A Wedding!

The BF and I have been to at least one wedding a year the whole time we've been together, and until last Sunday, all of them had been on my side of the family. We've been to a wedding at Disneyland where the guests were given Mickey Mouse ears instead of champagne; a sunset wedding at Hulihee Palace on the Big Island; and a hillbilly wedding at a campground in Idaho. The reception was held in a barn and my cousin Ted got drunk and fell into the bonfire, but he wasn't hurt so it's okay to laugh about it. Actually, that whole wedding was a pretty accurate picture of my family. The catering was barbecue, we tapped the keg before sundown and everyone brought out their car whiskey to pass around while the little kids threw things in the fire to see what would burn. Good times.

I imagine the BF felt the same way at his brother's wedding on Sunday. It was the first wedding on his side of the family, and also the first Jewish wedding I've ever attended, which meant instead of the couple's first dance, we did the communal Horah dance and lifted people up on chairs. Every single person who went up on the chair was gripping that thing for dear life, so I'm guessing it's kinda scary, though not having gone up in the chair myself, I can't say for sure. Still--white knuckles, every one of them.

There was also a LOT more talking than any other wedding I've been to. Something like six or eight people got up to make a speech, and each of them had two or three typed pages of notes. They were all very good speeches, because it was a crowd of hyper-educated Jewish East Coasters, and I gather this is pretty usual for this type of gathering, but I'm not going to lie--I liked the dancing best.

The location was tits, by the way, a vineyard outside of Charlottesville, Virginia with polo horses in the pasture next door. Waiting for the ceremony to begin, a bunch of us went down to the fence to pet them and take pictures of each other with the Blue Ridge mountains in the background. Here I am! I clean up real good, don't I? You'd never guess I was from hillbilly stock.
The only part of that trip that wasn't so much fun was the airplane ride. Now, it wasn't the smallest plane I've ever been on. That honor goes to the 12-seat puddle jumper I once took from Moloka'i to Oahu where the pilot requested that we all "lean forward" during take-off. But this plane, a two-propeller 34-seater, got the Indiana Jones theme music stuck in my head for days. All we needed was a couple of brown fedoras and the yellow map with the red line moving across it, and we'd have had ourselves a real adventure on our hands!

Mazel tov.

The Poetry Beat

One of my favorite writers is Diane di Prima. You might not have heard much about her. She was a Beat Poet--still is, I guess, does a person stop being part of a movement when the movement has moved on to other things?Anyway, you wouldn't have heard much about her because all of the other famous and "important" Beat Poets were dudes, and she was writing at a time when there wasn't really any societal or artistic freedom for women.

I'm considering Diane di Prima today because last night, my poetry teacher took me to an event hosted by her feminist poetry collective at the Dixie Club in SoHo. (There's no part of that sentence I don't like.) They showed a 26-minute indie short film called "The Poetry Beat," about the life and work of di Prima, which included interviews with women who knew her back-when, women who were influenced by her work, and di Prima herself, now living in San Francisco with her poems, watercolors, and little yellow dog. There were poetry performances by di Prima at all stages of her life, from when she was a well-titted young woman with golden-red hair, until today, still well-titted at 77 but a bit grayer in the hair.

My favorite anecdote was from a woman who hosted di Prima at a commune in Maine one year. The commune had 8 children under the age of 2, so when di Prima got a bit of royalty money from one of her books, she celebrated by buying the commune women a crate of Pampers diapers (until then, they'd been using and endlessly washing cloth diapers). The women loved it, but the men complained about how much waste disposables created. "It was an easy way for them to be down on Diane without calling her a pushy woman," said the commune manager.

I like that story because it illustrates the problem I have with the Beat movement. On the one hand, I like the writing that came out of it, but on the other hand, some of its more celebrated figures were raging misogynists. Jack Kerouac can go hell as far as I'm concerned. His book On the Road made me cross-eyed with rage. It's supposed to be about these guys who are all hip and free and not tied down by societal bonds, but they're constantly getting women pregnant and then abandoning their families to hitchhike across the country. Freedom bought for the price of a woman's suffering. Disgusting, I say!

Diane di Prima really gets it, though. I wish I had time to find some of her poetry to put up here, but my break is almost over and I guess I should get back to working for the Man so I can earn my cheese and waffle money.

Hurricane in Brooklyn

Tornado, earthquake, a tsunami if you count the one that came from Japan to my relatives on the Big Island, and now a hurricane. This is shaping up to be a really weird year for Big Island Rachel. No wonder church attendance was so good at the Catholic church on Court Street today.

Being from Hawaii, I have a Girl Scout badge in Hurricane Preparedness--Survival Camp at Kilohana, 1997--and good thing, too, because my little perfectly-Rachel-sized apartment on the East River ended up being in the evacuation zone. My Daddio left me a voicemail AND sent an email telling me to head for the hills and "don't do that family thing where we say, 'What is this strom you speak of, I can handle it!'" It was sound advice from the parental unit to the latest generation of that family the other kids were warned never to play with. I confess that I did have a passing fancy to stay in my apartment just to see if I could handle it, but when Daddio tells me to get out, I know it's serious.

Fortunately, me Mum was in town and staying a few blocks inland out of the flood zone, so I spent the night with her after hurricane proofing my apartment. Here is my "go-bag." Sure, it has all the usual stuff: passport, computer, three books, two graphic novels, five comic books (my worst nightmare is being stuck on a deserted island with nothing to read), blankets, clothes. I also brought Spam, couscous, my teddy bear (seen squashed up against the plastic bag) a chocolate donut that has been in my cupboard for so long it qualifies as a scientific experiment, and candles, except the only candles I had were tiny little Chanukah candles, so I ended up having to bring my menorah, too, since it was the only candle holder that would fit them. And of course, you can see my blue rubber boots there. A girl on the street yelled, "A shout-out to all my sisters rocking the boots and shorts!" I was the height of fashion that day, even without a bra.

I hung up my heavy winter curtains and covered the body--I mean, all of my clothes with my winter down comforter. If I'd been more clever about it, I would have simply lifted the closet rod off the wall with all the clothes still on it, but as you can see by the bare rod resting on the heap, that eminently practical idea didn't occur to me until it was too late. I figured that if the worst did happen and my windows burst apart in the gale like deadly flowers of glass and mayhem, all my expensive and fancy clothes (not always correlated, my fanciest gown was only $10 at the Hilo second-hand store) would have a modicum of protection.

I also filled up the bathtub. I got to impress a lot of people at work on Friday by informing them that the bathtub full of water, a standard preventative measure when a hurricane is bearing down on you, was not really for drinking, but rather for flushing the toilet in the event that the electricity went out and the toilet couldn't pump water into the tank. For reasons unknown to me, New York City water is a gentle shade of teal. I'm not sure if this picture really captures that soothing, sea-like hue, but trust me, that shit is teal.Saturday night was spent on the stoop of Mum's sublet, drinking wine and singing all the songs we used to sing when she drove me to high school in the morning. I think I slept through the actual hurricane, which didn't pass over us until 2 or 3 in the morning. It passed quickly and had downgraded to a mere tropical storm by that time anyway, but Mum said the winds still sounded like a freight train as they roared through.This morning, we went to inspect the apartment. The windows are all unbroken, but two of the three windows had leaked and there were a few puddles on the floor. The curtains in the bedroom were so heavy with water they'd pulled the curtain rod down. But underneath the down comforter, the body--I mean, my fancy clothes were bone dry. Everything is coming up Milhouse. Thanks, Girl Scouts of America!

And the bathtub? Totally empty. I always suspected that my bathtub plug was slightly defective. Oh, well. If there had been serious enough flooding that the power had gone out (all New York City power lines are buried in the ground), my riverside apartment would have had sewage and river water backing up into the pipes, and flushing the toilet would have been an exercise in futility. Rank, rotting futility.

Here are some tree branches that fell over. Fellow curious Brooklynites for scale. So long, Irene. Don't let the doorknob hit ya where the door should've bit ya.

Earthquake in Brooklyn

The Big Island gets little tremors all the time. We're volcanic. It happens. It's not supposed to happen in New York City. If I'd known I would have to deal with earthquakes and tornadoes in addition to fucking WINTER, I might have just stayed in Hawaii with my earthquakes and tsunamis. At least there we have perpetual summer.

Virginia just had a 5.9 earthquake that we felt up here in Brooklyn, first as a maybe-it's-just-me tremor and then as a holy-building-evacuation-Batman shake that left us milling about in the parking lot for about half an hour in some pretty gorgeous late summer weather. So it wasn't all bad. I was standing by the office printer with a piece of paperwork and thought at first that I was having a sensory flashback to the great Hawaii earthquake of 2006. But then the hangers on the coat rack started to clink together and the floor began to sway like a boat (we're on the top floor, six stories up, so sway is actually a good thing. Sway saves. Brittle breaks.). My coworker told whoever was on the phone with him, "It's an earthquake, get out of the building," hung up, and looked at me and snapped, "Get moving!" Combat veterans: they always know what to do.

It's a good thing we just had a fire drill a couple of weeks ago. Everyone scurried briskly down the stairs, making loud human-noises similar to wildebeasts evading lions on the savannah. "Don't panic, don't trip, don't puke," I told myself. Self, all excellent suggestions. I was one flight of stairs away from the outside world when this guy in front of me suddenly stops, turns around, and says, "I'm going back to help get Admissions out of their office!" I shoved right past him, because Hero, I'm too young and pretty to die! Let others perish, I've too much to live for!

I got out into the parking lot, looked down, and realized that the only thing I brought with me was the piece of paperwork I'd been clutching when the quake began. I felt like finding the student who gave me the paper and saying, "When disaster struck, yours was the only thing I thought to save!" I didn't feel too embarrassed, because one of our student workers was in the file room before she evacuated, and she brought the paper she'd been holding at the time as well. And it was one of my emails! Bonding moment!

Hanging out in the parking lot with everyone from my building was actually pretty fun. If we'd had a couple of kegs and a grill, we could have made an afternoon of it. Alas, they made us go back inside and work for another hour. We received emails and text messages telling us that "the buildings are secure and workers are to resume all activity." So I went back to copying my sexual organs on the Xerox.

You know. Like ya do.

Natural disasters--I use the word loosely, I don't know if much was actually damaged, especially not this far away from the epicenter--have a fun way of bringing people together. It doesn't matter who's the boss of who, or who makes more money than who (whom?). If that building goes down, peasant and noble are squished alike.

Terror of the wrath of the gods: the great equalizer.

New York Fucking City at it's Fucking-est

I wish I'd come up with that quote, but it's from Craig Ferguson's book, "American on Purpose."

I don't know if it's living in New York or working in customer services that's done this to me, but I am now totally willing to yell "Fuck you!" to random strangers that piss me off. Last night, I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond in Manhattan to pick up a bookshelf. It was my second bookshelf that week. The first one I bought was so awesome that I had to go back and get another one, exactly the same, so they could ruminate side by side, groaning and satiated with all of my pretty, pretty books. So sexy.

These bookshelves are wood, so they were too heavy for me to get on the subway. I had to hail a cab. I put the shelf in the boot, buckled myself in, and said, "I'm going to Brooklyn." Cab drivers hate it when you're going to Brooklyn, but the law says that when a taxi picks you up, the driver has to take you wherever you want to go. Which is what I said to the driver when he said he couldn't go to Brooklyn because he was on his way to pick up a fare at the airport.

"I'm in the car, the law says you have to take me to Brooklyn," I said, smug in my New York knowledge of taxi guidelines.

"Oh man, oh man, I can't take you, I have to go pick up this other man, I'm going to lose a hundred dollars if I can't make it, I've worked hard all day, I thought you were just going uptown--"

"I'm going to Brooklyn, you're required by law to take me there, why'd you stop and pick me up if you can't take me where I need to go--"

You have to imagine both of us talking at once. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I caved first.

"Fuck it! I'm not going to sit here and fucking argue with you! Get my shit out and hail me another cab."

Rachel from the Big Island would have never said "fuck" to a stranger. Big Island Rachel is sorry she didn't say it louder. New York Fucking City, everyone.

He got my shelf out, but didn't get me another cab and I didn't get his license number. I really should have, and I immediately scolded myself when I realized I'd forgotten it, because I wanted to report him. I still do. My heart beats angry every time I think about it. I want to put on my Catwoman costume and go beat the crap out of someone. My desire for retribution is great!

I should just let it go before this city gives me a heart attack

Death sits a few rows back to avoid the splash zone

Now I know why the best seats in a theater aren't right up front, but a few rows back. Actors spit, especially when they sing. It's a little like going to the orca show at Sea World.

My very first autumn in New York--I guess that would be 2008--the BF and I went to a reading of a musical in progress called "Death Takes a Holiday." About a month ago we saw a preview of it, and last Thursday, we went to opening night. "Death Takes a Holiday" is exactly what it sounds like: Death, feeling professionally drained after the slaughter of World War I, decides to kick back at an Italian nobleman's villa and take the weekend off. To quote Futurama, Death does "human stuff. He learns, he laughs, he loves." I suppose you could classify this musical as a romance, but like many works set in the period between the world wars (the show is based on a an Italian play by Alberto Casella from 1929), there's something melancholy and almost hopeless at the heart of the story. The gaiety of the 1920s is a deliberate rejection of the horrors of war, a sort of "No, we're going to have FUN now, damnit!" frolic intended to mask the existential crisis many faced in the aftermath of the years of senseless slaughter and pain. In the show, Death is a handsome, somewhat kooky Russian prince, but beneath that, he is also a stand-in for the nobleman's son Roberto, who died in the war. "Death is in the house," sings the nobleman, speaking of the actual Death vacationing at the villa, but also perhaps alluding to his absent son, dead but still lingering in the memories of the villa's other occupants: mother, father, grandmother, sister, widow, the younger sister of his war buddy. And although the nobleman's daughter Grazia falls in love with the man Death, on a symbolic level Grazia's love of death can be read as a kind of despair. Nothing lasts forever except death, so why not love Death? It's the only constant you'll ever get. The show I saw doesn't play this angle at all--it's a pretty straightforward love story that reads more as an affirmation of life than a rejection of it. "Life's a joy/Life is apples and lemons and lime trees" is pretty far from the ideas I've outlined above. But every American writer worth her salt has spent time in Paris in the 1920s, sucking up the Fitzgeralds and Hemingways and Steins like so much Prohibition champagne. Woody Allen just released a movie about that whole scene, "Midnight in Paris," which addressed the concept of nostalgia without touching much on the deeper fears and anxieties that everyone felt as they tried to return to some kind of normal life after experiencing a war that made literal mincemeat of concepts like "normal." So whenever I experience art from or about that period, I can't help but remember what's going on beneath the joy and the smiles.

Enough of that, though. Life's a joy! It's summer in New York and I got to put on my big-girl shoes and go to the theater!

Here's what I like about theater people: many of the agents, producers, and various creative and financial associates I saw on opening night remembered me from the reading. The reading that happened almost two years ago. How is that even possible? I can barely remember what subway to take to work in the morning. (Just last week I got on the F instead of the G and was 10 minutes late to the office. I was distracted thinking about the unknown creature currently living in my bedroom ceiling.)

We got to go backstage and visit with the cast and crew before the show started. There was a table covered in pastries and cheesecake, but when he saw me looking at it, the BF whispered, "That's not for you." He knows me well. The musical director, it turns out, lives in the BF's neighborhood and is hapa-Hawaiian. The island diaspora. We're everywhere!

My favorite part of the evening was meeting Death's understudy, who was called upon at the last minute to step in and play the lead on opening night. The actual lead had to stay home that night because he lost his voice. As the director said, "Death takes a medical leave of absence." And having seen the lead in the roll in previews, I have to say that I prefer the understudy's Death. "It's straight out of '42nd Street'!" said the BF. "The lead breaks her leg on opening night and the young understudy has to sing her part. 'You're going out there a nobody, but you have to come back a star!'" I don't know if the understudy gets to be a star now, but he definitely deserves to be. His Death was whimsical, unpretentious, and sweet. There was a lightness, a bounciness to him that the regular Death lacked. Understudy Death felt like he was actually on holiday; Regular Death felt like his mind was still back at the office.

Speaking of the office, New York and the surrounding areas are currently in the middle of a heat wave. On Friday, the heat index, which is like wind chill and basically means "what does it FEEL like," was 115 degrees. Today, it's only (ha) 89 with a heat index of 97. I know I really should go downtown to get all happy-weepy at the county clerks office, since today is the first day of New York Plus Gay Marriage, but it's nice and air conditioned in my apartment, and I've got blueberry beer. How would Captain America handle this situation?

Undulating Wall of Sound

Summer is here! This is my fourth summer in New York. I moved here on July 8th, 2008, which means today is my 3-year New York anniversary soon. Praise me!

This is my first summer NOT doing gigs with the Village Voice street team. On the one hand it's nice, because I don't have to haul 30 pounds of earplugs and condoms around in 90 degree heat and listen to band after shitty band play the same bad indie music at the Knitting Factory. But on the other hand, street teamstering did get me out of the house and all around the city, and it gave me some good stories to tell at the bar.

Looking back, I would recommend that any young person moving to New York City get themselves one of those part-time jobs in promotions of some kind. It's like New York boot camp, where you have to find your way around using public transit while loaded down with massive amounts of crap, make nice with the mouth-breathing freeloaders that come to free crap like bears to a campsite, and learn to withhold free crap from said bears until they cough up some personal information so your parent company can bombard them with offers for more free crap. It's the circle of life, and it moves us all down the bowels of this great city we call home. You learn pretty quick whether or not you can hack it in New York once you've worked Electric Zoo.

All of this is on my mind lately because one of my coworkers recently said good-bye to a young relative who lasted exactly 5 days in New York City before she moved back home. She didn't even make it a week. Poor soul. I can relate. I was so freaked out my first night in New York City that I threw up in a Polish restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. I probably wouldn't have left my room at all if the BF wasn't there to hold my hand and show me around. A lot of credit also goes to my old housemates at 187, who took me to parties at the Tip Top and let me drink with them on their roof. New York is a scary place, and you need nice people to hold your hands while you paddle around in the shallow end, but eventually you need to just dive in there on your own and swim for all your worth.

Shoots, all that talk and I haven't even gotten to the subject of my post, which is a picnic I had with some friends on Governors Island last Saturday. I brought a shower curtain to put under my picnic blanket to protect us from getting swampass, which I feel was pretty clever, and in true Hawaii-style, there was WAY too much food, even with 3 friends showed up unexpectedly and doubled the size of our party. We were ostensibly there to listen to a free classical music concert, but instead of a little Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel and we'll call it a day, the orchestra played with minimalist, experimental composition from 1964 that the program described as "an undulating wall of sound." In my opinion, that phrase should only be used in a bedroom context. We listened for about 10 minutes before we completely tuned it out and talked about cheese. Apparently you're supposed to treat cheese like a live cat, and not put it in a body bag and stick it in the fridge.

Who knew?