Julia Child Steps Onto the Stage

OK—I could tell you that the buzz on the island is that the secretary of justice, a guy by the name of Luis Sánchez Betances, ran over to the police station last Friday night, since a buddy of his, Jaime Sifre Rodríguez, who is also a partner in Sánchez’s law firm, got picked up for drunk driving.

In fact, his blood alcohol was .215%, which is high indeed.

Sour minds on the island are wondering what Sánchez Betances was doing there, and some have even gone so far as to breathe aspersions. But relax, dear Reader, there was no impropriety involved—in fact, Sánchez Betances was there to make absolutely sure that the rules were being followed, and that no special treatment was given. He was just there for a friend! Something anyone would do!

And now, of course, warped and twisted minds are attempting to misconstrue a perfectly normal action—how dare they! Here, for example, is an ex district attorney, Osvaldo Carlo:

El exfiscal Osvaldo Carlo dijo en NotiUno que “la mera presencia del secretario de Justicia allí, sin decir una palabra, crea una presión indebida sobre estos agentes de la Policía. Porque, por qué un secretario de Justicia va a estar en el lugar de los hechos si no es para crear un ambiente negativo de la investigación. No tenía ni que decir una sola palabra. Él tenía otras maneras de trabajar con ese asunto que no fuese presentarse allí, porque al presentarse allí iban a sentir la presión del cargo”.

(The ex attorney Osvaldo Carlo said to NotiUno that “the mere presence of the secretary of justice there, without saying a word, creates undue pressure on those police agents. Why? Because why is a secretary of justice going to be there if not to create a negative environment for the investigation? He doesn’t have to say a word. He has other ways of working this affair without being there, because by being there they were going to feel the pressure.”)

Poppycock!

Turning away from such negativity, what’s the deal with Lee Hoiby?

Why, you may ask, am I worrying about Hoiby? Because over the weekend, I was watching Renée Fleming talk about Leontyne Price, who had championed Hoiby’s work. So what was up with Hoiby?

Well, I knew he had a Wisconsin connection, but I didn’t know that he was actually born in Madison in 1926, had studied with Gunnar Johansen, and had later attended Mills College. His compositions draw the attention of Gian Carlo Menotti, who showed them to Samuel Barber. Menotti also invited Hoiby to Curtis to study with him: no small thing, since Menotti was the leading opera composer of the time.

And Hoiby didn’t follow the fashion of the time—which was to compose highly dissonant music. Instead, his music is tuneful, lyrical, and sophisticated. And his specialty? Here’s what he told Zachary Woolfe:

“It was the singers, not the instrumentalists,” he said. “The instrumentalists didn’t know who the fuck I was. I didn’t have any instrumental music played. Singers, you can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”

Here’s what Woolfe has to say about the songs:

Indeed, it seems likely that his songs-whose brilliant and varied texts, chosen by Mr. Shulgasser, range from Bishop to Roethke to Stevens to Rilke-will be what last the longest of his work. Perfectly honed little worlds, they benefit most from his modesty. Small shifts, like the opening into ecstatic brightness of the third stanza of “The Message” (set to a John Donne poem), take on a kind of humble grandeur.

In the interview with Woolfe, Hoiby said the following: “All I did was compose. I never went anywhere, I didn’t know anybody. I never went to any parties. I never met anybody. I’m basically not interested in social life, I guess.”

Well, he must have watched television, because his spoof on Julia Child is bang on. In the words of Joseph Dalton:

All of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on undaunted. She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked one. Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a light and colorful orchestration.

And as light as the piece—and the cake—is, there’s also something tinged with melancholy about Hoiby’s work. Is it because I know that he must have been dealing with being gay in a decade—the fifties—that was perhaps the most homophobic of the century? Is it because he never quite attained the celebrity of Gian Carlo Menotti? I feel about him what I feel about Barber: at the end, he must have felt he had given too much, and gotten too little.

The State Journal Goes Underground

For a considerable time yesterday, I considered the improbable but apparently true idea that I was dealing with a newspaper with an unlisted number.

Nor was that the strangest part of the affair. The real question was why the death of Marvin Rabin had hit me so hard. I knew he was in his nineties, I knew that his hearing was bad, but nothing in the video I had seen looked like a man who could die. Is that silly? Yes, but there’s nothing logical about grief.

And so there I was, sobbing in the café, remembering the Saturday mornings, remembering the temper tantrums followed by impassioned appeals—we were better than that, we could play it better. Then I remembered the toilet bowl brush, and I lost it again.

I had house-sat for the Rabins, and everyone had warned me—Rhoda, Rabin’s wife, was neurotically attached to her house. In fact, Rabin had threatened more than once never to take Rhoda anywhere: she spent the whole vacation worrying about her house.

Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo… runs an expression in Puerto Rico: translated loosely, it means the devil knows more due to old age than for being the devil. If true, I must have an old young man, because I knew what I had to do. And that was?

Well, I went out and bought a notebook, and arrived promptly at the door. And for the next two hours, I terrorized Rhoda. We started in the kitchen, where I instantly confronted her on the sea of medicines next to the stove. And where, I asked her, was her expiration medication log?

Rhoda’s eyes dilated.

I didn’t let up—I quizzed her on everything, we probed ever corner of the house. I took ceaseless notes, sighed frequently, frowned incessantly. I made a British nanny look like Santa Claus.

“I don’t imagine you’ll need to come in here,” said Rhoda, at the entrance to the master bedroom. But I was having none of that.

“I need to inspect every room of the house if I am to be responsible for it in your absence,” I told her, and so we spent ten minutes opening the curtains, making sure the closet doors were hung correctly, noting any stains on the walls and carpet.

And then we came to the bathroom, which of course was spotless. I decided to pounce.

“And where is your toilet bowl brush?” I couldn’t keep the acid out of my voice.

Rhoda blanched.

“I really don’t know,” she stammered, “Joyce—the cleaning lady—does…”

I had to interrupt.

“You don’t know how your staff cleans?”

Two days later, I got the report from Martha, the daughter. Rhoda had gone to bed for three hours after the inspection. And ten minutes after I started the housesitting, I ventured up to the bathroom.

Do I have to tell you?

I will tell you—if you are lucky enough not to know—that this is grief. Because there’s no middle, nothing except the extremes. Which is why I was sobbing, yes, but also laughing hysterically yesterday. Nor was I in any control, especially when I heard Ralph’s voice—sounding completely the same as his father’s. Oddly, he was doing better than I.

Not surprising—that’s another thing about grief. You often find yourself comforting people who are calling to comfort you. So what do you do? Well, it may sound heartless, but we took turns answering the phone, after Franny died.

What else happens? Well, for me, I get jittery, to the extent that I can’t type. So how, yesterday, was I going to do Bach and Beer? Could I play the cello—no, I decided, and then told Lady, the owner of the café, who had been hugging me and crying with me and who, like a good Sanjuanera  had come down the street to call up to me in my apartment to see if I was all right.

Why was I there? Because I wanted to be alone, and the moment I was, it wasn’t right., but I didn’t have the energy, somehow, to get up and go back to the café. But seeing her made me realize—I have to get out of the apartment.

Then I was hungry, and didn’t feel like asking for anything. Eventually I realized—the kids were eating pizza.

“Naïa, do you think some of that pizza wants to be eaten by me?”

“Ask it…”

Then I became obsessed—I had to call the paper. What kind of son of a newspaperman could forget to call the Wisconsin State Journal? I could feel Jack frowning down at me. At least I hope it’s down….

And here I confess—I couldn’t find the number anywhere. And today, when I was thinking better, I finally got it through switchboard.com. And why there? Because in all of Madison.com (the electronic version of the State Journal), I couldn’t locate one number, except for the individual reporters. Those were there, but where was the city desk, dammit?

“People forget you when you get older,” said Franny matter-of-factly. Not quite true—Facebook went wild, and my post on Rabin got 341 hits (a normal day is 100).

Nor is it the lack of a telephone number for the city desk, but doesn’t a city of over a quarter of a million have an arts editor? You know, somebody who goes to concerts and knows everyone artistically in town?

I spoke to somebody today—a nice Wisconsin person who cheerfully took my call and promised to follow through.

That stiff breeze, chilling you from the north? It’s my father—Jack—up there spinning….

Requiescat in Pace

Marvin Rabin

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

(Note: The writer of this blog wishes to re-post the following, as a tribute to Marvin Rabin, who has just passed away. It was originally published in this blog on February 18, 2013.)

The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.

Personhood for Chimpanzees!

Whew—that’s a relief. In the course of sifting and winnowing (all right, a good of scrounging, too) an email dropped into my lap and luck with the news: the bastards are still up to their bastardry.

No surprise, right? What’s surprising is the astonishing breadth and depth of the affair. For it seems that twelve countries—United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei—are getting together to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), a little venture which, according to Julian Assange “would trample over individual rights and free expression.”

Well, he should know, because he released the 30,000-word draft of the document on November 13 of this year, and that was pretty much the first time anybody had any idea what it was all about. Here’s The Guardian—surprise, surprise!—on the issue:

In case you were wondering why we had to get this information from WikiLeaks, it's because the draft negotiating texts are kept secret from the public. Even members of the US Congress and their staff have extremely limited access. Thus the much-maligned WikiLeaks has once again proven how valuable and justified are their efforts to bring transparency to important policy-making that is done in the darkness – whether it is "collateral murder", or other forms of life-threatening unaccountability.

Is it just me, or does anybody else have a knee-jerk reaction to anything done at this level of secrecy? And what, exactly, does the TTP intend to do? The Guardian quotes Public Citizen’s Global TradeWatch:

…set US policy on non-tariff, and indeed not-trade, issues in the context of 'trade' negotiations.

Ummmh?

At least that was my reaction, so I read and then reread and then figured it out—there are some concepts simple guys like me can’t get. So would the answer come later in the article? Quite possibly, and it did. Check this out:

Laws to protect the environment, food safety, consumers (from monopoly pricing), and other public interest concerns can now be traded away in "trade" negotiations. And US law must be made to conform to the treaty.

Well, the email that I got from Alice Jay at Avaaz.org put it a bit more graphically:

Monsanto’s about to celebrate their biggest coup ever, but we’ve got until the weekend to stop them.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a huge, ultra-secret deal among twelve major countries that would give corporations unprecedented power -- allowing them to use new global tribunals to sue our governments for passing laws that protect us, but reduce their profits! This could apply to everything from labeling GMO foods to protecting internet freedom. Wikileaks has broken the story and opposition is building fast, but the countries are rushing to seal the deal in 48 hours.

OK—let me imagine it. The US decides, at long last, to ban genetically altered wheat, since our foreign market doesn’t want the stuff. But Monsanto decides to raise the middle finger, and argues that the ban infringes on their right to make a profit. So they take us to a new global court, and sue us on the basis of this treaty.

All of this, asserts Assange, is an attempt to impose the United States’ strict interpretation of intellectual property rights, under which a seed becomes an idea, as long as you’ve altered its DNA.

Wonderful, isn’t it, what corporations are doing, and what they’ve become. They’re no longer things, or legal concepts—but people. So under Citizens United, corporations, like people, can donate money to political campaigns. Oh, and they can have religions, too, which is why Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supplies will argue this year before the US. Supreme Court that they have the right to not offer certain types of contraception through their employee health plans. Nor, by the way, are these particularly small companies: Hobby Lobby employs over 13, 000 people, Conestoga over 1000.

The following information, by the way, comes from the liberal website Slate.com. But it seems that the sword cuts both ways, because I’ve just read that animal rights activists, citing Citizen’s United, are now looking for jurisdictions that would take the adventurous step of declaring chimpanzees legal persons. (The article was entitled “Seeking Citizen’s United Victory for Chimpanzees”—of course I had to read it….)

Back paddling hard back to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there’s one thing to bear in mind: the process in the US may be fast-tracked. And that is, you ask? The Guardian comes through again:

…fast track, which first began under Nixon in 1974, was not only a usurpation of the US Congress' constitutional authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations".

It also gave the executive branch – which is generally much less accountable to public pressure than the Congress – a means of negating and pre-empting important legislation by our elected representatives.

So what’s our time frame? According to the email which alerted me to the issue, it’s 48 hours.

Here’s the link, dear Reader. You know what you have to do….

    http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_champagne_for_monsanto_loc/?bpRuwbb&v=32155  

The Colicky Babies of Puerto Rico

It’s one of those “ouch” moments—like the fact that nine of the ten zip codes with the highest rate of Medicare / Social Security abuse are in Puerto Rico. So what is it today? Well, The WIC program in Puerto Rico has a budget of over 200 million, and serves 184,000 people. Monthly, the government issues 700,000 checks, 80% of which are cashed at small businesses.

And who gets these benefits? Well, the majority are kids: 36, 000 under one year of age; 111, 000 from one to five. So that’s a total of 137, 000 kids. That in itself is a bit of a surprise, because according to Pew Research, there are 232,000 kids under 5 on the island. So over half of the kids on the island are participating in the program.

Curiously, this is not unusual; here’s the Urban Institute on the subject:

WIC serves many in need. More than half of all infants and more than a quarter of all children through age 4, pregnant women, and postpartum women participate. Nearly two-thirds of all WIC participants live below the federal poverty level (FPL) even though individuals with incomes less than 185 percent of FPL are eligible to participate. 

Right—and while it’s true that Puerto Rico leads the nation in WIC coverage, it’s not by much. The same Urban Institute has this to say:

The five states with the highest WIC coverage rates are Puerto Rico (78.7 percent), Vermont (76.3), the District of Columbia (76.2), California (73.7), and Minnesota (73.5). 

So none of this is particularly surprising. What is surprising? Well, 62% of the kids in Puerto Rico require special formulae, and in gringolandia? Only two percent. 

Nor is the special formula cheap—The New Day reports in its print edition of today that the special formula can reach up to 50 bucks a can. In addition, The New Day reports that some merchants are doing a bit of gouging:

“Sé que la administración no estaba administrando bien los fondos federales desde finales del año pasado. Estamos hablando como desde noviembre, por ahí... que se quedó sin administrador y ahí empezaron a haber malas decisiones. Un ejemplo, la leche Nutramigen en el mercado –para los efectos– se debe cobrar a $32. Los comercios regulares cobraban cuarenta y pico y el programa se los pagaba”, dijo [José Díaz, presidente de la Asociación de Comerciantes del WIC] al hablar de un esquema fraudulento que, según dijo, denunció a la “pasada administradora del WIC”.

(“I know the administration hasn’t been administering the federal funds well since the end of last year. We’re talking about from November on—when we haven’t had an administrator and then they started to make bad decisions. One example—the milk Nutrtamigen in the market costs 32$. The merchants charge forty something and the program pays it,” said José Díaz, head of the WIC Merchants Association, on speaking of a fraudulent scheme that, according to him, he reported to the “past administrator of WIC.” 

And it’s not just the merchants, according to one source, cited in the same article:

“Hay de todo. Hay comerciantes, hay participantes… pueden haber empleados. Hay médicos involucrados en una serie de esquemas. Están trabajando con ello. Se tardan más tiempo en hacer este tipo de investigaciones”, dijo [Dana Miró] la licenciada en nutrición.

(“There’s everything. There are merchants, there are participants, there could be employees. There are doctors involved in a series of schemes. They’re working with them. It takes a long time to do this type of investigation,” said Dana Miró, a specialist in nutrition.)

So the feds came to town, and will let us know—sometime in December—whether they will paralyze the program. It depends, apparently, on what they find and whether we can clean up our act.
The good news? We can, because that 62% that required special formulae?

Now down to 40!

My Problem with Geek….

And so it’s my privilege, this morning, to present the following sentence:

I woke up yesterday, drank my coffee, and decided on the morning trot to listen to Biber’s Requiem, a tremendous piece.

That to me is totally normal—it could have been Buxtehude, who also has an amazing work, Membra Jesu Nostri. Or I could have listened to Bach, of course, because he is the molten core of the earth for classical musicians.

But if I can say stuff like this, and listen to stuff like this, it’s because somebody stuck a cello into my arms and suggested I might embrace it. And I did, variously, with mixed results until recently. And besides opening a seriously beautiful world, the cello gave me friends like Geek and Dorothy.

We were teenagers, which is by definition not easy. We were also fucked up in other ways—both Geek and I were gay and not talking about it. Which is a pity, since there wasn’t much we didn’t talk about. We hung out a lot together, played a really awful Rossini duet together, and did gigs together. Do you ever need to put a string bass in an early 70s Pinto? Unbelievably, Geek can do it.

Like every clique, we chose to define ourselves and forget what the rest of the world was saying about us, if anything. And happily, it worked. Music was our life, mostly—and what free time we had, we hung out in the orchestra room. There, we’d practice, talk, and devise new ways to torment Mr. Percy, perhaps the blandest man I have ever encountered. (He married, coincidentally, a woman who was exactly his equal in apersonality—dammit, computer, you know what I mean…..)

Geek had a quirky sense of humor, which extended to putting the local wunderkind, Sharon Levanthal, into his bass case (the bass having been removed), standing it and her up in front of our friends’ houses, and ringing the doorbell. Then, from the bushes is which we were hiding, we could observe the astonished reactions.

There was nothing malicious in this, and mothers began to take as a matter of course the sight of a vertical bass case, which began to talk, if memory serves, in the course of time. In fact one friend’s mother routinely greeted Sharon, and would pat her head through the case. Sharon squeaked back.

Weekdays were West High, and the orchestra room. Saturday mornings were WYSO, or the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras. And if Mr. Percy suffered from severe micropersonality, Dr. Rabin was seemingly the opposite. Generally, he was heard before he was seen, and the character force was felt before he entered the room. And to this day, Geek swears that the best interpretation of the violin solo in the Shostakovich Fifth that he’s ever heard is Sharon Levanthal’s.

For years, we called each other, always starting with the formula:

“Myrc,”

“Geek”

For some reason, my mother Franny found this fascinating. “What do you say after the Myrc / Geek,” she asked. Answer—nothing: we just started talking.

Geek, wisely, decided to go to Interlochen—the high school, not the summer camp. And there, well—let the school’s website tell the story:

Interlochen Arts Academy is the world's first and foremost fine arts boarding high school, offering the highest quality training with college-preparatory academics.

Right—nice to know! Though I might ask why, if you’re so great, my computer has never heard of you…..

So Dorothy and I soldiered on at West High, and later at the University of Wisconsin, where we both studied nursing. (She stayed in the field, I moved on, as do most nurses—Dear Reader, there is never a nurse shortage, just an active nurse shortage.) And we played music together too, and through her I met a genteel lady of European charm, Mrs. Hagen, who played the viola in the Beethoven string trio (Dorothy was a violinist).

“Air your cello,” she would greet me, in her remarkable house filled with art, (her husband had been a distinguished professor of art history).

It was a refuge—the house, the music, the friendship. Because things were seriously not right at home. How not right? Not mine to say, and perhaps neither I nor anyone knows the full hell of it. Because however successful Dorothy’s parents were, they were miserable together. And I could feel it—especially when I stayed with the family in their Lake Superior summer home.

She’s a brave woman, Dorothy—a woman who raised a child by herself, and who decided, she once confided, to go on through the pain of her life just for him. And she always gave more than she got. When my father Jack landed in the ICU five days before his death, who was there? Dorothy, and what was she doing? Untying my father’s hands, since all of the other nurses were worried that he would try to rip out his breathing tube. (Of course he would—wouldn’t you?)

“Do you need money,” she whispered, as I got off the plane that day, the day I got the call from Franny. She knew I was in Puerto Rico, that I was underemployed, that I was still harboring the ridiculous dream: I was gonna make a living as a musician.

I didn’t, of course. Nor did Geek, who told me, a couple years ago, that the bass was now sort of a party trick—and there weren’t many parties.

I can imagine that. Geek is running a bookstore / bar, and it’s one of the few independent, gay bookstores left in the country. As such, it gained the gracious attention of the Phelps family, who were standing around in the freezing February weather with their signs announcing that God Hates Fags outside of the Aut Bar. Where was Geek? Warm, inside, and busy running a fundraiser—he had hit on the scheme of getting people to pledge money for every minute the Phelps family spent outside the bar.

Right—so he had gone on and given back. And I? I had written a book and after years of silence, called Geek to ask him what to do about it. He was generous with a young and not-so-young writer, who went on to do the unthinkable.

Publish the damn thing as a paperback through CreateSpace, an Amazon-owned company. Yes, that Amazon—the company that is busy putting him out of business.

I tell myself that independent bookstore owners are going to have to look at Amazon as small businesses look at Sam’s or Costco, as a business that supports their business. I tell myself that I will call Geek and confess—he’ll sigh and forgive me, I hope. I tell myself that I’ll just send him the book, with a little note, begging forgiveness. I tell myself that Geek would like to know that I’m playing cello again, and raising money for kids in the third world—Bach and Beer. I have no problem telling myself things.

The question?

What am I gonna tell Geek?

The Gringo the Next Island Over

OK—so all the talk of baseball didn’t work….

Or maybe it was the bad Spanish, which admit it, had to have been learned within the last months. But that’s hardly likely, since James “Wally” Brewster, Jr. only spoke two sentences (the first being, “¡HOLA, mi nombre es Wally!”)

Right—let’s get to brass tacks. What’s pissing off folks in the Dominican Republic about Wally, the new ambassador for the United States? The fact that his spouse is a guy.

Brewster, according to his account, grew up in a little Texas town; he went into business there and eventually moved to Chicago, where he started in 2010 a company called SB&K. Along the way, he raised funds for Obama, which is a nice way to get to be an ambassador. In fact, The Daily Mail reports that he raised more than a million dollars for the 2012 presidential campaign.

And he’s been active in LGBT issues as well: he’s now serving on the Board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

So the reaction to Brewster? Well, let’s put it this way: over 60% of the country is Catholic, so what did the cardinal, the top dog over there, have to say? Well, he referred to Brewster as a maricón (faggot) and gay people as “social trash.”

And then there’s this:

"He has not considered the particularities of our people. The United States is trying to impose on us marriage between gays and lesbians as well as adoption by these couples," said Father Luis Rosario, director of youth ministries for the church.

Then thousands of evangelicals took to the streets, and organized a “black Monday,” urging people to put black ribbons on their cars to protest. But not to worry, because the groups came out with this statement:

Expresaron que aman a los homosexuales y a los drogadictos, pero no  su actuación. “Si hoy aceptamos esa ley que nos quieren imponer, luego tenemos que aceptar una para patentizar las drogas”, señalaron.

(They expressed that the love homosexuals and drug addicts, but not their behavior. “If we accept this law that they want to impose on us, later we’ll have to accept one that patents drugs,” they said.)

Though homosexuality is legal in the Dominican Republic, there is—as you can tell—a strong cultural bias against it. Worse, the situation seems to be getting worse, and not better. Here’s what the French paper Le Monde had to say about it:

“En Haití, la República Dominicana, Jamaica y otros países de la región, los ataques contra homosexuales y transexuales han aumentado en los últimos meses. La homofobia no es nueva en la Cuenca del Caribe”, señala el reportaje.

(“In Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and other countries in the region, the attacks against homosexuals and transsexuals have increased in the last months. Homophobia is not new in the Caribbean basin,” the report indicated.)

Brewster isn’t the first gay ambassador—there have been five or six others. He is, however, the first ambassador to be named to such a homophobic country.

Good luck to him!

Anybody Got 70 Billion Out There?

I know that I was reading it at 3:45, because that’s when I sent it off to myself in an email. Bloggers do that, since a large part of my day now is spent wondering what, if anything, there might be to write about. The problem? Much of what seems perfectly splendid in the middle of the night looks a bit different in the colder light of day.

And you don’t really want to know, do you, that Puerto Rico is on the brink of financial doom? Why? Because for decades, every governor of either party has followed essentially the same strategy: hire as many people as you can, pay them marginally, allow them to do as little as possible, and borrow money to pay for it all. So what happened?

Well, the chicken came home to roost, and the Washington Post reported yesterday we’re 70 billion bucks in debt. Cancel that—I just checked the headline, and it’s not even “70 billion,” it’s “at least 70 billion.” That makes us number three in the nation—behind California and New York. We do, however, easily trump little Detroit, who went bankrupt at a mere 18 billion. Pikers, obviously.

Nor is that the only problem for today—everybody is leaving the island; in the years from 2006 to now, we’ve lost 138,000 people, most of them to the mainland, and most of them professionals. And why not? Salaries are low, crime is high, and the quality of life? Well, the Post also reported that our murder rate is six times higher than the national average.

Right—so what’s the solution? Well, here’s what we can’t do—go bankrupt, since apparently cities can but states cannot. Nor can we simply say “screw you” to the investors that have bought all our bonds, since the constitution stipulates that investors get paid before retirees and public employees. So what to do? Here’s the Post on the subject:

The situation is being closely monitored by the White House, which recently named an advisory team to help Puerto Rican officials navigate the crisis.

How bad are things on the island? Worse, apparently, than I thought. Here’s Caribbean Business:

The GDB-EAI (Government Development Bank—Economic Activity Index) had returned to growth in December 2011 for the first time since Puerto Rico’s recession began in 2006. It showed small but consistent year-over-year gains for nearly a year before beginning to retreat again last October. Since then, it has been on a steadily steepening decline: falling 0.7 percent in November, 2012, 1.3 percent in December, 2012, 1.8 percent in January, 3.1 percent in February, 3.1 percent in March, 3.5 percent in April and 3.4 percent in May, 4.5 percent in June, 5 percent in July, and 5.4 percent in August.

So our projection for the local economy in 2014? Instead of the minute growth projected originally, it’s now predicted that we will shrink by .8% next year. And if that’s not gloomy enough, consider the statement made by somebody at Moody’s—one of the three credit rating firms that has us one step from junk status:

“Further weakening of economic growth could result from the additional corporate and sales taxes, as well as increased tax compliance and enforcement measures,” Moody’s said. “Despite the increase in much-needed recurring revenue for the commonwealth, weaker economic conditions would also increase negative pressure on the rating.”

A friend who was the press secretary to two governors told me a story, once, about the governor who charged his cabinet to go home, think long and hard about the situation on the island, and come back the next day with a plan of action. So they all did, and returned with in-depth analyses and ideas. At the end, only one man was left who hadn’t spoken.

“Governor,” he said, “I thought about it a lot, and I came to one conclusion….”

“And that is?” asked the governor.

“Estamos jodidos,” the advisor replied.

We’re screwed.

And that was in the good old days!