989 issue of Washingtonian Magazine, Millie “says” that George told her to “shake it off,” then recounted to her the time when he was serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and he topped the list in a New York Magazine article entitled “The Ten Most Overrated Men in N.Y.C.” George’s response to the article was to invite the other nine men, plus the “nervous author” of the piece, Dick Schapp, and a host of ambassadors to a reception honoring “The Overrated.”

For the most part, Millie’s Book spends its time detailing the domestic everyday of White House life. We find out which room was turned into Millie’s nursery for the pups (the beauty parlor on the second floor, originally set up by Pat Nixon). We’re introduced to various historical individuals depicted in paintings around the White House. And we get treated to a series of pictures of George Bush rolling around the White House lawn with Millie’s young pups, the President seemingly more saturnine and distracted than playful, but still, there he is, the patrician George Bush, rolling around the White House lawn in a full suit with Millie and a bunch of cute little spaniel pups, one of which would eventually be owned by George W.

Appropriately for a mother, Millie pays much attention to the birth and raising of her pups. When they get their shots, there’s a picture of Barbara with her back turned to the scene, accompanied by the caption “Please note the lady who thought she could help deliver the pups! Makes me wonder what kind of mother she was.” A sentiment that, with all due respect, I honestly wondered myself, a lot, as I lived through eight years of her son’s presidential administration.

After Millie’s Book, Millie found minor television fame, being portrayed on Murphy Brown and Wings, as well as taking cartoon form on The Simpsons. She died in 1997 from pneumonia, before having a chance to witness her son Spotty’s return to the White House in 2001 with George and Laura. And unlike the first Bush’s term, this time I would be paying nothing but full and despairing attention to the latest dog owner in the White House.