PROLOGUE 
We Are Water
Wishin’ and Hopin’
The Hour I First Believed
I Know This Much Is True
She’s Come Undone
Couldn’t Keep It to Myself:
Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters
I’ll Fly Away:
Further Testimonies from the Women
of York Prison
For feminists everywhere, of every era
PROLOGUE I TURNED SIXTY earlier this year, an age that brings deficits, of course: creaky knees, a temporary inability to remember familiar people’s names, a second colonoscopy. But there are benefits to reaching this age, too. One is wisdom, or so they tell me. Another is the senior citizen discount at Dunkin’ Donuts—once you survive the shock of being asked if you’re eligible, or more shockingly, the cashier’s assumption that you’re eligible without asking. Geezerdom’s got a third perk, too. Let’s call it a bemused appreciation for how ironic life can be. Take, for instance, adult diapers: from Pampers we came, to Depends we shall return. Ironic, no? It’s the same with tears. We cry easily when we’re kids, not so much as grown-ups. Then, at about the time those AARP magazines start showing up uninvited in the mailbox, the lachrymal glands come alive again. Mine do, anyway. I can tear up at sappy commercials, sentimental newspaper articles, Facebook posts about some family’s decision to have their dog put down. And when the TV news shows one of those surprise reunions between a soldier returning from the war and his kids—or her kids—man, I lose it.
Hmm? Oh right—excuse my manners. I’m Felix Funicello. If you’re wondering why my surname sounds familiar, it’s probably because my family had a famous cousin. Annette Funicello? The Mickey Mouse Club? Beach Blanket Bingo? No? Well, never mind. But mark my words: someday when you’re my age, you’ll mention Miley or Bieber and some future youth will look at you blankly and say, “Who?” Take it from me. The accelerating passage of time will astound you.
So where was I? Oh yeah, tears. I was on a plane a while back, flying out to California for a film conference, and one of the in-flight movies was that Disney-Pixar film, Up. So I start watching it. Studying it, you know, because I’m a film professor—and the author of three scholarly books on film history—and these Disney-Pixar flicks are considered by some to be both entertainment and art. So what did I care what that teenage boy sitting next to me with the earplugs and the fauxhawk and the skateboarding magazine in his lap thought about some old dude watching a cartoon? What’s it to him, right? But then, when the film does that “married life” sequence between the old guy, Carl, and his wife, Ellie—shows them from the time they meet as kids to when they wed, lose their baby, grow into middle age, and then, in old age, she dies—I began blubbering. Over a cartoon movie, for crying out loud. And in my peripheral vision, I could see the fauxhawk kid staring at me. I felt like saying to him, “Wait until you’re my age, you little doofus, and we’ll see how dry-eyed you stay when you watch a sequence like this. Or De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, or Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, or Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father instead of Iron Man 12 or X-Men 27 or whatever the hell last summer’s pubescent blockbuster was. Maybe by then you’ll have picked up a little cinematic discernment. And by the way, your mouth-breathing’s annoying and your haircut looks kind of stupid.” But when I look over at him, I see that he’s not watching me watching the film. He’s watching the film. And then he taps me on the arm and says, “This movie rocks. That part they just showed? First time I saw it, I was like crying.”
By the time you’re sixty, you have, of course, encountered the reality that life can be unfair or even tragic. Bad things can happen to good people. Bad people sometimes do thrive and get away with terrible transgressions for which they should be punished, cosmically or legally. But life can also be amusing—hilarious even. Beautiful and sublime. All you have to do to realize that is take out those tattered family photo albums or pop in that VHS tape from 1983 or thread the old film projector, that vintage opto-mechanical Bell & Howell from the early sixties, say, and watch those home movies your dead dad took back when you and your siblings were kids and he was still in his thirties, and he aimed, shot, and captured for posterity who you all were back then.
That’s what movies are, right? Thousands of still pictures taken months or years or decades before—streams of images burned onto celluloid that are reeled in front of a lamp and projected onto a screen, allowing us the illusion that they’re alive. Flickers of light and dark. Brightness and shadow that won’t stand still—like life itself.
ONE HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD! That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood …
Oops. That’s my phone. Excuse me for a minute, will you?
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
Weird pause. “And, uh, who is this?”
“Kenneth.”
“Kenneth …?” That REM song starts playing in my head. What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Is your Benzedrine uh-huh …
“From the Monday night movie club.”
“Oh. Hey, Kenny.” (Speaking of what’s the frequency?) “What’s up?”
“I lost that schedule you gave us, so I wanted to know what movie we’re seeing this coming Monday night. Because I can’t find the schedule and I think my mother might have thrown it out, but she says she didn’t. She told me to decide whether to go to our group or to a graduation she wants me to go to.”
Kenny’s a community college kid going on middle-aged, which more or less puts him in the same demographic as the rest of the gang in the Monday night film group I run. Interesting young man, though—movie-obsessed, although he’s a specialist, not a generalist. He’s the only twenty-one-year-old I know who can speak in detail about the oeuvre of Russ Meyer, the breast-obsessed director of such films as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Wild Gals of the Naked West, Mondo Topless, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. If you want to talk Russ Meyer, Kenny’s your man.
“We’re going to be watching Ben-Hur,” I tell him. “Not the Charlton Heston one. The silent film from the twenties with Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman. It’s pretty amazing visually, given the limitations of moviemaking back then. It’s got the sea battle, the chariot race, a cast of thousands. A lot of the big stars from that era are in the crowd scenes. The Barrymores, the Gish sisters, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.” None of whom he’s ever heard of, I’m sure. Kenny’s somewhat dismissive of anything that came before Russ Meyer’s first film, The Immoral Mr. Teas, a nudist comedy.
“Wasn’t Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine?” he asks.
“Was he, Kenny? Let me think.”
“He was. Michael Moore went to his house and tried to interview him because he was the one who said they were going to have to grab his guns out of his ‘cold, dead hands.’ ” Kenny worships at the altar of Michael Moore, too, which is not something I necessarily would have assumed.
“You’re right. Now I remember. But Heston was a big action star before he became an NRA pitchman. Westerns, war movies, Bible epics. He won the Oscar for Ben-Hur and he had the lead role in the original Planet of the Apes.”
“He was in Touch of Evil, too. He had a mustache.”
“I forgot about that one. Classic film noir, right?”
“Silent movies don’t really interest me. I guess I’ll go to the graduation.”
“Okay, sure. We’ll see you next time then. Who’s graduating?”
“Me.”
“Oh. Well, sure then. You should definitely go to your own graduation.”
“That’s what my mother says, too.”
“And congratulations. I hadn’t realized—”
Click. End of conversation.
The Monday night movie club? Kenny came on board about a year ago, but I’ve been getting together with my little band of regulars for the past several years. First I introduce some great old classic—Stagecoach, say, or Sunset Boulevard—and talk about the technical innovations or camera angles they used, the historical or cultural significance of the story, the dialogue, the director’s other films. Then I screen it for them, after which we talk about what we’ve just seen. I don’t so much steer the conversation as let it go wherever it wants to. We meet in New London at the old Garde Theatre. They got some significant grant money a while back that allowed them to renovate and refurbish it and install state-of-the-art sound and digital projection, but they hung on to all the old equipment, too, and that’s what I prefer to use. For authenticity’s sake, you know? It’s called film, right? As in celluloid, not pixels. It’s getting harder to find distributors of the old film reels, and the shipping costs for those clunky metal canisters are ridiculous. But to me it’s worth it. If you’re going to show an audience the vintage stuff, they might as well see it the way it was meant to be seen, not with some technology that came along sixty or seventy years into the future.
I really enjoy my Monday night regulars—more so than, say, the college kids I teach at Hunter. Of course, those students have their charms, too, if not a whole lot of life experience yet. But by and large, the Monday nighters have some considerable mileage on their odometers so they’ve seen more, know more. Marilyn has her SAG card and was on a couple of Law & Orders, once as a socialite and another time as a corpse. JoAnne and Murray’s daughter is a big-time casting director. Reggie fell in love with old movies via TCM while he was doing a six-year bid in prison for check kiting. He carpools with Tony, a cop who retired with a work-related disability, paid for culinary school with his settlement, and opened a gluten-free bakery. Ed, a weightlifter who was once Mr. Rhode Island, mans the projection booth for me, hitting the foot pedal so that as reel one runs out, the second projector starts running reel two. They’ll start out talking about the film we just watched and end up talking about themselves. It’s the same with me. Hey, movies are touchstones, right? Triggers that have the power to transport us back in time. Songs can do that, too, of course. And music videos. The other day, I was looking for something on YouTube and I stumbled onto that old Tina Turner video for “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” Remember that one? Tina’s strutting through some urban landscape wearing her jean jacket and shaking that wild hairstyle she had back then, doing that sexy little two-step of hers. What’s love got to do got to do with it? / What’s love but a sweet old-fashioned notion? I watched that video and bam! It was 1984 all over again. Ronald Reagan in the White House and Cheers on TV and my then-wife Kat “power-dressing” for work like Joan Crawford in those suits with the shoulder pads. We couldn’t really afford it back then, but I bought one of those big-ass camcorders. Lugged it around on my shoulder so that I could get a videotaped record of our daughter, Aliza, taking her first steps, blowing out her birthday candles. Of course, VHS has gone the way of the dodo bird and the 35-millimeter film projector now. One of these days, I’m going to get those old tapes converted before—
Hooray for Hollywood! That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood …
Excuse me. Ah, it’s Aliza, speaking of whom. “Hey there, kiddo.”
“Hi, Daddy. Are you busy?”
“Too busy to talk to you? Never! How’s it going? Everything copacetic down there in Queens?”
“At the apartment, yes, although I didn’t realize what a slob Jason is until he moved in. Dirty dishes in the sink, toothpaste dots all over the medicine cabinet mirror. He’s almost as bad as Jilly.”
Jason is her new boyfriend, a New York University Special Collections librarian and part-time slam poet with whom she’s sharing her bed. According to my daughter, “Jason’s almost as big a film nerd as you, Daddy.” Jilly is one third of the trio of young career women with whom Aliza shares a four-bedroom apartment in the Astoria section of Queens. By New York standards, the place is huge. Jilly’s real name is Jillian and there’s Jordana and Jen, too, although I can never keep it straight which one is which. They all have college degrees and entry-level professional jobs in Manhattan, but to me the three Js seem like twentysomething middle schoolers. They travel in a pack, check their cell phones obsessively, and giggle in unison about the guys who respond to their online dating profiles and Snapchat posts. The last time I visited Aliza, I overheard one of them tell the others that she didn’t care how many pics of his “meat and potatoes” this one guy sent her, she was not texting him any shots of her pussy. Compared to these three, my free-spirited daughter seems so grounded, she could be the house mother.
Aliza told me that one of the Js—Jordana, maybe? Jen?—categorizes herself as “polyamorous.” Because this term was new to me, I had my daughter define it. “So in other words, she sleeps around a lot?” I asked. Aliza shook her head; it was about nonexclusive loving relationships, not hookups, she said. When I mentioned Mormons and sister wives, she rolled her eyes and said no, that polyamory didn’t make women subservient; it empowered them. I still didn’t get it. If this is the “new woman,” then thank god I’m a couple of generations removed. As far as I can see, Aliza doesn’t have much in common with the three Js, but she seems to get along with them fine. Get along with her boss? Not so much.
“I’m calling because I need to vent about my stupid, sawed-off little shit of a managing editor,” she says.
I squint at the clock. “Better keep your voice down. Aren’t you at work?”
“Yeah, but I’m so pissed off right now that I’m walking up and down Varick Street, trying to shake it off so I don’t go back in there and tell him what a dick he is.”
“Wow. What’s he done?”
“So we have this huge special issue coming up, okay? Stories about retro Manhattan? It’s called the ‘Yesteryear’ issue. I’m finally going to get my first big print feature. A couple of days ago, they posted the articles they’re planning: the Warhol Factory, Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley, the Copacabana, the Subway Vigilante. And the one I wanted—and was like ninety percent promised—was the history of the Ansonia Hotel.”
Is it possible to break down a promise into percentage points? Whoa, look at that. My toenails are starting to turn yellow just like my father’s did—yet another indignity of the aging process. Yecch.
“—because I was the one who fucking pitched it. Right?”
“Right. What drew you to that—”
“A ton of things! When it opened in 1904? It had a farm up on the roof. I mean, the concept of sustainable farming all the way back then? Shut the fuck up! They even had a special elevator for cattle.”
Which hotel is she talking about? Not the Algonquin. That’s the one that had the literary round table. Starts with an A, though. And there’s another thing. Your short-term memory goes to hell in a—wait. It’s got the same name as a town here in Connecticut. The Ansonia? Yeah, that’s it.
“Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser, and that opera dude Toscanini. Oh, and you know who else lived there? The one who played Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.”
“Billie Burke? She was married to Flo Ziegfeld, the theater producer.”
“Yeah, she lived there, too. With Glinda, it said.”
“Ziegfeld was a he.”
“Oh, okay. I assumed they were lesbians. But then much later? After they turned it into a condo building in the nineties, you know who had apartments there? Natalie Portman, and that guy who played Will on Will and Grace, and guess who else. Someone really famous.”
“Kim Kardashian?”
“Uh-uh. Legit famous. She won an Oscar.”
“Katharine Hepburn.”
“Younger.”
“Audrey Hepburn.”
“Come on, Daddy. Someone who’s big now.”
“I give up. Who?”
“Angelina fucking Jolie!”
“Really? No kidding. So what’s with all the F-bombs lately, Aliza? You’re starting to talk like some character on HBO.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s New York, Daddy. Everyone here swears like this.”
I can’t argue with that. The last time I was on the subway in Manhattan, I overheard a teenage girl complaining to her friend that the “tramp stamp” she’d just gotten was “hurting like a motherfucker.” And these two were wearing parochial school uniforms. “Well, just don’t curse like that in front of your Aunt Simone. She’ll start following you around with her rosary beads.”
“Seriously. How is she, by the way?”
“Good, I guess. Last time I spoke with her, she said she’d had a date. Got fixed up with someone at work’s brother.”
“Aunt Simone went on an actual date? That’s huge! Did you get the deets?”
“The what?”
“The details. Like, what he looked like, what he wore, and if he said he was going to call her?”
“No, she was pretty stingy with the deets. She just said it had gone ‘okay.’ And that he was nice.”
“That doesn’t sound too promising. I forget. How long has it been since Uncle Jeff died?”
“Oh god, eight or nine years maybe? And then, right after that was when your cousin got sick and she was taking care of him. But anyway, let’s get back to you. So you wanted to write about this hotel because there was a farm on the roof and Angelina fucking Jolie lived there.”
She tells me about all the stuff that went on in the Ansonia’s basement during the seventies and the eighties: a gay men’s bathhouse and then a swingers’ club for straight couples.
“Wow, quite a lot of ‘polyamorousness’ going on at the old Ansonia, eh?”
She ignores the wisecrack. “And how’s this for hypocrisy? When they made it a swingers’ club, they banned gay guys but welcomed lesbians. Lipstick lesbians, I’m sure. What is it with straight guys and their hot woman-on-woman fantasies, Daddy?”
Daddy thinks he’ll treat that one as a rhetorical question. There’s no way in hell I’m going there with the kid I used to bring to Brownie meetings.
“Sounds like you’d already done a fair amount of research.”
“He had practically promised it to me!”
“Ninety percent, right?”
“Right! But then today? At the staff meeting where they were handing out assignments? This new guy, Taz, who’s been on staff for like three months? He gets the Ansonia. And I just sat there like, Seriously? But he’s the fair-haired boy around here. The Brown University graduate who’s only twenty-three but already has a book contract from Knopf. Taz: that’s his poseur name. You know what his real name is? Eugene. He wears a porkpie hat and a string tie and crop pants that he cuffs up. And Keesha the receptionist and I are like, Really, dude? Could you be more of a hipster cliché? Oh, and he has this wispy little mustache that makes you wonder if he’s still going through puberty. I would have killed to write about the Ansonia.”
“So what assignment did you get?”
“Some stupid, sexist New York beauty contest.”
“Let me guess. Miss Subways?”
“What? No. Something that a beer company sponsored every year.”
“Ah. Miss Rheingold.”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Oh, it was a big deal back then. We voted for Miss Rheingold here in Connecticut, too. There were always six Rheingold girls in the running and the public picked the winner. They had ballot boxes in all the stores. Even kids could vote.”
“For a beer queen?”
“Uh-huh. For some reason, the beer was incidental. One year, a girl from Three Rivers was in the running. She had been our babysitter when she was in high school. I thought my sisters were going to blow a gasket when she got picked to be a Rheingold girl.”
“Even Aunt Frances?”
“Especially your Aunt Frances. She worked on all cylinders that summer to get Shirley Shishmanian elected.” Aliza asks me what kind of a name Shishmanian is. “Armenian. But she changed it to something less ethnic when she became a model.”
“Why?”
“Well, I guess it was because you could be Armenian or Italian or Jewish back then, as long as you covered it over with an Anglo-Saxon Protestant veneer. So Sadie became Sandy, Elisabetta became Betsy, et cetera, et cetera.”
“God, I had to cover the Victoria’s Secret fashion show last month, and the ‘Angels’ were from places like Namibia, Angola, Egypt, the Czech Republic. And trust me, Daddy, none of them had changed their names. Those accented vowels drove me nuts when I was doing the write-up. So I’m curious. What did Shirley Shishmanian change her name to?”
“Can’t recall off the top of my head. You know who might remember, though? Your Aunt Simone.”
“I thought you said Aunt Frances was the one who was into the Miss Rheingold thing.”
“She was, but Simone was best friends with Shirley’s sister, JoBeth.”
“Are they still friends? Maybe the sister could tell me how to get in contact with Shirley. It would be awesome if I could get a quote from her for my piece.”
“I don’t know if they’re still in touch or not. Why don’t you email your aunt and ask her?”
“Okay, cool. Hey, as long as I have to do this story anyway, you may have just given me an angle. I mean, not even straight-up supermodels like Alessandra Ambrosio and Tyra Banks could have competed for Miss Rheingold. Right?”
“Well, Alessandra could have if she changed her name and lost her accent. But Tyra? Uh-uh. No way she would have passed as a WASP from the wilds of Westchester or Westport, Connecticut. That’s just what it was like back then: blacks at the back of the bus, Lucy and Ricky sleeping in twin beds, Mrs. Cleaver vacuuming in pearls and high heels while her husband was at the office earning a paycheck.”
“It sounds so fucking restrictive.”
“In retrospect, yes. But it wasn’t until the sixties that people started questioning the status quo.”
“Mostly blacks and women, according to Mom. But then again, why would white dudes want to change things when they held all the cards?”
“Well, some of us white dudes wanted to change things, too—on the political front, mostly. You know—anti-war, anti-Nixon, pro–civil rights. When I was in college, I went on strike in protest. A lot of us did. Of course, we were also putting down our placards to ‘party hearty,’ too.”
“Wow, you hippie you,” she says, chuckling. “Wait, who’s Mrs. Cleaver?”
“Hmm? Oh, the Beaver’s mom.”
“What?”
“Never mind. But look, sweetie. I think you’re onto something with this angle you’re considering. You might even have some fun with it, from a sociological viewpoint. Maybe season it with a little of that smart-ass tongue-in-cheek you’re so good at.”
“Yeah, I wonder where I get that from.”
“Look, all I’m saying is, keep an open mind and give it a shot. Okay?”
“It’s not like I have a choice as long as I’m working for Napoleon.”
“Well, if I were you, I’d keep my head down, drop my defensiveness, and let my writing make the noise. And one of these days, you’ll be giving assignments instead of getting them.”
“Not soon enough.”
“Kiddo, you’re writing for a great magazine, you’re getting your name out there on that blog of yours, and you haven’t even hit thirty yet. You know who I saw at Starbucks the other day? That girl Kelly who was on the swim team with you in high school. She’s working as a barista, teaching a couple of classes at a yoga studio, and on the weekends she moonlights as the overnight supervisor at a group home for emotionally disturbed kids. She said she’s living back home with her parents so she can start digging out from under all the student loans that are burying her alive. Where did she go to school?”
“Sarah Lawrence for undergrad and NYU for her master’s, I think. But I get your point. I guess I should stop complaining because I’m pretty lucky.”
“What you are, Aliza, is talented. And determined. Own it.”
“Okay. Thanks, Daddy. Shit, I better get back and—oh, wait. I almost forgot. Jason and I were thinking about coming up this weekend. Depends on whether or not I can get my piece done and put Miss Beer Queen back in her crypt. I have Katie’s bridal shower on Sunday and Jason wants us to check out a slam show in Providence Saturday night because one of his poet buddies is performing. He said he really wants to meet you, too, so that you two can talk movies, maybe watch a few together. But if you’re too busy on Sunday, he could always go down to the casino when I have the shower. Play poker or something.”
“Likes to gamble, does he?”
“Jason does not have a gambling addiction, Daddy, if that’s what you’re asking. Or a drug addiction. Or a wife and a couple of kids. He hardly even drinks. Hits the chocolate milk a little hard sometimes, but that’s about it.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound too worrisome. Seriously, though, if he’s a film buff, maybe I could take him to the Garde. Show him around, put something up on the big screen for him. He’s not afraid of ghosts, is he? Did I tell you that after The Day and The Bulletin both did stories about some of the paranormal stuff that’s happened, Steve and Jeannie have been getting inquiries from that show Ghost Hunters about doing an episode there?”
“Oh, Daddy, that’s such a crock. In all the years that you’ve been running your movie program there, have you ever seen any ghosties or ghoulies?”
“No, but I heard footfalls on the grand staircase once when no one was there.”
“It was probably that ancient furnace making some weird noise in the basement. Didn’t you say that thing makes a racket sometimes during the movie you’re showing?”
“Yeah, but Steve saw a guy in a Civil War uniform up in the balcony once. Said he looked almost translucent. Like a hologram or something. And Maura, who works the box office? She saw a girl dressed like a flapper. And when Maura said something to her, she just faded away. Maura thinks it might have been this old-time silent movie actress named Billie Dove.”
“Maybe Maura should lay off the hallucinogens.”
“Ha! Maura’s idea of tripping is taking a bus tour to Vermont during foliage season. There is a connection, though. Billie Dove was one of the stars of the first film they ever showed at the Garde—opening night, 1926. She was considered the world’s most beautiful woman back in her day. Mary Pickford was so jealous of her that she began eating rose petals to enhance her own beauty.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure that worked. Oh, look! Here comes Charlie Chaplin’s ghost up from the subway. And wow, he’s riding on a pink unicorn.”
“Okay, ye of little faith. So how old is this Justin of yours?”
“His name is Jason, Dad. Not Justin. And he’s twenty-five. Don’t start with the ‘cradle-snatching’ jokes, please.” (Fair enough. Aliza grew up on those; her mom is four years older than I am and never once thought my wisecracking about that was funny.) “Why do you want to know his age?”
“Just trying to gauge what his cinematic tastes might be. Tarantino and the Coen brothers, I’ll bet. Fell in love with the movies the first time he saw Donnie Darko or Napoleon Dynamite. Right? Oh god, he’s not one of those Star Wars–Comic Con kind of movie fans, is he?”
“He’s more into Wes Anderson, actually. But I think he wants to pick your brain about films you like. Maybe have you make him a list of must-sees.”
“Yeah? I’m starting to like this guy. Do you think I could call him Grasshopper and get him to refer to me as Master Po?”
“Don’t be weird, Daddy. If you take him down to the Garde, I’m sure he’d love that. By the way, is it okay if we stay with you when we’re in town? Mom says she’s already got company coming.”
“No room at the inn, eh? Sure, you guys are welcome to bunk in with me. Separate bedrooms, though. None of this sleeping-together-before-marriage stuff.” There’s a long pause on the other end. “I’m kidding, Aliza.”
“Oh, okay. For a minute there …”
“Hey, I’m your cool parent. Remember?”
“Dad, you wear argyle socks.”
“So?”
“With Crocs.”
“Well, yes, there’s that. Maybe I’m so uncool that that makes me cool. Ever thought of that? Anyway, I assume you’re taking the train up. Just call me when you know what time you’re getting in and I’ll pick you guys up, take you two to dinner.”
“That would be great, Daddy. Thanks.”
“Okay, kid. Tell Justin I’m looking forward to meeting him, too.”
“His name is Jason. Justin was the last guy.”
“Oh right. The stockbroker with the little ponytail.”
“It’s a topknot, Daddy. And they know each other. Jason fucking hates Justin from when he and his Wall Street buddies used to go to the pub where Jason worked part-time. They treated him and the other waiters like crap and left shitty tips. So it would be really uncool if you got mixed up and called him Justin.”
“Yeah, that would be fuckin’ fucked up of me if I fucked up like that, huh?”
“Ha-ha. Very funny. Look, I better get back up there and start researching Miss Brewski.”
“Attagirl. And do me a favor, will you? When you get back up there, get ahold of that little twerp Eugene’s porkpie hat, sit on it, and when you give it back to him good and squashed, tell him it’s a hello from your old man.”
She laughs. “Gladly. Love you, Daddy.”
“Love you more, kiddo. See you soon.”
Aliza: good god, I’m crazy about that kid. Kat and I had wanted more, but we sure lucked out with the one we got. Smart as a whip, sensitive, hardworking. And I like to think I had a little something to do with that sense of humor of hers. My ex is great, but she can be … intense. Doesn’t laugh a whole lot. She was a damned good mom, though, and, for all the things we used to fight about, we pretty much balanced each other out as far as child-rearing. We both gave our daughter quite a bit of free rein, let her figure things out for herself, and she never abused that freedom. Even during all that testing most kids do in high school, Aliza pretty much behaved herself. Avoided the mean-girl cliques and the wild parties. Did her own thing and let everyone else do theirs. She’s just always been a good kid. Not that Aliza’s a kid anymore. Her next birthday, she’ll be twenty-nine.
Looks-wise, she’s a blend of Kat and me. She has her mother’s pale complexion and China blue eyes and my dark hair and long lashes. I’m not sure where that turned-up nose came from; not from either of her parents. When she was a baby and the three of us were out someplace, strangers would sometimes tell us Aliza should be on TV—in commercials or whatever. After they left, Kat would grumble about her daughter being objectified, but it kind of tickled me when someone said something like that. Sometimes when I’m feeling sentimental or blue, I’ll pop one of those old tapes into the VCR I still keep hooked up to the TV and watch who she was back then, when she was my little girl.…
She’s grown into a lovely young woman, too: tall and athletic—she ran the New York City marathon last year and recently joined a wall-climbing club. She dresses unpretentiously—more Patagonia than Prada. Hates shopping, she says, and hardly ever wears makeup. When we’re doing something in the city together, going to a restaurant or an art gallery, she seems unaware that guys are checking her out. That’s what’s lovely about her, in my opinion.
When Kat and I split up, Aliza was in her freshman year at Connecticut College. She’d seen the divorce coming, I’m sure, but still, when the ax finally fell … To her credit, though, she didn’t take sides. Didn’t seem to resent either of us. And as divorces go, Kat’s and mine was pretty amicable. Neither of us had cheated on the other; that wasn’t it. We’d just grown so far apart that the only thing we had in common was our daughter. Still, we held it together until she went off to school.
At Conn, Aliza minored in creative writing, which pleased me, and majored in feminist studies, which her mother was over the moon about. After she graduated, she got a job as a tech writer all the way across the country in Silicon Valley. She lived out there for about four years. Then Yahoo laid her off and she and her California boyfriend called it quits. That was the lowest I’d ever seen her, but she came back home, got her bearings, and moved to the big city. One of her friends pulled some strings and got her a fact-checker’s job at Condé Nast Traveler. After a while, she began writing pieces for them. And then, about a year ago, she jumped ship and landed a job as a staff writer for New York magazine. Much to Aliza’s frustration, she’s usually assigned to cover the fashion and shopping beats for their website. Still, she’s maintained her feminist cred by blogging. Her Tumblr page, Invincible Grrrl, gets over a thousand hits a week and she has twice that many people following her Twitter feed.
Or should I say her post-feminist cred? I’m not even sure what post-feminism is, but Aliza’s mother doesn’t seem to be particularly fond of it. She’s annoyed that twentysomethings like our daughter and those roomies of hers, the three Js, take for granted the rights that Kat and her “sisters” marched for in the streets back in the seventies. “The battle’s far from over,” Kat told Aliza a while back when the three of us met for brunch. “Not with women only earning seventy-eight cents for every dollar that men make. There’s even a gender gap in nursing, for Christ’s sake. Why should male nurses make more than women in a traditionally female occupation?” Kat got herself so lathered up that she kept forgetting to eat her eggs Florentine, which I kept looking at, wishing I had ordered that instead of my buckwheat waffles. She went on to blame pop culture for all the backsliding. “Eighteen-year-olds getting boob jobs and fanny implants, middle school girls posing on social media in their underwear. All the women in TV news squeezed into those tight sleeveless dresses. Spanx! A girdle by any other name is still a goddamned girdle. And that show Girls that you’re so addicted to, Aliza? I watched two episodes and I was done when Lena Dunham submitted to anal sex, not because she wanted it but because that monkey-faced boyfriend of hers did.” That was when I noticed our waitress standing there, waiting to ask us about coffee refills. I smiled apologetically at her, in case she’d just heard my ex-wife opine about Lena’s up-the-butt sex.
Sounds like Aliza’s new man will be an improvement over the stockbroker. That guy was a little too full of himself for my taste, not to mention way too right-wing. Listening politely to his long-winded explanation about why Obamacare was going to bring us to financial ruin felt like torture, but I held my tongue. When Aliza called to say that she’d ended it with him, I was conciliatory. Then I got off the phone and did a little happy dance. I just better not slip up and call this new one Justin. Because he’s Jason. Jason Robards, Jason Bateman, Jason and the Argonauts. Jason, Jason, Jason.
But yeah, it would be fun to take him down to New London and show him what movie palaces used to be like. Maybe give him the grand tour of the “Whaling City” while I’m at it. Show him where the bus depot and my father’s lunch counter used to sit before they built that parking garage. On second thought, that probably wouldn’t excite him too much. Well, speaking of Ye Olde Garde Theatre, I’d better put some shoes on, drive down there, and set up the projectors for my Monday evening movie mavens.
HEY, NOW, LOOK at this: a parking space right in front of the theater. Must be my lucky day. I fish out the key, unlock the side door, and walk into the lobby. Take a moment to scan the renovated splendor of this exquisite old dame: the palatial lobby with its mosaic floor tiles and grand staircase, the neon-lit refreshment counter, the framed lobby cards. They did some extensive research to find out what it looked like when it opened back in ’26 as a “photoplay” house and vaudeville stage. The murals and wall etchings are done in what’s called the Moroccan Revival style. Always makes me feel like I’m walking onto the set of Casablanca. And they’ve left the doors into the auditorium open, so I can see the giant screen and red velvet curtains. Sixteen hundred seats at this place, and back in the day, for the biggest shows, they’d fill every single one of them.
If Aliza wants to write about a place with a fascinating history, she should do a story about this theater. Everyone from W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker to Itzhak Perlman and the Plasmatics have appeared on that stage up there. I was at the latter show, watching punk princess Wendy O. Williams break every taboo she could think of, including flashing the audience and taking a chainsaw to the bass player’s guitar. Over the years, moviegoers have watched flicks from Busby Berkeley to Boyhood and Birdman on that big screen. My parents used to take Simone, Frances, and me here when we were kids. We could walk to the movie theater in Three Rivers where we lived, but if it was a special-occasion film—say, The Shaggy Dog (with our cousin Annette!) or King of Kings (with Jesus!)—we saw it at the Garde.… The day I got my driver’s license, I took my high school girlfriend here and we necked up in the balcony instead of watching that boring big-budget mess Airport.… And one summer during the seventies, when I was home from college and my buddy Lonny was on leave from Fort Dix, we saw a porn film here, Carmen Baby, in which the title character did her infamous “bottle dance,” courtesy of a long-necked jug of wine and, I would guess, a fair number of those Kegel exercises women do. The place was in pitiful shape by then: ripped seats with the stuffing coming out, water stains creeping down the walls. Not long after that, when the Garde had reached its nadir, they showed a snuff film here. I passed on that one, but I think it was called Faces of Death. Something like that. There was a big brouhaha, I remember, and the cops shut it down after the first night. The theater closed for several years after that inglorious episode. Became a downtown eyesore and a target for vandals. There was talk of demolishing the place, but then a committee of locals and summer people with political pull got that whopper of a grant from some historic preservation foundation and they were able to renovate it back to its former glory. Well, I’d better get up to the projection room. Set things up for the movie club.
I love the way these old lobby cards accompany you on your way up the grand staircase. They got some of them on eBay, but they also found a stash of them stored in the cellar when they were doing the renovation. Miraculously, the cards were still in pristine condition. Look at these babies. Gloria Castillo and Edd “Kookie” Byrnes in Reform School Girl … The Singing Nun starring Debbie Reynolds … Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride … Mamie Van Doren in Born Reckless. I can all but hear Kat indicting Hollywood for only offering women two role models: virgins or whores. And, of course, that would be my fault.
This one at the top of the stairs is my favorite. It’s the film they screened at the Garde’s grand opening: The Marriage Clause, a Lois Weber film starring Billie Dove and Francis X. Bushman. It was 1926, so Bushman must have filmed it straight from his role as Messala, the villainous chariot driver in Ben-Hur. I’ll have to point out this poster to my group on Monday. Maybe I could do a little retrospective on Bushman’s and Dove’s careers. And Lois Weber’s career as a director, too. Now there’s a woman who never got her due. She was a trailblazer—a female film director in an industry dominated by domineering men. She made more than a hundred movies—shorts, mostly, with social justice themes: wage inequality, capital punishment, birth control, racial prejudice. Made the censors apoplectic from time to time, too, I’ve read, even before the Hays Commission lowered the boom. I forget the name of it, but one of her films was the first to show full-frontal female nudity. I’d take her on as a subject for a biography if I thought I could interest a publisher, but it would be a tough sell. Maybe some university press. Speer Morgan runs essays about film history in The Missouri Review. I could start there. Query him to see if he’d have any interest in an article on Weber and, if he did, maybe use it as a springboard to a full-blown book.
Well, back to business. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Reel number one. Let me just … let … me … just …
What the …