Randy Newman

I remember him briefly from the mid-seventies, and (me) laughing out loud over the vast number of people who did not understand the ironic intent of Short People. I don’t claim to be any sort of genius, but oh my God. What’s not to get from, Short People are just the same as you and I/All men are brothers until the day they die? If music lovers had paid any attention to the characteristics of Newman’s other sixties’ and seventies’ songs – Sail Away; Burn On; Louisiana 1927; Old Man; Davy, the Fat Boy; Marie; Dayton, Ohio - 1903 – they would have had to know or at least suspect Newman’s tongue-in-cheek intention behind the words, “short people got no reason to live.”

I became more intimately acquainted with Randy Newman’s music after Don and I became a couple in 1980. I was listening (repeatedly) to Judi Collins’ version of I Think It’s Going to Rain Today...broken windows and empty hallways, pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey...but had no idea who had written the song. Then along came brooding, wickedly wry Don, who told me that Randy Newman was a genius.

Wanting to impress Don (terribly terribly), I ordered two of Newman’s tapes from the U.S. – Sail Away and Good Old Boys – which became iconic in our home on through the years, especially when Don was away on business, when I would get the children up at midnight for pizza and we would all dance in our underwear. (Oh, the stories...)

But nothing impressed me more than that first week of dating Don and his early morning interpretive singing, with actions, of Newman’s Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear. First off, I knew that anyone who had committed such a song to memory had to be lovely, but I also understood something more of the musician. And so it was that I became a minor (if such things can be qualified or quantified) Randy Newman aficionado.

That said, I cannot tell you the magnitude and complexity of emotions I felt sitting in Centrepointe Theatre this Monday evening, watching the 67-year-old artist, his voice in full and magnificent throttle, his fingers steady on the keyboard, as he regaled a rapt audience for over two hours with music and anecdotes that were passionate, lovely, laugh out loud funny, and heartbreaking.

He is handsome. This is true. He is tidy; this is also true...although I never did figure out the sparkling emanation (a tie clip, perhaps, or a button?), or whether he really is as self-deprecating and emotionally awkward as I saw him, as he (so endearingly) hump-a-lumped across the stage, a white-haired man still a little unsure of himself; still, somehow, unsettled.

I can tell you, however, as I sat there with a lump in my throat, moved beyond words by his heart on his sleeve and his incredible talent, there is no memory lane I would rather have travelled...all those songs and all those years...Don and Sarah and Pablo and Noam...Newman’s remarkably evocative phrases and phrasing reminding me that some people are not afraid to feel, to show that they feel, to share what they feel, to embrace, to live, and to let go. Randy Newman is a crucial reminder that while life moves along in its haphazard way, every now and again we are able to pause and to savour; to remember that so much of our lives have been good.


I may go out tomorrow if I can borrow a coat to wear
Oh, I'd step out in style with my sincere smile and my dancing bear
Outrageous, alarming, courageous, charming
Oh, who would think a boy and bear
Could be well accepted everywhere?
It's just amazing how fair people can be.


Seen at the nicest places where well-fed faces all stop to stare
Making the grandest entrance is Simon Smith and his dancing bear
They'll love us, won't they?
They feed us, don't they?
Oh, who would think a boy and bear
Could be well accepted everywhere...
It's just amazing how fair people can be

Who needs money when you're funny?
The big attraction everywhere
Will be Simon Smith and his dancing bear
It's Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear.

Randy Newman

Two Crows Joy

When I was a child, no one that I knew knew the rhyme except my mother and me. And in a life fraught with emotional busyness, the rhyme, because of the superstition, meant everything. Over the years I went about the towns and cities in which I lived reciting the verse to anyone who would hear me, although it is also true that Don was not pleased when our five-year-old daughter began counting crows.

Such fun Sarah and I had over the years, spying two crows and darting our hands out to cover each other’s eyes. (The joy, you see, can only be experienced if one person spots the crows.) Besides, Sarah and I figured what was good for one would automatically carry over for the other.

Last summer, thirty years into our mutual crow counting habit, Sarah and I, on our own, kept seeing one crow (...sorrow). So often did this happen that Sarah began calling me to remark and laugh, nervously, about it. At this point I was (conveniently, perhaps) coming around to Don’s old viewpoint: “Crows are not gregarious. If you see a single crow, generally he is out foraging for food; he is not trying to make your life miserable.”

In September, however, when life changed radically, I wondered if I had been wrong in adopting Don’s logic. So I started again...One crow sorrow, two crows joy...and it wasn’t long before I began paying particular attention to every crow couple I saw.

[The sorts of things two crows had come to mean were these:

I passed the test.

I got the job.
The x-ray was negative.
He gave me a raise.
She invited me to dinner.
They remembered my birthday.
They’re going to publish my story.

But in the fall, everything, as I said, changed.]

In September, when the skies were taking on more vivid autumn hues and the leaves were blowing along the sidewalk, two crows meant, “There is a mass, but given Sarah’s asthma and pneumonia history, it might be some weird virus that we can treat with antibiotics.”

By October, when Lainey was set to celebrate her fourth birthday, two crows meant “incurable but treatable. This is not a death sentence. There is also a trial drug that has proven somewhat successful.”

By November, when the sky took on its pre-winter grey, two crows meant, “The chemotherapy doesn’t seem as bad as we imagined. The treatment area on the second floor is lovely and, except for the gruesome volunteer at the front desk [how’s that for irony?] so are all the staff.”

By December, when the air was turning colder and the snow had set in, two crows meant, “There are only two small hemangioma and there is minimal bone invasion. The chemotherapy should wipe all that out quickly.”

In January, after the lung bleed and successful radiation, two crows meant (successful radiation and), “How fortunate that the trial drug was not an option because that lung bleed could have quickly become a hemorrhage.”

By February, when Lainey was anticipating Valentine’s cards and candy, two crows meant, “We know the treatment has not worked the way we had hoped, but there’s a new chemotherapy pill that has been highly successful, especially in young women.”

And now, in March, when we have seen our first double digits on the plus side of the Celsius scale, two crows has come to mean, “Mum, this treatment is not working and I want to stop. I am tired mum, but, mostly, I am not afraid.”

I have spent many moments in the past weeks and months thinking also of Sarah’s father – how grateful I am that he has not been here to see his daughter suffering in these ways; trying to imagine him here beside me, us beside her, his dark eyes relentlessly heartbroken.

And I remember, too, all my wonderful years with Sarah, and teaching my little girl, both of us so young...

One crow sorrow
Two crows joy
Three crows a letter
Four crows a boy
Five crows silver
Six crows gold
Seven crows a secret – never to be told.

A-Men

I was all set to disparage (especially younger) men, most of whom I felt incapable of coming through when hard times fell.

I could not have been more wrong.

First off, my son has been a saint, having offered up his apartment these many weeks, sacrificing his bedroom as if he were offering mere crumbs, and showing himself to be tender, caring, loving, generous, consistent and protective...throughout what could not be more difficult times.

I have also received several fond email from my brother, a man I did not think inhabiting the planet; a most thoughtful missive from the son of my favourite (husband-and-wife) professors, a young man with whom I more than once shared cigarettes and poetry discussion on the steps of the UPEI cafeteria; a series of lively email from his widowed and grieving father; a friendly paragraph from a nephew; constant and lively communication from one of my favourite new friends, a young man I met last year as a result of a short story contest; concerns and condolences from men with whom I volunteer and from other men with whom I work; queries from men in the neighbourhood and from men who call themselves my friend; communication from men who knew Don long before I did, and, today, a card sent care of my son from an old writing friend with whom I have not been in contact since before Don died.

I think I have said before that it is so easy to see who didn’t, who wasn’t, who isn’t, who can’t...the careless, the prurient (if you want a story about prurient, have I got a tale for you), the shallow, the selfish. After all, we make so many excuses for adults who cannot find the wherewithal, the kindness, the pencils and pens, the stamps, the telephone number, their address books...to call, write, email, send a card, or simply ask.

Add to this my lifelong friends; the book club women; my daughter’s friends – Crystal, Christena, Lesley, Keira, Gina, Joanne, Sean, Shawn, Steve, Sandy...I can’t count that high – some of whom feel more like family than friends of family; Mary’s family, including a brother-in-law who is more devastated than he can express; friends I have made since my move to Toronto – it isn’t possible for me to remember everyone.

But as long as I live, I shall never forget the number of women – and men – who time and time again have called, written, asked, offered, suggested, assisted, proffered, gifted, befriended, humoured, hoped, visited, stayed and made me laugh.

I am counting on all that you have given me in the recent past to sustain me in days to come.

Thank you.

Holiday Greetings

Happy St. Paddy’s Day, Sarah, sure
and  begorrah! Or as your father
used to say…hoy hoy hoy!



To Mary…a glass raised to
churches and the Lord of the Rings
collective, sipped from a tumbler of
Irish whiskey.


And to a world filled with doubters…
pogue muh ho-in!

Shameless

I watched Shameless tonight for the first time, on the recommendation of my son. The thing I love about much of what I see on HBO is that now, instead of reality television, they are making television that is, at least from the perspective of the world in which I grew up, realistic.

William H Macey, for example, is the epitome (if a drunk can have highlights of this sort) of every drunk I have known, inside my family and out. I can’t help but think of some of the regulars in Myron’s Pub in 1980’s Charlottetown, for example – mostly men, wandering in at happy hour or on Saturday afternoons, their cheekbones in high alcoholic pucker (a telltale sign of their disease).

Mind you, my son and I sat through this evening’s episode, each of us with a wine glass in our hands (his decorated with the Calvin cartoon character; mine with bowling pins), so perhaps I am not the authority on this subject that I think I have earned a right to be.

Come to think of it, if I had a dollar for every alcoholic or addictive personality in my family – and I don’t think any one of them would argue with this – I would be, if not rich, wealthy enough to take a long sea voyage twice a year.

In fact, of the four primary parents I had (out of ten or so), all were alcoholic...two of them stumbling-down-stairs dependent; one abhorrently self-pitying (no blood relation there), and one an adept ‘social’ drinker to the point of falling down up escalators and crashing company cars into trees stumps. (Don’t ask.)

So to see William H Macey debauched and dishevelled made no difference in my experience of hardened drinkers, the actor so convincing, in fact, that I wondered if over-imbibing off-set was typical for him. (Then again, I guess that’s what fine acting is all about – convincing the viewer that you’re real.)

Joan Cusack, too, threw me for a scary loop, spiralling about the house in agoraphobic confinement, completely focused on the finer points of encapsulated living. I mean, the woman was cuh-razy!

She reminded me, actually, of a woman I met once in a group setting who had not left her home in over twenty-five years. Can you believe that?

Ultimately, after weeks of friendly discussion, this woman was able to go grocery shopping with her husband, and my oh my...what a revelation that store – and this woman – turned out to be. I will always remember her lit-up face as she regaled us with stories of frozen pizzas, new-fangled birthday candles, and aluminum stove protectors. (I don’t know what they’re called, but you put them on your burners and leave them there – sometimes for months – until bits of encrusted food get on them and threaten to set the house on fire, at which point you have to change them.)

I remember, too well, the man in charge of this group, who talked about how extremely brave he thought people with anxiety were: how they dared to look at the reality of their situations – at the realm of possibilities of life and of living – and despite the terror of it all, managed to get on with their difficult days. He said that most people, if you got right down to the nitty gritty of it, didn’t have the courage to examine the possibilities because the possibilities were simply too numerous and too frightening.

He also referred to aspects of shame and guilt, saying that people who suffered an abundance of anxiety also tolerated more than their share of these two oppressive qualities. Who knew why, he conjectured. Life, as he said, was a complicated process.

Anyway, I found it somewhat ironic, watching this program full of anxious, addictive, depressed, dysfunctional people, knowing that the title of this series is called Shameless, all the while also knowing full well that what they are suffering from, if anyone cared to ask them (or me), is the very opposite of shameless.

What they are suffering from is shame, and guilt, in great big tub loads. Vats and vats of it. Inescapable, irredeemable, irrepressible shame and guilt, brought on by tormented, persistently absent parents; by overwhelming disappointment; by people who could not love them and who, therefore, shunned them.

And that, as I said to myself, is real. Or real in the world that I have always known. And that’s what makes for good, believable television, like it or not. Sadness and thwarted expectation/s. Isolation and awkwardness. Loneliness and sudden alterations. Everything leading toward shame and guilt.

Unhappiness.

Unrequitedness.

Underhandedness.

Or, in a word –

Shameless.

Technorati Tags: Op Ed,TV

The Way We Were

I have run out of viable excuses for my continuing obsession with the Robert Redford/Barbra Streisand film, The Way We Were. I can’t even imagine how many times I have seen it, but by now the total has to register in the dozens. It’s ridiculous – and I say that of both my fixation and of the film.

First off, my willing suspension of disbelief simply cannot stretch as far as making the forty-something Redford a young university student. And Streisand, with her Streisand hair and her Streisand fingernails and her Streisand mannerisms and her Streisand pretensions...is never quite believable in any period piece. (I think now of her in The Prince of Tides and in Nuts, which are not – or not yet – period pieces – and oh my.)

Worse, for all that I have seen it, with each renewed viewing most of the scenes feel brand new. I ask myself – as I did today when I once again came upon TWWW on Turner Classic Movies – how can this possibly be? I mean, when I tuned into Arthur the other day (a movie I haven’t seen since the eighties) not only did I remember most of the scenes, but I could quote lines word for word.

Then it hit me. It’s the music.

As much as I thrill to (Pablo’s version), “Once in your life you find a wife” (that’s what he said) (he was four years old) from Arthur, I can’t think of many scores or lyrics as stirring as “Memories, misty water-coloured memories...of the way we were.”

So taken up am I by the sound and the passion, so in keeping with the theme...memories memories memories...so sentimental am I, that once the music gets rolling, my thoughts start spinning slowly backward to my own days of youth and happiness and unhappiness and passion (Ban the bomb! thrills me every time I hear it, however) and to the what ifs and what might have beens and the what wases (pronounced wuzzes) and the what I could have beens and the what I never, ever was – so lost in personal thought am I, that Hubbell (who burdens their child with a name like Hubbell? Wood nymphs?) is one minute tying K-K-K-Katie’s shoelace and the next lying back on a sailboat remembering his own best days of a marriage now gone sour.

In other words, I miss most of the movie, and know it, at best, in snippets: little bits of parsing here and there; overly stylized, anachronistic costumes; woody bars and elite parties; hints of the Hollywood ten. And only today, after all these years of viewing and reviewing, have I come to understand why.

Only today did I actually see Hubbell kiss Katie, the two of them lying on the floor of her apartment. Only today did I watch the wistful agony cross James Woods’s face. Only today did I understand that what I have missed all these years is not a subtle sign of Asperger’s Syndrome (although the fact that I have not got an eidetic memory counters any logic I am trying to bring to my argument) or Attention Deficit Disorder.

No. It was, and is, the music—what the music evokes. And how clever is that? If the music is doing the thing that the music speaks (or in this instance, sings) to – in this case, memory – how then could a person not be driven to watch this film time and time again – each time finding herself carried away on a wave of maudlin abstraction – each time unaware of the minutiae of the story?

I had no idea.

And now I keep repeating the sentiment.

But if you knew how much time I have spent wondering why I have remembered the same highlights over and over...and nothing else...well, Shakespeare was right.

The only problem with this is now that I realize why I have missed so much of the movie, I wonder: will I be able to stomach the (whole) thing again? Along with being constantly annoyed by the seventies’ twist on the forties, what else is there in the film that is going to render me speechless? What other small details will cause me to either wring my hands or throw them up in despair? How long before I actually get up and toss the TV through the window? Or how long before I haul myself out the door, into the car, off to the mall and buy the music – which is what I ought to have done 496 viewings ago.

Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind...

Technorati Tags: Movies,Op Ed

Incidents or Accidents?

Everywhere I turn I keep running into Philip Larkin's...They f*** you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do...they fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you.


There are days when I think the entire world is haunting me. I have just finished reading a novel by a favourite author and found, page after page, coincidence, resonance, synchronicity, confluence and whatever else means striking similarity to my life, opinions, thoughts, expressions, partialities and so on.

There are days, too, when I am chatting with whomever about whatever, and seconds later, when I tune into my email page, I find the exact same topic in my spam box: diabetic children; radio tuning; cat hair removal; the benefits of cinnamon; box spring mattresses; cuticle remover. It's bizarre.

It isn't enough that the television has been talking to our family for decades, but it seems now that the universe is following me wherever I go.

Mind you, wouldn't that be lovely -- people from beyond our sphere contacting us in the way Houdini promised his wife he would (and, as far as I know, never did)? Imagine, for example, if every time you made a cup of tea, the sugar bowl magically appeared at your elbow, or each time you ran out of toilet paper while you were sitting in the bathroom -- eureka! -- a roll would appear at your side. (I have enough side rolls to keep me in a lifetime's worth of tissue, but that's another [sadder] story.)

Anyway, it's the poem these days. The Larkin one. It seems to be shadowing me, but I am not sure, apart from the obvious, what it is trying to tell me:

Forgive myself?


Apples and trees are seldom parted (and here, my dear, is where we started)?


Look inward, angel?


Don't forget to laugh?

I don't mean to be glib during these cloudier days, but occasionally I have to shift my umbrella sideways in order to see the sky and catch the full meaning of the ideas that follow me about. They are forever trying to teach me something, and I am afraid if I forget to pay attention I will not be able to do and give full service to this life of mine and ours.

As for Philip Larkin, I know all about the inevitable familial chain. But there are good things too that we take and we pass along, and maybe the most relevant part of this particular haunting are the words they may not mean to, but they do.


In the meantime, I'll keep checking over my shoulder. Should I come up with a more reasonable explanation, I'll let you know.

Charlie Sheen Is an A-hole

I don’t know who made the declaration that fame, illness or even megalomania permit people to behave asininely, but the notion is wrong. Everyone, except the clinically insane, has a responsibility to behave in a manner that qualifies as humane. No matter the degree of illness or addiction or experience, there are, as that wise woman once said, reasons but no excuses.

Charlie Sheen, looking haggard and spongy tired on air this morning, referred to his anger as “passion”; bragged that he has banged “seven gram rocks”; reminded us that he is “different”—that his heart and his constitution are like no other man’s; educated viewers by explaining that “dying [from a drug overdose] is for fools” and that people “should read the instructions before showing up for the party,” boasting that he is proud of what he has created by way of his recent debauchery, advising us that he has “exposed people to the magic.”

He also said, at least twice, that “cancer is the can’t of happen”—I have no idea what this means—and that he has been contacted by “radical” people—Sean Penn; Mel Gibson; Colin Ferrell—whom he clearly admires.

Wow, I said to myself. What an a-hole.

And here’s what else I know.

I had a mother who, lost in a complex confluence of tragic circumstances and who, following “radical” stomach surgery for a nine-year gastric ulcer that had transformed into life-threatening disease, began post-operatively, on her surgeon’s advice, to medicate herself with a snifter or two of brandy every night before going to bed. Comforted by alcohol and not much else, my mother soon found a way to ease her most pressing problems, and before long had become a full-fledged alcoholic.

To make a sad story less elaborate, it is enough to say that my mother drank her way into an early grave from an overdose of vodka and sleeping pills.

During all those years of drug and alcohol dependency, my mother never lost her compassion, her humour, her awareness that she was responsible for her actions, and never once did she exemplify the assertion that having died from addiction made her a fool.

What does qualify a person as idiotic, however, is when they, as a public figure, carry far too much weight with young adults and with individuals who are suffering from addiction. (We are all responsible for this, because we listen.) It wasn’t as if Charlie Sheen was making great strides in evolution with his and his producers’ bleakly themed Two and a Half Men (how much further back do we have to throw ourselves before we fully realize what damage we are causing our children?), but now we have to listen to him spew across the airwaves as he lambastes the people and the network who have furthered his career; demands ludicrous sums of money, and smugly contends that he is special and therefore not subjected to the same rules of law and living that the rest of us are.

That’s some magic all right.

I would give anything to bring my mother back to a happier life, to have been able to stop her self-destruction, to remind her of all that she was and all that she gave. I am also entirely certain that if my mother had a chance to make life better for people who are making the same mistakes she made, she would say that living with addiction is for fools, and that death, when it comes in the form of an overdose, not only kills the victim but squashes the better parts of all the people who loved the addict.

If there were a benevolent God who cared deeply for all of mankind (or, more simply, if there were justice), we would no longer be exposed to the inane, maniacal rants from the likes of Charlie Sheen. Someone would whisk down and yank him off to a long-term psychiatric facility, where, if he is capable, he could spend time rehabilitating himself and ridding himself of his egregious superiority and his overweening degree of entitlement.

Meantime, there is nothing much else to say other than Charlie Sheen is an asshole.