Moammar Khadafy and David A Paterson: Same Man?

You decide.

My smartest thought of 2009

About a week ago, maybe two, I woke up and had my smartest thought of 2009. So smart, in fact, I'm still somewhat trying to decode it.

Usually I rise with a jolt, prompted by my own personal psychic starter pistol and I'm off to the races mentally. A sped up scroll of the things to be done, what's left to do from yesterday's scroll, the things I'm dreading, maybe something good is on the roster, something embarrassing I did or fear I'll do, all the while digesting the series of bizarro dreams I just had. It would be a panic attack except I'm too tired. Waking up has always been traumatic.

Back to my smartest thought. I was waking, but there was no starting pistol. It was calm; a sedate swimming through honey, surfacing from sleep feeling, my beau's unbelievable snoring in the distance was even soothing. And eyes still closed, a massive mental supertitle appeared:

WITHOUT MEMORY, THERE CAN BE NO CONSCIENCE.

Weird, right? Who thinks that at 6am?

I rolled over and pretended to wake my beau with a kick by accident.

"I just had my smartest thought of 2009."

I repeated the phrase slowly to him like some kind of loony tune soothsayer.

His response, that kind of half snore/choke men do.

"Who said that?" Surely I was regurgitating.

"Jonathan Sacks?" He offered, probably praying I'd shut up.

"No, me I think."

The true irony is, of course, I meant to get up straight up and I write about it, but forgot. Or I fell back asleep. Or I got lost in the more mundane less super supertitles. I honestly can't recall.

Anyway, I remembered about an hour ago and it still seemed smart. If nothing else, an esoterically perfect sentiment for High Holidays.

Now that I'm Jewish

Now that I'm Jewish (at least as far as the Conservative movement is concerned) I feel the same kind of disorientation I had when I first returned from studying in Prague at the turn of the century(Yikes, but I had to say it. You understand.). I had fallen out of the regular lock step hipster rhythm of New York City, after striking dramatic poses and giving serious cheekbone across snowy Central Europe.

In Praha, I was mostly cut off from pop culture, unless you count the steady and relentless thump of that one fucking Cher song popular in 1999. I was attempting to learn Czech, not that this Americhanka ever got beyond the absolute survival basics like, Beer please, Another please. Marlboros Please. (Marlboros in Czech is still Marlboros, though drastically cheaper) I actually spoke more French than anything, since the African Hash dealers tended to be comfortable en francais. Et moi aussi.

I was more concerned with the plays of Havel and golems than Stella Adler and Patricia Fields. I didn't watch t.v. really. I went to the opera instead, mostly alone, because it was cheap, made me feel European and tragic, dressed up in my single box at the Statni Opera House, watching Nabucco.

I've spent most of the last year and half in another kind of single box; reading Jewish books, studying Jewish thought, beginning to observe Shabbat and holidays and learning Hebrew(which rivals Czech in bitchiness). I've been basically immersing myself in all things Judaica until the final immersion in the Mikveh. I've done less reality television watching, I've spent less time searching out obscure music that is about to be hip, hell, I can't remember the last time I broke out my leg warmers.

It's not that these things are no longer me or that they aren't important (The Wendy Williams Show, is a perfect example of new important ironic likes) but they had taken a temporary back burner.

But now that the JSATS are behind me and my dunk done, I'm recollecting myself, if that makes sense. I wonder how I integrate the Liz of before with the Liz of now. I'm thinking about how I marry the somewhat observant me with the historically iconclastic me. Constantly trying to catch up with myself seems to be an ongoing project.

I'll keep you posted.

Are you there GdashD, it's me Elisheva

Two weeks ago today, I became Jewish.

At approximately 10:25 am on the 22nd of Tammuz in the year 5769 on west 72nd street between Broadway and West End Avenue, I dipped three times in the Upper West side mikveh (my local Jewish ritual bath) and entered into the covenant. Naked, chin deep in warm, slightly chemically, totally religious water, my friend Dvora at the mikveh's tiled edge cheering me on as I wept through prayers in Hebrew, a mikveh lady named Gita proclaimed after a final successful immersion,

"KOSHER!"

Ritual dipping, by the way, is harder than it looks. One must submerge completely whilst not allowing feet or hands to touch the side of the small pool. Never mind that the impossible Hebrew language must be recited between dips and somewhere in the back of one's mind, one knows that a block away people are shopping at Fairway.

As I emerged from the sacred waters newly Elisheva, blubbering, "Baruch atta...." New Yorkers outside were boarding city buses, hailing cabs, chewing gum, pushing baby strollers. being normalish, having an ordinary day.

Pulling me back into semi reality, Gita took my newly Jewish baby cheeks in her hands, peered into my face as if I were a crystal ball and she was reading me:

"YOU ARE NOW A BEAUTIFUL JEWISH GIRL!"

And then of course, "BE GOOD!"

I've done some fairly radical things in my life, but this is definitely in the top three. Much more on this to follow.

My worst fantasy

I would like to share some of my worst fantasies. Daydreams really, except they're disturbing. Daymares, if you will.

I do this somewhat hesitantly, offer a ringside seat to my psyche that is, because though I know they are telling of something about me, I'm not exactly sure what. I offer a window in anyway because at worst, no one cares about my reoccuring terror montages and at best, you have some too.

Everyone has a certain sort set of morbid disaster scenarios, I'm convinced. And by everyone, I mean New Yorkers. And by New Yorkers I mean those on the west side. There are the sprawlingly cinematic big budget global apocalyptic kind, usually experienced on the subway, going over a suspension bridge or on a transatlantic flight. These often involve fireballs whipping through tunnels, odorless poison gases and wildly infectious flesh eating diseases. And then there are more loca-horrors, small scale home grown nightmares, the insidious little imagined machinations that can happen anywhere.

Let me explain. Or better yet, let me just tell you one.

Like all other fledgling starry eyed, painfully earnest and perpetually stoned actors in New York City who study The Method, I've spent a great deal of time in acting studios. You know the kind, floor to ceiling mirrors, nondescript splintery black wooden boxes, ballet bars. The landscape speckled with borderline suicidal thespians, usually found in some sort of a stretch and waxing socialist about The Group Theater.

Actors are constantly stretching. Actors adore being relevant. I don't why this is.

Anyone who has ever gone to a Method acting school also knows that 98% of the student body teeters perpetually on the verge of suicide. Not that any of them will or do in a straightforward way. Drugs, drink and keeping your weight just this side of organ failure are the scenic route to self destruction. But anyway.

It's the resigned state of a future without stability, I guess, and with a krabillionth of a fraction chance at The Big Time.

I was one these types- a stretching socialist lunatic. Deep down I still am I suppose in some ways, with my energies redirected more to page than stage. But back in the day, I had this one recurring worst fantasy.

Usually it would happen just after yoga warmup and before a long day spent in the studio. It was not uncommon in those days (I say this like the late nineties were ancient times) to spend ten hours a day rehearsing in dance pants, memorizing Shakespeare and decoding Chekhov, perfecting my breathing and sneaking out to the fire escape for cigs. It was in some ways ideal, going to acting school. I was like an adult baby; learning to walk and talk all over again. Being told that Ibsen mattered, that the work mattered.

In other respects it was heinous. Having to witness fellow students regurgitate their most painful childhood molestation memories in the form of an acting exercise, being graded on pretending to be a tree, wincing through acting teachers berating ingenues on questionable talent and small tits, these are things I miss less.

Okay. The worst fantasy. I would walk into the bathroom post-yoga warm up and for a flash of a second I would expect to see a fellow actor hung from the ceiling. Not like by invisible Peter Pan Sandy Duncan hanging wires, but by a rope. A noose. Two leg warmed legs swinging as I would open the door. My heart would skip every time, expecting to discover the scene.

This obviously never happened in reality, praise Adler. And I still don't know why I had this daymare. It's much funnier when I tell it aloud, I swear.

derekh shiksa: part one

To kvetch or not to kvetch

That will never be my option

I admit to being one of those ethnically Christian gals who professed a love of matza.  And while I'm being honest here, I'll also confess to being so excited for Pesach that I couldn't even wait until Passover to open the Kosher for Passover Cheerios.  I've since learned the dread, not exuberance, is a more common sentiment among those observant. 

The night before the holiday began, a time when you're supposed to be rooting out those last morsels of chametz with a feather and a candle, I was watching the Daily Show and happily chomping on my first bowl of kosher cereal.  So what if it had the texture of corrugated cardboard and flavor of a manilla folder, my kitchen was already sterile enough for surgery, let holidays begin!

But after 8 days of chametzlessness, I realize I should have been more specific.

I love matza when it's 3am, I've 2 or 3 too many scotches and only after I've eating everything else not nailed down in my beau's kitchen.   

But before you pleasejudge yourself away, remember it was my first attempt to go unleavened.  This was my first Passover.  I may be, at least physically and legally an adult, but in all things Jewish, I am like an adult kindegartener.  There is a joy in starting from scratch, make no mistake.  Reading, writing, and speaking a new language, especially such a bitchy one like Hebrew, is full of small triumphs.  A holiday is still exciting for me.

One last goyish admission, I tried to make a matza bread house, or tenement I called it.  I learned, something everyone else figured out pre- bat mitzvah, matza is not a structurally sound building material.

In the end, I was successful in my matzaness, but now slightly bloated and not quite as psyched for the next 15th of Nissan, a few miscellaneous thoughts.

1. I understand the symbolism of eating matza.  It's a very tactile way of connecting with history.  It's the tradition, so who I am to argue with 2,000 plus years of it.  However, and I know this from many many years of expensive Upper East therapy, a traumatic event in childhood is often repeated throughout the course of one's life.  As a gentleman pointed out at my first night seder, one who has an especially strong disdain for the holiday, "We made the bread correctly.  We were waiting for it to rise!!!"  Again, I understand Passover won't change but aren't we retraumatizing ourselves?

2. I will never be able to genuinely kvetch.  This is the derekh shiksa, or way of the ethnic Christian, one who chooses a Jewish life.  Choosing is a powerful and empowering thing, but it doesn't leave much room for complaining.  But I think I've found a loophole: to kvetch about not being able to kvetch.

3. The most important realization: The seder I attended this year was hosted by an obviously brilliant, genuinely funny and hugely gracious gay couple in New Haven.  It may be the first positive thing that has ever happened to me in Connecticut.  I was nervous, mostly because of my ineptitude even after 1 1/2 of study, but also because the feast was to be vegan.  What would we eat?  With no meat, dairy, eggs or fish, I imagined noshing on tinfoil, parsley and charoset.  

The meal turned out to be excellent- the traditional lamb shank bone on the seder plate replaced by a flower, a special kiddie Haggadah for me and showtunes that marvelously accommodated the word, Halachic.  It was like no other seder I had ever attended. I was thrilled to be included at the "big kids" table.   

But more, as I sat, laughing, reclining, retelling the story of Exodus with all these folks; one, a molecular biologist, atheist and Sondheim lover, his polyglot gourmet chef partner, who let me light the special holiday candlesticks, the Rav Tastic, a writer, bgirl, my Hebrew teacher and friend, who stood up on her chair to deliver part of the four questions and the very drunk woman sat across from me, who confided with a wink in her voice, "I just don't get on with non-Jewish women, do you know what I mean?"

that there are a lot of ways to be Jewish.  

And that I will find my own way.

PEEP SHOW