“Of course he is, honey. It says right here in the text, ‘A participant opens the door for Elijah.’” As a sidebar, seder participants are supposed to drink four cups of wine over the course of the ritual, so suffice it to say, now that the evening was winding down, I was more than somewhat loopy.
“No, Mom, I mean really Elijah. Faith’s Elijah.”
The entire room went silent. I had to admit, the timely appearance of Elijah was pretty eerie. When was the last time a prophet showed up on cue at your house?
“There’s a man in our midst,” Claude whispered.
“I’m interrupting. I’m so sorry,” Elijah apologized. “Faith told me to come over at nine o’clock. She thought the festivities would be over by now. If you give me the key, sweetheart, I can wait upstairs.”
“Sweetheart,” Izzy murmured, as though the word was a juicy secret.
“If it’s all right with Susan, I’d like to invite you in, Elijah,” Faith said.
I waved him over to the table. “C’mon. Have a macaroon. And some wine. I guess…” I said, handing him the silver Elijah’s Cup, “I guess this goblet has your name on it.”
Faith linked her arm through Elijah’s. “This is my ‘why is this night different’ news. I didn’t want to say anything during the meal because I was afraid I’d depress people. After all, I’ve lived in this building a long time. I’m even older than those washing machines,” she added, to much laughter. “Elijah asked me today if I would do him the honor of moving in with him. Now, I’m an old-fashioned girl, and at first I thought I deserved a ring with that proposal, but I can’t see myself getting married again at this stage in my life. And besides, Susan is always encouraging us to take risks and try something new. I’m sure the landlord will be delirious when he learns that a rent-controlled apartment will be up for grabs, but I am looking forward to pottering around my new garden in Brooklyn Heights.”
“You’re moving to Brooklyn!” Meriel exclaimed. “We’ll be neighbors almost.”
“Yes…next year I’ll almost be able to walk to the West Indian Day parade.”
“Oh my goodness,” I said, beginning to cry. “You really are moving on.”
Faith handed me her handkerchief. “I’ll visit often,” she promised. I still have my opera subscription and I don’t think the Met will be moving to Brooklyn anytime soon.”
“I’m so happy for you,” I sniffled. “But sad for me. It’s always hard when a therapist has to say good-bye to a client. But it’s even harder when she has to say good-bye to a treasured friend.”
“You’re making me cry,” Elijah gently kidded. “I’m sure you’ll agree, Susan, that I’ve got me one unusual lady.”
“Unusual? Is that a compliment?” Faith wanted to know. “Elijah was planning to take me out for some champagne. Dashing out in the middle of a dinner party goes against everything I was raised to do, but I don’t want to keep him waiting much longer…”
“We’re staying to help clear the table, Faith,” said Elijah decisively. “The champagne’ll chill.”
Everyone pitched in. But after such a joyous meal, the mood in the laundry room had turned bittersweet.
“This is going to be my hardest Passover ever,” Molly said, going over to congratulate Faith. “Mom, you thought it would be hard to give up pizza and pasta for a week, but now we’ve got to give up Faith too.”
Faith draped her violet-clad arm over my daughter’s shoulder. “Molly, in this life, you’ll learn that things change—sometimes for the better, and sometimes not—and people you care about come and go and grow and move away. Life is as mutable as the water that comprises the lion’s share of our bodies.”
“Okay, yeah, I get that,” Molly nodded, “but it still doesn’t change what we’re talking about.”
“Oh, yes it does,” said the older woman, eager for the last word on the subject. “Just because things will be a bit different from now on, it doesn’t mean you have to lose Faith!”
Progress Notes
Me: Well, I waved good-bye to the moving van and to Faith in her yellow taxi this morning. Alice is off to England to talk dirty in a series of electromagnetic dust-rag commercials. In a couple of months I’ll rent a car to drive Molly up to college, and when I return home, it will just be me and Ian, my Broadway baby. Over the past several months, I’ve lost a few clients and a husband. I finally found a more honest and solid relationship with my daughter, only to “lose” her to a four-year (I hope!) educational sojourn in Vermont. Believe me, I can see the irony in it; but this “loss” is everyone’s gain.
And even though I may no longer be seeing a couple of my laundry room clients, they have all become my friends.
What about Eli? I still lose sleep at night worrying over whether I had given everything I could have to our marriage. I second-guess myself constantly. Our separation, and possible divorce, has not been easy on me. In my mind I try to revisit as many days as I can of our twenty-plus years as a couple, looking for clues to see if there’s something I might have done better. Or differently. Or all over again. There are plenty of times when I look to blame Eli.
But if I were my own client, I would remind myself rather pointedly that agonizing over what I coulda-shoulda-mighta done so that my marriage didn’t end up in the glass-half-empty column is an exercise that is not only futile, but self-destructive. There’s a vast difference between emotional self-flagellation and how I would counsel myself to healthily explore the situation: through rational analysis, assessment, and awareness of what happened, why it happened, and whether it could have been avoided. And if Eli decides that he wants to come back, or not—and at this point it’s looking more like “not”—I will be able to handle the situation with strength and self-confidence.
After all, isn’t that exactly what Mala Sonia said I’d do?
It’s one of my credos, both personally and professionally, that you have to be willing to take risks if you want to get close to someone. To risk love of any kind is to risk the pain that comes of loss. And it’s the experience of both that makes us truly human.
But here’s an interesting question: if you’ve lost someone close to you, but you’ve given them your all—showed them and shared with them the most vulnerable parts of yourself as well as your more resilient and tenacious sides, and they’ve been just as open with you—haven’t you also won as well?
I guess it all comes out in the wash.
Balletomane Magazine
Shaw’s Giselle Gave Me the Wilis
It’s always a treat to see a fine performance of Giselle but I would encourage anyone within a hundred miles of Manhattan to jeté, don’t walk, to see a stunning debut in the role. New York City Ballet’s Talia Shaw, back in the rosin after a crippling injury several months ago, imbues the fragile title character with a range of emotions that this writer has not seen since she saw Fonteyn dance the role decades ago. Just because I’m an octogenarian doesn’t mean I’m in my dotage; Shaw is the real thing. To his credit, City Ballet’s artistic director Peter Martins has increased Shaw’s repertoire gradually so that she has had time to grow into the great roles. And as the young country girl jilted by her lover, Shaw truly shines, her emotional connection to the doomed Giselle right on point, capturing both the joy and exuberance of the early scenes and the elegiac wistfulness of the denouement.
Her technique and control have matured over the years as well: sprightly and bouncy when she needs to be, with flawless allegro work; and strong and supple as a reed, with one of the surest and most disciplined arabesques I have seen in years. Perfectly partnered by the always-elegant Damian Woetzel as a truly tormented Albrecht, Talia Shaw’s performance is an experience not to be missed and one surely guaranteed to elevate this relatively unknown, homegrown American ballerina into the pantheon of great Giselles.
Lenore Hetter
The Little Red Restaurant Guide
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“A Jamaican vacation right in your own back yard,” any local will tell you that reservations are a must at this hot new Caribbean entry, with “Mama”—the incomparable Meriel Delacour—in the kitchen. At No Problem, you’ll savor all the Jamaican staples—curried goat, jerk chicken, and the moistest black fruit cake this side of Kingston, served in a cheery decor by a friendly, laid-back staff that won’t set your wallet back.
The New York Sun-Tribune
Alice Finnegan and Dan Carpenter
Alice Finnegan, daughter of Frank and Leah Finnegan of Boca Raton, and Dan Carpenter, son of the late Ronald Carpenter and Helen Carpenter Tavares of Saratoga Springs, have announced their engagement. A September wedding is planned.
The bride-to-be, who will keep her name, is a professional actress. She has performed Off-Broadway, most recently in the long-running interactive comedy Grandma Finnegan’s Wake, and is currently represented internationally in television and print advertising as the “Snatch Girl.”
Mr. Carpenter is a self-described “Mister Fixit” with a specialty in antique furniture restoration. He is also a folk guitarist. His first CD, cut this past June, is titled If You Were My Lady and features Ms. Finnegan on some of the background vocals.
The couple “met cute” in the elevator of Ms. Finnegan’s apartment building. “He was carrying one of those little black bags and I thought he was a doctor, especially when he said he was paying a house call. Turns out, he was going to repair his niece’s Victorian dollhouse!”
Stage Business
The Actors Resource
Harry Potter Magic Comes to Broadway
The Great White Way will be transformed into Hogwarts when the long-awaited musical version of the first Harry Potter classic, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, chugs into the Shubert Theater in November. Rumors have been buzzing for months about Brian Vinero’s witty lyrics and solid book, which honors the tried-and-true source material while adding its own special brand of magic. J. K. Rowling is said to be over the moon about the way her blockbuster novel is being retooled for the stage. The talented Adam Guettel, the man with the strongest musical theatre pedigree in America, has written the charming and oh-so-singable score. Young Ian Lederer, a Broadway veteran at the tender age of twelve, who really captured hearts when he performed the title role in the workshop versions of HP, is set to star. Let’s hope he can nab that Tony Award before his voice changes! For all you potential Hermiones, Snapes, and Dumbledores out there, turn to the Casting section for the AEA casting notice and breakdown.
Simi Sheward
American Beauty
Top Ten College Freshmen (and Women!)
This month, American Beauty honors the best and brightest of this year’s crop of exiting college freshmen: students who’ve made a difference in the lives of the people around them.
Nineteen-year-old Molly Lederer’s novel, Confessions of an Overachieving Underachiever, which chronicles life in the trenches amid the insanely competitive world of New York’s private high schools and the high-stakes college admissions race, will be published by Avon Trade next fall. She’s also just signed a six-figure deal for the motion picture rights to the book, “The first of many, I hope,” she cheerfully avers. Molly completed her first year at Bennington as an English major. “They didn’t have a Creative Writing major anymore when I applied, but after me, they changed their curriculum again.” True, the Vermont college, better known for its free-thinking “fruits and nuts kind of students,” as Molly calls them, has decided to bring back the Creative Writing major.
“When word got out that one of our freshmen had a publishing contract—and then a movie deal—based on a manuscript that was nurtured by her professors here at Bennington, well, there was such a flurry of e-mails asking us about our Creative Writing major that we were ashamed to admit we’d discontinued it,” said Bennington provost Akia Summers. “Thanks to Molly, we’re back on track.”
A note to prospective Bennington Creative Writing students: get those college admissions applications in early!
Molly Lederer will be American Beauty’s student guest editor in the August issue. What does she think of this exciting assignment? “It’s all so Sylvia Plath!”
Lion Lines
In Praise of OlderWomen
Faith Nesbit has made a sizable donation to the Butler Library in the name of her late husband, Columbia grad (class of ’51) Dr. Ben Nesbit. Dr. Nesbit was a pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, but had a passion for “just about everything under the sun,” according to his widow. “Ben loved history, the classics, baseball, Javanese puppet theatre, Italian cuisine, seventeenth-century Flemish architecture…it was hard for me to keep up with him!” Mrs. Nesbit said that she had thought of earmarking the money for a specific area of interest, but she felt that it would be better spent on a diverse range of subjects. “I think Ben would have been very pleased with my decision. He’s up there somewhere, smiling.”
New York Journal of Jurisprudence
Newter & Spade Presses First AmendmentSuit and Wins
Newter & Spade, in a rare pro bono representation, has struck a blow for First Amendment rights. Romance novelist Casey Rabinowitz, who writes under the pseudonym Ciara Romero, was appearing at a Nassau County Barnes & Noble as part of the book tour for her current release, And then He Kissed Me There, when two police officers interrupted her reading and arrested her for public lewdness. Rabinowitz spent seventy-two hours in lockup before she was arraigned. Amy Witherspoon, on behalf of Newter & Spade, brought suit in the Eastern District of New York, claiming that the defendant was well within her First Amendment rights to read passages aloud from her own work, “‘however purple and lurid they might be to some auditors’.”
Federal District Court Judge Shera Goldberg ruled for the defendant, awarding fifty thousand dollars for defamation and monetary damages on the counterclaims.
Full decision will be published tomorrow.
Urban Parent
A Valentine to Nontraditional Moms
Lesbian moms speak out on everything from overcoming prejudices to icing cupcakes at three A.M.
“The most important thing a parent can give a kid is TLC,” says Naomi Sciorra, who with Claude Chan, her life partner, adopted Jin, a Chinese baby girl last year. Claude agrees. “There are so many children out there, particularly children of color, or girls in China, for instance, who have been deemed by their own cultures as less than desirable. How can any reasonable person not find that appalling? Where’s their humanity?”
Sciorra is adamant in stating her view that a loving home is “obviously preferable” to life in an orphanage, no matter the nationality, religion, race, or sexual orientation of the parents. “Where is it written that a man plus a woman of the same ethnicity as their child equals the perfect family?”
Claude laughed. “Yeah, think of the number of people who grew up in so-called ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ homes who are in therapy!”
Having spent a good deal of time with Chan and Sciorra, I can safely assure the naysayers that Jin is one very happy—and very lucky—little girl.
Erica Barth
Psychology Tomorrow
Clients Who Air Their Dirty Linen in More Ways than One
Susan Lederer is a Manhattan psychotherapist. Nothing unusual about that, especially on the Upper West Side, where there are probably more analysts per square inch of real estate than there are parking meters. What makes Lederer’s practice so uncommon is that she devotes a significant part of her week to conducting free private therapy sessions in her prewar apartment building’s laundry room. Her patients, fellow tenants (and all women, as of this writing) have really cottoned to the idea. “My clients find the atmosphere relaxed and informal—though I wish we could do something about those gray walls—and the various scents of detergent and fabric softener seem to have a benef
icial side effect. One of my women calls our sessions ‘aromapsychotherapy.’”
Lederer’s clients credit her unorthodox method with any number of outstanding breakthroughs in their emotional and psychological health and well-being. “I would have been mortified to walk into some office filled with ferns and a receptionist who wonders what my neuroses are and all that,” said Faith Nesbit, who now commutes from Brooklyn to her weekly sessions with Lederer. “What can I say? I missed her energy. Or maybe I’m still crazy; I guess some people would say that a seventy-three-year-old woman who hops the D train at dawn to go all the way into Manhattan to talk about herself for fifty minutes is somewhat off her rocker. Susan is a very warm and loving person. Never, ever judgmental. I don’t even know if she realizes what a treasure she is.”
Acknowledgments
Spin Doctor would not have been spun without the encouragement, as always, of my wonderful editor Lucia Macro and my indefatigable agent Irene Goodman. Thanks are due to Rebecca Scarpati and my cousin Laurie Weinberg, for providing “shrinky” info during the novel’s early gestation—any errors are my own; to Jan Leslie Harding, for so generously discussing the international adoption process with me; to my tarot guru Brian Vinero, for his inspirational guidance and for vetting my fictional “readings”; to d.f, for making me think way out of the box on this one; and to my apartment building’s laundry room, for providing inspiration. Maybe one day all the washing machines will work.
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