Regarding Yoselyn Ortega: Comments from the Critical Mom

Since I've gotten replies regarding my views of Yoselyn Ortega, I'm posting again on this topic:  my response is too long to post as a reply.

I'm not sympathizing with the nanny!  To say she's unhappy is not to sympathize--I'm pointing out that people who kill are not happy people.  They are usually desperate people. I agree with your descriptions of her as a narcissist and a psychopath and a sadist.  I agree that no one could have foreseen a murder.  But I don't agree that no one could have foreseen that Yoselyn Ortega was going to do something bad--and probably to the children.  I don't agree that when the mother and the nanny are having heated arguments things are likely to be okay with the kids.  I do know what it is like to have a situation in which the kid likes the nanny and you don't anymore--then what?  But this is different.  If reports are true (and who knows?) that Marina Krim and Yoselyn Ortega were arguing heatedly and that Yoselyn Ortega, leaving for the day after the argument, said "goodbye," and that Marina Krim ignored her, then I think that's already putting the children at a disadvantage.  The mother's relationship with the nanny defines the nanny's behavior toward the children, at least, the mother must assume that it does, because the mother has the power to hire and fire and the nanny's livelihood depends on the mother's good will.  If the nanny is behaving in some undesirable way already--here it seems to have been, before these murders--acting apathetic and feeding the kids junk food, then the parent has to say to him or herself, okay, SHE'S WATCHING MY KIDS.  Yelling at her, if that is what happened, will make her do something bad to the kids--she won't take it out on you, the employer, if she's desperate for a job and if she is a sadistic narcissist.  She's going to take it out on the kids.  Not necessarily murder them--the murderous nanny is a breathtakingly unusual phenomenon, more common in fiction than in reality--the New York Times called her "unique." But in a situation where the mother feels angry at the nanny, disgusted with her performance, and wants to tell her "shape up or get out"--which had already happened, apparently--then that "shape up or get out" is exactly the mistake.  In this situation, the mother could do the following:
(1) "Yoselyn, you need a vacation.  We'll pay.  Here's ________. Go see your family."
(2) "Yoselyn, things aren't working out.  Here's ____________."

Or just fire her.  But you can't leave anyone with the kids if you think that person is no longer good with them.  I know what happens--you hire someone, they're great for a year or two, you get fond of them, and then something goes wrong in their lives and they're really a different person--now they're depressed, stressed, forgetful, apathetic.  And you want to be fair to them.  But the mother can't close her eyes to the change in personality or behavior and hope that things will improve, nor can she tell the nanny to shape up if she's already got the feeling that the nanny is in a state of permanent sulks or very cold or very sad.  The mother is always in the position of evaluating the nanny's personality.  
I once had an au pair who was a very sweet, young (sixteen years old) girl whose family wanted her to learn English with us.  She sat in her room painting her toenails and I said, "Look, you've really got to go upstairs and tell the boys to get out of their pajamas and into their clothes."  They had told her they were fine and she took them at their word.  She really did not understand that her job entailed standing in the doorways of their rooms and saying, "It's time to get out of those pajamas and into your clothes--now!!"  Once I really spelled out things, she could function and the main thing is she was SWEET.  If I had felt that she really resented me for telling her what I expected, or was angry or depressed, I'd have talked to her at some length just to figure out what I was dealing with. 
I'm not blaming the Krims when I say they failed to see how unhappy a person Yoselyn Ortega was--and is.   The failure of imagination to see Ortega's degree of pathology is a typical failure of normal, happy people.  I don't think the Krims ever experienced pathological people before.  As I said in an earlier post I myself grew up in a family filled with crazy people.  Just about every pathology you list above was there.  And that kind of experience, growing up in a family like mine, gives you a watchfulness, an almost compulsive sense of needing to observe people, that the Krims, with their more normal background, just did not have.  I could say it takes one to know one, but I'll promise you I'm not a murderer.  But I sure have wanted to kill someone.  A thin line of "decency" or "civilization" or "self-control" luckily keeps me and most people from acting on the occasional impulse to kill.  Then there's the lie-down-with-dogs-get-up-with fleas phenomenon in the blanket term "dysfunctional family," so I can say that I saw my father railing that "the communists" were bugging his light bulbs, but I'm not paranoid, except when I am really looking over a person whom I might hire to care for my children.  I saw my mother flitting around pretending she was Peter Pan, grinning like mad when daily conversations revealed she was almost desperate enough to kill herself, and I'm not suicidal, but there's a certain weariness in a person's face that tips me off, if I'm considering hiring them to care for my children.  I've seen my brother holding long conversations with persons that neither I nor anyone else can see, and I don't have imaginary friends myself, but I do always imagine what's going on in someone's head when I'm talking to them.  I'm always expecting the worst, and reminding myself that actually the world can be a pretty good place.  But If the world is pleasant most of the time--if you grew up with parents whom you loved and who listened to you--you don't question things and you don't observe things, unless you're a born poet.  The Krims have met evil face to face for the first time in their lives, and my heart goes out to them.  Thank you for your thoughts, and I'd be interested in hearing from you again.

After the Election: The Critical Mom

In our small German city, the networks were beating the bushes for Americans to interview, which is how my husband and I ended up on local TV--me looking frumpier than Angela Merkel on a bad hair day. The interviewer wanted to know what I thought, but he wanted to know it auf Deutsch, "Because zen I don't have to over-voice it," he added, in English. 

"Dub it," I corrected sourly.  And told them, auf Deutsch, that we'd gotten up at 3:00 a.m. to watch the polls and that naturally I'd voted for Obama.  Cut to my husband, who discoursed authoritatively, the lucky native speaker--and he's really good-looking, too.
I was relieved when my part was over; I had the usual problem of sounding like an ungrammatical four year old with an accent that--after this election--would not have to be lied about.  I'm happy that I don't have to insist that I'm Canadian, when people ask.  Germans tend to think that I'm English or American, and now I can reveal that I am indeed American--I'm confident I can even do so for at least the next four years.  Yes, my fellow Americans, I denied my country of origin repeatedly during the Bush years, and was all set to do so again should the Age of Romney (known, in some alternate universe, as the Last Age of Humanity or The End of The World) have dawned.   
That evening, the three kids, my husband, and I all crowded around the TV at 7:30 in the evening and saw how forty-five minutes of interview could be boiled down into four minutes.  Gone were the parts where I told them I was so nervous watching those exit polls that I baked a New York state cheesecake--even though I said it auf Deutsch--because I looked directly at the camera instead of conversing with my colleague and my husband.  Hadn't understood those auf Deutsch instructions again.  I usually understand around seventy percent of what people say, but only under stress-free conditions.  Gone were the parts where I told the interviewer--slipping into English--exactly why Romney's humorless, business-oriented, heartless leadership would have been all wrong.  Gone even the part where I walked down the hall and entered my office--because I fumbled with the key.
All this gave me a genuine admiration for people who stand in front of a camera, smile, look good, and make sense all day long on a campaign trail.  Wow.  I saw myself up there on that screen and wanted to shout:  "Sit up straight and don't look so crabby!  And couldn't you have combed your hair?  And of all days to wear your glasses!  AND YOU LOOK SO OLD!"  A phrase I could not stop repeating to myself, so that when my daughter was hopping around saying, "Mommy!  You were on the news!  You and Daddy were on the news!"   I couldn't help mumbling, "But I looked soooo old."  

"Aw, Mommy," she said, waving her little hand, "Everybody has times like that! Don't worry."  It made me think of our good luck: first, our luck with this very close election, since whatever happens in the next four years, we know it could only have been worse with Romney, whose most telling failure is his utter lack of humor (after Hurricane Isaac saying he was grateful to be on dry land, or cracking that no one ever asked to see his birth certificate).  Obama may make mistakes but he loves a joke at his own expense--calling a voter in the west sometime on election night, he said the guy "didn't know who I was."  He loves his wife, loves that America fell in love with her, and says so.  It is just his honesty and freedom of emotion that Romney looks down on.  A lack of humor is the last thing we need in these increasingly desperate times.  Good leaders usually have a good sense of humor.  Think of Churchill's hilarious quips about everything from Hitler to his own old age (when someone told him his fly was open, he said, "dead birds don't fall out of nests.") 

I felt lucky as well that my husband and children are with me and doing so well.  I thought again of the heartache of the Krim family and then of how in the past mothers lived through crises we don't want to imagine:  Mary Rowlandson, the seventeeth century colonial American settler was kidnapped with her young daughter by American Indians whose land had been stolen.  Rowlandson's relatives were tortured and disemboweled before her eyes and her daughter, who was the same age as Lulu Krim, died slowly of her wounds during their captivity in the woods.  And I thought of Mary Shelley, daughter of a brilliant feminist who died of sepsis after giving birth to her (and whose grief-stricken father was unable to love her) enduring during her fifth pregnancy, at 22, a miscarriage that nearly killed her--she'd already written Frankenstein, and she'd already lost babies to illness, dystentary and everything that a quick call to the pediatrician could fix today in a minute.  Her heartbreaking journal chronicles dreams after the death of a baby: "Dreamed my little baby was alive.  Awake and find no baby."  Not to mention the utter failure of Percy Shelley as a husband and father--and it was just her luck that he went and got drowned.  How did these women cope?  In the only ways possible:  Rowlandson convinced herself that her tragedy had meaning--the meaning seems bizarre today, namely that God had planned every horrible event in order to make her a better Christian--but that belief sustained her to a ripe old age.  Mary Shelley, as we all know, wrote and wrote and wrote, making enough to send her surviving son to the best British boarding school.   Faith if you can manage it, work if you cannot:  these are the keys to survival.  I urge all my readers to support the arts education LuluLeo Fund founded by the Krims in memory of their children.

Victorious President Obama and The Critical Mom

"I saw Mommy vote!" said my eight-year-old, remembering me laboriously filling out the ellipsis in black, putting the paper ballot inside an envelope and that envelope inside a mailing envelope--and I hope it got there and was counted.   My vote for Obama was predicated on hope, not absolute faith.  But Romney's concession solidified my sense of having cast the right vote:  he remained cold and formulaic, with a revolting touch of sentimentality, namely that his wife "woulda made a great first lady."  Sentimentality, Oscar Wilde remarked, is the bank holiday of cynicism, and the District of Columbia recognized this, voting overwhelmingly for Obama.  I thought back to John McCain's concession four years ago, so heartfelt and sincere:  "He is my president," he said.  The concession speech is invariably revealing, because it's delivered under unimaginable pressures, and the grace of John McCain's speech broadcast his character--a man who believed what he was saying and fought for it with all his energy--a man I could respect, although I'd never vote for him.  Had Romney won, America might never have had a chance to recover from disastrously oligarchic--nah, plutocratic--tendencies fueled by the Reagan administration and pumped up by the Bush dynasty.  It could have been even worse.  What if Rick Santorum  had stayed in the race?  We might have ended up with a dystopia straight out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale--in which women are deprived of the right to earn or keep money, or even to learn to read, and are designated asexual wives or raped handmaids.  Now, with a still-young leader whose sense of honor carries the day, perhaps there's hope.  But the utter division of the country--the nearly fifty-fifty split--bodes no good.  My husband and I were up at 3:30 a.m. German time, imagining that we'd know for sure by then.  No dice.  Wolf Blitzer was hoarsely delivering an analysis of a Florida poll as a 49% lead for Obama clicked--at that moment--into a 50% lead for Romney.  "Whoa!" said Blitzer, whose sly asides conceal not at all his enthusiasm for Romney's defeat:  "I'm not saying this to rain on Romney's parade," Blitzer zinged at one point.  By six a.m. German time we were no further ahead--it's only now, at 9:10 a.m. German time, that the numbers are finally settling into place and establishing how close an election we experienced.  

Now it's noon here, and I'm thinking back to the debates, and the way Democrats chewed their nails and made excuses like "Obama's not a debater--he's a great speaker!"  But what if the chilly remoteness we saw--they said he was "wooden," they said he was sleepy, they said the Denver altitude did him in--what if all that "woodenness" was strategy?  What if Obama's debate demeanor was his sly way of mirroring Romney's real attitude?  What if Obama wanted to say, "Okay, I have to stand up here and debate you, but I'm not going to engage with you because you're a fake.  Instead, I'll stand up here and mimic the way I know you feel about the American people instead."  Hey, maybe every move was calculated.  Maybe the October 15 New Yorker cover showing Romney debating to an empty lectern was broadcasting the message:  Obama's too busy running the country to take time out for an opportunist like you.

Last thoughts:  Loved the tweet asking:  "What's Herman Cain thinking now?"
P.S.  We should all celebrate by enjoying this video:
 

The Fight with Yoselyn Ortega and the Critical Mom

Friends have told me of summers spend slaving away as au pairs, sent to wash stacks of laundry and hang it all out on the line--while watching four or five children.  One told me of feeling sad at being far from home and being told by her employer: "I don't want to see your unhappy face!  You go in there and smile at my children."  This particular friend, because she was young and less disturbed than Yoselyn Ortega, swallowed her sobs, grit her teeth, and pasted on a smile.  Can't we assume that the children for whom she cared would have been happier if she had not been forced to fight her sorrows alone?  If the nanny has an unhappy face then she's an unhappy person taking care of your children.  If only for their sake, you owe the nanny a conversation and an attempt to discover why she's unhappy.  You owe her even if you're not interested in the nanny and don't give a damn about her.  You owe her because you want her to feel interested in your kids.  Believe me, if you don't give a damn about the nanny and how she feels, she'll figure that out and why wouldn't she take it out on your kids?  The happiness of the nanny decides the happiness of the kid--or if not, then you're lucky.  I can't understand why anyone would want a woman who's an emotional wreck to take care of their children.  The latest tidbit about Yoselyn Ortega is that she had an argument with Marina Krim the day before the murders--that they were yelling at each other, the mother demanding that Ortega "interact" more with the children and not feed them junk food.  These are red flags.  If you're yelling at the nanny, you're yelling at the person who is supposed to protect your treasures.   Not at someone who is doing faulty work on an assembly line and who can be bullied into picking up speed.   
Why is it not obvious that a mother has a vested interest in keeping her nanny happy?  The first thing you look for is a cheerful person.  Competence comes next.  The first thing you notice is the moment when the nanny isn't her happy self anymore--In I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron develops a theory about babysitters--that after a few years they wear out the way anything wears out.   Childcare wears you out even when you love your children and they're the light of your life.  They're still the ones you yell at when they forget to flush the toilet for the thousandth time, use cuss words you told them not to say, or throw a towel on the floor after using it once even though they know they are supposed to hang it up.  Usually we don't murder them for things like this--and usually neither would the nanny.  But we don't want to take any chances with a babysitter who feels undervalued, underpaid, or exploited.   No matter how irrational the demands of Yoselyn Ortega, they should have been taken seriously for the sake of the kids.  The Krim children are the victims of parents who failed to see that a nanny could possibly be as unhappy as Yoselyn Ortega.  A profound failure of imagination fueled this tragedy.

Yoselyn Ortega and the Critical Mom

No second chances--no "okay, we'll pay you more, and you do a little housework, or we'll have to let you go."  Which is the latest morsel of information on Yoselyn Ortega and her motive for apparently murdering her charges.  No.  When things go wrong with the nanny, you offer her a vacation or you say, "Here's ___________."  Fill in the sum.  And say goodbye.  This is the point where you know that SHE WILL NOT IMPROVE.  And you don't owe her more than a generous severance pay.  The children always come first.   You can't defer to their remaining affection for the nanny when your hunches tell you something's off.   If there's any moral in this sad story, maybe it is that the parents felt that they had to be decent to the woman who had worked so long for them, who had seemed so wonderful, loved the children.  It's the very decency of the Krims that destroyed them.  

Nannies, au pairs, almost always feel exploited.  Sometimes they feel that way because they are young and far from home.  Sometimes we ask too much of them.  Sometimes their lives implode and we don't see it.  But from the moment that their discontent becomes evident, we have to address it.  My first au pair, the one who became a friend, looked sad and grumpy at one point, and I asked what was the matter.  At nineteen, and because we had been friendly though a local swimming club, she didn't like to tell me.  She just said, "Oh, nothing," and after talking to my husband, I said, "I think you need a vacation--it's an enormous change coming here to New York after growing up in a small German town."  And I sent her on a visit to my best friend, where she walked in the woods, met American teenagers her age and made smoothies with them, and got enough sleep.  I asked my friend to do a bit of sleuthing and find out what was bothering her, and my friend did find out:  the au pair felt exploited, felt that we were asked too much, but felt better after the end of the vacation.  She found out some au pairs were making more than she was making--and it turned out they were working longer hours, too.  But she seemed happier after her vacation and the rest of her year went without incident.

Our second au pair seemed unsure of herself before she started working for us.  She loved the idea of going to New York for a year, but I had the uneasy sense that she had vague dreams of glamor and no idea what working long hours with an 18-month-old would be like.  The mistake I made lay in imagining that she would get used to New York and to me and to her work.   Instead, every attempt I made to ease her transition--buying her classes, access to a swimming pool--made no difference.  She grew increasingly non-communicative, her face discontented.  I arranged for her sister to visit, and things went better for a while, but eventually I grew afraid that she would harm my son, and since she kept saying she was lonely, I got friends to come over and stay "just to help you out," but she wasn't fooled.  "They're checking up on me!" she yelled.  I said I thought she looked worn out, and just wanted her to have some help.  That must have felt like a big insult, and she stomped out, after throwing her swimming pool card at me.  My son walked after her, saying "Bye!  Bye!" and she ignored him.  A day later I got a phone call from a lawyer who lived around the corner, and with whose family she had moved in, asking what was going on--she said we were exploiting her and had thrown her out!  I told him I had been afraid for my son's safety.  How old was my son?  When I told him, he burst out laughing:  no wonder I was scared.  We arranged for me to bring over her mail, and I arranged for friends to stay at my home and babysit until we found someone else.  We were extremely lucky.

The Nanny Murders, Again

None of us can banish this tragedy from our minds.  Not just because of the murder of innocents, the senselessness of the murder, the trust invested in the nanny who betrayed the children, the mother, the father, and herself.  We know how much fatigue we can take before bitchiness, then psychosis, sets in:  we know we yell at the kids because we haven't had a good night's sleep.  We all know we would never kill, but we hate being reminded that the ghost of hostility toward our own kids ever flitted through our dreams.  We can assume that the nanny had a psychotic break--we can assume that when she killed, she thought she was killing a devil, or she thought she was protecting the children from a devil.  Or we can assume other things.  Scenarios develop every few minutes, each with a degree of plausibility, each unsatisfying, because the explanation will never make up for the crime.  Conspiracy theories have appeared on blogs:  the CNBC executive father went after the "banksters" who then went after his kids, mind-controlling the nanny, or making her take the blame for some intruder who got away, the theory goes.  Sometimes I think the parents were too normal.  If like me you've grown up in a home filled with crazy people--the father who thought the light bulbs were bugged, the mother who pretended to herself that she was a naughty little girl and you were her mommy, the brother who saw and spoke with people from space ships that no one else could see or hear--then you hone your observation skills to the point of paranoia.  You're always watching.  You're always interpreting.  You're always ready to conjecture that a change of mood could mean the worst.  Your vigilance, your readiness for crisis, erodes your ability to enjoy life, but the habit of ever-focused watching and analysis readies you for the real emergency, incidentally weeding out bad nanny candidates.  But if you've grown up in a normal, loving home, perhaps you cannot imagine the worst.   Your imagination takes you as far as fatigue and menopausal woes and money troubles, not as far as the violence that can erupt as a result.  If you haven't seen it, lived it, you have--in some ways--fewer protections.  These murders have had the side effect of reminding me that perhaps I did gain something worth having from growing up in my crazy family.   One of our au pairs was unhappy from the beginning of her stay, and two weeks into her tenure--after she'd come home at four in the morning and I'd told her this would not do, she'd said "You're not my mother!"  I said, "No, I'm not.  I'm my son's mother, and I don't want the person who is taking care of him while I am at work to be exhausted."  She laughed.  She saw my point.  But the problem was that she needed her mother, and instead of being her mother--which she absolutely did not want for me to be, and which I had no wish to become--I was asking her to engage in activities performed by mothers when I was at work.  Which continued to make her wish for her mother, or wish (in spite of herself) for me to be some form of her mother.  I sent my friends over to protect my son while she was still working for me, and she stomped out.  Good riddance!  Her predecessor had worked out wonderfully, but that girl always seemed very heads up to me, and we're still friends now that she has three children of her own.  

The Nanny and the Critical Mom

"This woman is unique," said The New York Times.  It's more likely that a mother will kill her children than that a nanny will murder her charges.  Reading the story of the nanny who apparently knifed the children--a six-year-old and two-year-old--in the bathtub--it occurred to me that the murderous nanny appears in novels, films and stories more than she appears in real life.  In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's ghost story, a child dies in his governess's arms, and it's not even clear whether she's killed him.  How the nanny who killed the Krim children didn't get stopped is a question I'll never stop asking.   Did the parents not notice changes in moods?  Did the children say nothing?  I have a long history of hiring babysitters and au pairs.  So far, they've always behaved just as I expected they would.  There were women who applied for the job--and some men--whom we never hired.  First I thought we'd go through agencies, until a former student who had worked for one of the most expensive American agencies told me no one ever checked her references.  That, on top of being told by a woman at one agency I called--who confided, "Listen, I'm leaving tomorrow to start my own agency," that all kinds of stuff, from stealing to prostitution, happened all the time.  That checks by the agency were invariably superficial.  That I'd do better checking things out myself.  And just as I was starting to phone every name on the list an au pair candidate had given me, our friend who'd worked for the American agency weighed in with another story:  the family who had hired her had just received another au pair from the very same agency.  Who left the baby locked in the car while she went to the gym, then absconded with the family's credit card.  And was on a plane back to Poland the next day, and thank God the baby was okay after his three-hour sojourn in a car in sub-zero weather in Chicago.

No one knows enough about what drove the Krim's nanny to murder their children.  Will we ever?  The report that stays with me is that the nanny looked sick and distraught before the killings, and that for days she was visibly losing weight.  Did the family notice this?  Did the children?  Did the people to whom the parents recommended the nanny and who did not hire her, finding her "a little grumpy" have a reasonable hunch that something bad might happen?

This case has made me review everyone we ever hired to care for our children.  I remember the more comically unsuitable rejects--websites with apparently desperate Russian men who described themselves as follows:  "I Boris.  I truck drive.  I like kids."   A crazed mug--Tony Soprano on steroids, or Jack the Ripper with huge, poorly sewn scars across the neck and forehead, stared out of the ad, and I'd click on the next one, hoping to find something better.  And I'd find glamorous sex kittens with silicone lips purring: "I require _________ (fill in the outrageous sum) for my services, because I am well trained."  It was enough to make me check the website:  had Google somehow accidentally jumped me to a porn site, or to one for mail-order brides?  But no, it was the same standard "Nanny.com" site I'd been combing all morning.
We're all waiting for the one clue that will make sense of this, but none of the clues add up to murder:  "Oh, the babysitter looking wierd and losing weight," or "Oh, the babysitter having money worries and requesting extra hours."   That might have been enough to make me want to replace her.  But not enough to make me suspect her capable of doing what this nanny did.   If Sherlock Holmes could appear and find a fingerprint proving that no, she didn't do it--she was threatened, there was an intruder who got past the doorman by swinging through the window, he was a drug dealer, he did it and the nanny only felt responsible--well, then, the world could make sense again.  But the hurricane, the monster hurricane following these murders feels like nature in revolt against the unnatural behavior of humans.

The Critical Mom and the English Teachers

The critical mom is American, as you probably know.  The critical mom has on previous occasions grumbled at the locally-held delusion that British accents sound good and American accents sound like chewing gum.  The critical mom enjoys hearing her children imitate the accents produced by their classmates, especially when those classmates have been singing.  As in:

Old Meck-Tonald head a farm

Eye-eye, eye-eye, oh! (alternatively, "Ay-yi, oh!)

Und on zis farm zaire vas a pick,

Eye-eye, eye-eye, oh!

Those "th" sounds defeat them completely.  The "d" sounds so much like the "t" to them, and vice versa.  Also difficult is the hard g, also the soft g, so that "pig" becomes "pick" and "Sponge" becomes "Spunch" and Sponge Bob becomes "Spunch" (rhymes with crunch) Bop, as in bopping along, not much listening to language become global.  Another favorite often brayed lustily by my sons:

Heppy Burs-day tow you!

Heppy Burs-day tow you! . . .  

Sometimes the "H" gets that gutteral, I'm-coughing-up-a-hairball sound, too.  And we know a little girl named "Chenny."

"You mean Jenny?" I asked her mother.

"Ja!  Chenny."

If you want to erase your accent, or make it possible to hide your German identity, all ya gotta do is:

(1) Get that "th" sound--YouTube has lots of pronunciation exercises on this one, but basically, to make the sound at the beginning of the word "this," you have to touch the tip of your tongue to the backside of your two front teeth.  And if you want the word "think," you blow out a little, as if you were blowing a big bubble with your bubblegum.

(2) Learn how to pronounce "J" as in "Jack," and this one is harder.

(3) Learn how to pronounce "V" and "W" and don't get them confused.  And if you do all that, I just God-damn guarantee you that folks will guess you are from somewhere in Europe, but they won't know where.  And they will think that you sound "so sophisticated."  Take it from me.  How well I remember the Bavarian restaurant owner who catered our wedding.  His dream was to marry a rich American.  He heard--from an American friend of mine--something about a rich Guggenheim, and wandered around the whole wedding dinner murmuring:  "Guggenheim?  Guggenheim?"  I assured him that he could pass himself off as a count in New York.  None of those folks would ever guess that in Bavaria his accent betrays him as a peasant.

Recipes and the Critical Mom

I love fancy ones.  But I'm a Fannie Farmer cookbook kind of a gal.  My ideal is Ruth Reichl; my reality is somewhere between Peg Bracken and inspiration.  I'll take the tried-and-true cookies and banana bread and scones and cakes from Fannie Farmer--also the meatloaf, if we're still eating meat--and in a pinch I'll go very nineteen fifty-three and pour a can of Campbell's mushroom soup over four chicken breasts salted and peppered and paprika-ed and then a few fresh mushooms over that and then a container of heavy cream.  In the oven that goes at 375ºF (190ºC) for an hour.  When true guilt about cholesterol hits me I fry tofu in vegetable oil, drain it, stir fry bok choi or ming choi or any Chinese cabbage that looks good with baby corn cobs that have been boiled for five minutes, Chinese scallions, the kind that are really skinny, all with lots of finely chopped garlic and finely chopped fresh ginger.  Then throw the fried tofu back in, heat and stir, and at the very last minute add a few drips of very dark (the very aromatic kind) Sesame oil, and a dash or two of soy sauce.  Voila.  Forgot to mention you serve that with the Basmati rice you've been cooking.  It should be the very good kind, which means the kind you need to soak for half an hour before starting it boiling.  This kind of rice has a lovely aroma.  

Now, my mother hated cooking.  Following recipes meant some restriction on freedom that reminded her of her parents putting metal caps over her hands when she wanted to suck her thumbs.  They did that to babies in the olden days, and they put nasty stuff on her thumb, too, so she wouldn't want to suck it.  In revenge she made mud pies whenever the recipe told her to add precisely this or that, imagining that you could substitute honey for corn syrup or that a Sachertorte could be made from angel food cake with a little jam smeared on it and some chocolate sauce.  Or maybe it was just the joy of mixing that did in her cooking:  creating textures and colors--the perfect technique for painting portraits, her greatest talent--did not work well with cooking.  My father adored cooking, and though his recipes tended toward the extremely eccentric--boiled cucumbers, one time--they were always delicious.  He favored cholesterol-high foods and my mother cholesterol-free foods, except when she's wolfing down chocolate ice cream in the middle of the night.  On days when my father comes to mind, I cook shepherd's pie with globs of butter and cream in the mashed potatoes.  On days when thoughts of my mother ascend, it's more likely to be tofu.   A smorgasbord of memory and food.

The Critical Mom and Baby Talk

On the tram today my friend was bouncing her thirteen-month-old daughter on her knee; the little girl produced such a sociable string of babble that I wished I could have understood her.  She untied her shoelaces for me and seemed very pleased with herself.  I started remembering when my ten-year-old first started talking:  he uttered long strings of sounds earnestly and I tried to transcribe them:  "Bah, bawa wuppah bu muh nuhbubbbaa . .  ." complete with serious nods and sweeping gestures, or he pointed energetically at his red truck and grunted appreciatively.  I knew that meant "Bring it here now!"  But I said, "Oh, you'd like the red truck, wouldn't you?"  since language specialists think that conversing with the child increases his urge to use language.  He responded with increasingly urgent grunts, jabbing his finger insistently at the truck, his eyes bulging.  Even though I knew perfectly well that meant, "Give me that truck instantly or I will scream, scream, scream," I said, with a smile that I believed at the time was encouraging, "Can you say truck?"  I was afraid he'd never speak.   He did reply, on his own terms, naturally:  Grunt, grunt, with a few growls thrown in.  I handed over the truck and he gave me the look you'd give to a waiter who hands you burned food with a smile.  I was telling the ten-year-old about his infant communications about his truck, and he said, "Aw, Mommy.  I was trying to say 'fire truck'--just without the f, the i, the t, the u, the c, or the k.  Got it, Mommy?"  Yes, I did.  And I do.

The Critical Mom and the Awful Sit-Com

If it's not "I Love Lucy" I hate it.  What passes for humor in the sit coms favored by my children--and I find them hard to tell apart, the sit coms that is, not the kids, is a guy peeing in his pants during his own wedding, which the kids found hilarious and I didn't, or the dumb rich girl (London on Zack and Cody, the only one whose name I remember) bribing her teacher with a suitcase filled with cash in order to get a good grade.  Which she gets.  This particular turn of the plot brought home to me its probably creators:  grad students who have abandoned the dissertation for Hollywood, and are remembering their favorite nightmares.  I just heard another version of this not infrequent story:  the principal told a young teacher in a high school somewhere in this small city in which I live that she couldn't give her students less than a grade of B minus, because otherwise the school would receive less money from the wealthy parents who were bypassing the teacher to bribe the principal.   While the TV is spewing canned laughter and London is bribing her teacher, the kids are laughing, I am making dinner while bustling around hissing, "This IS NOT funny!"  and naturally that makes it even funnier.  Meanwhile, the usual track is playing in my mind:  "How come we even have a TV?  Why didn't I stick to the let-them-watch-DVDS-that-I-choose mode?  Think how many books they would have read by now if they had never seen one of those dumb shows . . ."  Well, but they're doing okay.  They're reading cookbooks and building dioramas out of old wooden wine boxes and holding Lego pirate and soldier battles . . . and when I was the age of my middle child, ten, I used to rush home from school to watch--of all things--Dark Shadows, which I found scary and sophisticated.  What was my mother thinking, letting me while away hours in front of the idiot box?  I should have been shuffling off to a tap dance class or ballet or recorder lessons or violin lessons.  But I watched Dark Shadows instead, which I now think of as a sit com, and learned to do vampire imitations the way my children are now learning to do Zack and Cody imitations. . . plus ça change . . .

The Critical Mom and Planet of the Apes

So, Marky Mark crash lands back on earth . . . he thinks he's in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but it's a little dark at first and you can't see the secret.  Is it a bird?  A plane?  No!  It's Ape-ra-ham Lincoln.  It's a statue in the shape of Lincoln with an ape's head.  That's the end of this weird re-make of the 1968 Rod Serling Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston finds himself unexpectedly facing the statue of liberty poking out of the sand, and realizes that he's home, only home isn't home anymore.  Liberty is sinking back into the sand, but in the Tim Burton version, the slaves have been freed by Ape-raham Lincoln?  So the humans are the bad guys again?  Is this Hegelian?  But Tim Burton first supplies Helena Bonham Carter with an ape costume rendering her a dead ringer for Michael Jackson.  Michael Jackson as a man who wanted to look like a woman?  A black person who wanted to look white?  Is that the kind of ape the movie wants to promote?  Dressed up as Roman soldiers, the apes batter, torture, and brand the humans, who can all speak, but who are tied up in chain gangs and sold on the open market.   In her Michael Jackson apesuit, Helena Bonham Carter plays a combination of Mother Theresa and Booker T. Washington, gibbering away about "separate but equal."  She falls in love with Marky Mark, who plays a U.S. air force pilot blown off course, who lands on the Planet of the Apes, which is actually, because of "let's do the time warp again," turns out to be our very own earth, only the apes who had taken over on his space ship have now evolved their own society, and become the masters, no longer the slaves of humans who send them off in rockets on missions deemed too dangerous for themselves.  Yes, it's all here--the sensitive, female, ape Michael Jackson; the harsh racism of the apes complaining about the way humans smell, and oh, yeah, the world trade center wreckage done up to look like a rocket.  If you're into Dystopia, it's all here.  But me, I'll watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers next time.

The Critical Mom and the Bored Child

"Mommy I am so bored . . . will you read to me?"  This I love to do . . . especially when it is something I enjoy reading.  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and the radish cure, the one about the little girl who won't take a bath until the radish seeds planted in the rapidly thickening topsoil all over her arms and forehead sprout big leafy green leaves.  Or the madcap adventures of the "children of the lamp," who at the moment have been turned into camels by their Uncle Nimrod in order to see the pyramids at Giza.  Or Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow changing places, the Stanley Fish character chewing the large cigar on his way to England, the timid Philip sipping orange juice on his way to San Francisco in 1968, where all his inhibitions will be dissolved in the student riots.  Now that last one had some raunchy bits--should I read this to the 13-year-old, I thought, as I was reading it to the 13-year-old, who had been eager to hear stories about why England is dumb and America is better, since the teachers back at his gymnasium keep telling my little native speakers to change their accents to British?  I read.  He gets worse on You-Tube.  As my daughter said one day coming home from English class, "Mommy, I was so bored I put my head down on the table."  But degrees of boredom vary:  "Mommy," she also said with surprise, "It's amazing how much fun school can be when Frau X isn't teaching."  Frau X is the one they apparently can't fire, because of inertia or regulations or she's tenured or who knows?  She's the one who told a nine-year-old who asked why his painting wasn't pinned up to the wall (she would have to ruin art class for them) "Because your painting is shit!"  She's the one who won't let first-graders out to use the bathroom and they wet themselves.  "The only thing they get out of her," one mother said, "is good handwriting."  And boredom, when they sit, stiff with good behavior, hoping she'll just calm down.  Never have I been more aware that education happens at home.  As a matter of fact I am home-schooling them.  Back when they were babies it was all CDS of American folk songs that they'd be missing since they went to German kindergartens.  Now it's reading, reading, reading, and me yelling "Speak English!!!"  The schooling that occurs from eight to two every day is almost incidental.  It's the thing they have to get through in order to come home, have a decent meal, and then "Let's see what the children of the lamp are doing now that they're stuck in the bottle." or "Next we'll read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's cure for the show-off," or "This part is about this thing called the Berkeley Free Speech movement, back when Mommy was eleven years old . . ."

The Critical Mom and the Debate

America buys youth, but will it buy Paul Ryan?  He's ethnically identical to Joe Biden, but younger, cockier, and more earnest.  It's the overly earnest part of him that may have done him in.  I'm banking on Obama, but I know his youth was part of the ticket to his success.  Biden and Ryan have in common their Catholic identity, which makes them want to take care of people--but their ideas of doing so diverge, especially when it comes to medicare.  Biden could barely contain his contempt for the "malarky" and "stuff" coming out of Paul Ryan. What, the moderator wanted to know, was "stuff?"  Chortle, chortle, we all knew from the note of contempt exactly what "stuff" he meant--the stuff you hope you don't have to scrape off your shoe if you've walked through any area where dogs relieve themselves.  Biden's benevolent patronage of Ryan--"my friend," he called him, may have won him a few points.  The bald spot on the back of his head didn't.  The schoolboy manner of Ryan, taking careful notes and guzzling the water from which he was supposed to sip, like English people nibbling at their cucumber sandwiches, got him a few demerits.  I'm still betting on Obama, have just filled out my absentee ballot in his favor, and, as I head out to the post office, envision some office in lower Manhattan, on Varick street, where (I imagine) a League of Woman Voters lady will open the envelope, put my ballot through the slit in a ballot box, tag the envelop in which it was stowed carefully, and wait, fingers crossed, for more ballots to come in for Obama.  Then she'll go out for dim sum at some little hidden place unfeatured on the web, the best kind of place, where nobody speaks English and there's no menu--they just keep bringing little plates to the table.  When you're done eating, they count the dishes and hand you a check.
Like something out of A Cricket in Times Square . .  .

J.K.Rowling and the Critical Mom

I thought Michiko Kakutani tasteless for saying she couldn't find "narrative sorcery" in J.K. Rowling's new novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, because a world-class critic shouldn't make it even more difficult for a writer to deviate from every reader's favorite subject.  Rowling's fabulous children's fiction, the Harry Potter series, is what everyone wants to read, but she's done with that, and wants to write a novel for adults, and wants readers to anticipate a novel written entirely for adults.  She's asking the impossible, but I think we owe her reviews that don't suggest that she ought to be writing more Harry Potter books just because we want to read them.   In the spirit of wanting to prove Michiko Kakutani wrong, I started The Casual Vacancy and liked the first few pages, which begin with an unexpected and very sudden death.  After that, the book loses momentum.  I kept reading--and I re-read the first thirty-nine pages because I was having trouble keeping track of characters--and I'm still plowing through the thing, but really plowing.  I'm enjoying it less and less.  At least now I can give you one reason:  Rowling hates these people.  And they're hateful, the main characters, most of the secondary characters, and the minor characters.  Denizens of a small, and small-minded English village, every last one of them, with the possible exception of the man who dies in the first scene, is riddled with petty prejudice or the object of petty prejudice.  A father calls his son, "little shit"and "pizza-face," ridiculing the boy's acne; a mother can't forgive her daughter for being less than brilliant, and the daughter cuts her arms routinely, under her physician mother's nose.  Teenagers whose families fill them with boredom or despair, parents at sea in their marriages and relationships . . .  I could see anyone making a good novel out of these people, and the novel is very well written, filled with precise observations, but there's no real story:  the plot feels jerry-rigged.   We're supposed to care that the death of Barry Fairbrother leaves a "casual vacancy," an empty spot in the lowest rung of British government, and that bad guys may rush in to fill it and get rid of the methadone program and other socially conscious enterprises.  But I don't give a damn, because I have the constant, uneasy feeling that Rowling's main purpose in writing, or what gave her pleasure in writing, was to reveal how horrible and petty the people in the village of Pagford are.  But I already know how horrid and petty people can be--and there's got to be more of a story than that.  The difference between the appeal of Harry Potter and the failure of this novel is that Rowling loved the characters in the Harry Potter series.  Even the worst villains strike some sympathetic note--not that she offers any explanation for evil on the scale of a Voldemort, but she does make the character an orphan.  Choices, especially moral choices, remain important to her, but what carries the story is her love for the characters, and her good humor.  I can't help thinking that she can't stand most, if not all, of the characters in The Casual Vacancy, even Krystal Wheedon, who, because she makes an appearance in the thoughts of the man who drops dead in the first scene, and because she's clearly an underdog struggling to do the right thing, is bound to have some great reward by the end of the novel.   But she's not someone Rowling seems to like much either.  I'd like her if Rowling liked her.   

The Harry Potter books were so good that I allowed myself a pleasant delusion:  J.K. Rowling was writing an autobiography:  she's really a renegade Hermione Granger who decided to spill the secrets of the magical world, and expose her alma mater, Hogwarts, to the world.  And ever since she did, all kinds of new enchantments have been cast to prevent muggles like me from finding the place, situated as it just must be somewhere in the northernmost reaches of Scotland.  (How could I believe otherwise?  My children sit around drawing up the Marauder's Map and pretending that they are on their way to the shrieking shack.)  But the truth is likelier to be that The Casual Vacancy is the autobiographic novel, that it spills the beans about life as the young Rowling experienced it in several small-minded British villages:  she can't forgive these people for their bigotry, their cruelty, their stupidity.  And neither could I.  But that's one reason--one of many, no doubt--that I'm no novelist.  She's the novelist!  She's either got to write a story that makes it interesting to hate these folks--supply us with an excellent reason to do so--or she's got to love them.  Somehow.  I wish I had something better to say.  I'll buy anything she writes, and I'll read some of it, and, now that I see I'm in the same camp as the rest of the world, I'd like another magical world, please.  With lots of sauce and a cherry on top. 

The Critical Mom's Guide to A German Vacation Or the German Birthday, Part Two

The spa is the way to go.  My husband chose it for his birthday and has wisely decided just to take the family.  We chose a spot that two of my children have enjoyed since before they were born, judging by the mother's influence on the child and the happy face of the mother in photos of her eight months pregnant self at this very spa . . . Bad Salzuflen in NorthRhine Westphalia.  When I was eight months pregnant with my second child, who happened to be exceedingly large at birth, my hips felt as though they might crack.  Nothing soothed them like a swim in a salty, warm waters of Bad Salzuflen.  Boiling salty water geysers out of the earth, is controlled by feats of German engineering and then pumped, in various shades of temperature from pleasantly toasty down to freeze-your-booties-off cold in a variety of pools.  No American could possibly afford this if indeed it exists in the States and I would bet you, dollars to doughnuts, that it does not.  You can swim laps in a large outdoor pool, even when there's snow on the ground.  You can soak in a hot pool and have your ankles automatically massaged by hidden jets of water, and then jump into a freezing pool.  Then there's the sauna.  You park your bathing suit in a plastic cubbyhole and enter the coyly designated "textile-frei" sauna area:  clothing is verboten here and patrons wander naked or draped in towels which are immediately removed to lie upon in the very hot saunas.  There's the "fire" sauna, which at 95º Celsius (that's 203 ºFahrenheit) is quite warm.  There's another one that's only 85º C. but I could hardly tell the difference.  I was sweating buckets within minutes, and found more than minutes unendurable.  But sweat is what you are supposed to do, and then you're supposed to run outside and dive in the cold pool, or rub crushed ice over your neck and chest, and/or consume little conveniently placed cups of vanilla and chocolate ice cream.  Now all this was just the outdoor saunas.  Inside, a little halo of saunas in designated themes ("Colore," "Rustico," "Nebbio") radiate off the main room like chapels in a cathedral.  Each delivers what it promises:  in "Colore" the lights flicker becomingly in shades of yellowy-orangey-red to blue and purple and then green; that's the least hot sauna, at 55º Celsius or a mere 131º Fahrenheit.  In "Rustico" you're treated to herbal aromas emanating from the hot brick walls.  The hottest one here is "Silencio" at 100º Celsius or 212º Fahrenheit, and you're silent because speech involves inhaling and you're too baked to do it.  "Nebbio" turns out to be a steam room, but it seems as hot as "Silencio."  Germans believe that all this is very good for something that they call your KREISLAUF, which literally translates as circulation but actually means quite a bit more . . . the sine qua non of health is your Kreislauf.  If it is going, you are in good shape.  If you are dizzy, fatigued, anemic, overweight, depressed, or feeling a general lack of energy or enjoyment, then your Kreislauf is out of whack and you better get yourself into the sauna, where you sweat, sweat, sweat and then go out and plunge into freezing water.  Sometimes the staff leaves herbally-aromatised rock salt around in bowls, which you rub onto your skin.  Then more freezing water!  By the time you are done with this process, you are lobster red and pleasantly tired.  If you are American, you're ready for dinner.  Same if you are German, but if you are German you also feel that your Kreislauf is now ticking away, utterly recharged.  You feel virtuous; you feel that your body has been exhalted to healthy heights.  It is sort of like finding out your HDL and LDL are perfect.  Then you go eat pizza or Greek food and stagger off to bed  . . . . in rose-covered sheets.  The Haus Cecilie, a charming little place, has hallways filled with stained glass windows and an imposing porcelain guard dog, a proprietress eager to make sure we have internet access.   Now, off to another day in the hot tubs and saunas . .  .

The Critical Mom's Guide to the Sacred Animal

We are in the land of the pig, the great and powerful pig, whose juices infiltrate almost every food item . . . when I first moved to Germany more than fourteen years ago, a guidebook advised me that when it comes to the pig, Germans make use of "everything but the squeal."  Whenever we took the kids to the supermarket they were invariably handed a slice of a bologna-like substance called "Gelbwurst," for which, alas, they developed a taste.

Now that I am trying to go meatless, that is.  I've been buying soya sausages and soya burgers and lots of tofu; the thirteen year old assures me that these do not cut the mustard, or as he says: "I'm German.  I like MEAT!"  But I like stir-fried tofu delicately flavored with ginger, lots of garlic, sesame oil, and the fronds of some fern-like Chinese cabbage that I found at the Asian store.

When my brother in law had his fiftieth birthday party, he followed German custom and hired a hall complete with banquet.  And invited the whole village.  This is standard procedure, as is the alternate:  I phoned a friend whose sixtieth birthday it was, but it took quite a bit of sleuthing to reach her at all; various friends indicated that they weren't supposed to tell anyone where she was and they were informing me only because my birthday happens to fall on the same day.  So I reached her in the hotel in Switzerland, where she was hiding out.  "I hate birthdays," she confided, ashamed.  German custom dictates that one invite all one's friends to a big party.  Or all one's colleagues.  Or both.  There's no such thing as the birthday girl or the birthday boy being taken out to a restaurant by his or her friends.  He or she throws the big party, and the party, traditionally, boasts pig in every form that pig can be cooked, baked, boiled, fried and fricasseed.   When the Brazilian dancers zumba-zumbad in to my brother in law's birthday . . .  he was almost too filled with pork and too plastered to enjoy them:  I thought that was the high point, but oh noooo!  The great god pig had to be brought in, first even more of it on our plates and then in real life:  a squealing, thumping piglet.  The piglet's name, "Terminator," he earned by sturdily resisting being enclosed in a crate, in which he was carried, on a litter, by four strong guys in Bavarian Lederhosen.  He made his presence thoroughly known; he was even allowed out to skitter around the dining hall in a spirited, but futile attempt at escape.  As my daughter, entirely in tune with local custom, said, after patting him, "First he's sweet--and then he's meat!"  And she made up a German version of this, too:

Erst ist das Schweinchen süß,
 Dann isst man schon die Füß.

(First the piggy is sweet, and then you eat his feet).  And I do believe that she enjoyed eating the sausages made out of little Terminator as much as she enjoyed scratching his cute little ears.  Which were probably eaten by somebody, possibly even me, since on cold Winter nights I find sausage an appealing food.  But I just like it; I don't worship it.  Nothing gets my husband going like reminiscences of the delicious pig's feet he had in . . . various locations . . .  nothing makes him more indignant than a Northern German's incorrect answer to the question of how one cooks a Bavarian Weisswurst, a delicacy properly consumed around eleven in the morning, with beer:  my husband, standing on line at a grocery somewhere in Westphalia, heard the woman ahead of him, another Northern German, ask how one cooked this interesting Bavarian sausage, Weisswurst.  The clerk waved her arms around, saying, "Oh, you can fry it."  Which, incidentally, makes it explode, usually on the ceiling.  Weisswurst has to be placed in boiled water and left there for a certain precise time, which varies slightly according to whichever region of Bavaria you might be visiting. 

Mmmmmm, mmmm good.  First he's sweet . . .then he's meat!

The Critical Mom and the Diplomatic Dad

The critical Mom yells.   She yells whenever the energetic ten year old throws a ball around the living room.  She yells because he has a basketball hoop in his room, and plenty of balls in there.  She yells because she had told him this ten thousand times before and sometimes when she actually sees the tennis ball smacking the wall, she takes away his computer.  She yells because we have a perfectly nice yard outside, where he can throw a ball around.  She yells because once, a long time ago, one of those balls hit the Diplomatic Dad's favorite beer stein, which smashed, leaving glass shards all over the living room floor, and children in socks, who had to be shooed out, nearby.   She yells because she feels guilty that she and the Diplomatic Dad have never managed to summon the energy to clear out and re-model the cluttered, spiderweb-decorated basement where a dart board hangs forlornly, hardly used in cold weather, where you can see your breath down there.  

The Diplomatic Dad returns from Mexico laden with presents, and the most expensive, and also the most beautiful, is the carved obsidian head of an Aztec sun god, lapis lazuli disks complementing his blazing white eyes, a malachite and glittering orange jadeite design forming his imposing headdress.  He  is a protector of the family, the Diplomatic Dad explains, and he came all the way from Teotihuacan, the huge archeological site, complete with pyramids, of pre-Columbian America.   The middle child's eyes grow round.

"This one cost the most," says the Diplomatic Dad matter-of-factly.  "So I would be really angry if someone were, say, playing ball in here and it broke."

The ten year old asks, "If I broke it, would that mean that our family had no more protection?"  A pregnant pause ensues, in which the Critical Mom and the Diplomatic Dad exchange a glance indicating our temptation to allow this convenient delusion to prevent further breakages in the living room.  But we shake our heads.

"No," the Diplomatic Dad concedes, "We still have plenty of protection."

But the Aztec God is so beautiful and he stares ahead so resolutely.  It is good to have him peering out across our living room from his perch above the TV.  The Critical Mom is sure that he is protecting us.

The Critical Mom and The Girl from Ipanema

It was always a favorite song, and last year my husband and I were on Ipanema beach together, and I was the girl and he was watching me and we went swimming.  I am not tall, I am not tan, I am not young, and I would never in a million years consider looking straight ahead not at him, so he still thinks I'm lovely.  
     Rio, a fun house mirror version of New York, as if  built by the architect of the Bizarro Superman series, boasted extremes of wealth and poverty: the homeless man in rags selling bananas in front of the gorgeous, gated apartment buildings, and contrasts:  the contemporary art museum, itself a flying-saucerlike apparition, jutted over a gorgeous beach with its pathologically polluted bay.  The scenery out the window far surpassed the art, except that you knew the people foraging in that incredibly polluted bay were exposing themselves to toxic waste.  And the ever-present vultures overhead knew it, too.  But the girl, the lucky girl from Ipanema, is somehow untouched by all this.
     I used to hum "The Girl From Ipanema" daily with my first room-mate out of college:  every day we scooted off to our jobs in publishing that led nowhere with our pearls in place, scones and coffee in hand, and that song on our lips.  And when we went up to Columbia in the evening on weekends, to take graduate courses in order to get away from the jobs in publishing that led nowhere, we were greeted every time we stepped off the platform at Broadway and 110th by the guy who sang, 

As she waits for the One IRT

She looks straight ahead not at me . . . 

And now I find, reading my middle child the Skulduggery Pleasant books, that the hero, Skulduggery, while enduring torture from the evil wizard, Nefarian Serpine, fills the interludes between Nefarian's torments by singing "The Girl From Ipanema," which I began to sing, nostalgically, to my ten-year-old.

"All right, all right, Mommy!  So you know some songs and I know others.  Enough."

Okay.  Stephen Sondheim having provided a boy from Ipanema ("Whyyyy are his trousers vermilion?  Whyyyyy does he claim he's Castilian?") and somebody, Frank Sinatra, it seems,  even a girl with emphysema, we've ended up with Loose Bruce Kerr's "The Guy from Al Queda":

Short and fat and bearded and flapping

The guy from al Queda in Iraq goes Jihadding. . . 

 I wonder what the homeless guy at the 110th street subway station is singing now . . . on my last two trips to New York, he wasn't there and nobody was singing a New York version of the girl "who waits for the One IRT."

Oh well.  My husband and I will always have Ipanama.

Ten Fun Facts from The Critical Mom

1. A Mormon friend just called to invite me to her baby's blessing and delivered this enchanting tidbit:  "None of the Mormons I know are voting for Mitt Romney."  Her mother seconded the motion, adding "I don't trust him."

2. Home schooled children are sought after by American universities:  universities find that they are far better prepared than other applicants.

3. The German title of "Bringing Up Baby" is "Leoparden küsst man nicht" (One Doesn't Kiss Leopards).

4. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

5.  Obama's favorite book is Moby Dick.  But he has read all the Harry Potters, and can bench-press 200 pounds. (about 91 kilos)

6.  There are over 300 kinds of bread in Germany, and gummy bears were invented by a German.

7.  The United States has no official language--even though English is the language of government.

8.  The first soup ever made was hippopotamus soup.

9. Buckingham Palace was built in 1702 on the site of a brothel.

10.  In Greece, voting is required by law for everyone age 18 and up.