The Ballad of Amber and Johnny (to the tune of "Please Mr. Jailer")

I can't seem to take sides--they're both so childish. But it's fun to re-imagine old songs:

The Ballad of Amber and Johnny*

 

Please Mr. Jailer,

Won’t you lock ‘em both up now!

Please Mr. Jailer!

‘Cause they’re not highbrow!

 

He don’t belong in my life ‘cause he’s guilty as can be

But the only crime he’s guilty of is simply boring me.

But, you big courtroom, I like this here jamboree!

 

Hey judge she’s lying—I wasn’t boring at all!

Hey, judge she’s stupid! ‘Cause I got the biggest balls

Hey, judge she’s so wrong! ‘Cause I’m still handsome me!

 

He don’t belong in my life ‘cause he’s not Jack Sparrow now!

He’s fatter and he’s older than my sense of self allows!

I used to think he’s cute but (face palm) now I don’t see how!

 

Hey, Judge, she’s not nice—she cut my finger tip too

Hey, Judge she’s freaky—she left a gift of her poo

Hey, Judge, I’m tired—I really think she’s cuckoo!

 

All Rise, here’s my verdict—both of you kids stand up straight!

All Rise, here’s my verdict—and I won’t placate!

Miss Manners is waiting for you outside the courtroom gate

She’ll tutor each of you now! Her method is first-rate

And when she’s done with you, you’ll know the golden rule is great!

 

Oh, Mr. Jailer,

We’re more polite than you think!

Whoo-hooo!

Oh, Mr. Jailer!

Sorry both our stories stink!

 

*To the tune of “Please Mr. Jailer,” from his least known and possibly most brilliant film, Cry-Baby (1990)

 

Watch the original. Fasten your seat belt for “the lick” and “the growl”

No Time for A Spa: My 48-Hour Alternative

Step One: I walked into Lidl to scarf up everything I never buy: chocolate-chip cookies, two kinds of junky chocolate pudding, and sweet wine:

 

 

Step Two: I served it to myself. My favorite wineglass. A Plate. TV

After about four cookies, half of each of the puddings, and 3/4 of the glass of wine, I gave up. I was stuffed.

Step Three: I passed out on my bed while trying to read.

Step Four: I opened a book I was saving for the beach: Dan Brown's Origin. But I was too sleepy to read. Which is fine, because I really do want to lie under a beach umbrella somewhere like the North Sea and read this. 

Step Five: I slept for around ten hours. I think I went to bed at 9:30.

Step Six: The next day--today, that is--I got a haircut.

Step Seven: I bought all that overpriced shampoo and hair oil every salon tries to sell you. The stuff smelled good. 

Step Eight: I went impulse buying, a not remotely alarming sport for me. Net takeaways: a new toilet brush and a watering can.

Step Nine: I thought about re-writing all the stuff I'd planned to re-write rather than actually re-writing it.

Step Ten--the best: I managed not to feel one bit guilty.

Women and the Fourteenth Amendment

Justice Samuel Alito says that abortion was never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was slavery, until the thirteenth amendment abolished it. Neither was marriage between persons of different ethnicities. Neither were women. Yet the spirit of the nation was moving toward abolishing slavery, allowing marriage between different races and including women as equal partners in government. Not immediately, of course--the term "all men are created equal" didn't include  anyone who wasn't a white guy, usually a property-owning Protestant white guy. But those guys had more than an inkling that slavery was bad--see early drafts of the Declaration: https://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/compare.html. Note the stuff in the first and second drafts regarding slavery didn't make it into the final version, the reason being that the writers didn't want to abandon a large source of their wealth. But like Saint Augustine they wanted to be good--just "not yet."

Even if these guys hadn't already been considering the evils of slavery and other injustices, they were hearing about these things from underlings--like their wives. Abigail Adams told her husband, John, the second president of the United States, “Well I suppose we will have to have to have a new code of laws and when you write those laws, remember the ladies, because all men would be tyrants if they could.” Against slavery, in favor of universal public education for girls as well as boys, she made it known that women should be allowed to hold political office. 

When Alito claims that rights must be"deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition," and that the "right to abortion does not fall within this category," he's wrong. The country was always moving toward rights to privacy regarding one's own (male) body. If it hadn't been, we'd have had a constitutional amendment banning or permitting vasectomy. 

No one is arguing in favor of a slaughter of innocents or defending abortion as a contraceptive method.  Jill Lepore refers to the procedure as "morally thorny," a position I suspect we all take. When it comes to the crunch--when a woman's physical or mental health is threatened, when the pregnancy results from rape or incest, when the fetus is not viable but has a heartbeat at 20 or 30 weeks, it's cruel to ban abortion. 

It's up to women to define their physical and mental health needs; their privacy in making these decisions would be unquestioned if they were men.

A Human Being's Right to Choose

In 1973, when I was sixteen, the condom broke. My boyfriend and I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood and said I might need an abortion. Luckily, I didn't, but by the time I'd gotten my period, my psychoanalyst--like many an Upper West Side girl in the seventies in Manhattan, I'd been sent to an analyst--had fired a salvo: an abortion, he yelled, would have put me on the terrible slope of depression. Downhill all the way. Central casting's notion of a Viennese shrink, he assured me  "many women" came crying to him after abortions. They felt like they'd killed "the next U.S. president" or "a genius," he warned, adding insult to injury with "you're oversexed."

I'd had sex exactly once, and it had never occurred to me to imagine myself as a murderer killing the next U.S. president, a genius, or anyone else. I knew I wasn't ready to become a mother, nor did I want to incubate a child for nine months and give it away. I felt very grateful to know Planned Parenthood was there.

The Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decriminalized abortion nationwide in 1973. In April of that year, Ms. magazine published the police photograph of Gerri Santoro, dead, in a fetal position, blood soaking through towels between her legs. She looked as though she'd died in agony. That photo drove home to me the need for women to have access to safe, legal abortions. 

Published one year before Gerri Santoro's terrible death was revealed, Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen included an abortion scene, a woman home, in pain and terrified, lucky to have survived, taken to the hospital, where a doctor won't perform the D&C that would prevent complications, bleeding, infections. 

Until 2018, the Catholic church let Irish women die when a heart was still beating in the chest of a brain-dead fetus. Ten years ago, Savita Halappanavar, a dentist living in Galway, began bleeding, but because the non-viable four-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat, she was sacrificed on the altar of the Irish church, dying of blood poisoning. Medically trained herself, Halappanavar knew the risks of heavy bleeding during a miscarriage, and wanted to live. Six years after her 2012 death--at age 31, from entirely preventable sepsis--Ireland finally passed the Health Act, giving women the right to abortion.

I'll never forget the Irish woman who told me the story of her mother dying giving birth to her eleventh child--the child died too, she said. At the time of her mother's death in the early nineteen-sixties, Irish doctors who had to choose between the life of the mother and that of the baby picked the baby's life, on the grounds that the child was not yet baptized. 

Ireland has come a long way in advancing human and women's rights. The United States Supreme Court should not devolve, taking us all back to the days of coat-hanger  and back-street and other dangerous abortions. Abortion is a matter of personal health care and should remain protected. No woman should be berated for her choices, as I was, or prevented from making them, or offered anything but respect during what for many women is a difficult and painful decision.