Jaime Franchi's Open Salon Blog

Scout's Honor

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:05:19 -0400

I’m going to preface this by saying that I am no Angelina Jolie. While you might find yourself tempted to draw comparisons between me and that sexy orphan saving-woman of the world, try to remember that although there are some striking similarities, I’m just your average, you know, soccer mom.

But where Angie and I overlap is in how we’ve sacrificed in our daily lives to defer to a greater cause. Whilst Angelina had put off her wedding to Brad Pitt until every citizen of the United States could exercise their own equal rights to marriage (I would totally have done that too - Brad would just have to wait for me), I too forfeited personal advancement in deference to the greater good.

Because September has always acted as New Years to me, I started off this school year with some resolutions. I would be a better, more organized, more involved mother. I would make my kids proud. I would volunteer at bake sales, join committees, show up to PTA meetings, and sign on as class mom. My daughter started Kindergarten this year and was excited for her first year of cheer, which met for practice twice a week from August through November. My son played soccer, attended religious school, and moved up from Tiger to a Wolf Scout. Since I work from home, I have the luxury (on good days, I call it that) of taking them to and from each practice, game, event, and meeting. By the end of December, I’d stuck to my resolutions, for the most part.

It turns out some people had noticed.

At the December monthly den meeting for the Boy Scouts, speeches were given at the beginning, per usual. We were all a little anxious for the leaders to finish about fund raising results and for belt loops to be given to mark accomplishments in bowling and good manners. Santa Claus was expected to ride in on the town’s shiny red firetruck with presents for the kids, and they were all rowdy as a result. My daughter was practically vibrating next to me, so I was only half-listening when they called for a new committee chairperson. It seems some of the Webelos will be moving up to Middle School next year, and they’re taking their parent volunteers with them.

In between the Scout Master’s disappearance and Santa’s magical appearance, my son’s Scout leader turned to me. “He was talking to you, you know,” she said.

I looked to either side of me. “To me about what?”

“To be the next committee chairperson,” she said, a smile on her face atop the beige scoutmaster button-down she wore, decorated with patches and buttons, each marking progress made by our troop.

“What does a committee chairperson do?” I asked her, for two reasons. The first was to stall, and to process what was being asked of me. The second was also to stall.

“The organize all of the den meetings, to coordinate activities, that sort of thing,” she told me. And then she waited, expectantly. I looked at the current committee chairperson, a gentleman dressed impeccably in his own beige uniform.

I shook my head. My throat constricted a bit as I realized that I could not ever consider taking a leadership role of any kind in the Scouts. That meant that I was breaking the resolution I’d made early in the year. But there was a stronger resolution inside me that knew, with certain finality, that participating would break something in me.

“You can’t be a leader if you’re gay,” I said to her.

Her eyes widened, as if I’d just come out.

I hadn’t.

“Are you gay?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

She shrugged as if to say, “Then it doesn’t matter.”

But it does matter. If my son was raised in a loving home with me and a female partner, then I would not be allowed to wear the uniform. If I preferred soft breasts to hard chests, the Scouts would disapprove, and I would not be invited to be a leader. The fact that the Scouts approved of me, deemed me safe even as news of a 23 year old scout leader from Garden City was arrested for possession of child porn, filled me with discomfort. It seemed that “safety” and “straight” were synonymous to the Scouts. I didn’t feel like I deserved some kind of extra bonus for inclusion into their club just because I happened to prefer men over women, sexually. And if my son ever voiced a preference for the same sex, he would be unceremoniously rejected, no matter his prowess in bowling, or his sparkling manners (the sparkle might be the first tip off), or years of service to an institution that has shown him only the merits of community, hard work, and honor.

I tried to explain this to my son’s leader, and realized I sounded overly serious in the festive atmosphere. She said she would probably agree with me, if she stopped to think about it. My conclusion was that she didn’t. Maybe most of them didn’t. I didn’t believe that I was in a room of hard-hearted bigots. Most of them probably felt the same affection for their gay brothers and sisters as I do. I took a look at the leaders around me, decorated with badges and pins. The women didn’t seem especially feminine, nor the men masculine. They pronounced “we-blow” without any sense of irony. They just seemed like people who loved their kids.

Like I do.

So why then, do I feel so conflicted? If my son wasn’t so excited to be a part of the Scouts, didn’t enjoy the camping trips and the projects so much, if the kids weren’t so cute and earnest, if the leader didn’t introduce so many interesting projects, I would have pointed my kid way away from an organization that has taken such a strong anti-gay stance. But he does. And I do too.

But I cannot put on that uniform, to wear that badge that says that I support their bigotry. I don’t. And for the first time this year, in breaking the resolution that I would get more involved in my children’s activities, I felt like it was working. My cupcakes were found lacking at the bake sale and my class-mother duties suffered because it turns out creative craft ideas are not my strong suit. Yet, I finally felt like I was a mother my kids could be proud of.

As for Angelina, she ended up marrying Brad Pitt after all, at the behest of their children, despite the lack of nationwide same sex marriage legislation. Just like me, her kids propelled her to an institution where not all were welcome.

Chalk that one up to another in our long list of similarities.

The End of the Beginning

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:05:38 -0400

I respond “Yes” to everything: every Pampered Chef, Tastefully Simple, Tupperware, Lia Sophia party invitation that comes my way. It’s not that I wouldn’t rather drive a nail through my eyes than sit in a neighbor’s living room listening to a well-rehearsed spiel about the latest domestic Ponzi scheme, but rather because some obscure Tuesday night a few weeks into the future doesn’t seem real to me. I don’t believe, in my heart of hearts, that, say May 21st, will actually happen, not while I’m standing in my kitchen in April. I make simultaneous commitments, often promising to be two places at once. It stems from my lack of ability to say no, but also from this time-doubt condition I have.

I’m the youngest of three, and I’ve always surrounded myself with an older group: my husband, our friends, our parents. A consistent fuss has always been made about my age. So much so, that it became part of my identity. I’m the baby of the group, of the family, and often of the office. While others celebrated the milestones of graduations and big birthdays, mine were usually parties marking beginnings: bridal showers, baby showers, champagne clinked at the purchase of our house, a dinner out to mark a first day at a new job.

My husband was pretty well-seasoned by the time we met, in his mid-thirties to my twenty-one. As such, I had a lot to learn. The basics: paying bills, keeping my car insured, figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I rented an apartment in a carriage house behind a restored estate. A two-bedroom that I thought I’d negotiated to a rent that I could afford, but found out later, was being supplemented by my now husband. I painted the walls lavender and bought wineglasses and invited my girlfriends over to gossip and play house with me. When my friend Toni’s cat had kittens, I adopted one and brought her home to my apartment and boyfriend, marking the beginning of my adulthood. I was now paying rent and responsible for another living being.

They managed to surprise me for my bridal shower, a big to-do in a fancy restaurant where we drank watermelon martinis while I opened an enormous pile of gifts. We honeymooned in Italy because we had money then and knew that life was going to interfere soon. We knew that now was the time to traipse all over Europe, before life grew too complicated with kids to ever come back. I humored the notion, and enjoyed the sun-drenched days of walking cobblestone streets filled with art and wine, to lava-sand beaches that burned my feet, and the icy-cold depths of the Mediterranean. It was June of 2002 and being New Yorkers and newlyweds brought us lots of attention. Nine months earlier our part of the world lost our collective innocence. It marked the end of an era. But that June was a beginning for us.

When we said goodbye to Italy, I made a vow to Maria and Anthony, the owners of the last hotel in Positano where we’d stayed for ten nights that we would come back on our fifth anniversary. Being in the first thrusts of matrimony, I couldn’t imagine that day, but it made me feel better about leaving. But by then, we’d added another kitten to our mix, and I was anxious to get back to feeling their weight on my chest and the vibrations of their purrs against my body while I slept.

As luck and circumstance would have it, I was in the heavy throws of child labor on our fifth anniversary and Italy was not in, or anywhere near, the picture. Baby bottles and breast-feeding, infant carriers and product recalls, pediatricians and preschools consumed the next few years as I jumped, feet-first, into the lifestyle of young motherhood. I wore yoga pants and pushed a jogging stroller. When my second was born, I upgraded to a sit and stand stroller - where the baby reclined, but my toddler could stand on a platform. We called it his skateboard stroller.

I went back to school and completed my bachelor’s degree and started graduate school. Somehow, the days started to pile up behind us. In one year, we lost one of our closest friends to a worn-out esophagus and a hospital glitch. Then my father died.

The darkness and ugliness of death making pock marks on the clean whiteboard of our marriage and lives felt like abominations. They didn’t fit my idea of what our life was or was supposed to be. When we were talking on the phone one afternoon, my dad and I discussed the new senior housing that he was to move into. “This is a new phase,” I’d told him.

“My last phase,” he said. I didn’t argue. He was right.

Even though he was only sixty-two, he’d written the narrative of his life and could visualize, with a clarity that I will never understand, the end. Not so me. Up until his funeral, I didn’t really believe, not in any actual sense, that it was possible for my father to die. I couldn’t picture my life, not without both parents on the front lines ahead of me, insulating me from my own death by their single layer.

And yet it happened anyway.

He was young. Our friend was young. And so while their deaths hurt, they felt like asterisks, side notes in the arc of our time, our marriage, our lives. They didn’t define us.

We considered making plans for a trip for our ten year anniversary last year, but they were half-hearted. Something about being married for ten years didn’t compute. I couldn’t identify with a marriage that long or what it implied about me: that our marriage wasn’t young, and by extension, neither was I. No, I looked into a three day cruise to the Bahamas, or a car trip out East on Long Island. But since I never truly believed that the day would come, we were left unprepared when it did. We ended up in a local restaurant, the kids with us, throwing utensils and arguing while my husband and I made eyes at each other over their heads that said, “This is our life now.” We grinned over spilled milk and clinked glasses of champagne.

I’ve heard people say, “Small children equal small problems,” implying that the older our kids get, the more complicated their lives grow, the higher the stakes, the more serious the consequences of their problems. My husband has always dreaded that time, and has repeated that phrase to me at different points over the years. Rather than worry about teething and separation anxiety, there are state tests next year. My son wants an X Box to play “Call of Duty” with his friends and we have squared off in the fight of, “But everybody else is doing it!” My daughter has prematurely adopted teenage slang and a penchant for lipstick and tops that hang off her shoulder. They traipse off to school for six hours a day, out of my sight. I trust that there are no gunmen heading for their school .

Still, the days of driving, of sex and drugs and drinking are far off, and try as I might to imagine their elementary school sized legs long and gangly as teenagers, I cannot. They are young. And by extension, goes the thought, so am I.

My husband doesn’t think the way I do. He’s not as optimistically unrealistic. Maybe it’s because he’s had to play the role of the elder in our marriage, or because he’s actually older. Whatever the reason, when I called him from the vet’s office yesterday, the kitten I’d adopted way back in the beginning of us on the silver antiseptic table in respiratory distress, he was more broken up about putting her down than I was. “This feels like the end of something,” he choked out.

I knew what he meant. The beginning of the end: watching our remaining parents grow older, our children go through more serious hardships, our marriage itself seasoned now, no longer young. But I hate to think of it that way, while we’re in thick of the middle of our lives. I don’t want to anticipate the end, even if it were possible for me to do so.

And so we’ll move forward, making plans for days that astonish me when they arrive, love our kids and each other, and try to appreciate the parents and pets we have right now. We’re less green definitely. No longer innocent.

This is the end of our beginnings. But not the end of us.

Top Ten Things I Do Not Care About

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:05:14 -0400

Chris Christie’s lap band and his weight before or after. I care more about what comes out of his mouth than what goes in it.
Where Tamerlan Tsarnaev is buried. I saw a group collecting money to ship him to Russia. Sorry childhood cancer, I’ve got more important things to donate to? Bury him in Boston. Piss on his grave if it makes you feel better. Or throw him in the Hah-Bah.
Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe and/or haircut.
Where the Obamas vacation.
Who Mark Sanford’s mistress is or where she lives or why he considers her his soulmate. How he got the majority of votes over Elizabeth Colbert Busch, however, interests me immensely.
Ariel Castro’s bad childhood, his drunk mother, his abusive father or whatever sympathetic tidbits the media dredge up.
What you think Thomas Jefferson would have thought about AR-15s.

What you think Jesus thought about homosexuality.
What she was wearing the night she was raped.
Sports.

Originally posted on www.jedmorey.com

Ugly Tax: A Vomit-Whore Love Story

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:02:29 -0500

In our twenties, birthdays meant limo rides from Long Island into “the city.” Seven to ten girls, whomever my sister and I were close to at the time, most repeaters, but always some new blood. The girls were always much cooler than I ever was - my relation to my sister was my ticket to entry. My hair never quite reached the heights or lengths of their’s, my clothes never as tight, my eyelashes shorter and lacking. Still, I was accepted as Lisa’s sister, and then liked on my own.

Our collective memories from those days all included Tony the limo driver, whom we hired every January. Tony was tall and tan (even in January) - his olive oil skin a Boehner-orange. He wore pinstriped shirts open at the collar and escorted us wherever we wanted to go. The first year, our first stop was at Smith and Wollensky’s - a fancy steak joint where we took turns kissing the maitre d’ upon arrival before we escaped to the ladies room to pee off the beer (for them) and vodka (for me). Hair fluffed, lipstick replenished, we headed back out the door (smooching the doorman) and into the stretch, vamping for pictures (natch.) That doorman could count on us the next six, seven? years running, on making the traditional stop, kissing our traditional kisses. We were nothing if not dependable.

The clubs we ended up at were fun and loud. We danced on bars, flirted with strangers, and created stories that we could tell each other on the ride home, and rehash over and over until January rolled around again, and Tony and Smith and Wollensky beckoned. Most of the time, I paced myself, and saved the vomiting for when the limo pulled up to my house in the dawn’s early light. But there was the time I never made it into the club at all. A combination of starving myself during the day to look best in my outfit that night and mixing drinks that should never be mixed sometimes took a toll on me. So much so that one year, the most I experienced of the city was the green metal can in front of Polyesters that served as the receptacle for that night’s fun. I missed everything, sleeping off my drinks in the limo: the fist fight the girls got into over a poster of Eric Estrada, everything.

There was a night when I made it into the club, met a number of men all named Vinny, each of whom bought me several mixed drinks. Dances were danced, conversation screamed over booming music, hair consistently fluffed in bathroom mirrors. I, for all intents and purposes, was awesome.

Until I stepped outside to get some air. The fresh, cold air hit me in the face so hard, concentrating the liquor, spinning my head into a Gravitron of nausea. There was no green metal receptacle available. But miraculously, amazingly, propped up against a door was a sizable paper bag, the perfect barf bag, placed just so for me. (The next morning, the fuzzy recollection and my experience as a deli counter-clerk had me sit straight up in horror, knowing that I had puked in an early morning bagel delivery.)

Ahh. My twenties. To be young and irresponsible.

It’s a good thing that’s all in the distant past.

For her (let’s just say not twenty- or thirty-something) birthday this year, my sister had an in. She could get us a free limo, procured by a guy she called “Gangsta”, and entrance into the most exclusive NYC nightclub. So exclusive that I had never heard of it. It was table service only, which meant that we had to purchase four bottles of booze for $250 each. The thousand dollars was to be split between ten girls, making it a bargain of a night. We dressed, we primped, and we ate (barely anything) and drank (champagne cocktails before the limo, vodka in it.)

The cool girls around me don’t intimidate me at my advanced age. Luckily I am entrenched in maturity and at a place in my life where I do not fear the judgement of others. Except, you wouldn’t know that when we discovered the music situation in the limo. There was a hookup for an iPod and a setting for one’s Pandora station. Excitedly Dawn, a girl who would never have deigned to look my way in high school (not that I care about that stuff anymore) grabbed my iPhone and plugged it in.

“What the fuck?” she said, when my stations came up on the screen for all to see. There it was. Neil Diamond Pandora. Loudon Wainwright. Journey. For the love of all that is holy, I had a station dedicated to everything Air Supply.

I drank up.

At the club, the doorman took a look at us girls who are decidedly not in our twenties any longer. A quick word on his walky-talky and the asking price of entry was now $1500. I’d like to think it wasn’t an ugly tax. I’d like to think that I’m still hot. I’d like to think Air Supply is cool in some retro-nerdy way.

But even I know better.

Our table for ten was cut to a table for five and the four bottles of liquor were now at $400 apiece. To my mind already clouded with fuzzy judgement, I felt that charging four hundred for a thirty-five dollar bottle of Ketel One meant one thing: that I needed to drink every single drop. So as not to waste that money. Does that make sense to you?

Me neither.

The rest of the night is a strobe night blur, with dancing and screaming conversations. At some point, as in every time I have more than one sip of liquor, I confessed my undying love to each of my friends. I told them how happy I was that we were friends. I told them each every single thing I loved about them. I am the opposite of a mean drunk. I am an absolutely lovely drunk.

Until the cold air hit my face and I relived my twenties, face in a plastic bag, heaves and tears, the whole way home.

Ugly tax, indeed.

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Gun Control: Something Bigger

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:02:14 -0500

Originally Published on JedMorey.com

http://jedmorey.com/2013/gun-control-something-bigger/

It seemed unfair and even cruel to open brightly wrapped presents by the fire this past Christmas when there were twenty sets of parents in Connecticut grieving and devastatingly un-merry.

With the gun control debate taking over the national conversation, l’ve forced the writer in me to look at the issue critically, to reconcile the far-left idea of gun control with conservative fears of a too far-reaching government. But it was the mom in me who “liked” The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and as such, has been drawn into debate with right-leaning friends through social media. “It’s not the gun laws,” I’ve been chastised. “It’s the culture.” A culture of violence based on a departure of religious celebration in deference to political correctness, a culture of video games that have taken over parental duties in what are now the new normal: broken families. And a culture that celebrates violence in song lyrics that brags about gun murder and echo misogynist sentiments of “hoes” and “bitches.” It’s the natural progression of the deterioration of this country, so I’m told.

It would make theoretical sense that exposure to violence in films and the pretense of shooting people in violent video games would desensitize children to violence in actual reality. In practice, however, the research suggests otherwise. A ten country comparison reported by the Washington Post shows little correlation between video games and gun murder. In fact, the countries that tend to have the highest rate of video game consumption rank lowest in gun murders, seemingly because these countries are richer and more fully developed. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/17/ten-country-comparison-suggests-theres-little-or-no-link-between-video-games-and-gun-murders/ So the economy tends to affect the purchase and use of video games, but that statistic doesn’t carry over to gun violence. Simply put, video games don’t create killers. As a friend recently told me, “I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto since I was ten and I’ve never had the urge to pistol whip a prostitute.”

We know that the Japanese play violent video games, yet their fire-arm related death rate is the second lowest in the world. Violent movies like Trainspotting, Hellraiser, and the slew of Guy Ritchie films originate in the UK. The British are a violent people as well, as their history and crime rate will show you, but due to strict laws, gun violence is not an issue there. It’s embedded in us here. In our culture.

It must be something bigger.

Is it in the parenting? In Nancy Lanza’s case, that certainly seems to be a fair assumption. She bought semi-automatic assault weapons, introduced them to a child of nine who seemed to have been showing signs of disturbance, and had them within reach of that son. Yet, this wasn’t the case with the parents of the Columbine shooters, or others. My own son unwrapped a Nerf Hail-Fire rifle this Christmas. It shoots out 200 foam bullets at lightning speed. He was nothing less than ecstatic at uncovering this bounty. But it made me feel uncomfortable, in light of recent events. Am I complicit in the expansion of this violent culture? Is this how it starts? What exactly is the appeal of such a toy gun? What is he thinking in his mind when he aims it at his little sister, who screams in delight for at least having captured his attention for a few spare minutes, even if it is only to be his target?

If I had withheld the toy guns, might this have fostered an obsession, something like forbidding sweets to a child who grows up to be a Type-2 diabetic candy fiend? How can you know? These are the complexities of parenting, the second-guessing, the regret and the unknowing. But as parents we move forward, and if we are lucky, we get to learn from our mistakes. We allow ourselves to build on the successes of our past and learn from the missteps of others.

Can the disintegration of “family values” be the source of the corrosion of society? Or is it dangerous to mark non-traditional families as a pock on society? I know families with gay parents that are filled with the same love and discipline that I strive to have in my own two-parent heterosexual home. Single mothers have raised two of the last three Presidents. And only heterosexual parents have ever bred American mass murderers. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that heterosexuality is the cause.

Pop music today has some blatant sexual references, designed to shock parents, but if you think that’s a new phenomena, ask your grandparents about what their parents thought of their music. The modern equivalent of the chicken or the egg conundrum seems to be the question of whether violence in our art is the cause or the reflection of what we see. And although we can find examples of how art and literature can change the world (Catch 22, for example, or the writings of the Harlem Renaissance that helped to spur the Civil Rights Movement), the answer seems to lie in the after. Like Monet’s water lilies or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, the artists of the world are painting what they see before them, in the mediums that are available: television, film, song writing - especially rap lyrics. And it’s there on Twitter, on Facebook, in blogs and advertising and gaming.

So how did it get there?

Michael Moore cites one of the main problems with this country to be the “Me” syndrome, a culture that translated from “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” to a separation where we don’t care about our neighbors’ problems: poverty, lack of healthcare, education. We blame the poor for their own missteps and misfortunes, their lack of success. We define ourselves by our singular identity, instead of in the context of community. That makes it easier to shoot those neighbors, and to stomach it when they shoot each other.

That gun owners are motivated by fear is apparent. The argument for unrestricted weaponry appears to be the threat of a government overcome by tyranny. Background checks and registration lists that can be cross-checked inspire a fear that the government is compiling a master list from which to work when they come to confiscate all guns (and then enslave us.)

But what if believing that this is fear motivated is too charitable? What if it stems from our uniquely American sense of ownership and entitlement, reflected and distorted by US policy? Noam Chomsky chronicles the attitude that has informed the American zeitgeist since World War II, when the United States was the global power that we pretend it is today. In his book “Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire,” Chomsky discusses an event in 1949 in which the U.S. “lost China.” http://www.salon.com/2013/02/04/noam_chomsky_americas_yearning_for_democracy_is_a_bad_joke_partner/ That China’s emancipation was independent of the U.S., who in fact, cannot “lose” something it doesn’t own, was lost on American leaders. It bred fear that we might “lose” the Middle East or Latin America. Our ownership of the entire planet, its resources, people, economies is so engrained in our collective psyches that it informs so much of who we are as people, and what we tolerate from our own government. Is it possible that our tacit consent to the United States’s throwing its weight around the world, under the guise of “nation building,” informs our domestic egos and our intolerance for dissenting opinions?

Our rights have become our righteousness.

We infringe our notions of “freedom” and democracy in the world unilaterally, at gun point, in oil-rich deserts only because of this sense. This is how we justify indefinitely detaining prisoners in Guantanamo without due process, though we pride ourselves on due process as a distinction from other countries and as a way to prove how civilized we are. This is what allows us to justify unmanned drone strikes that don’t have nearly the precision we’d like to believe they do, that cause death and destruction to people in countries we cannot pronounce, yet we bow our heads and cry when one of our schools gets shot up.

We laugh about global warming. We ridicule Al Gore and his wishy-washy environmentalism, preferring our version of badass representatives who kill, sometimes without provocation. We gobble up the resources of the planet as our birthright. That sense of entitlement - the we “lost China” syndrome - is uniquely American. The fear that the government is coming to take our guns - to take away our rights to protect ourselves with high-capacity rifles, shotguns, AR-15s, our right to shoot someone thirteen times without reloading, stems from this American ideal.

My right to kill you is stronger than your right to live.

From foreign policy to individual rights, we hail from the promised land, the chosen country whose rights supersede all others. It makes sense that who we are as a country informs who we are as citizens. This naturally includes our attitude about immigration, global warming, and gun ownership. This is the culture from which mass murder is committed - atrocities far and wide. Blaming video games, rap lyrics, and divorce is lazy. And dangerous.

What divides us from all other countries?

Both the writer and the mother in me fear that it just might be good PR.