The special thing is, my boyfriend can sing “La Bamba.” He’s not allowed to enter the lip-sync contest because it would be sort of a conflict of interest. He doesn’t just lip-sync. He sings it a cappella. He sounds so sincere when he sings it. He makes up the words—he’s not a purist—but they sound right; he has the right tune. That is the secret of “La Bamba,” inventing it as you go along. That is the true soul of La Bamba. La Bamba lives.
Sheep Down Under
Featured in the New Yorker, May 4, 1987
From a young woman vacationing in New Zealand:
My friend Sharon and I are having a wonderful time. We’re crazy about New Zealand! It’s got everything: alps and tropical beaches and rain forests and fjords and the most wonderful, complicated hills, which look as though someone had draped a crazy quilt over a pile of oranges and rocks—the hills are very irregular, that is. The borders of the pastures on the hills are planted with “shelter belts,” which are double rows of trees where sheep can huddle when it rains. I’ll come back to the sheep in a minute.
The climate is temperate. It’s fall now, and the leaves are turning. The people are very friendly, and they speak a fast, very British sort of English. Everyone in New Zealand says, “Ah, yeah!” Sometimes we can’t understand them at all. Yesterday, when we were flying over Mt. Cook (12,349 feet, and New Zealand’s highest mountain), I thought the flight attendant said there was a tea shop on Mt. Asparagus. Maybe she was talking about Mt. Aspiring, somewhere to the southwest. And Sharon thought a woman referring to the motorway said “mud whoopee.” We keep getting the giggles—the giddiness of travel. We can’t believe we’re so far away. Did you know the moon is all turned around here? (Technically, I guess, we’re turned around, in relation to you folks back home.) And a lot of other things here are turned around, too. The north is warm and the south is cold. They drive on the left. The racetracks go clockwise. (Our Maori guide took us to the speedway—he races sprint cars.) Even the numbers on the telephone dials are in reverse order. The hot and cold faucets are reversed (not always, though). And salt and pepper shakers are backward—one hole for salt, three holes for pepper.
I bought a sweatshirt depicting a mob of curious sheep surrounding a nonplussed kiwi bird. Sharon bought a T-shirt that said “New Zealand, Land of 70,000,000 Nuclear Free Sheep.” I bought some “Footrot Flats” books. “Footrot Flats” is a national craze in New Zealand. It’s a comic strip about a sheep farm, with a nameless dog and a farmer named Wal’ and a neighbor and a possum and other animals. “Footrot Flats” is in all the stores—on coffee mugs, games, T-shirts—and there is even a “Footrot Flats” leisure park and a “Footrot Flats” movie. The line was too long at the movie.
The other day, we went to an amazing place called the Agrodome to see performing sheep. The stage had raised platforms for two rows of sheep to stand on. Each place had a nameplate below it and a feed cup on a stem. One by one, nineteen rams were let loose from the sidelines to trot up onto the platform and find their places while a taped voice lectured on sheep. When the sheep were all chained in place, they resembled two chorus lines, but they kept bumping into each other and stealing each other’s feed. Of course, if the Rockettes had to wear heavy wool carpets they might have similar problems.
Up close, sheep look considerably different from the way they look scattered out on the hillsides. They come in assorted sizes and shapes and coat styles. The Merino, the largest in the mob at the Agrodome, occupied the star spot in the center of the stage. He had enormous curled horns, and his name was Prince. The English Leicester was very shaggy, with what seemed to be a kitchen mop hanging in his eyes. The bangs on the curly-fleeced Lincoln spilled down the center of his nose. The Corriedale, however, had short, neat bangs. The Suffolk had a black head and black legs, and the Hampshire had a black nose and black ears and black circles around his eyes. All the sheep were excited. The Border Leicester knocked down his feeding cup. The Perendale seemed to be doing a cha-cha-cha. The Dorset Horn broke his chain and had to be led back to his place. His horns curled around in front of his eyes like gigantic spit curls, and probably blocked his vision. Then the Merino folded his legs and sat down, front first. After licking their feeding cups clean, most of the others sat down, too. During the rest of the show, they sat there and chewed gum, it seemed.
While they watched, a man in a black wool singlet (traditional shearing garb) sheared a sheep—a female extra, not one of the stars. The shearer sat her down and pinned her by holding one of her forelegs between his knees. She was frightened, but he showed how you could touch certain pressure points to keep her in position, and she seemed relaxed. (I can do exactly the same with my cat.) The sheep got into the rhythm of shearing and allowed herself to be turned and twisted. The fleece came off in one piece, as if it had been unzipped. In seconds, the sheep was naked, and, looking embarrassed and sad, she scrambled off the stage.
Next, two sheep dogs hurled themselves onstage. Quickly and precisely, they responded to the man in the singlet as he whistled and spoke certain words (“Right,” “Left,” etc.) in a low tone. They were champions bred from border-collie mixes, and they were frisky and likable. They had short hair, shaggy tails, wide noses, and were much smaller than Lassie-style collies. They loved licking the sheep’s faces. I used to have a collie, and these dogs reminded me so much of him it made me feel very sad but thrilled, too. I don’t know why it always seemed an important point to me, but my dog was a full-blooded collie. His mother was the Lassie type, and his father was a border collie. People didn’t believe my dog was a collie, though, because he had short hair and a wide nose, but those were his border-collie traits. He was never so happy as when he had the whole family rounded up, all in the same room. When one of the sheep dogs barked, it sounded just like my dog’s welcome-home bark. There are two kinds of working sheep dogs: the huntaway dog, who drives sheep from behind with his strong bark, and the heading dog, or eye dog, who stalks the sheep and controls them with his eyes. My dog was definitely the huntaway sort. The dog in “Footrot Flats” is an eye dog.
Suddenly, the dogs onstage bounded across the backs of the sheep, using them for steps. The sheep shearer said that dogs often get from one side of the mob to the other in this manner. And Sharon said, “Hey, I just realized the joke at the end of ‘Crocodile Dundee’! Remember when Crocodile Dundee is trying to get to the woman across the crowded subway platform after she’s said she loves him? He walks right on top of the people—like a sheep dog! I bet nobody at home got that joke.”
And then the man in the singlet invited people in the audience to come onstage and pat the big Drysdale sheep, the most huggable-looking sheep in the mob. (Sheep, you may have gathered by now, travel in mobs.) He had large, curled horns and long, shaggy wool that seemed to have been treated with mousse. Sharon and I took turns going onstage and photographing each other with this funny sheep. The sheep didn’t move, but he sort of smiled. He felt like a big couch.
Hot Colors
Featured in the New Yorker, September 1, 1980
At the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the crowd one hot afternoon resembled a tropical garden of extravagant blooms and gay colors. It was as though in deciding how to dress for the heat everyone had been seized by Picasso’s reckless willingness to try anything. We overheard someone say, “Form was to Picasso what color was to Matisse.” Matisse, too, must have been involved in this scene, we thought—especially when it came to pink: neon pink, Day-Glo pink, hot pink, Shocking pink. We saw pink-flowered pants suits; pink trousers of velours; a glowing pink Picassosignature T-shirt; pink plaid slacks; a very tiny woman in bright-pink pants and baby-size pink spike heels; a young man in jeans with a pink belt and red patent-leather shoes; a woman in pink plastic open-toed, backless heels; a trio of women in pants suits of the same flesh tones as “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; a girl in loud-pink basketball shoes with red laces; a man in rainbow-striped pants, a red shirt, and flamingo-pink shoes. One you
ng woman was wearing an unobtrusive brooch in the form of a tube of paint with plastic paint oozing out. The tube was labelled, “Orange,” but the color was more like that of a pinkish Elberta peach.
And green, a Cézanne-ish sort of green, was just about as popular as pink. It was Picasso’s favorite green, the green of his “Still-Life with Hat (Cézanne’s Hat)” and “Green Still-Life,” from Avignon. A woman was wearing a tank top of this hue, and it was peeking out from her yellow seersucker jump suit, which had a dashing design of large jelly beans on it. Another woman’s green sun dress exactly matched the green earplug of the museum tape-cassette tour she was carrying. But our favorite was a dress patterned with green frogs and pink strawberries.
Picasso’s Blue Period was strangely somber—this group was wilder than that. And in the gray Cubist rooms the colors were dancing: Hawaiian shirts, splendid purples, a black sun dress with palm trees on it, and a white skirt with purple birds flying across it. In the Garden Café, a woman in a red-and-white hibiscus-flowered muumuu and white gloves and marble-size beads was smoking a cigarette while standing in line to buy grapes and cheese—a Saran-wrapped still-life.
Picasso’s harlequins had leaped out of the paintings. Most of the sun dresses that did not have flowers or birds on them had harlequin designs in flashy colors. One notable shirt had large pink and green diamonds. Even the plaid shirts were cut on the bias, making diamonds instead of squares, and one man’s shirt, made from a patchwork-quilt top, imitated the wallpaper collage in “Women at Their Toilette.”
For relief, the museum guards wore black and white, and one stationed in the Sculpture Garden sported reflecting sunglasses just like those of the prison guard in “Cool Hand Luke.”
It was only a simple red, white, and blue, but our favorite blouse pictured twenties-style flappers standing on stair steps, and lists of names zigzagging beside them: Julie, Jeanne, Marcelle, Georgette, Germaine, Suzanne, Rose, Paulette, Camille, Blanche, Marthe, Thérèse, Agnès, Juliette, Claire.
Finally, before the gray agonies of the “Guernica,” a startling sight: a woman in pumps of a linen fabric with a design like a Jan Brueghel stilllife—one of those botanically impossible combinations of flowers. As she moved on, we tried to catch up with her, for it seemed as though she were the leader of all these mad expressions of the heat of summer, but she flitted away, her feet like birds of paradise.
Sanctuary
Featured in the New Yorker, October 5, 1981
Letter from a woman in Pennsylvania:
On the first day that really felt like fall, Roger and I biked to a wildlife sanctuary in our community. Roger gets melancholy over autumn, and, besides, we had moved from a sixty-acre farm only a few months before, so the idea of going to a wildlife sanctuary in the middle of town at the beginning of fall had a promise of sadness in it. But we enjoyed our expedition.
At the entrance to the sanctuary, which covered seventy-five acres, a sign told us to leave pets at home and to “touch, not take.” We picked up a brochure that said, “The silent observer sees the most. Take only memories, leave only footprints. Stay on the trails.” It listed a woods-edge trail along the local river, an orchard trail, a tree-edge trail, and a woodland loop, offering varying “habitat experiences of stream, field, thicket, and forest.” Most of the trails were carpeted with wood chips. Along the orchard trail, the rotting apples on the ground smelled like vinegar. The trail led to the bird blind, a three-sided six-foot barrier of woven strips of wood, painted red, with openings to look through at several feeders. People had written on the bird blind “You saw somethin’ else didncha?” and “I’m Free.” On a clipboard you could record the birds you saw at the feeders. Billy Zaboroush had seen a pigeon three days before. I watched for pheasants and wild turkeys, but the only creatures I got a good look at were some chipmunks skittering about and a sparrow—whose markings resembled a chipmunk’s—nibbling leaves and cheeping like a day-old chick. Roger was sitting on a bench reading a book called “Two Acre Eden,” which he had brought along. He whispered to me that the book said you can try to keep rabbits out of your garden by putting spices on the vegetables but that in fact rabbits are crazy about cabbages sprinkled with chili powder. Around us, the invisible birds were an orchestra tuning up: there was crying and trilling and clucking, led by the teasing mew of a catbird. Now and then, we heard the huff and swish of horses in the shade of the apple trees. When I spotted a robin, Roger told me that his book said a robin gets so singleminded about wild cherries that once it spies one it will fly through a cat’s whiskers, if necessary, to get it. All at once, I caught sight of a bird that I thought was an extinct heath hen, but it flew away before I could even guess its real identity. Heath hens had been on my mind since I saw an ad in the “Antiques” classifieds in the Times for “extinct heath hens, male and female, mounted on extinct American cedar ($250,000. Call Tom).” I wrote down “Robin” under Billy Zaboroush’s pigeon.
We followed the thicket path through reddened poison ivy and raspberries. Everything had a dried-up look about it except a village of white mushrooms in the path. The brightest thing in the woods was the scattered butter-yellow leaves of the tulip poplar. On many trees, patches of leaves had turned brown. We found a large wire cage, its door swinging open. Inside were two hutches, a large feeding pan, and a climbing branch. Outside, on the doorstep, was a hard, yellow cucumber. Fifty feet away, we stumbled across these small gravestones: “Peckie, Loveable and Playful,” “Buster, A Cuddly Lovable Puppy,” “Fritz, Rebellious Puppy, Lovable Dog,” and “Bozo, A Lovable Rogue.” I suddenly thought how odd it was that we had to go to a special place, a sanctuary—a refuge, with a sort of religious connotation—for a ritual farewell to nature, because in becoming town dwellers we had already said goodbye.
And then, just down the wood-chip path, we made an unexpected find—bladdernut shrubs. These gracefully bending little trees, up to eight feet high, lined the path, arching to meet overhead. We seemed to be on an endless trail of bladdernut shrubs (Staphylea trifolia), all waving reluctant goodbyes. Their clusters of seed packets—some green, some crisp brown—were hidden beneath the highest leaves. The green pods made me think of limp, wrinkled party balloons that have hung too long, and the brown withered ones were almost as tough as cocoons. The seeds rattled inside like a baby’s rattle. The seeds were the size and color of lentils but more spherical, and some of them peeped out—surprised eyes.
The hanging “cocoons” made me think of butterflies and caterpillars, and I thought that perhaps this grove was the showcase of the sanctuary, a kind of special exhibit of nature’s metamorphosis, a hopeful but ironic insistence that, despite appearances, not everything was going to end up in graveyards, parks, or zoos.
As we biked home, a gust of wind pushed a dried leaf alongside me for half a block.
All Shook Up
Featured in the New Yorker, March 4, 1994
Scream sightings have been popping up all over the place ever since the famous Munch painting was stolen from the National Art Museum in Norway. The Scream was first spotted at the Olympics, and then at a Starbucks in Santa Barbara. It was glimpsed on a frozen shoulder of I-95 just south of Waterville, Maine, trying to hitch a ride, and it turned up on the same morning in the crowd beside the batting cage in Sarasota where Michael Jordan was making his first swings of the day. It has been seen driving a big-rig, walking a Rottweiler, and lurking around mini-marts, laundromats, and factory outlets. But these are all bogus reports. I know where the Scream really is. It’s right here in front of me, in my kitchen. How the universal totem of complaint materialized at my house in the Heartland is a good question.
I had already been screaming a lot over assorted recent tribulations (ruckus on the Richter scale; Tonya Harding’s bodyguard; Oliver North’s olive-drab hat flying into the ring; Lillehammer-like winter weather everywhere), and a friend who has one of those inflatable four-foot Screams tethered in her dining room sent me an eighteen-inch Scream, Jr., of m
y very own. My husband, Roger, blew it up and set it on a paddle of the ceiling fan. It looked terrified. He put it on the floor, where the cats gave it a good sniffing over, and the Scream looked as if it were holding its breath in the expectation of a fatal puncture. Then Roger placed the Scream in the arms of our lifesize plush Koko the Gorilla: nothing doing. Everywhere he put it was worse than the last, from the Scream’s timid-looking perspective.
Then something happened. Roger set the Scream in front of our Elvis. (More than one vanished icon has found a new place to dwell here, but I can’t go into that.) Our Elvis, a sexy ceramic collectible, entertains on top of a cabinet between the sun space and the stairs. He’s decked out in one of his caped Aztec-sun-god suits, which is missing a few sequins. There in the light, he really appears to be a sun god—or at least one of the sun god’s buddies. I like to think of him as Orpheus, the original rockabilly who plucked the lyre in a band with Apollo, Hermes, and Big Boss Man Pan. They say Orpheus could charm rocks, but Elvis could charm the pants off a snake.
Now the King of Rock and Roll and the official spokesperson of angst stand face to face, their mouths hanging open. It is as if they were meeting down at the end of Lonely Street, one block over from Valhalla. Their confrontation is timeless, yet full of moment.
“Eeeeee,” says the Scream.
It shakes Elvis up. What is this? The Scream looks about a hundred years old and is as bald as a monk. Bless my soul, what’s wrong with me, Elvis wonders. He starts itching like a man on a fuzzy tree. He’s acting white as a bug. His insides are shaking like a leaf on a tree.
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