“…In San Francisco Mrs. Hurtle was regarded as a mystery. Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr. Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr. Hurtle, and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed. Everybody knew that she was very clever and very beautiful — but everybody also thought that she was very dangerous.” — Excerpt from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

From the Library of Congress photo archives -- undated

In school I was plagued by Victorian heroines — quasi-tubercular virgins who were buffeted by one outrage followed by another — this was what it meant to go to English class and do the assigned reading.  Only men were heroic and swash-buckling.  I  signed up voluntarily for all of Jane Austen’s heroines, who, while plucky, were virtuous, extremely bound by convention, and ironically from a woman author who never married, abandoned the reader at the marriage altar, as if marriage meant an end to all unsettled business in a woman’s life.  I regarded these novels, as much as I loved Ms. Austen, as offering little insight to a modern woman seeking a sequel to her own part one.  I read a lot of other stuff instead — ALL of French literature, the ancients of Greece and Mesopotamia, modern Americans, the Elizabethans and the Restoration Theater, but nineteenth century England, with a few exceptions — Oscar Wilde’s outrageous humor and the delicious silliness of Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas — bored me to no end.

Then I recently discovered the Trollope family with all its buttoned-up but still baroque dysfunctions.

I knew how the word “trollope” came to mean a woman of ill repute — a Mrs. Fanny Trollope had visited the United States in 1830 and had returned to Europe to write a book about us, Domestic Manners of the Americans, here in which she complained about absolutely everything we did and said to no end.  She actually went so far as to say that the foundational idea of our society (however imperfectly expressed it was in 1830) — “all men are created equal” was a total crock and that it was high time that we uncouth hillbillies learned who our betters really were — the British, of course.  I had read in a history book in tenth grade a short excerpt from this book, which has been out of print since a decade or two before the Civil War, and thought it was bitingly funny — she described with all the fluster of an English snoot the disgust she felt about men spitting tobacco and women asking her impolite questions without proper introduction.  It was delicious the way that a bitchy character on 90210 is delicious, and  I always wanted to read what she said.  However, at the time, that would have required about the same amount of inter-library loan international diplomacy as getting my hands on an original Guttenberg Bible to check the font size.  Yet, I never forgot, especially, since when I was called names by angry men, they often chose the T-word to insult me — very unusually for someone of my generation.  “Trollope” evokes a kind of whale-bone-corseted sluttiness, an old-world tea-party-low-cut sluttiness with sharp-Alice-Roosevelt- Longworth “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me,”-worthy wit, not just average twentieth century sluttiness. I always saw this as a mark of distinction,  as I have  learned to treasure the insults of my enemies almost in the same manner in which I treasure the compliments of my friends.  Both indicate the amount of success I have had in accomplishing my purposes in this life.

Now, thanks to the paperless world of electronic libraries, I was able to acquire a copy of that above-mentioned bitchy masterpiece in the public domain, and let me tell you, it was worth the price of my Amazon Kindle to read it — I howled out loud with laughter.  I say, no wonder we hated her.  I also understand why she thought we were such a pack of future Jerry Springer guests with no sense at all.  She made a better living as a writer than most men of her day because she possessed a high-minded version of Simon Cowell’s articulate rudeness.  We tune in to him, and she was a best-seller.

Only because she was the mother of Anthoy Trollope, the very British novelist of Victorian B-List or C-List fame, I decided to venture into his novels and his biography to find out what I could.

Ladies and trollopes, what a surprise!

He is in fact up to the very things I did not ever care for in Victorian Lit — he uplifts the institutions of the Anglican Church and Victorian marriage, the family unit as it was popularly understood in his day, and he is as classist as Kipling and, at times,  as maudlin as Dickens.  However — and this is a big however — he messes with all the institutions he lionizes, and he uses American characters to do it, and many of the women are total trollopes.  In a Trollope novel, everybody is trying to find a mate or a fortune, but romance and capitalism are the  same thing, even where people are sincere.  Even in his Barchester novels, the church is where the money changers go to perform their alchemy.  It’s not that he doesn’t have his Christ-like parsons and his virtuous virgins –  he does.  However, there are these other people in his works who are so disestablishmentarian as to make the others look like loveable boobs who have missed the zeitgeist of their times.  My thinking as to why I was forced kicking and screaming in high school to read so much Dickens and none of Trollope is that he tells it so much like it is, particularly about young people and sex, that somebody at the PTA must have banned the good stuff.

For those of you who have never read Trollope, imagine the drawing rooms of The Importance of Being Ernest at tea but infiltrated by Annie Oakley.  That’s like the presence of  Mrs. Hurtle in The Way We Live Now, an American woman who admits to a number of people who will talk, and she knows it, that she has had sex without being married to one of the heroes of the book, tries to and nearly succeeds at chasing away the fiancee of this hero, and she does so while threatening to shoot him like she did another man in Oregon who wronged her.  She actually says in a book written in the  1870s something that would not really be imagined until the feminism of the 1970s that she does not need a man to defend her honor — she brought her six-shooter  to England with her and she still shoots straight in a duel.  And she says this while looking like a Gibson Girl in a bustle and a bun.

I love her. I love her shoes.  And I love her some more.

I also love Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator, an aristocrat without an inheritance who is supposed to marry money, like almost any Jane Austen character.  The difference between Arabella and any of Jane Austen’s heroines is that Arabella is all about the cash.  She has no other thoughts of even friendship with men until late in the book, and she resents her situation — she asks, very reasonably, why she should not be angry at the fact that women have no other way in her society of getting money.  She talks romance but thinks like a Wall Street MBA closer.  At the end of the book, she finds herself married to an  ambassador, who warns her that it won’t be all parties and frivolity any more — she will have work to do as an ambassador’s wife.  She tells him, “I have found the pleasures very hard.”  It looked like a royal ball, but it was a day at the office for her — and she admits it.

The two women I mention are not revolutionaries — they muddle their way through circumstances over which they have impaired control — impaired because they are women in the Victorian Age.  Still, they are  refreshing to see.  So are the openly dysfunctional portraits Trollope gives of Victorian families without “Poor Oliver Twist” hand-wringing, just the picture as he imagined it — unsentimental, even anti-sentimental.

Anthony Trollope wasn’t a feminist.  He opposed women’s suffrage.  He seems to have had a difficult relationship with his trollope mother.  He married a very proper, very dutiful, and very dull English woman.  He loved her dutifully, commenting that it was good for a man to have his dinner on time the way he liked  it.  He seems to have had no back talk from her.  However, in his forties,  Anthony Trollope meets and falls in love with a feminist suffrage militant woman from New York.  She was wild.  She was free.  She was smart and frank.  Nothing much scared her, not their age difference, not his marital status, and not even his copious, scary white beard.  I admit I would  not commit adultery with any man, but even a single Anthony Trollope would meet one of my Lady Bic Razors before his lips met mine.  However, trollope epithet notwithstanding, I am a New York feminist of another era.  Perhaps she really dug the whole Santa Claus vibe.  What’s clear is that he decided, probably thanks to her (and freudianly, his mother), that women who thought for themselves and who weren’t afraid to fight to be free were just much hotter than those good girls that everybody was supposed to like back then but didn’t actually like any less or any more than they like them now.

I love it that Trollope, after his mother hung us all out to dry, used American truth-tellers as a device in multiple works to convey his true thoughts.  I admit I am disappointed, much the way I am disappointed  that Jefferson had slaves, that Trollope loved opinionated women, he just didn’t want to emancipate them, not even in his books.

Brilliantly, Trollope does not punish the trollopes in his books — they make out okay, and we don’t hate them when we close the cover shut.

I have forgiven the dead white men I was forced to read in English class a bit because I now know that they were in better and more iconoclastic company than I heretofore knew.    I am grateful for the bitchy voice of a foremother and her undue influence on her underappreciated son. I am still looking for a novelist who writes about second acts for women, sequels post-alter, post-divorce, post- sagging, post- wrinkles.  I intend to write whatever I need that I do not find pret-a-porter.  Doubtless Mrs. Fanny Trollope would hate my homespun and call it uncouth, but that’s okay — she has given me her name, and I value her criticism as well as any other’s.

“The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.” — Psalm 46:6

” What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them…” — Barak Obama

Brethren,  I used to work as a political organizer — I got disgusted by the cynicism of many in the field.  While political deal-making is the art of compromise, a deal can be struck between battling factions that is so watered down that it is almost worse than no deal at all for anyone.  Even when politics works, it is a messy business.  However, too many who have been in power for too long have been too cynical.  The public does not help matters when it says that all politicians are crooks, that they are all just in it for themselves.

I present to you this photo in today’s’ news of a woman moved to tears by today’s inauguration.  I presume, never having met her, that President Obama’s election and institution represents for her the healing of past wounds perceived or borne because she is a woman of color.

That said, if my anecdotal evidence means a thing, cynicism has got to find a rock to hide under for at least the next four years.   I knew plenty of white folks, too, weeping with joy today at around noon, including me, those who have been disenfranchised by business as usual in the government of the cynical and the toadying over the masses of people who just want stuff to be fair are also ready for a new day, and we have somebody who is actually prepared to confront the politics of the stupid and usher in the era of politics of hope and hopefully virtue.

He had me at hello.

He had me at his first complete sentence, at his first demonstrated ability to distinguish between Sunnis and Shiites, at his ability to find Pakistan on a map.  For the last eight years I have felt tyrannized by politics organized in the name of my savior around a man of blithering, shocking stupidity propped up by the worst cynicism imaginable since Machiavelli.  The few idealists he brought to Washington with him he made a mockery of by lying outright about what he was willing to do.  The few Republican moderates he placed in visible positions  — he destroyed their careers.  He did this by making people like ex-New Jersey governor and local Republican Party outsider — the smoky rooms flatly refused to promote her candidacy when she ran for governor because she was a woman — Christine Todd Whitman, a known environmentalist, the spokes person for the worst environmental policies since the virtual extinction of the Buffalo, and by making Colin Powell, who could have won the presidency only a few years earlier, the spokes person for a boldfaced lie to the United Nations.

I am personal friends  with a few ex personal friends of W.  I am struck by their willingness to forgive him public slights of them for politics’ sake.  I say good riddance to bad company.

Today, I found myself weeping and praying, yes, praying and praying, for this new president’s safety and success, so that the woman in the photo above gets whatever she wanted to see in government when she came to Washington to stand on a freezing cold mall and see her candidate sworn in.

The ground has shifted because people finally decided that they would have no more of this cynicism, and we rejected it, finally, like the Earth shaking off bad architecture in a tremor.

President Obama says, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”  Brethren, we were the ground beneath them.  We were getting walked on, and enough of us moved in the same direction at the same time, undistracted by stupid arguments and arguments in favor of stupidity.  We were undistracted by raging heathen.  Instead, God uttered His voice, and the Earth melted.  We melted.

I admonish all those Christians on the Right, usually women with the same CNN newscaster haircut, no matter which ultra-Right-wing-legalistic church I met them at, who told me that George W. Bush was placed in office by God as evidenced by his election (or Supreme Court appointment), and whom I had to tolerate with a grim nod and a change of subject to believe the same thing about Obama, who has surely been placed by a vote in office, and by the same logic, is an anointed, God-appointed leader.   I want to hear that out of the same lips that told me that I was unChristian for criticizing a man whose family stood to gain so much money by the war in Iraq for going there.  I want to hear them say to me that God pointed to the political Left in America and we are under His divine guidance in the Obama administration.

Actually, even in Eden, we had the free will not to do what God wanted us to do — so the whole argument of God-interference in human elections is rather stupid and unbelieving.  We are to pray for all those in authority.  I prayed for Bush to have wisdom, or at least grammar, but God did not perform a miracle, unless you count the one we have had today.

It felt like 11 degrees Farenheit today on the Washington Mall.  Aretha Franklin’s voice was obviously scratchy from the frost.  However, the Earth melted.

The ground has shifted.  The price of freedom is constant vigilance.  May we remain vigilant and unwilling to be walked on by cynics with ambitions which mock our own.  Amen.

What happened to my culture while I was at the library?

Most of you probably know about this already.  Those of you with daughters between the ages of ten and fifteen surely already know.  I was the one who missed it.  I had my nose in a book about classical Greece, in a commentary on Pauline letters to the Corinthians.  I turned my back for a minute, and look what happened!

..For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?  — 2 Corinthians 6:14

Paris Hilton got a show on MTV.  It’s not like the show on Fox that blatantly made fun of her, showing her to comic, if nauseating, effect as a spoiled, vapid, bulimic, pill-addled, too-slutty-to-be-a-real-debutante, rich girl.  She and Nicole Ritchie were objects of derision on the show where they attempted half-heartedly to adapt to farm life.  Whatever one thinks of shows that make fun of the retarded or the terminally fashionable, this show did not celebrate Paris Hilton’s system of values or  her lifestyle.  I admit the once or twice I tuned in, seeing Paris covered in manure, forced to get up before dawn to feed livestock, it made me feel hope that Fox might give her some comeuppance in the name of viewers born without trust funds.  It also gave me some vague hope for Ms. Hilton’s personal growth, as most of us have gained moral fiber by confronting challenges. Americans are schooled in anti-urban bias, and like many, I hoped the smell of cut wheat stalks might provide this morally challenged young woman with a sense of wholesome connection to others unlike her.

Of course, since then, Ms. Hilton has not grown morally.  She has played some associative role in the drug addictions of former friends and celebrity addicts –Nicole Ritchie, then Lindsay Lohan, and Brittney Spears.  After some false dismay about a private sex video “leaking” into the mediosphere, she has consensually flashed her genitalia like a shaved baboon to the paparazzi, and she has tried to get out of jail by using bribery and false medical reports after being convicted of driving while intoxicated.

Worse, she is, I believe, singlehandedly responsible for the epidemic we recently saw among young women of trucker caps and of sweatpants with “juicy” written across the backside.  She has popularized clothes previously worn exclusively by Hollywood Boulevard sex workers.  I’m for the unionization of prostitutes, but I don’t believe Ms. Hilton’s intentions were to spread awareness of their struggles, particularly since she appears so willing to cross their picket lines without pay.

I don’t mention at length Paris’ foray into pop music – - yes, while I was at the library, she recorded an album that seems to help bulimics by inducing vomiting without the need to stick the flat edge of a butter knife down one’s throat.  Unlike some of her former friends who went to rehab, Ms. Hilton does not have  even a thin, glossy veneer of musical talent.

All this would put her into a lamentable but imaginable category of phenomena — think of Geri Hall, former companion to Mick Jagger, whom no one took seriously, think of Charro, the blonde latina variety show guest star of the seventies who shook and started every word with the letter “j.”  Think of meringue cookies  eaten after full meals of healthy food.  These phenomena really caused no harm to the culture at large, evne though they were not a sign of  our culture’s health or sanity.

However, Paris Hilton has transcended the meringue category with her own television show on MTV — Paris Hilton’s My New BFF – and thus she is now the main course, a sign of America’s moral diabetes.  MTV has found a way to institutionalize Ms. Hilton’s system of values and ethics into a contest, and they have made her its judge.  The reality TV show takes in other vulnerable, bulimia-prone, stardom-seeking, psycho fans and determines through a series of formalized tortures which one  of these girls will be Paris’ new BFF — more like BFTS — best friend for the season.  The episodes play out like every woman’s worst memories of junior high school and of trying to gain popularity with the meanest girls by subjecting themselves to progressive humiliations (remember playing truth or dare with them?).  It is the young women kicked out of the inner circle first who appear the least pitiable.  Those who get closest in orbit to the sun that is Paris Hilton seem happy to be there, but they increasingly need to sabotage each other to move closer to the dark star.

In the last episode of the season, Paris takes one of the two surviving contestants to a spa, where they wear matching red bikinis in a scene fraught with that latent and vaguely lesbian tension that occurs between women who disdainfully compare every inch o f their own bodies to the bodies of others.  They also go to the Hamptons for lunch, where they declare to one another, “I love you, bitch.”  It isn’t supposed to be sad or funny.  How long was I in that library?  Paris, of course, drop-kicks this contestant two days later, proving that the words “love” and “bitch” really don’t belong together.

With the winner, if one can call a close relationship with Ms. Hilton a winning proposition, Paris goes shopping, and afterward, the pair of BFFs eat a sundae costing $1,000.  They decide not to order two but to split one, not because the price is absurd but because the calories might add grams of fat to their emaciated bodies.  Neither of them enjoy it, finding the edible gold and the caviar/ice cream combination distasteful.  Neither asks, in this time of economic crisis, if it might not have been better to donate the price of the sundae to a soup kitchen.  It is clear that the winner of the BFF battle is shallow and ambitious like Iago, that Paris is prepared to buy friendship from her, or at least the appearance of it.  After all, Paris has been unable to hang onto friends who do not share drugs or need money.

What does Paris Hilton understand of friendship, anyway?  Her non-contest-appointed friendships are always rivalries, it seems.  She exudes neither warmth nor wit.  She has a soulless beauty to her, empty but unblemished, as if she were poured into a mold at the Mattel factory in Japan and given Malibu beach-blonde  acrylic hair.  To play Barbies at this level is a form of annihilation.  It drove Lindsay into rehab and the bed of Samantha.  After too much Paris, Brittney shaved her head and beat a truck with a broken umbrella.

Paris was nowhere in sight, of course.  However, most of us are not as distilled or frozen in our plasticity, and even those of us who would go so Hollywood cannot withstand such an ice storm.  To be friends with a vampire is to become undead or its dinner, for what fellowship has light with darkness?

Again, I ask, brethren, what happened while my nose was in the books?  What happened to girlfriends?  It happens often that older women wag their fingers at younger ones.  This is not new, the lamentation of the state of younger people’s morality.  But I liken  this show to a form of friendship pornography, as it cheapens, commercializes, and distorts friendships, treating them as contests and acquisitions, rather than the development of solidarity, affection and trust.  Paris hugs these girls in the show (see the photo here) inexplicably clinging to a silver shaft that resembles nothing more than the ice pick of the movie Basic Instinct.  Don’t turn your back on her, girls.  She’s ready to stab.

“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children” — Ephesians 5:1

Brethren, I’m writing today about a couple that was for a short time living in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg were Lubavitchers.  For those of you who don’t know about this, they were super-faithful, quasi-evangelizing (to Jews who have fallen into secularism), quasi-messianic (The Lubavitchers had a rabbi who died a few years ago, and some few of them believe he was Moshiach, not Yeshuah, our real Moshiach) Jews who hungrily attempt to follow the teachings of the Old Testament in the Law.  These are not people who were on the fence about God.  They had no born-again moment, but clearly they loved YHWH, Ha Shem, the name, and they were desperate to be obedient to Him as they understood Him.

If that isn’t enough to make you respect them by itself, brethren, then try this on for size:  This couple, in their twenties, had an audacious plan — to build a Chabad center in Southern India.

Okay, here it is — you’re sitting in Brooklyn, maybe you’re visiting your aunt in Israel.  What makes you think to yourself, “What we REALLY need is a Jewish community center in Mumbai, India!”

What makes a person think that?  What kind of a person would you have to be to do that?

To be clear, there are a few ethnically Jewish people in India.  Remember that for centuries, the Jews were the traveling merchants of half the world, and as a result, a few settled in what is now Mumbai and live and worship there.  But it’s not Brooklyn.  It’s not Israel.  Even the Lubavitcher headquarters in Israel were designed to be exactly like the brick building in Crown Heights.  The Chabad Lubavitch movement seems to engender a great deal of conformity.

However, Gavriel and Rivkah had some kind of vision for this center.  Here’s a picture of Rivkah opening the mikvah at their modestly-sized center.  Look at her and look at the Indian women around her.  They look respectful, but they also seem like they are wondering what on Earth she is thinking, but Rivkah knows.  She has a distinct purposefulness to her in the photo.  This is the way someone looks when they have heard from God.

Look at the serenity of her face.  Look at her confident, steady gesture.   Her footsteps to this place are ordered.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” — Isaiah 55:8

I have one more photo to show you of this brave, odd couple, courtesy of The New York Times.  The husband Gavriel is the one with the book in his hand, and the wife Rivkah, is obviously pregnant to the far left of the photo:

Look at them!  They are performing a wedding ceremony under a huppah in the sweltering heat of Southern India, in the polluted air of Mumbai, and these people are fully committed to the life they are leading here, a life that even in Brooklyn seems like it came from another time, and they transport this life, this Godly life to a far-away place where they are surely, surely misunderstood by almost everyone.

Rivkah and Gavi were killed yesterday by Muslim terrorist gunmen.  The baby in the belly of Rivkah in the photo above, Moshe, ran out and was rescued — I say miraculously — by the Chabad  center of Mumbai’s cook.  The little boy’s pants, he is turning two today as i write this blog entry, were stained in the blood of his parents.  It breaks my heart to think of what they will miss in his life, his graduation from school, his wedding, the birth of their grandchildren through him.  It breaks my heart to think that if these brave, interesting Brooklynites had stayed closer to the group-think of their subculture, they would be alive today.

So here’s my question to all who would listen:  Did Gavi and Rivkah miss God when they thought for certain that they were led to open a Jewish center in Mumbai?  After all, why would God send them there and let them be killed?

If being killed for belief, for surely this is the only reason why Gavi and Rivkah were targeted, were a sign of being out of God’s favor, then Paul was a failure, Jesus’ cross was a symbol of absolute failure.

I say they did not miss their calling.  I say they were sent.  Why?  Why did God need a center for an unusual group of Jews in Mumbai?  God knows.  Perhaps He finds, as I suspect He does, the diverse juxtaposition of unusual things one to another, absolutely glorious.  After all, who knew there were Lubavitchers who were so experimental? Who knew in Brooklyn about the Jewish community in Mumbai?  Who knew among the Hindus about the mikvah?  God wants to wake us up.  God loves, I say, original thinkers.

But make no mistake — original thought is dangerous.  It may lead to death.  Jesus even promises people who act like Him that they will be persecuted.  Honoring God in unusual ways that actually wake up people to God’s presence in their everyday lives will lead to persecution.

The Jews are chosen and set apart by their bloodlines, their attempts to conform to the Law of YHWH from the nations.  The church is set apart by the circumcision of the heart that Paul talks about and the New Birth Redemption, grafted into the vine by the Blood of Yeshuah that Gavi and RIvkah claimed by natural bloodlines.  If we really are interested in pleasing God, we will attract animosity from the world.

There is an old saying in the African-American community — If they are shooting at you, you must be doing something right.  That was true for the movement of liberation politically of African-Americans, and it is true, as Martin Luther King said, that acts of civil disobedience have the primary purpose of making people call into question the way things are usually, and some people get angry enough to shoot.  I say Gavi and Rivkah were doing something right.  What are Jews doing in Mumbai?  Serving the Most High as best they know how.  That someone got angry enough to shoot proves that they were effectual challenges to the merciless systems of the world.  God bless them.  In His thoughts, I believe He sees victory, even where there is mourning today.

Brethren, rather than hang this on a text from scripture, I choose to hang this on the words to an old song, not as gospel, more as ambience –

“…And love, love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off and he stated firm
Oh, oh, oh
You’re a native New Yorker
You should know the score by now You’re a native New Yorker…” — Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell

This song was the tune du jour when Studio 54 was the club du jour. There are surely hipster clubs. There are plenty of velvet ropes left in the city, plenty of back rooms filled with ottomans lined up against banquettes in zebra print, with track lighting and artistically cut mirrors. However, before the clubbing hour – never a minute before 11 pm ever, if you’re really hip, and honestly, it would be much hipper to cruise by about 1 am – where are the hipsters hopping?

I found them at #1 Beard Street, in Brooklyn, all of them, around 4 pm. I passed leather-clad Japanese couples arm in arm, a girl with a saffron Obama T-shirt on with Sarah Palin glasses, a pony tail tortoise-shell-clipped to one side of her head, true religion jeans, and a macramé hip-hugging belt. I locked shopping cart wheels with a German runway model with waist-length red hair with her Catherine-Deneuve look-alike mother. I breezed past young men, with that over-gelled hair spiked up, that crazed look in their eyes from too much World of War Craft suddenly unplugged, eating cinnamon buns, making the Jonas Brothers look old and jaded. I brushed against a Rastafarian man with dreds bound up in hemp, I think, wearing a Movado watch, carrying a futon.

True, there was no velvet rope, no sushi bar with aquarium walls, no giant moon with a cocaine spoon hanging from the ceiling – yes, I DID see the original 54 when it was open and I was too young to have legally entered – but there were ottomans in neon colors, track lights galore, artistically cut mirrors enough to quench the thirst of the vainest among us, and one could buy hanging moon mobiles, spoons, but not the two combined. Besides, exclusivity is no longer hip – it’s obscurity, like a Red Hook warehouse is remotely located, that is the bar to the uninitiated.

I was in Ikea, and not the suburban one. Everything is pretty much the same as the Ikea in New Jersey or Long Island, only people wore more black, more Ugg, people were greener, were more blasé. It was the bootylicious Ikea, the street Ikea, the I-just-bought-a-loft-in-Bed-Stuy-and-am-painting-it-chartreuse Ikea. Even in Europe, Ikea is generally planted in the suburbs, but this one was planted in the just-out-of-reach-of-the-uninitiated gentrifying Red Hook, and everyone knows that the new Soho is now in Brooklyn – the debate is only about exactly where.

I bought some lamps for my desk and my bedroom, a set of casters to attach to the bottom of a cabinet, a curtain rod, and a few other accessories from renewable resources. Green, after all, is the new black. Black is still the new black, of course, but green – green is the new black, and mocha is the new green. Clear – in case you haven’t heard – is the new mocha. What the new clear is, I don’t know.

While I was trolling around with my yellow bag between products with names like Glimma and Trikka, they were piping in a sound track that was cooler than most of the lounges I frequented in recent years, much of it from my misspent youth, others of it sounding like the goth side of the Fuse network or MTV2. I paused to pick up a pink table lamp using low-wattage, energy-efficient bulbs only, and I heard a song that used to close out my nights at Le Privilege, the VIP lounge of the Palace night club where I used to dance mid-eighties, drinking flaming drinks from cups that looked, well, a lot like this lamp in my hand, I thought, and air kissing all kinds of girl models (French kissing a boy model or two). Now my club days have been turned into a retail experience – I am apparently one of the targets of this market, as I did buy some knick-knacks that I might have avoided at Costco with no sound track at all and no hip clientele of which to speak. They are doing pretty well, even as the stock market yo-yos.

Seeking more aficionados of this new hipster, urban American Ikea market, I have some suggested product names and designs for the folks at Ikea –

• Bufda – a home gym that folds into the wall, making an inclining bookshelf unit.
• Mutha – a vibrating baby chair with black and red skull-and-crossbones in a mobile above it.
• Stuppa – An ice pack with a straw – fill it with the hair of the dog for the morning after.
• Sherpa – an environmentally sound, ergonomically designed GPS for pedestrians.
• Friki – a black twin Murphy bed with hand-cuff-suitable hooks.
• Prozaka – black-on-black double Venetian blinds.
• Ganja – a highly flammable organic furniture set, woven from fair trade grasses that are more than just decorative at a party.
• Chikka – a hot pink bed on a large lazy Susan in the shape of a pair of lips.
• Sukka-fri – a narrow quadraphonic speaker system with extra base and with spinning rims on the woofers.
• Hipsta – a combination lava lamp/blackberry/loofah sponge/chaise lounge made out of recycled tires and mulch.

In any case, it was nice to see my co-Brooklynites out en masse with Manhattanites willing to go through the Battery Tunnel to buy that which must be had this season among us. It is nice that exclusivity is out, democracy is in, and the New New York is the Old New York over the East River. Red Hook, in case you haven’t heard, is the new little black dress.

Brethren, I’m back on this blog, after a pause in August.  I take my anger from observable hypocrisy and my scripture from Paul:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28

Here is what I have recently observed.  As I have said here before, I am recently divorced, and I have been looking for a righteous, Christian man whom I might eventually date.  I have not accepted dates or even had conversations wth non-believers.

Twice, it has happened that a caucasian Christian man has engaged me in conversation. Over the coure of time, while he is doing that peacock dance that seems to be the better part of most men’s courtship ritual, puffing himself up to prove to me he is better than other men, he mentions people of color.  He uses — horror of horror — the “N” word, not in a hip-hop twenty-first century way (which would be bad enough, coming from a crunchy white man), but in a nineteenth century Jim Crow way.

The two times that this has happened, I have gasped, called the man on his bad attitude, told him to lose my number if that is his attitude toward other people of any race, and then he denies he meant anything by it, and he tells me, “I have plenty of black friends.”

Hmmm…

Twice, too, these men have then told me utterly improbable stories about brave, young, wonderful, much-admired, bff-type best male friends who were black.  One told me he dated a woman of  color who was a wonderful woman whom he cared about — this I doubt even more.

No one white ever uses the N word and has “black friends.”  There may be people of color who have to tolerate these lying hypocrites, but there are surely no confidences, no shared important memories, no affection whatsoever.  I pity those who have encountered these people and received less than their fair share of compassion and respect.

I have attended mixed-race churches ever  since I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, more often than not where I was, as a white woman, in the minority.  I have volunteered for church projects, and I have borne my soul  to women and men of  color, and those brothers and sisters have enriched my life by allowing me to really get to know them.

Even with all that, I would say that I only have made a few lasting frienships with people of color, not for a lack of love and mutual respect, but because racism is alive and well in America today, and African-Americans are right to exhibit some level of distrust, even within the church, with white folks, who are apprently, even as we — in Jesus’ name, elect Barack Obama president — still not conquering their absurd and idiotic ideas about  people of other races.

The good news — We are quite probably electing a black president, so this view is by no means universal, and most of the people  who don’t want to vote for him have other objections to him than that of his race.

Also good news — the men who heard me gasp and spew invectives knew that their views were absurd and idiotic, and they were embarassed by them when they were called on what they had said, and so they lied to cover their racist tracks.  Even if their views did not change — I suspect in both cases, they just wanted to get into my white panties, not embrace the black population (and for the record, my panties remained unconquered)  — however, at some level, they understood that their views were entirely unjustifiable by any intelligent argument.

The bad news, very, very bad news — before those words slipped out of their mouths, they assumed, surely from recent experience, that they were generally acceptable to the majority of white, Christian women whom they might want to date. This shocks me more than I can say.  I am horrified that there is at the very least a complacency among any Christians about racism, who seem to think that it is nothing that needs to be overcome.

I especially don’t understand how any Christians are left without understanding that Jesus is coming soon for an unblemished church, that racism is one of America’s greater blemishes, that it was designed and perpetuated by a group of social darwinians who understood that if they could get immigrant workers to hate African-American workers and vice-versa, they could dominate both groups because they were divided.  An unracist America would conquer poverty and crime, would ensure the welfare of every single child born in the USA, would demand a living wage for all workers, would demand excellent education for all students, wherever they lived, and would, in short, conquer the elite’s stranglehold over the many.  If this sounds communist to any of you, I exhort you to read your New  Testament carefully — it is in fact the way God sees the role of the church.  We are to take care of, as Jesus told us in the  sheeps and goats parable, “the least of these,” in other words, the most vulnerable people in our society, hence the poor, hence the excluded, hence the illegal immigrant, hence the crack baby, hence whoever has been given the short end of the stick, and that often  includes people whose skin color is different than our  own.

We should all gasp when we hear the N word from white Christian friends, especially those whose friendship is not imaginary.  We should storm out.  What fear do we have of calling our bretheren on this?  It is as great a sin as any, and it speaks so very little of the intelligence of the conversation that would bear it.

Any man who thinks he recommends himself by announcing that he is better than another ethnic group ought to have his name written on the walls of the stalls of  ladies’ rooms in churches with this warning –
“Has imaginary friends.  Has imaginary appeal.  Is a great, white hope in his own mind.”

I pray, in the name of Jesus, a man with wooly hair and Middle-Eastern skin darker than my onw, who died on the cross and rose from the dead for me, that we will at long last conquer this horrible affliction within the church.  In His name, I bind the spirit of ignorance and pride from our body.  I loose  the spirit of unity and understanding.  Let the church say AMEN.

Brethren, sorry for the poor-quality cell phone photo of what was a kick-@## rock festival’s stage. I was there yesterday. I got sunburned, and my neck is a little sore from all the head-bopping I was doing.

Here’s the scripture upon which I am basing my homily this week — I consider it a promise to all believers who will pounce on it:

Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. — Psalm 103:1-4

Saturday this past weekend, Coney Island was host to a day-long indie rock festival, the Siren Festival, and everyone from other parts of town who considers himself or herself hip, the same ones who go to hear bands in basements on the Lower East Side, seemed to be there.

Most of them were in their twenties, and those who were “older” were in their thirties, and I’m, well — ahem — perpetually thirty-nine at this point, but I was there, too. Does that make me hip? Let’s check:

TOP TEN REASONS I MIGHT BE REALLY HIP

1. Last year, a (Holy) hip-hop CD was released, The Cornerstone, and I was the only white person whose voice was on it — www.newlewmusic.com (Everyone there was half my age, too, it seemed like).
2. I have occasionally been asked for my autograph after readings by hip-looking people in their twenties. I also have gotten a couple of fan letters for my poetry from people who are serious hipsters.
3. There’s a guy in Brooklyn named Jackie, who is an older man of color who volunteers to talk to young black men in “at risk” programs to give them reasons and ways to avoid the mean streets. When Jackie wants to reach these young men across generational lines, he reads them several of my poems that show empowering images of black men. A lit journal that writes about literature of interest to African-Americans gave a positive review of my work.
4. I have watched a cocophonous orchestra in Manhattan — experimental modern music — blare dissonant horns as a woman with a British accent shouted words I wrote about freedom — that happened at Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.
5. I taught a college semester last year where I told my students (truthfully) that I was about their parents’ age, and they said they couldn’t believe me. When I asked why, they told me things like, “My mom doesn’t text her friends like you do.” “You just don’t look that age.” “You dress way cooler than they do.” “You know words they don’t.”
6. I am part of the Colbert Nation — actually, that might make me a total geek in some people’s eyes.
7. I often give readings on stages where legends of the rock world have stood before me.
8. I am so riding the crest of the wave of the return of big earrings.
9. I own clothes by certain hip labels, such as Baby Phat — remember, the Bible tells us that the liberal soul shall be made phat! (Proverbs 11:25, King James Version, Anne Babson spelling)
10. I bought fair trade products long before everyone else consciously started to do so in order to be “hip.”

Understand that there are plenty of things that might disqualify me from hipsterdom — my faith, for one. I don’t have any nose piercings, no tattoos, nor will I get any, when I wear t-shirts, which I rarely do, they may have ironic slogans on them, but they are never cynical, I never do any drugs, designer or other, and while I am always looking for friends, none of those friendships will ever include benefits.

Understand also that when I say “hip,” I really don’t mean Sex in the City chic. Carrie Bradshaw might slum at the events where hipsters go from time to time, but unless Samantha is there professionally to promote them, she wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfits hipsters wear. She would be bored by their artistic and intellectual pretensions. She would not find their antiestablishmentarianism even slightly compelling.

You see, quintessential New York hipsters don’t wear designer labels. I have occasionally joked that I have the K-Mart Jacqueline Smith Collection version of Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe, but that’s not really true. Even if I had billions of dollars, I would never buy from the more fashionable couturiers because of their lack of fair trade practices (see my hipster top ten list). I am more chic than the twenty-something tribe that haunts the corner of Stanton and Rivington on the Lower East Side or any corner these days in Williamsburg, but I’m enough like them that I find myself bumping into them again and again.

Most people my age that I know don’t go to indie rock festivals any more — and I promise, I’ll talk about this one part of the scene, I swear — they go to the occasional movie, go to work, go home, feed kids, water plants, once in a while have brunch — their only potential crossing coordinates with hipsters — and attend establishment cultural events. I asked a few of them to go to the Siren festival with me, but they said no. Only my friend Doris, who is twenty-four, said yes, even though she has a kid she could go home and feed. She left the baby with relatives.

Now the festival itself was wonderful. I particularly LOVED this band I had never heard before, and so did Spin.com — they are called Ra Ra Riot, and they are a marriage between the sound of The Clash and The Kronos Quartet. They call their music “chamber pop.” They are a bunch of fresh-faced kids from Syracuse New York — okay, fresh-faced with really, really intense “I’m making awesome music” grimaces. It’s very original stuff.

Ra Ra Riot (totally go to www.rarariot.com because they rock) was on the main stage, set up by the historic roller coaster the Cyclone, so while they were riffing, the only screams were not from fans but from people sliding down wooden tracks very, very fast. The hipsters looked, well, bored.

At the top of the page is the one lame photo I was able to take. The hipsters are bored. So I borrowed another photo from Ra Ra Riot’s promotional material which is more fun to look at:

As a part-time, non-card-carrying hipster, I had forgotten, as my friend Andrea reminded me today, that one of the cardinal rules for being hip is that you’re not supposed to appear to interested in anything, even stuff you spent a lot of time and energy to go see.

Me, though, I was bopping my head and dancing around. If I like something, I just like it. I’m not going to pretend to be ironically detached from it. That’s just lame, that’s missing the point. Honestly, the young, bored people around me were wasting their time, in my opinion, if they weren’t going to even bother to enjoy what they took the F Train all the way to the end of the line to come see.

This brings me to the passage that I quoted — let me focus on that rather mysterious part about our youth being renewed “like the eagle’s.”

Cosmetics promise us this, but surely not in quite the way God meant it. I don’t think here that God is talking about literal age. I think he’s talking about an outlook that brings joy and a freshness of being, physically, perhaps, but because one’s mouth is involved, and good things in it, I have to assume he means something spiritual and intellectual.

One of the things that I find frustrating about talking to people my own age these days is that many of them have stopped entertaining new ideas. It seems with each passing year there is less and less originality among my chronological peers. I did not go to the siren Festival to be “hip,” in fact. I went because I wanted to see it for my own enjoyment. I do a lot of things — like when I learned about “bars” and “hooks” in rap, and the difference between gangsta rap and more mainstream rap from a hip-hop producer’s standpoint, that was just for my own edification and enjoyment.

My peers used to be curious about new things. What happened? I admit wholeheartedly that someone with a child has a lot less time to focus on cultural phenomena. I understand that. But still, wouldn’t being around that child engender greater curiosity by constant contact with someone who can’t seem to stop asking “why?”

And as for those youngster hipsters — isn’t youth supposed to include the ability to just let loose and enjoy without fetters? If being hip means being detached, I’d rather be a geek.

Perhaps being renewed in one’s youth like the eagle’s in Christ is like being held aloft in a state of perpetual vivacity, to be like the Nobel Prize winner whom I met who decided in his late nineties to learn the minutia of artificial intelligence design at the software engineer level, just because it’s cool, or to be like a woman I met years ago in a night club who was in her seventies and in the VIP lounge past the velvet rope, clubbing with her granddaughter because she wanted to see it all. I guess I’m on my way to being like that.

I exhort you, in the name of Jesus, bless the LORD, forget not all His benefits, and remember that if your mouth is filled with His good things, your youth can be renewed. Never stop asking impertinent questions. Never stop trying new things. His mercies are new every morning. Amen.

Brethren, those of you who have been following my blog must have discerned that I am going through a rough period of my life. I just got divorced after the man I loved literally went crazy — off his needed medication, and became menacing. I’m old enough that I thought by now I would have the white picket fence American dream — you know, the Norman Rockwell painting of Thanksgiving with patriarch at head of table, the children, the lovely home. When I was married, I lived in a suburban, lovely home. I now live on Coney Island, back in bohemia, writing my poetry in a (very nice part of the) ghetto. Have you seen the movie He Got Game? Spike Lee filmed that in my neighborhood. As a white woman, as a woman with a job that pays above poverty level, I’m in the minority here.

For those white (or otherwise Rockwell-cliched) people reading this entry, there is an expression that is used in the ghetto — one that I like but that I fear — “ghetto superstar.” The ghetto superstar is the person who plays ball better than half the people in the NBA but who never gets through enough school for the scouts to notice him, it is the singer at the local church who is better than Mary J. Blige but never gets the recording contract. Jefferson’s ideal of a meritocracy is belied by the very existence of ghettoes — don’t believe for a minute that the race is always to the swiftest in our society, not yet. There are people who are known locally in any ghetto for their talents, but the system, and sometimes their own personal weaknesses — drugs, general unreliability, shut them out from real success. I never want to be a ghetto superstar, not in poetry, not in any field.

So here is the scripture on which I am hanging this homily:

Hebrews 12:1 — “ Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us…”

This passage of Hebrews comes right after the “faith superstar” chapter — we get the list of people in the Old testament who hung on to faith despite adversity — then it says “wherefore.” Think “therefore,” “since they did all of this and are watching us.”

A few weeks ago, I gave a reading in Manhattan with a brilliant collection of women for WSQ, the premiere academic women’s studies journal. I was VERY honored to be included in their current issue. I was included with some other poets, among whom is a woman whose name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but when I saw her face, I knew exactly who she was.

Here is her beautiful face:

Nicole Cooley and I met in high school during a summer writing workshop at Bennington College in Vermont. She changed my life. I had never met anyone who was my age and took writing as seriously as she did. I was a little punk rocker at the time, at least the suburban version of one, and everything was ironic. I was not so much an artist as a misunderstood teenager with a variety of radical fashion statements and a real interest in poetry.

Nicole had already finished the manuscript of a novel. She was brilliant, intense, quiet, conservative. I was much the woman in the previous blog entry, dancing with bare-chested men painted green. Nicole’s choices were much more conservative than mine. My poetry was wild and loose. Hers was tight and clean. This is still true.

Today, Nicole has many things I wish I had, at least things that I wish I had my own version of — she is happily married to a like-minded man. She has kids. She is the new chair of a new writing program at a local college. She wholly deserves this distinction at her comparatively young age because she remains as she has always been — a phenomenal talent. She has published novels, poetry collections, and her latest book, soon to be published by Louisiana State University Press, entitled (I believe) Resurrection, is going to be the definitive book on the recovery of New Orleans (where Nicole is from originally) from Hurricane Katrina. I have heard one of the poems from this collection, and it is a brilliant work of art, one that borrows cues from Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda alike. In short, Nicole is amazing and deserves absolutely every wonderful thing she has.

Have you ever been to your high school reunion and met someone who you used to hang out with, and you find she is still as pretty as she was on graduation day, rich now, with kids on the honor roll? Have you ever then looked at your own double chin in the mirror, reflected on your own bank account, reflected on your own kids, in trouble with the vice principal’s office again?

Oddly, or so I thought it was, I met Nicole in such a way and yet felt not the slightest bit jealous. Really! I mean it! Stop looking at me that way! It’s true. I am genuinely happy for Nicole. Praise God for what He has done in her life. I could not have met her at a time of greater self-doubt than where I am now, and yet I looked at her with everything she’s got, despite all my sweat and travail that I don’t have, and yet I felt blessed, profoundly blessed, that Nicole is not a ghetto superstar — she’s in the NBA, she’s got the Motown contract — and I’m okay, glad, thrilled.

Because God never misses a moment to show me he likes irony as much as I did as a punk rock teenager, here is one of my poems I read that evening in Manhattan, which appeared originally (I am obliged to say legally, as they have first North American serial rights to it) in Red Rock Review:

SONG OF ENVY by Anne Babson

The God of the triple-process blonde is in a heaven where black is never worn, where cream cheese is eaten by triple-process blonde angels, just like in that commercial. The God of the triple-process blonde is in heaven, and there are songs of praise to be sung in a Texas two-step lilt, and there are blonde babies to be pig-tailed and pressed into new dresses. It is Sunday, and the God of the triple-process blonde hovers in a heaven filled with snowflakes over the church converted from the bowling alley, while the triple-process blonde sings songs.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish in an empty night club where crushed cigarette butts line the morning floor, the stench of beer wafting from the broken boards. This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in the bitterness of tea without sugar drunk hungover. This is a song of envy to the triple-process blonde who voted to close this place down last election.

This, Blondie, is my confession — think of it as a prayer before bedtime — even though it is Sunday seven a. m. my head has not touched pillow since high noon Saturday — well, his front seat headrest tilted down wasn’t a pillow, and we weren’t sleeping. This, Blondie, is my confession, my confession to you — your church doesn’t abide Latin or popery (unless you spell it pot pourri), but my confession is this — mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – I stink of sweaty cowboy, sweaty nightclub, and Sweaty longneck beer, of sweaty sin, of sweaty desperation. This is my battle hymn, a song of envy.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish chipping in my metal bathtub, in frothy water drawn to scrape the glitter off my tattooed back, the stink of cigarettes and “Yeah, baby!” From my single-process head of spiked-up devil-red hair. You — Triple-process: that’s bleach, bleach and Bleach again — you are the object. You are the object of this song of envy.

My God is a jealous God, Blondie. He is a loner. He sulks often. He is enigmatic. He’s like any one of my dates this year — promising to call, but never dialing my number again. Even the answers He provides are in the form of a question, just like on Jeopardy — “What is children going hungry?” “Who is an underachiever?” “What is surviving bitter pestilence?” “What is war, what is it good for?” The holy book I read is filled with more riddle than rhyme, Blondie, and I’ve dog-eared the pages looking For where I get your pristine life, where I stop flirting with losers, where the deus is ex machina, where.

This is a song of envy. This is an epistle from my church — a bathtub for baptism, a beat-up pick-up truck For the lectern, two pair of jeans stiff with paint and cow patties crossed to form crucifix — to your church — The one in the old bowling alley, still boxed-in coffin-like with faux wood paneling, the one where I see Only whitest whites, the one where everyone flosses daily, the one where your God answers everything Before it is asked and whose voice is as clear as the voice-over selling cream cheese, the God of my envy.

Don’t think, Blondie, that my skepticism is chosen. I know a world where you have never walked. I have seen the blisters on my mother’s hands. I have seen my father’s nakedness uncovered. I have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has trampled on the vineyards where the grapes of Wrath are stored — that would be in my uncle’s gun rack, where my cousin picked the lock and exploded his brains on the Naugahyde sofa set. Yes, Blondie, I have smelled burned brains and vinyl, so point me to your Jesus who heals this. I dare him to clean the ring from my bathtub, the scum from my veins.

This is a song of envy, a battle hymn to battle Him. I envy your shingled roof. I envy your fresh-baked Lingonberry pie. I envy your porcelain skin. I envy your pressed dress. I envy your diamond-heavy hand. I envy you your cream cheese heaven and your interceding savior. I envy your ignorance of people like me, who have stared into eternity downward and see their own mascara-murky faces staring back at Them from Darwin’s pond, who see the darkness of “In the beginning” — before your God moved over The face of the Earth, before anyone saw that it was good, before I saw anything but envy.

I mean for this poem to be an exhortation to the Body of Christ who would evangelize women like the speaker, a woman like so many non-believers, who has made choices that were the best she knew how to make, and who feels condemnation from church folks who seem to have it better than she does. We need to tread compassionately with such people, for they are more like us than they let on at first, and they are hungry for blessing and love.

Reading the poem that I wrote years ago on the evening of my brief reunion with Nicole Cooley, however, legitimate superstar, made me test my own spirit for signs of envy. The truth is — I told you to stop looking at me like that — I’m not. So why not?

I cite the passage from Hebrews I quoted earlier for the reason. I don’t know how much or in what Nicole believes, but I do know what I believe. The race that is set before ME is different than the race set before another, and the prize is not a book contract, although, Jesus, that’s one of the desires of my heart. The prize is not family. The prize is not even brilliance. I’m competing in a much more important prize. I’m running the race of faith. I have a stadium filled with onlookers — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Hannah, and the rest. Praise God, and to Him be the glory, I have set aside the weights — divorce, childlessness, every brick in nearby housing projects, disappointments, getting older — and the sin that does so easily beset us — covetousness comes to mind here, and I truly don’t covet, just continue to hope for my own — and I am running the race that is set before ME with PATIENCE, just like Paul told me to.

Trust me. I’m not that holy. I didn’t make my heart any special way here out of my own volition. I’m surprised I’m not jealous. It’s not my own goodness at work. That’s why you can stop looking at me doubtfully. I’ve done only one thing right, it seems to me. I have surrendered my heart and my real belief and confidence to God’s promises. I believe I will have a husband, or I’ll have peace about not having one. I believe I’ll raise children, or I’ll have peace about not raising any. I believe my writing will be published on yet higher levels, that my career will explode, or I’ll have peace about where it goes. I don’t write for a press. I write for the one who gave me His Word. And my poems are what He fashioned them to be. He may have given Nicole a violin and me a trombone. It’s His orchestra, and I am playing the notes He gave me on the page. I hear the music in my head, and it sounds beautiful to me. If that’s all that ever happens, to Him the Composer be all Honor of it. Amen.

This is a picture of me taken last night around sunset. The men are half my age, bare-chested and painted green. There was loud music playing in the background, and a woman wearing star fish on her breasts and wrapped in fishnet was dancing on a stage to it.

Did I sin? Do Christians attend such events?

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. — Romans 12:2

Brethren, while each of the blog entries here are testimonies of sorts, I can’t really say that I’m penitent for anything I did last night. I danced, mostly with the men in this picture, who were more interested in running their fingers through each other’s green hair than through mine. I spent the evening talking to people, including a man in a kilt, wearing a strange mink stole. He was straight, and I thought he was kind of cute, but our conversation was civil and one that might have taken place after church at a fellowship brunch — nothing untoward. I do regret that twice, one man who was a volunteer for the event — he judged the mermaids — and a man disguised as King Neptune, wearing a loin cloth made of material almost identical to my top — flirted with me in front of their wives. I told the men how lucky they were to have women in their lives who would tolerate them.

I also spoke to a burlesque dancer, who called herself Fin Ray. She was dressed half as a mermaid, half as a gorilla. During the course of the evening, where dancers performed in between rock bands who were very good and of no surprising kind, except that they were in fact better than some wedding band for hire, Fin Ray kept her half-monkey persona and otherwise dressed in bridal lingerie. She pantomimed an imagined King-Kong Fae Ray wedding night. Much of the action involved her eating a banana suggestively handed to herself by her gorilla arm. At the end, the Gorilla arm (again, her own) tore off her negligee, and she was wearing something slightly more revealing than what one sees wearing on the beach. It was far less lust-producing than laugh-producing.

Again — should Christians not have attended this event, which was a fund-raiser to preserve an arts community on Coney Island?

I am amazed at the success of the movie Rent among people who have never set foot in New York City. When I saw the movie (after having seen the musical on Broadway), I wept.

That was really my life back when I moved to the city in the late Eighties. I lost a lot of men (ones who looked like the men in green with whom I danced last night) friends to AIDS. I was kind of like the performance artist in the movie who got everyone to protest artistically — I ran a guerilla theater squad for women’s rights. For instance, I crowned myself “Miss Sports Ill-Lust-Raided 1992″ on the day the magazine launched its swimsuit issue and vogued in front of the Time-Life Building while reporters snapped pictures and women older than me gave out statistics about women athletes. I did this as a protest in order to gain greater recognition for the accomplishments of women athletes. My protest was reported internationally, and Sports Illustrated not only started to cover women athletes with greater seriousness, they started a women’s sports magazine that lasted for some years.

I did some other kinds of protests as well. I marched for AIDS research funding wearing a leather jacket and lingerie, because that was what our cohort had chosen to wear as a uniform to get attention. I dressed in a long, red robe with some men who wore dresses like Dana Carvey’s church lady character from Saturday Night Live to protest some of the ugly, nasty things that were being said in a very unchristian manner by certain Christian leaders of the time against people with AIDS and against women in general.

At the time, I also attended church every Sunday, and I read the Bible. I wasn’t a lesbian, the way that the character was in the movie that I referred to earlier. I was straight, dating a lawyer who was more conservative than I was in almost every way.

So those of you who know about what is called “La Vie Boheme” in the movie Rent — I wonder what you think of those characters. Paul says to avoid the appearance of evil. I agree, but what does that mean? I never did drugs. I was not into what might be termed by some “alternative lifestyles.” I did, however, choose to keep company with drag queens, people who pierce their tongues and their genitalia and are willing to show others both, people who do drugs, talk about sex that churches do not condone, and these people who were in my life during that time — we protested together for the world to change to be more compassionate, more patient, more fair. Were they sinners? By any definition of Christianity, I’m sure they all were without exception. But if they were the only ones not conforming to the world — the system of Babylon that is still here and according to the world will still be here until Jesus comes — not willing to accept injustice, weren’t they actually the only ones obeying the command above from Romans 12?

Brethren, as for the last part of the directive above, about the will of God — let me address that. Let me speak plainly to you about it. If Bohemians of every sort aren’t Christians, it’s not really as much their fault as it is ours, the church’s fault. I was often the only Christian that they knew who would really talk to them without judging them outright. I brought a small number to the foot of the cross, but quite frankly, it was an uphill battle, especially while their friends were dying of a horrible disease and the church responded largely by telling them that God was punishing them for fornication. Fornication is a sin. So is pride. So is anything short of the Good Samaritan’s response to pain and suffering of all kinds.

Last night, I was there to dance and to get to know my neighbors, not so much to evangelize, but I did shout over the loud music to four men that I was a Christian. They were astonished. They thought of Christians as people who would never dance — even though our Jesus is the Lord of the Dance — who would never laugh as loudly as I was laughing, who would never have talked to people like them. Brethren, I want to remind you how many parties Jesus attended. He would have seen belly dancers. He would have seen drunks. Don’t think for a minute he wouldn’t have seen hookers. Don’t think for a minute he wouldn’t have seen homosexuality, adultery, and other things against the Word of God. Did Jesus go in there and shout at the front of the room — repent thou evil doers, for my kingdom is at hand? There is no record of Him doing so. On the contrary, he seemed to have danced, to have had some wine, to have eaten plenty of what was served, to have enjoyed the company of these people largely on their terms.

Be ye not conformed to the world. I submit that the truest sense of this is not in the wearing of make-up, green body paint, sequins, or other manifestations of fashion and fun. Let me amplify what I hear: Be ye not conformed to the cruelty of the world. Be ye not conformed to the indifference of the world. Be ye not conformed to the selfishness of the world.

All of the men I shouted to about my faith told me with some surprise in their voices that I was very sweet. They said they were not used to meeting sweet people at these kinds of events. They treated me with decency and respect. They made sure I had a place to sit, enough to eat and drink, a safe way to get home. I can only imagine the people who met Jesus at these parties reacted to him in even stronger terms. If people feel honored and sense a general goodness — it is convicting to them, whether they fully understand it or not.

Preaching the Gospel, I submit, is often less about Bible tracts than about living like The Living Word. So go ye into the World, everywhere in the World. Be ye not conformed. Hang with the non-conformists. Go change the world with the power of the love you have been given. Love never fails. Amen.

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” — Hebrews 13:2

This week’s homily is about girlfriends, the ones I knew I have, but especially the ones I had no idea I had until they suddenly appeared. I have my good female friends, the ones I know I can count on all the time — the ones who attend parties with me. Here’s a picture of some of my A-List friends — I took this when we were at a Mets game.

These are the women that I always know I can count on to care enough about me to help me when times are down. The women in this picture have known me since I was in my teens (just a few years ago, I joke).

But this week, I became particularly mindful of the women who have helped me and treated me with enormous kindness even though they had no particular reason to do so. I was practically a stranger to them.

People who live outside of New York City may think that this is not the way New Yorkers are — that we’re a cold bunch. They couldn’t be more wrong. Look at the way we cradled each other after 9/11 — that’s our real character. We’re all toughness and bluster until somebody falls down. Then we gather around and pick each other up.

The women this next photo are virtual strangers to me, and yet, they behaved as kindly as sisters ever have. They met me first when my ex-husband and I were looking for wedding bands, just having been engaged. My ex had purchased my engagement ring from Rosanne, the owner of the shop, and he told them how much he loved me. They met me, and we tried on rings together. Rosanne employs only women jewelers — something that makes the shop have a terrific character. They give out terrific advice to men picking out gifts for women they love. It also has the chatty informality going there as if one were going to the beauty salon.

When my birthday and Christmas would roll around, my ex would swing by Rosanne’s and purchase a trinket for me — he gave me a couple of diamond pendants and some pearls.

Rosanne also buys gold and repairs jewelry. She has a terrific woman who works for her who delicately repairs broken jewels. She’s the one in the back of the photo. I went in there with a charm that belonged to my grandmother, and these ladies helped me buy a bracelet and attach the charm to it. I wear it on my wrist now.

When my ex-husband became scary and threw me out, I had to sell everything of value I had just to have enough to survive. I came to Rosanne’s and asked her to buy my gold. These ladies had already been nice to me, and I knew she would not steal from me. When I explained why I was selling, these wonderful women wept with me. Each of them hugged me as if we had known each other forever. They bought my gold, but they insisted I come back regularly for more hugs.

Here’s a picture of them with me taken yesterday. There is no more need for weeping. I’m the one wearing red, smiling the largest smile. These women are so wonderful. It’s amazing that they were so nice to me even though they barely knew me, that they are so happy for me now that I’m back on my feet living my life in joy. Why were they so kind? I am no one special to them — just another customer.

My accountant, Helen Kyrillidis, and her bff, attorney Susan Rizos, are another pair of suddenly discovered good friends. I had to see Helen about a matter related to old taxes, and she and Susan were sitting together laughing in their offices in Astoria, Queens. I wish I had a photo of these women to post here. They look smart, shrewd, confident, and a little tough. However, they have each expressed concern for me, delight at my triumphs, have worried about me like two clucking hens when I have made mistakes.

All the sociologists talk about how disconnected we are one from the other in today’s society. With kinship ties less stable — divorces at such a high, non-marriage, single parenting, abandoned elderly folks — we can surely see that on this father’s day we are all less connected in traditional ways than we ever have been. Community ties as we have defined them are frayed.

However, I am encouraged by my women acquaintances. Without a strong exterior social structure, perhaps we females remain kind, loving , generous, empathetic, and full of the spiritual gift of hospitality. I trust that women have been given at birth a sense of connection that cannot be permanently disrupted by the bad behavior of men who leave us, cheat us, beat us, treat us like trash. I’m back on my feet in part thanks to women like these half-strangers, who treated me as somebody important enough to care about.

Medical science backs up my assertions. It is a proven fact that those diagnosed with cancer have a much, much greater chance of survival if they have women to talk to. This is equally true for men and women — women are the ones who make us feel better when we’re down for the count. Guys surely have other strengths. I thank God for some of the men in my life, too, who have been incredibly supportive. However, there is something about the way women talk to each other and to men that makes the human race feel, despite evidence to the contrary, that everything is going to be all right.

So go to Rosanne’s Jewelry store — the address is 1040 Park Boulevard in Massapequa Park, telephone 516-799-7722. Tell them you saw them on my blog, and I’ll bet they’ll give you a hug if you need one.

Go into the world and see if you don’t have friendships that take you by surprise. People are kinder, more compassionate, than you perhaps think. Thank God for that. And thank you to those who have entertained me as if I were an angel sent to them. I am no angel, alas, but I am your sister. Thank you to those sisters in Christ whom I will never meet on Earth but who regularly practice Christian hospitality. We are family, despite what the sociologists can quantify. Together, we will endure somehow until the sky cracks.