Gay males who show too much of their chests also over-douse themselves with expensive stink water. I avoid sharing air space with them, too, as I have had to learn the hard way how to protect myself.
Almost invariably, for some reason, the overweight person is a huge offender, even though dressed in the muumuu or bowling shirt and sweatpants, they still manage to make up for looking bad by trying to smell good and are therefore a huge nuisance.
In fact, the only people who do not reek of perfumery are lesbians, ever the proverbial canary in the cultural mine. In San Francisco, these right-on women actually add this to the bottom of the various flyers they pass out announcing the newest gathering of conspiracy theory speech events; “THIS IS A FRAGRANCE-FREE EVENT.” Though I adore lesbians, unfortunately, they all seem to smell of coconut products, which make me itchy, though not quite migrainous.
Lesbian rabbis, though, seem to smell much like their straight male counterparts, of strong, fried onions, and Right Guard Spray Deodorant, which is just plain off-putting, though nontoxic.
Little children and early teens smell the best to me. Of course, that is if they have not shit their pants, and have showered after gym class. This, of course, is rare, as any mother of an infant or preteen knows.
Attending Hollywood functions makes me nauseous not only due to the grotesque displays of vulgar wealth that tempt me to cast the Evil Eye, but also due to the fact that there is no greater offender to those with olfactory allergies than that of the Hollywood publicist, whose overdependence on perfumes in order to disguise the stale cigarettes and nervous sweat of manic-depressive desperation is unparalleled in offensiveness in the civilized world.
Also, makeup artists of either sex are deadly. I must bring my own (Shannone) with me to gigs and photo shoots, because most makeup artists in Hollywood really pour it on and stink to high heaven. Plus, their incessant name-dropping and gossiping about young stars with three names, none of whom I have ever heard, is a bore. Although not quite as bad as when they are New Age and talk Oprahtic about angels and positive thinking and all that bullshit.
I used to think I avoided the above types because I was prejudiced and neurotic, but I have since accepted that all of that was just me overly second-guessing and judging myself. I was actually just allergic.
Lest I be accused of leaving myself out, let me say that honestly I know that I smell like the proverbial old, Jewish, Lefty Granny—like pee, sardines, and garlic. My boyfriend is at home with my smells. Perhaps that is because he is old and Serbian. Some, perhaps all, older male serbs smell like leather, paprika, and pancake syrup, which just happens to be a huge turn-on for me, so it works out well for us both.
Chapter 4
The Curse of the Cute Cousin
I had longed to star in commercials since I was a little girl on the stage. They always seemed to me to be the best thing on television. Frequently funny or accompanied by catchy little jingles, they depicted people who seemed so happy—unless they had indigestion or constipation or a pounding headache, which was illustrated by an animated hammer hitting a drawing of a cerebral cortex. To this day, the commercials are what I remember best of watching television as a child (besides the Eichmann trial, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Jackie Gleason’s shows). I loved that Ed and Jackie did their shows’ commercials themselves!
So I was overcome with jealousy when my cousin Debbie and her brother, David, were cast in a Dr. Ross dog food commercial in the early ’60s. I never quite got over it, either.
Their mother was a natural blonde with dimples, and David and Debbie had dimples, too. They were adorable because they didn’t look Jewish at all. David and Debbie lived on the east side of town because their dad was in Formica counter sales. My dad sold crucifixes and 3-D pictures of Christ door-to-door to Mexicans on welfare, so we lived on the west side. The Aarons were everything my side of the family wasn’t. They were the perfect, modern, assimilated Jewish family.
Debbie sang and danced and impersonated Shirley Temple like I did, but she was thin and bubbly and I was fat and morose, so you do the math. David and Debbie always got to find the afikomen (the special matzoh, wrapped in linen and hidden for kids to find and then use to extract ransom money from the adult who led the service) every Passover, too, because their grandfather, Uncle Ben, always led the Seder every year, and he shamelessly let them do it. I always hated him secretly for that, too. It was horribly unfair, since my grandmother did all the preparation and the cooking and the buying of every single piece of the whole Passover affair, and she had seven grandchildren of her own who deserved a chance to find the goddamn afikomen, too! I seemed to be the only person who was ever upset about this.
My own mother said, “It is just something nice we let Uncle Ben do every year.” And I asked, “Well, how come no one does anything nice for Bubbe Mary? She does all the work!” I was actually thinking more of myself and my jealousy of Debbie than I was about the division of labor in my family, but my mother, ever the patriarchal apologist, said, “We do nice things for men because they lead the services!” as if I was slow-witted regarding everything that life is really about. I had to sit there year after year and watch David and Debbie get the fifty cents, and it burned me up.
I vowed that I would do anything to get my crack at starring in a television commercial someday, including developing some form of talent to make people pay even brief attention to me. That talent shit is the real hard part of the whole thing. Although it really doesn’t seem to matter—anyone can sing and dance to a drum machine and recite ridiculous lyrics about how being sexy matters more than anything on earth except money. I am now convinced that talent is secondary to distribution in show business.
When I used to sit in front of the television set watching Miss Dinah Shore in her sparkling gowns sing about the glories of Chevrolet, I was so in awe of her tiny waist. I remember thinking that she probably had to squeeze into several girdles to look that thin. It never occurred to me as a child that some women just have tiny waists! All the women in my family were bumpy around the middle and would force their flesh inside restricting boned contraptions. My grandmother told me that a good corset is not only the foundation for making a waist but the foundation of good posture needed for musicality itself. The “cors-a-let” that she wore when dressed up squeezed her fat out of her middle, down into her butt, and up into her back. But the creation of a waist made her a more confident woman, so who was I to doubt her?
I remember hating Miss Shore’s singing because vibrato reminds me of howling cats. But I knew that this was the “talent” she had to trade on in order to be afforded the great privilege of selling things for big companies. So I used my talent to write two hundred and sixty excellent jokes and one-liners for my act, got “discovered,” and then my dreams came true—I was chosen to do a Pizza Hut commercial, which went on to win every single award that advertising offers, including the Cleo, the veritable Peabody of commercials and commercialism, and I knew I had arrived. Right after that ad, I got a job as “Mrs. Ralphs” for Ralphs food stores in California.
The many men and women who wrote the commercials for the average housewife (played by me) about the transcendental Ralphs Shopping Experience told me that my “input” was welcome. And I was thrilled to give it; I could say whatever I wanted to say and rewrite the commercials to make them more comical—and do it for free without credit. I now understand that means “appropriating uncompensated intellectual property.” I learned this too late, when later I could afford some big-time Hollywood lawyers. The hours and hours of enjoyment I gleaned from the hours and hours of drinking and stewing in my own juices after hearing that the “input” I had freely offered had won Cleo awards and made money for others, and that I had not even been included, thanked, or even courteously notified that something I wrote got somebody I met once a pretty nice home, were so worth it. I was unable to keep my big mouth shut, however, and was soon fired when it became all too apparent to the people at the top that M
rs. Ralphs was a loud, lefty feminist and not a liberal career woman.
Similarly, after mutilating the National Anthem, the sponsorships I had landed for a children’s cartoon and line of toys were revoked. I was called to New York and told to my face by Dennis Somebody, as head of the ABC Saturday morning children’s programming, that as a marine he was personally offended at my rendition of the Anthem, and was canceling my cartoon, and was replacing it with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I destroyed my own dream with my big mouth and my lack of respect for authority and decency. I have learned my lesson. I would like another chance to sell a product on TV, but the truth is that I probably cannot get any endorsement deals or my own commercial, ever, because everyone is afraid that I will not be able to control shooting off my big mouth, or perhaps I’ll start too high again (one way or another) and proceed to ruin another sacred tune on television. They’re probably right, because this comedian thing is sort of a spiritual Tourette’s syndrome, seriously! However, incurable optimist that I am, I still have a feeling that I can make millions starring in “before” ads for weight-loss products and Prozac, and “after” ads for Depend adult diapers.
Chapter 5
A Tale of Two Bubbes
Almost every word of the following story is true, except one or two things.
My two grandmothers, or bubbes, as we in the Jew trade call them—my mom’s mom, Mary Davis (formerly Bitnam-Davidovitz) and Fanny Barr (formerly Katz-Borisofsky), my dad’s—were way larger than life; they both knew it and so did everybody around them. They impressed and affected me in ways I still recognize and rediscover to this day. I still see them in my mind’s eye, watching me from the wings in my fleeting roles as everything from hippie hitchhiker to Bel Air benefactress, from tradition-bound matriarch (sort of) to rebel at the barricades. No wonder I’ve been called the Queen of the Mixed Message by lots of people in my life. (Mixed message? Hey, I’m just passing it along; don’t shoot the messenger.) They, along with my mother, all very different types of Jewish women, lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, and formed the kaleidoscope of my early spiritual training, and also my feminism.
My allergy to ambergris (a perfume ingredient) colored my entire worldview, so Yom Kippur was the only tolerable, migraine headache–free childhood Jewish holiday for me. Most Jews in the world have obviously been similarly imprinted by an allergy to whale vomit (ambergris), or something like it, because Yom Kippur is the one and only day that most of the world’s chosen people attend synagogue. Most of us share not just weird allergies, or the unceasing craving for carbohydrates, but the fear that not repenting for the things we did the other 364 days of the year will really come back to kick our ass if we omit groveling for God’s forgiveness on Yom Kippur. That’s our holy “get out of jail free” card. Jews are so brainwashed that even though the majority of us are closet atheists, we wouldn’t think of not getting together to kiss God’s probably nonexistent ass on the High Holy Days.
According to Bubbe Mary, my Orthodox Jewish grandmother, Simchat Torah, not Yom Kippur, is the most important Jewish holiday, because it’s the day Moses came down from the mountain with “the Law.” She loved the Law and discussed it with me all the time. Whether it was the Laws of Moses, which, of course, had to be obeyed, even though they were intolerable or ridiculous and incoherent, or the law of averages—she clearly cheated in order to win every single hand of gin rummy that I ever played with her. Her interest in keeping certain laws and cheating others included an immense admiration for the “practice” of law by one Perry Mason, America’s supreme TV lawyer back in the pre–Judge Judy days. If Bubbe had only lived to see the day when Judge Judy, a feisty, female, gavel-wielding Member of the Tribe, unseated the non-Jewish Oprah Winfrey as the queen of daytime TV’s ratings, she would have died of JOY! Bubbe Mary was quite a virulent anti-non-Semite.
Born of elite, Lithuanian, Jewish parents, Bubbe Mary classified everything into two groups, Jewish and Goyische. Many Jews, including Bubbe Fanny, fell under her “Goyische” listing. Bubbe Mary was the “Lady Chairman” of the Talmud Torah Committee, whose sacred task it was to make sure each child at synagogue knew about Simchat Torah. In order to do this mission justice and represent properly for Moses, she “conducted herself like a lady,” and coordinated and designed gorgeous ensembles that she sewed herself. Bubbe Mary was an expert seamstress, and that ability had brought her to America, where she was hired for work in a sweatshop at age sixteen, and promptly enrolled herself at the Salt Lake City Conservatory of Music as well. She sang Yiddish songs and Rudy Vallée songs, played the ukulele and the mandolin, and entertained at bar mitzvahs in her spare time before she became an old woman whose friends died before she did.
She applied a fraction of these skills in order to look fantastic, while passing out the traditional Hershey’s milk chocolate candy bars to the children on their way out the door after Simchat Torah services at Congregation Montefiore, the Sephardic synagogue we attended. She explained to me that the chocolate bars were not only Kosher and ordained by Heaven and the Rabbinical Council of America, but were also given to us in order to help us make the symbolic connection in our young minds to the sweetness of the Law. So, in other words, the sweetness of Moses receiving the tablets from God Almighty was synonymous with receiving an entire large bar of milk chocolate from Bubbe’s white-gloved hand, and huffing it by oneself, unshared with other siblings or parents. Ah, how those wonderfully rich commandments really sealed the deal for us chocolaty chosen children, as well as laid the groundwork for our future type 1 diabetes.
Almost as much as lusting for the candy bar, I coveted (two separate sins) her typical couture outfit for Simchat Torah. There was the navy dress with the white collar and three-quarter-length white cuffed sleeves that had fifty or sixty tight rows of pleating down the bodice front, with a smart belt that had a rhinestone buckle, white hat with net, and gloves, worn with open-toe woven blue wedgies with cork heels and tiny little patent leather bows, tied neatly above the open peekaboo tips, where three, perfectly manicured, red nails were encased under the black-lace toe of the hose covering her foot. It was quite a post–French Revolution, educated-proletariat kind of look, which I adored.
I inherited her gold dress with the brown embroidered neckline and pockets that I still own to this day, and wore in her honor on my first trip to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. There, I told The God that I would never ask It for another thing, but instead, as a responsible adult created in Its image, I would now begin to solve my own problems and accept things for what they are, and not as a symbol of something else. Declaring myself a peer of God was the most spiritual thing that I have ever done, and of course, as you might imagine, I topped it all off with a delicious Hershey’s milk chocolate candy bar.
As a preteen girl, I wanted to dress as twins with Bubbe Mary because I just loved her clothes, but she never wanted to do the whole matching grandmother-and-granddaughter-outfit-making and -wearing thing that was so popular with our Mormon neighbors, which was a huge disappointment to me. My clothes never were nice or right for me, and that was largely due to the fact that I was close to being the only overweight girl in the land of Zion (SLC). I had to shop from one rack in the basement of ZCMI, where there were only ever two size 14 dresses in the space marked “for chubbettes.” The store would not even have had a size 14 rack, except for the fact that my other grandmother, Bubbe Fanny, worked there as a salesperson, and she would order a couple of dresses for her chubby granddaughter each season and put them on layaway for me! That brings me to Bubbe Fanny.
Bubbe Fanny was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to parents of Russian Jewish descent. Her father, Joe Katz, left Russia at age nine, after his father, whose death by pogrom, otherwise called “natural causes” for the Jews back then, he witnessed. His mother walked herself, Joe Katz, and eight other children out of Russia to Poland after that. And Joe then walked his way to Spain, earning a living by the shoemaking skills his father had taught him, later sailing fo
r South Africa as a merchant marine. After landing in the USA years later, he proceeded to walk from New York to Kansas City, Missouri, where he found gainful employment, by dressing up like a blindman and selling pencils on the street.
He married a fat Jewish woman there, who gave birth to little, dimpled, kinky-haired, wide-nosed, round Frances (Fanny) Katz, who was a working-class hero, did not believe in God, was not educated or refined, but in a weekend could crochet a slipcover or an afghan to cover and warm the Statue of Liberty. When I was sixteen and turned hippie, discussing Marx with her, she told me she would have been happy to carry a rifle in the revolutionary forces against the czar had she lived in Russia back then. She said, “I’m a Bolsha-whatever, too! Those dirty bastards sitting there eatin’ caviars, while the people starved all around them, should roast in hell, if there is one.” Fanny’s father, Joe Katz, used to call her a whore because she didn’t keep kosher and she dyed her hair red. She loved Spam, ham and eggs, shrimp, and all the other delicacies that disgusted Bubbe Mary, who agreed with Joe Katz that only a Jewish whore would defile her overweight and diabetic body by ingesting nonkosher meats.
Leftist and rebellious, Fanny enjoyed every moment of her life, despite the misery she had lived through: an abusive father and husband, and the tragic loss of two of her preschool-age children—and she did it all without any prayers, ever. She had no superstition in the least. Once when I was out walking with her, and we happened upon a cemetery, which she insisted we cut through, I repeated a learned Jewish law, “We are not allowed to go into cemeteries!” Fanny replied, “Hey, it’s not the dead ones we have to worry about.” That sentence remains the funniest one I can recall from my entire childhood, and also the most freeing. It broke through the fear I had been taught by Bubbe Mary’s adherence to the Law, which had been shoved down my throat every day of my life since I learned how to speak.
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