Amy and Me (reposted)

I wrote this on January 5, 2013. An update to it is that Ms. Tan has a new novel titled The Valley of Amazement, published last month. Didn't have time to write today, so I chose this one to give you. Hope you enjoy it, and the video!
 

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

Muscular Christianity

Right, Iguana people, it’s time to get down to work. We gotta raise 8500 bucks so that a group, as Susan put it, of predominantly older, white people can listen to a black guy talk about bullying.

“What,” you’re saying, “don’t these guys have enough money to pay the fee? And who’s the group; who’s the guy?”

The group is St. Dunstan’s Church; the guy is LeRoy Butler, who everybody but Susan and me will know is an ex-Green Bay Packer. And Butler is apparently quite a guy—he spent his childhood wearing leg braces and, at times, using a wheel chair. From that he gets to this, as described in Wikipedia:

Butler was selected by the Packers in the second round of the 1990 NFL draft. He played in 181 games, earned a Super Bowl ring, for Super Bowl XXXI, following the 1996 season, was selected as an All-Pro five times and was selected to the Pro Bowl four times (1993, 1996, 1997, and 1998). He was named to the 1990s NFL All Decade Team, by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and was later inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, in 2007.

Wow—that’s a turn around! So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Butler moved into action, after he chatted with a fan wearing his jersey but adorned with a little pink ribbon. The fan was a little girl, but quite knowledgeable about breast cancer, and she filled Butler’s ears with statistics.

OK—Butler has four little girls, so he knows: when little girls speak, you listen!

And act—which is why he set up the LeRoy Butler Foundation, an organization that will give up to $800 to women who need financial assistance following breast cancer treatment. Here’s what the foundation website has to say:

After retiring, Butler founded the LeRoy Butler Foundation, whose mission is to “to help women going through breast cancer treatments obtain the assistance they need to focus on the job of healing verses (sic) the financial impact to their families.” Money from the foundation goes directly to patients who may be having financial struggles—such as home foreclosures—because they’ve spent so much on treatment and prescriptions.

Right—it should be “versus,” not “verses,” but how many typos do I make every day? And what a truly great cause, coming from a guy who presumably doesn’t need to do anything, after twenty years or so as a pro football player. Those guys make money.

Butler also has another cause—bullying. Or rather, anti-bullying, perhaps because he was the target of some barbs slung at him when he was limping around with his leg braces as a kid. So it was natural, apparently, for him to start speaking on the topic, for which he charges $8500.

And that may be why he decided to tweet Jason Collins, the gay basketball who came out recently. Butler wrote, or rather tweeted, these incendiary words:

         Congrats to Jason Collins

Sorry—should have warned you to have the smelling salts near to hand…..

OK, so then he got the news—the minister wanted to cancel the contract. “Why,” asked Butler. “Check out the moral clause,” was the response. Oh, and then he was told that he could speak—and earn his fee—if he retracted his tweet, apologized, and asked God for forgiveness. (Question—what if God said “no?” Or better, here’s what my God would have said: “No frigging way. I am NOT gonna accept an apology from anybody—pro football player or not—who kisses ass to a bunch of bigots for 8500 bucks. Get some balls, LeRoy!”)

Well, perhaps LeRoy’s God and my own were running on parallel tracks that day—or maybe, just to keep the metaphor consistent, playing on the same team. Because LeRoy did tell the minister—don’t know why I didn’t put quotes on that—to go jump. Actually, here’s what he said, in a Milwaukee Sentinel article:

“This is a form of bullying, what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me to do something I don’t want to do. He disagreed, and I said, ‘We agree to disagree’ and he said ‘No, I’m right and you’re wrong.’”

All right—so Butler lost the fee, which apparently was to have gone to his foundation. Into this story steps St. Dunstan’s Church, of which my friend Susan is a parishioner. And although St. Dunstan has a number of gay people, most of the congregation is older and white—the demographic that should be against Butler’s tweet.

Nope—not these guys.

And they were talking about it—no wonder everybody hates Christians; who wouldn’t, since it’s always the idiots like the “minister” above who gets the attention? And yes, St. Dunstan’s has some money, but guess what? It’s earmarked for the usual things: snowplowing the parking lot, salaries, and also, well, for the poor. As Susan says, “we chronically run a deficit budget but don't cut funding for the poor even if we have to cut other expenses to the bone.” So no, there’s not $8500 in the budget for a speaker fee. But wouldn’t it be great if…..

So they contacted Butler, and he agreed to come speak in the middle of June of this year. And they did it, as Susan frankly admits, in part to spread the message: for every church that cancels on Butler, there is (minimally) another that will engage him.

Moral—there are good Christians out there…..

And no, they’re not gonna let bad Christians create the image.

Right—so here’s the challenge. I will match 10 dollars for the first ten dollars donated to St. Dunstan’s to bring Butler to speak. That’s 100 bucks. If you agree that Butler’s message should be heard, write the amount that you’d like to contribute in the “comments” section below. If you match one dollar for the first ten dollars, your contribution will be 10$; if you match two dollars, your contribution will be 20$, and so on. Then, send an email to marcnewhouse333@gmail.com with your contact information.

The challenge ends on Friday, 31 May 2013. That weekend, you’ll be notified of the results and sent a link to the site set up by the church to contribute funds for the activity. It’s the honor system, guys—I’m trusting you to contribute the amount pledged. And here, by the way, is the link you’ll be sent: http://www.stdunstans.com/wp/members/bringing-leroy-butler-to-st-dunstans

Second thing to do: copy and paste the following message into an email, and send it to all of your friends.

Do you love football and fairness? If so, please consider supporting a fund of St. Dunstan’s Church, which has engaged former Green Bay Packer LeRoy Butler to speak—for $8500—after he lost a speaking engagement at another church. Why?  Only because Butler tweeted a message of support to Jason Collins, the gay basketball player, who recently came out. The minister of the other church demanded that Butler rescind his tweet, apologize, and ask forgiveness to God. Butler refused.

St. Dunstan’s Church is located in Madison, Wisconsin, and is a small parish of about 100 people. Most of their funds--beyond those for necessary expenses--are earmarked for helping the poor; the sum of $8500 for a speaking engagement is a true challenge for them.

Butler, who played for 12 years as a Green Bay Packer, speaks nationally about bullying, which will be his topic at St. Dunstan’s in mid-June.

If you can help, please send a donation to: http://www.stdunstans.com/wp/members/bringing-leroy-butler-to-st-dunstans

For more information, and to contribute to a matching fund, please click here:  http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com/2013/05/muscular-christianity.html

Look, if every guy who loves football and fairness chips in a buck, we can easily get to $8500. Actually, I think we can go over the top. Here’s my proposal—anything over $8500 to the LeRoy Butler Foundation.

Hey, Butler—you in?

Amy and Me

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

Junk Mail

It must have been the weakness brought on by two days of non-stop diarrhea. Otherwise, who can explain it?

Why would I buy a book about RickyMartin? 

It was something about Jack, I recall—he used to do this weird stuff. I can still remember the letters from Westinghouse and the funny little corporate trademark they had. And whatever happened to Westinghouse? Where’d they go off to?

Well, things are appearing and disappearing in a strange way, lately. Starting with Sonia—sorry, she’s not a thing, I know that. But there she was, big as life on my morning walk, looking at me as if she’d seen a ghost. 

Maybe she had….

So we agreed that we had to talk.

That we did yesterday, after I had been rescued from Rock River (Río Piedras) by an angel (Ángel) who took me home. In his BMW. 

No, not for what the iguanas do so well. This is a respectable household, sex toys on the carpet notwithstanding….

And he didn’t rescue me from the river, although in a sense he did. It was pretty much a river—just flowing down, not sideways. It was a water zero (aguacero).

Now where was I?     

Oh—Sonia, whom I met with Nicky, yesterday. And the curious news that Whitney Houston is dead. Wow, I said—that terrible voice has been stilled! News to me!

“Whitney Houston is dead,” I remarked to Sonia.

“Yeah, two months ago….”

Oh.

Well, no stranger than learning from Cousin Ruthie from Minnesota but in Chicago (and at the Drake Hotel, no less!) that Romney had won the Puerto Rico primary. We don’t actually vote for president, but we do go to the convention. Well, why not? It’s a party—in several senses of the word—and we do parties well down here. 

OK, I was struggling to hold up my end of the conversation with Cousin Ruthie, but I was able to keep up by mentioning that Rick Santorum was, apparently, a family man, a Christian, a believer in tradi….

“A lizard!” said Ruthie.

Oh. They hadn’t mentioned—or boomed—that.

Or maybe they had.

OK—so Whitney Houston has gone the way of Westinghouse, apparently—or maybe they’re both still going strong. I don’t know.

I do know that I started out talking about Ricky Martin….

And that there’s a book entitled I (yo) in Spanish and the same book entitled Me (me) in English. Written in English—I did check this—by a Puerto Rican (Martin, or Martín) living in Gringolandia to be read by me, a gringo living in Puerto Rico.  

Oh yes, and I had bought the book because I really thought that I should get going. Stir about. Get moving on this failure project, because really, it seems the right thing to do.

Jack would do it.

So Jack wrote to Westinghouse—shouldn’t I write to Ricky? But what would I say?

That’s why I bought the book.

Gotta find out something about the man….

Well, I learned that at Wal-Mart—direct marketing.

And it started out well enough, for Ricky, it seems, is completely in tune with and connected to his fans through…

Twitter.

WHAT!

No. 

I mean, NO!

I am not gonna join Twitter and tweet to Ricky. And hope that he tweets, or twitters, back. It’s gonna be a letter.

But what to say?

Well, here goes….

Dear Ricky,

First an apology. For years, you were the butt of a joke between Raf and me at 12:01 AM on the first day of the January.

We’d gulp the twelve grapes, down the champagne, and then say, soulfully…

“and may this be the year that Ricky finally meets the girl of his dreams!”

That was snide.

I’m sorry.

We do it all at our own rate.

And curiously, our lives seem to be running parallel, but on different tracks.

And in opposite directions.

I’m a classical musician, you’re a pop star.

You’re famous, I’m not.

You’ve written a book about me (yo) and I’ve written a blook—apparently—about my mother.

You’re interested in giving better lives to third-world kids.

I’m interested in giving better deaths to ancients (ancianos).

So that’s why I wrote the blook, and that’s why I need your help.

Your voice is louder than mine….or at least carries farther.

We have, Ricky, you and I (not me) only one year—actually now nine months—to get the word out.

You can cheat the nursing home.

You can slip away from the party, go home, and die in your own bed—all quite legally, morally and comfortably (more or less).

Ricky—read my blook, as I have not read yours.

Who knows anything about me?

Sincerely,

Marc Newhouse

Jack woulda done it better….