The Critical Mom Goes to Rome

It all started with Ryanair, which offered a flight under a hundred euros, round trip, so long as I kept my check-in bag under 15 kilos, something I could manage for a three-day trip.  The airline did not try to charge people a whole British pound to use the toilet ($1.66, about 40 cents less in euros)--the notion that this is one of Ryanair's usual charges having been allegedly aired by management on the theory that negative publicity brings in customers.  But halfway through the two-hour flight, the stewardess announced that the toilets were "blocked" and asked that passengers please not use them.  I was glad we landed on time and the Ciampino airport proved a mere half-hour bus ride to Rome's version of Times Square, namely, the Termini.  Named after the Baths of Diocletian, it looked Grand-Central-Stationish, and a comfortably hectic air reminded me of that very much missed icon of New York as I stood online for a taxi.  There the resemblance to my favorite city ended, for the driver spoke no word of any language that I could manage, including English, and demonstrated--by waving around an actual paper map--that he remained clueless about the address to which I had to repair posthaste.
"Uh, do you speak English?"
"Eee-talia!" he said. "Leetle bit, okay!"
"Deutsch?"
"Eee-talia!"
Once he'd studied his map, he got me there after a ride no more wild nor wooly than that of your average New York cabbie, and seemed ecstatic, practically falling at my feet, when I rewarded him with a tip of one euro.  
I was visiting a dear old friend and her lovely new husband, and we enjoyed a delicious meal of Cacio e Pepe, pasta with a whole lot of melted butter, pecorino romano, and coarsely grated salt and pepper.  That hit the spot, as did the wine.  Rome is, like Paris, once of those places where it's almost impossible to get a bad meal--you have to try really hard, and I didn't try at all, so ate very well indeed.
First stop the next morning was the Colosseum, that ancient ampitheater  where gladiators fought to the death and became freemen if they survived a certain number of rounds.  Centurions paced the grounds, charging to be photographed with tourists and checking their cell phones.  Many hidden catacombs followed--some formerly secret training grounds of gladiators, and then the Basilica of San Clemente, a mosaiced wonder with a second century Mithraic temple beneath it.  Layers upon layers of civilizations interlard Rome, just like the layers of olive oil and cheese in most of the delicious food.  
We spent some time seeking the exact spot on which Julius Caesar was stabbed to death, a grassy hill plastered with homeless men.  We shopped--oh, what a paradise for leather and linens!  A gorgeous briefcase, complete with butter-soft leather and piping, was found for my friend's husband, and I almost bought a lovely red leather knapsack that continues to haunt me.  
We visited Villa Torlonia, on the scale of New York's Frick, which was rented by none other than Mussolini from an eccentric banker for one lira per year.  Frescoes of mythological figures--including a Leda who could never have inspired Yeats, since she's got the swan firmly tucked under her elbow, and his beak, at the end of a weak, skinny neck, seems in a desultory way to be pecking as if for a single grain at the corner of her mouth.  An "avian dildo," is how a visiting professor acquaintance described the poor bird.  The walls featured photos of Il Duce himself fencing--going by his size, he sure needed the exercise!   Art exhibits of Italian painters from the nineteen-forties and earlier graced the upper storey.  The Casina delle Civette, or Owl House, a 19th-century Swiss chalet on the grounds, included William-Morris-like wallpaper, stained glass that looked very Tiffany, and a host of increasingly odd and delightful rooms.  There is no escape like Rome, the city of ruins and hidden beauties--and my kids loved the bobble-headed Caesar and mini-models of all the ruins I hadn't managed to see.

The Critical Mom and the Chinese President's Wife

For weeks, my husband and I looked forward to a performance.  It was important enough to be on our calendar along with reminders to remember it--because the Chinese President's wife was coming to our boys' school.  A superstar singer of treacly hits who, according to my smart fifteen-year old, dared to trill,  "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead," right after Mao Zedong died, she's now trying to make sure Chinese girls in villages get an education.  And our boys are getting a model education, she believes, along with many girls in their school, which went co-ed not too long ago. 

But we weren't going to hear her sing.   We were going to hear our boys sing to her in Chinese, and the elder was going to narrate a play in Chinese, plus play Chinese songs on his clarinet.  

Alas, we didn't get to go!  Less than a week before the event for which we'd cleared our calendar, we learned that a mere seventy policemen could be assigned to the event, since the lady had no official security clearance, and all students would have to empty their pockets, open their musical instrument cases, answer questions (No jokes! I told the smart fifteen-year-old, who was brimming over with wisecrack answers to security questions).

The kid has been learning Chinese all year, and speaks it fluently enough so that I believe he'll be able to understand waiters at the Columbia Cottage restaurant we like to visit on trips to New York.  I told him he should tell his Chinese teacher about the Chinese guys who deliver take-out on bikes, and who know one word to blurt into the intercom, "Food-ee!"  The kid does not think his teacher would appreciate this anecdote, and it has occurred to me that had the kid been educated in the Chinese style, he would not disagree with me so much.

China is building bridges with the U.S.A and Angela Merkel is trying to build them too, but she couldn't get Ai WeiWei a passport three years ago.  At the moment, his exhibition, "The Evidence," is at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, one that I bet the singer would love to visit.

A Chinese friend who studied in Germany made the mistake most Chinese students I teach make:  he memorized everything he read for his oral exam, and when the examiners asked what he thought about a particular text, he began reciting.

"No, what do you think?"  they asked.  "Not the critics you read.  YOU!"

Confusion.  "Ahh, uh, ahh . . . "  

I know this confusion.  I ask my university students, not only Chinese students, for their own thoughts.  And they answer, "You mean what I think?  You mean, really, my opinion?"  They seem astonished.  The worse the German high school they attended, the less they've been asked to have an opinion and to express it.  But students raised anywhere in Asia, especially Chinese students, have usually been taught to parrot the opinions of others, or of their teacher, or to determine the opinion of the group, or to make sure that the group has one unified opinion, and to express that opinion with as little individuality as possible.

The friend all but failed his oral exam.  Next time around, he criticized the teacher and got an A.

I'm imagining the school visit the way it should have been.  Not kids getting frisked and security forces guarding the doors.  Just parents coming to see their kids, and the lovely, relaxed atmosphere of other concerts we've attended--which are so good that even folks who don't have kids at the school attend them.  Mom-baked muffins and sandwiches and quiche for sale with wine in the intermissions.  And a conversation with Peng Liyuan, the wife, in which I ask:  "How are you?  And do you like Ai WeiWei?  Do you hate him?  Why?"  And in my dreams, she would have a very clear opinion of her own, the opinion of a girl who had been educated in the Western style, with exactly the type of education she is promoting right now for girls, the kind in which the teacher asks you for your opinion, and you actually have a very clear, considered opinion, and you articulate it.

The Critical Mom and the Crumbling Parents

First, the phone call from one of my daughter's best friends:  "My daddy's moving out.  He fell in love with another woman.  I'm very sad."
I'd just seen this girl's mother at the birthday celebration of another girl in my daughter's class, and when I said we'd chosen Gymnasium A instead of Gymnasium B, since B is run by nuns, and I don't go for nuns, the mother had loudly defended her husband's aunt, "who is a nun!  And a highly educated woman! Very intelligent!"  Which of course left me grinning foolishly and agreeing that indeed, many a nun is highly educated and extremely intelligent.  I kept to myself the rest of my thoughts on that matter, including that I think any woman who volunteers to give up love, sex, makeup, the delights of color-coordinating her clothes, and a pagan sense of joy has big problems with all of the above, and since I think those things are pretty important in any girl's development, I didn't particularly want her influencing my impressionable child.
So I thought back on the now-abandoned wife vouching for her husband's nun aunt, as if defending his honor, and I was pretty sure this new development had completely gobsmacked her, that she hadn't been prepared, that she'd never have been defending his honor if she had any sense that he doesn't have much.  He's leaving her with three children under the age of ten, including a two-year-old.  I can't say we knew them well--we saw them whenever we got our children together; we offered cups of tea and laughed about what the children had said or eaten.
A day after the birthday party, but before the phone call, the mother running the party, who had also been earnestly discussing schools for next year with me, announces as I run into her at the elementary school's circus, that she is "getting a divorce."  Since I'd just seen her with her very courtly husband, who was making sure every guest got some birthday cake, I was surprised.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Well, no, not really, because I am a Catholic!"  Now, there's an answer that leaves me gobsmacked.  My husband's a Catholic too, but I'm sure he wouldn't answer the question, "Are you happy in your marriage?" with "Yes, because I'm a Catholic!"  He'd say he had a good relationship with his wife.  In any case, further conversation didn't leave me a moment to ponder her answer.  The phone rang shortly after the school circus.
"This is X.  My husband is doing bad things.  Can my daughter stay with you tonight?"
"Uh, sure!" I said.  Because I'm not a Catholic, I almost added.  But didn't.  Now, the daughter didn't stay for one reason or another; the police were there, deciding where she could stay.  But the phone rang again this morning.  At seven, or before.  Could the daughter come there this morning?  
"Uh . . . "  As it happens, I have a very bad cold today.  Crawling into bed and sleeping it off is not consistent with calming a child I don't know well at all whose mother somehow trusts me . . . when I don't know either of them very well. 
"I mean just before school."  The kid's dad is apparently now not allowed in their house but keeps phoning every two minutes, and the daughter is scared.  Says the mother.  The kid was grinning from ear to ear by the time I saw her.  I introduced her to our guinea pigs and gave her a tour of our garden.  She walked to school with my daughter and my husband, and that was the last we saw of them.  Today. 
Is it parental breakdown week at the elementary school?  Just a full moon?  Are my husband and I the only sane parents?  I asked him this, and he pointed out that we do know one other sane couple with sane children.  Possibly two.  But there do seem to be an awful lot of angry, despairing single mothers and single dads out there in our city, more in the last two days than I expected to see.  I did spend some time explaining to my daughter that daddy and I are not divorcing, that I do not want another man and he does not want another woman, that we love each other.   And I feel very lucky.

The Critical Mom Goes to Berlin on a Budget

Berlin is, but don't tell everybody, really inexpensive, especially if you're traveling from within Europe and don't have to deal with air fares.  Once you're past the airfare consideration, prices are in the range of those in Riga, Latvia, Sofia, Bulgaria, Kiev, Lisbon, and Istanbul . . . . now, Kiev and Istanbul are on the dangerous side, lately, and Lisbon, Riga and Sofia do not, for me, have the range of extraordinary attractions in the form of Western European history, art, culture, and architecture, nor the internationalism.  Berlin feels to me like New York.  Berlin is where you can get a bagel not only as good as, but better, than a New York bagel: Barcomi's is your best source for this delicacy, and believe me, having spent years being handed so-called bagels by well-meaning Germans and having to explain that no, this was an ordinary German Brötchen baked in the shape of a bagel, I was delighted to have the real thing.  I was equally delighted with my hotel, at least it called itself a hotel, but really it was a time warp off the set of Das Leben Der Anderen ("The Lives of Others," the  2006 film about the ways in which the Stasi, East Germany's police force, electronically bugged, harassed, bribed, and drove to suicide ordinary citizens.)
The walk to my hotel, about a mile from Hauptbahnhof, (Berlin's main train station--and the city has a bunch of them) took me past the uglier form of DDR architecture, the cement-cell-block type looking like Lego leached of color, only bumpier, not the nicer wedding-cake style seen in other parts of the city.  The hotel itself was easily spotted, the white sign and blue lettering standing out from a brown smear of a building on one side and a gated restaurant offering hamburgers and cocktails (Sex on the Beach, Long Island Ice Tea).  I entered and found myself standing in front of a dark, worn stairwell, and wondering if I'd really have to lug my suitcase all the way up to the Erdgeschoss, the so-called "ground" floor.  But no, an elevator the size of a large locker, with a door you had to pull open, appeared on my left, and then I noticed on wall above the stairs some soothingly elegant pink-and-white imitation Greek friezes.  I'd walk down the stairs next chance I got, and look at them.

The elevator worked and took me to a narrow warren of hallways in faded green carpet--again, right off the set of The Lives of Others--leading to a desk, behind which sat a shy, sweet, Matrioshka lookalike, who asked me to fill out a form, and hesitantly inquired in heavily Russian-accented German, as I pulled out my credit card, whether I might pay in Bargeld?  (Cash).  I pulled out a fifty, and no, I didn't have to pay that much.  The room cost thirty-five euros a night, plus a small city tax, plus an optional buffet breakfast for six euros at the gated restaurant next door offering hamburgers and those cocktails Don Draper's gal Friday might like.  Total:  slightly over forty-two euros.  I paid--there was no Starbucks around--and breakfast the next morning proved spectacular:  friendly, smiling, a waiter poured coffee and directed me to a buffet redolent of freshly-baked Brötchen, plus a vast spread of yoghurt, breakfast cereals, canned fruit, jams, butters, platters of salami, heated silver warming dishes of eggs, bacon, you name it.  I wished I were hungrier.  
I was handed an actual set of keys on a bulbous red bakelite key chain which I was very tempted to keep as a souvenir, but did turn over after my stay, because it was the right thing to do, and because the lady was so nice and helpful and made sure I found the correct train station from which get to the event I was attending, and thank goodness for her--the invitation left me clueless.

My room itself fulfilled every criteria I hold for a hotel room:  it was very clean, and quiet as the tomb.  The bed was reasonably hard and I like a hard bed.  Plus, it was actually attractive, in a very sparing way:  I liked the broad-boarded hardwood floor, the fluted glass Russian ceiling lights (in which it had always been so easy to conceal an electronic listening device back in DDR days).    Was there soap?  Certainly not in the bathroom, but atop the white towel on the white duvet I found tiny packets of soap and shampoo--plenty, for a one-night stay.   Two very utilitarian bedside tables, devoid of Gideon bibles, stationary, or anything else, buttressed the comfortable double bed, and a curiously shaped line from floor to ceiling in one corner, thin as twine and right under the plaster, suggested a leftover coil of electronic wiring from DDR days.  The place was filled with silent Chinese tourists and one or two European students, and I slept very well indeed.   Hotels like this abound on Trip Advisor, and if you want even cheaper, signs in Hauptbahnhof advertise youth hostels "from 15 euros" per night.

How to Deal with Dinner Guests Who Have Allergies

I eat gluten by the gut-full, I never heard of Paleo, and it seems that butter is back--yippee!  In any case, nothing could be ruder than announcing to a hostess that you are on a very particular kind of diet involving some holier-than-thou food philosophy.

But it is okay to say that you are a vegetarian.  Or even a vegan, but if you announce the latter, you have to define terms for your hostess: "That means I eat _________, but I don't eat __________ and I can bring my own food."  Remember, Moses Montefiore brought along his own Kosher chicken to a formal dinner (and it seems Queen Victoria was there).  

If you're the hostess, however, you must ask.  You call somebody to invite them to dinner and you say, "By the way, is there anything you don't eat?  Or allergies?"  I always ask, and people usually eat everything, but I do get the occasional, "Oh, I really don't like fish!" or "I hate Brussels sprouts."  Then I know, and I can plan the menu.  

If a guest does have an allergy to nuts, then it's your responsibility, for a small dinner, to avoid them entirely--to reassure the guest that salad is made with olive oil, not hazelnut oil, to understand that hidden allergens cause anxiety--as when a friend offered a chewable vitamin E tablet, I chewed, and it had almonds in it.

If you're hosting a large party, it's your responsibility to tell the guest which dishes have nuts and which don't--and to provide something that he or she can eat, even if only salad and cheese and crackers.  The good guest recognizes that a hostess should never be asked to provide a special meal.  The good hostess remembers that she has an allergic person coming to dinner, plans accordingly, and puts the guest at ease.  If you buy something and you don't know what's in it, read labels, or just tell the guest, "I can't be sure about this dish."  Waiters do this all the time, and believe me, I appreciate it.

In a nutshell (so to speak) being a hostess to an allergic guest is just another dimension of being a good hostess:  you greet guests, you make sure they feel at home, you introduce them to people you think they'd enjoy, and you get them talking over food they feel happy eating.

Here's a list of DON'TS for a host or hostess with a guest who has just said, "By the way, I'm allergic to nuts":

(1) Do not reveal your anxiety, as a hostess recently did to me:  "Uh, I'm not sure I can rule out debris and uh, uh, I'm not sure if it's okay."

(2)  Your guest should never have to say, "Please don't worry--I eat most things and I know to avoid chocolate.  I'd just like a heads up if you know there's nuts in a dish."

(3) Do not forget to tell the guest that you remember he or she cannot eat nuts.  When they arrive, and you hand them a glass of wine, you've got to remember to say, "I just wanted to let you know, you're safe with the salad and the meat, but the appetizer does have cashews."

But this is all part of the same dynamic:  you make the guest comfortable:  you reassure him or her; the guest never reassures you.

The Critical Mom and the Taxis

If you're a native New Yorker who never learned to drive and transit goes on strike--everything, that is, the buses and the trams--then you are up the proverbial creek without the fabled paddle.  Today, my husband drove both boys to school but then found himself almost late to a meeting in another city.  I walked my daughter to school and then rather than have her walk all the way home and then walk back up our hill to her music lessons, I schlepped her recorders and violin to school and she sat rather forlornly with me in a local cafe having a tea and a brötchen.  It might have been more restful to go home after all, the freedom to lie in one's own bed for a whole ten minutes overriding the amount of walking then necessary to get you to the first music lesson.  The second required a cab, and the cab company had to be called, for cabs do not cruise in our city.  This being Germany, the dispatcher wanted an exact address, not the corner from which our tram runs.  

"Um, er," I said, running out of German.  She rapidly gave me an address and hung up on me, and luckily we found it.

At the violin lesson I sat reading my students' exams, and learned that Oscar Wilde's Jokanaan had been "decapitulated."  I was delighted to find that he had also been de-headed.  

During the violin lesson, I called the cab company and the lady said, "Das dauert!"  (It's gonna take a while!")

"Meinen Sie mehr als funfzehn minuten?" (More than fifteen minutes?")

She sounded very annoyed, possibly because it was impossible to give me an exact answer, and told me there were a lotta cars out there on the street and how should she know, since she never took cabs.

I'm living in a place where if you take a cab, you're an elitist snob.

Which I'm not.  But I'm spending money like one, because by the end of the day, when all children are home, we will have spent close to eighty euros.  The folks on strike, by the way, make 18-19 euros an hour, which might not sound like a lot, but it's a dang sight more than I make, and by way of comparison, hospital nurses make 7 euros an hour.  The cost of living here is around one sixth of the cost of living in New York, and health care is universal. 

So it's paradise.  But if that strike continues tomorrow, our piggy bank will be in shards.  At least the cab came fast.  No sooner had I gotten out my cell phone to try to tell the boys to put the chicken in the oven than our driver screeched to a halt in front of us.

A Fish Recipe Peg Bracken Might Like

If anyone's old enough to remember the original I Hate To Cookbook (1960; revised and re-issued 2010), you know that the criteria of her recipes remained:

(1) What's easiest

(2) What's lying around within reach--you should neither have to go to the store nor walk to the other end of the kitchen.

(3) Whatever ensures that the family won't complain.

(4) Liberal dollops of Bracken's wit.


I can provide the first three, but you'll have to pretend that Bracken would somehow have been interested in a non-artery-clogging, sustainable-food, fresh as opposed to frozen or canned, way of life.  Which she wasn't, not one bit, but when I feel like a cake that tastes like one, or a really creamy dish, I resort to her immediately.

But this doesn't go the butter-salt-sugar-mayonnaise route.  This is just easy:

Ingredients:

Three 200-gram (about 7 oz, or a bit more) slabs of fresh salmon (another fish will do, too)

Seasoning of your choice (I used garlic salt; you can use Lawry's, Mrs. Dash, fresh basil, or the herb of your choice.  Anything from Oil&Vinegar is fine)

Three or four fresh red (or yellow, or orange) bell peppers.


1. Pre-heat oven to 180ºC or 350ºF

2. Slice big pieces of pepper and lay flat on pan--enough to go under the fish.

3.  Lay fish on top (probably best to rinse and shake dry first).

4.  Sprinkle on the garlic salt, or the seasoning of your choice

5. Lay more broad pieces of pepper on top of the fish.


Bake for about 25 minutes--turn on whirling heat at the end if you like.

I served this with steamed broccoli and snow peas.  And we all would have lost weight if we hadn't chased this perfectly sensible meal with a cheese course, wine, and a hunk of chocolate.

Rosenmontag, Red Bull, Carnival-Zug, and Teenagers

This being Germany--the pagan holiday, Carnival, kind of like Hallowe'en-- appearing right before Lent, for convenience, the kids have no school Monday and Tuesday.  Now, says the fifteen-year-old, would just be the perfect time, please Mom, for another overnight computer-games party.  So okay, if you do your clarinet practice and go to fencing and complete your homework . . .  yes, yes, yes.  Now, my husband and I have weathered two other all-night computer parties with charming, very school-oriented young men with delightfully nerdy interests like U.S. Presidents and good internships, and found that the young men fell silent about 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. on each other occasion.  Not this time.  They were lively as all get-out when I went downstairs at 7:00 and I immediately discovered the reason why:  there, on the coffee table, stood several empty cans of Red Bull and some other Godawful substance called Monster cola (140 mg caffeine per can, as opposed to around 95 in your average cup of coffee).

I stomped around, removed cans, yelled at my husband to yell at the boys, while, in the background, the boys were alternating, "But I didn't drink any," with "Mom, has it been scientifically proven that this stuff is bad for you?" and "Besides, you never told me I couldn't drink this and I didn't buy it--my friends brought it."

Grrrrr!  I said.  And reminded the kid that once upon a time the principal of my old school dealt with a problem girl who'd stolen the rabbit from the science room and played with the animal in the bathroom.  

This would not do, said the principal.

"But," said the girl, wryly grinning, "I never heard of a rule that you could not play with a rabbit in the bathroom."

Well, Carnival in Deutschland is the time when everyone is playing with the rabbit in the bathroom.  The Ruhrgebiet doesn't go as far as New Orleans, where mooning from balconies is the least of it (a very experienced friend admitted that Carnival in New Orleans had introduced her to sexual positions and language that had previously seemed beyond the reaches of her Olympic imagination) but still, there's plenty of topsy-turvy.

You stand out on the street (my husband and I went as cowboys and our youngest went as a hippie) and yell, "Hello!  Hello!" as the carnival floats go by--and the folks on the float, dressed in hats that look either like a Freemason's hat on steroids or a bishop's mitre on speed (complete with pheasant plumes) throw you candy.  But sometimes they throw it AT you rather than TO you.  In Cologne, a few years ago, Cologne being the heart of carnival around here, there were reports of people being hit in the head with massive boxes of chocolate and frozen hams.   It didn't get quite that bad here . . . . I did duck once or twice when the hard candies pelted down . . .  and though we stood in chilly pouring rain we heard good band music and saw every costume imaginable, from Jack Sparrow to nuns (but with split skirts showing a lot of thigh) to a toaster (complete with toast).  

And then I had a sedate tea with a good friend, and we gossiped.  A lovely day, by the end of it.

Culture Shock and The Critical Mom

Or Culture Schlock.  In some ways the whole blog is about the title subject, but more and more, American schlock is finding its way to German arteries, waistlines, and blood sugar:  the fifteen-year-old just had another wireless-LAN party with his pals (translation:  all-nighter devoted to the kind of computer games that Mom does not like, accompanied by potato chips, tortilla chips, pork-rind thingies, chocolate, and of course coca-cola--every VERBOTEN thing under the sun that originated in the U.S. of A.)
Nevertheless, I find a few  moments of Culture Shock had indeed escaped this anecdotal blog, and I list them here for your delectation:

(1) Once, long ago in a Bavaria far away, when I was still pregnant with my firstborn and my husband and I were taking an afternoon "nap"--the kind we're only awake enough for on a Sunday afternoon these days--a knock came at the door.  Our elderly neighbor had invited us for coffee and cake more than a week before, and truth be known, we had forgotten all about it.   I vaulted out of bed, hastily donning a robe, and opened the front door, only to find standing there, freshly coiffed and almost wringing her hands, the lovely old lady, behind whom I could see her open door leading into a living room with a white-tableclothed, freshly-laid table with porcelain gold-and-white coffee cups.

"Come you?" she asked.

Yes, I said yes I, er, did, I mean, yes.  And she never knew that I meant that in both senses of the word.

(2) I love to window-shop.  And I especially like to look into the windows of jewelry stores and gaze at the pearls and the semi-precious stones.  So imagine my surprise when I found something in the window that I particularly liked, such that my gaze wandered above to look for the name of the store, but the word "Schmuck" hit me first.
Now, for German readers, in American English, a schmuck is a jerk, a dick, literally (Yiddish, in use since 1892) a penis. But here, "schmuck" just means jewelry.
And that all made sense, in a way--the family jewels are one's most prized possession.

(3) Stoppersocken remain a required item here, especially for children.  I kept forgetting to buy them for my kids and the other mommies kept shaking their heads and insisting that my child would CATCH a COLD!!  These socks with little rubber treads attached to them are what children put on their feet after they take off their shoes upon entering the home of a playmate or their kindergarten homeroom; some schools ask children to put on "house shoes"--study rubber-soled shoes that I mistook for sneakers and bought for one of my children once.  They were too young to wave them at me and inform me that these shoes could only be worn indoors, but I soon learned.  I also learned that I was expected to provide house shoes to guests, who do sometimes bring their own because they know that I always forget, and put them on when entering other persons' homes.  But I always think:  who wants to wear old sweaty slippers that have been on somebody else's feet?
Everybody in Deutschland, it seems, except me.

The Critical Mom Rediscovers Poetry

These are the times that try anybody's soul, and the band-aid to slap on the bruise is a good poem.  I've been re-reading Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Charles Simic, and all my favorite Seventeenth-Century English religious poets, the ones with the numbers games and the word-play and green grass in a green glade.  I go for the direct, the obviously autobiographical, although I'd use the term broadly.  I find, having written a poem or two, that the combination of a bad headache, a touch of flu, and exhaustion can produce a nightmare, the contents of which easily fills a poem.  But here's a tribute to some favorites, all found online, and why I think they're great:

Letter to New York, by Elizabeth Bishop
For Louise Crane
In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going. 

Now this is a love letter to a great city written by someone who catches the mood of the place exactly--even though she didn't live there, in fact, spent much of her time in Nova Scotia, Massachusetts,  and Brazil.

Another favorite: Robert Lowell's

"To Speak of Woe that Is in Marriage"

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282#sthash.IPl2N79W.dpuf

The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms.Life begins to happen.

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge.

This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--

whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick?Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant. 

Not too many guys can really take a title from Chaucer's Wife of Bath and update her complaints--this 1976 poem seems to me to do just that.  And who'd think of rhyming "disputes" with "prostitutes?"  

Here's another,  from Sharon Olds:

Primitive

I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat,
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.  

Here is love, here is marriage, here is passion . . . and here is Moo Shu Pork.  Add a glass of wine, and I'm in heaven.

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282#sthash.IPl2N79W.dpuf

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282#sthash.IPl2N79W.dpuf

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282#sthash.IPl2N79W.dpuf

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours." —Schopenhauer "The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open. Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes, free-lancing out along the razor's edge. This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge. Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . . It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust— whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. My only thought is how to keep alive. What makes him tick? Each night now I tie ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . . Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an eleph - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282#sthash.IPl2N79W.dpuf

How to Get Banned by the BBC Website

(1) You don't have to write !@#$%^&!!!  or even &*()_______++++{}:"|M<>‰ˇ›fifl‡!!

(2) You don't have to write a single four-letter word.  

(3) You don't have to pose threats.   Or even say so-in-so ought to be dealt with by the likes of Tony Soprano.

(4) You do, apparently, have to say that somebody did something bad.  Even if you were under the bed watching that person do the bad thing, but it has not yet been proven in court  that the bad deed was accomplished, the English can take you to court.  Even if the criminal is now dead, his family can claim defamation.

So I'm actually not sure whether my remark that Woody Allen incriminates himself every time he breathes did it, or my remark that Oscar Wilde had sex with underage boys and gave his wife syphilis.  Possibly both.  Now, Oscar Wilde died in 1900, but his grandson lives on, and once upon a time he wanted to sue me for libel--not because I said in my book that Oscar Wilde had sex with men, but because I said in my book that Oscar Wilde had syphilis, and gave it to other people, including his wife.  Folks have been fighting over that finding for more than a decade--check out the controversy on Googlescholar.

In any case, I received an e-mail from DoNotReply at the BBC thanking me for contributing to their web site, and saying that my posting contravened one of their House Rules.  My comment was "considered to have broken"  the house rule about "defamatory" statements.  I was invited to go to a link explaining the rules, where I found a photograph of Caroline Langrishe as the barrister Georgina Channing in the third series of 'Judge John Deed'--she is wearing one of those white curly wigs, with her own blond locks and cute diamond earrings peeking out.  

I got it!  Women can be censors too.  What an accomplishment.

My comment had been appended to an article entitled, "Did Woody Allen Times opinion article change any minds?"

So here's the post that they deleted.  I find that it did, after all, contain a hint of violence:

 Allen incriminates himself every time he breathes. Farrow is straightforward. Allen dodges, shrugs, and marries his girlfriend's daughter. He's a terrible man, a great artist. I laugh at The Importance of Being Earnest although Oscar preferred underage boys and gave his wife syphilis. I love Allen's films, but if he ever comes within ten feet of my daughter, he's dead.
 
Now, I wonder whether one of the following would have allowed my post to remain on the Beeb's website:

(1) Reportedly,
(2) In my opinion . . . 

These terms are generally resorted to by American academic publishers, but seldom bothered with by American newspapers.  Or blogs.  Which brings me to my next question:  is my blog going to be prosecuted under 

(a) German law

(b) American law

(c) international law

(d) No law, 'cause I'm nobody (who are you?) and nobody reads this and I don't make enough money to keep a student alive, although I'm 57.

Let's suppose somebody, like maybe even Woody Allen, reads my blog and doesn't like my remark that I believe Dylan Farrow and that his attempt to refute her story does the reverse.  I'll go one further.  Reader, go through his stories and his screenplays; watch interviews with him on the topic of whether he molested Farrow, watch every film he's made.  

Then try to find the stomach to say she's lying, or "deluded."  I bet you can't do it.

But I would also like for Woody Allen to avoid the fate of Oscar Wilde, whose best play folded soon after he was arrested.  The Importance of Being Earnest premiered at the St. James Theatre in London on Valentine's Day, 1895. When on 5 April 1895, Wilde was arrested on a charge of "gross indecency" (that was the legal term for any kind of gay sex not involving anal penetration) his his name was removed from the program and from all advertising for the play. The box office collapsed immediately and the play closed on 8 May, having run for 83 performances.  The New York production on Broadway folded after twelve performances.  The play was not revived in the English language until years after Wilde's death.  Only the Germans translated and performed Wilde when his name was still considered unmentionable in the English-speaking world.
A great work of art is still a great work of art, no matter what.  And I speak as one whose grandfather, a painter still known for his lyrical busts and portraits of Anaïs Nin, molested her mother, and whose father, a not untalented pianist and teacher, got drunk and molested her.  And I still say, reject the man and embrace the artist.  The name constantly associated with Allen now on blogs is Roman Polanski; let's try another for a change.  Go to posts on DemocraticUnderground.com and find the question "What has James Levine (the brilliant director of the Metropolitan Opera) done that was so bad?" answered with: "I wouldn't leave my kid alone with him."  Other posts implied an omnivorous sexual appetite involving harassment of any female crossing his path--along with young boys.  Arthur Fiedler's daughter, whom I knew, lowered her eyes when talking about Levine's interest in young boys--a topic not included in Molto Agitato, her book about the Metropolitan Opera.  She got into plenty of trouble with her own family for spilling the beans on Dad in her book, Papa,the Pops, and Me, also because people don't like to separate the man from the artist.  You don't have to live with Allen, or Polanski, or Levine.  But still, you don't want to be deprived of the ability to admire them. Forget it.  Admire the art: it stands by itself.

Now, Wilde's "crime" was not being gay, but forcing a population devoted to repressing a number of sexual desires to face them.  His boyfriend, irked because the British public discreetly looked away as he held hands with Oscar in a popular watering hole, fired a pistol at the ceiling.  Forced to look at what they absolutely did not want to see, the British public took revenge. Allen's crime can't be compared to Wilde's, because Allen in secret took advantage of a child, and harmed her.  He severely damaged another life.  Oh, in my opinion, ye who judge.  That goes for every word in this, and all other posts. If Wilde was a crusader for gay rights, from whose early advocacy has come genuine civil rights, we don't want to go down the same road with Allen.  He's in any case not campaigning for the "rights" of the pedophile.  He's denying all, and saying the charges are "ludicrous" (his word).  Even he knows he's supposed to think what he did was bad.  What I'm hearing as I watch him is "I don't remember anyway and it wasn't so bad and jeez, the kid didn't mind in fact the kid seemed to like it and probably the time she didn't she forgot about it and oh, she's such a great little kid and why is this such a problem anyway it all happened a long time ago and only once and anyway it doesn't matter."  You're never going to get any answer other than that out of him; he will never see it any other way.  He will never be moral.  But we can be moral.  We can watch and learn and warn children, and we can have not sympathy for the devil but understanding for a pathetic person with zero impulse control.  Let him make movies--they are terrific movies!--and parents, watch your kids.

Dylan Farrow's "Father"

I believe her.  She's telling the truth.  The more Allen talks, the more he incriminates himself.  His New York Times rebuttal is all about himself and his needs and his anger and his accusations.  Dylan Farrow's straightforward remarks contrast starkly with Allen's Miss-Piggylike shoulder-shrugging denials.  Allen's romance with Soon-Yi Previn floodlights his narcissism.  Of all the young girls in the world, he chose his girlfriend's daughter.  Previn may not actually have been under the legal limit, but that's beside the point.  Allen's relationship to Previn's adoptive mother, the court's decision to remove him from Dylan's life, the fact that he is old enough to be Previn's great-grandfather all militate against the idea that he could be innocent. 
The details Ms. Farrow offers--the thumb stuck in her mouth, the face breathing into her naked lap, are convincing, but her symptoms convince even more:  Dylan Farrow's despair expresses itself in self-cutting and a desire to destroy Woody Allen.  Her unwillingness or inability to separate the bullying pedophile who took her up to the attic with the witty, brilliant filmmaker tends to confirm her story as well.  The private self is not the public self.  But how can you believe that when the public hero who seduces your seven-year-old self is the father who is supposed to be protecting you?  You don't know why you are with him in this dark upstairs place, but he's promising to give you things and take you to Paris.  All this--and seven years old is, in my experience, old enough to remember accurately--leaves you feeling guilty no matter how many times your therapists tell you it wasn't your fault.  It leaves you with the feeling that the last person you can trust is yourself--because somehow, none of this would have happened if you had only been good.  It leaves you with despair and with problems that seem too shameful to mention.  You must have done something. So you feel untrustworthy, and trust no one, even when you want to do so.   
Why did a roomful of psychiatrists at Yale insist that Dylan Farrow couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality because she said, "I like to cheat on my stories?"  
A child who has been molested wants to control what happens to her body, and at the very least what happens to her story, because the story has become the only thing in her life over which she can exercise control.  The last thing any seven-year-old--even one who has not been molested--needs in order to be able to tell the truth is an army of adults in white coats waving anatomically correct dolls.  
Who does her brother, Moses the family therapist, imagine he is, insisting that Woody Allen could not possibly have molested her? Moses Farrow's degree in family therapy gives him no authority to say or to know this.  Dylan Farrow is the only person in the world who knows what really happened.
But it's a failure of judgement to equate the artist with the man.  The man Woody Allen seems to believe that Farrow's revelations just don't work in the conversation right now and maybe even believes himself when he says she's lying.  His genius for lying seems just the quality that serves his art so well.*  
So it's not surprising that people are equating the man with the artist.  But they're different things.  Subtract art, subtract inspiration, subtract genius from Allen, and what would he be?  I think he'd be worse.  I'd bet that a talentless pedophile spends more time seeking out and molesting children than a pedophile whose art takes up some of his energies.   When I pick up the DSM--the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association--it's got case studies of bus drivers and "semi-skilled" men who go after any child of either sex who crosses their path.  Of these types, maybe the Bible has it right--just tie a millstone around their neck and let them be dropped into the sea.  Artists are more complicated.  If I could throw out the bad father and keep the artist, I'd do it--that's a problem King Solomon couldn't solve.  
I went to the same school as Dylan Farrow, but never knew her--many years separate us.  I learned of her revelations through a message sent by an alumna who is a clinical psychologist and knew Farrow as a child.  The psychologist applauds Farrow's bravery, wondering what the school should do to protect girls better.  The classmate who sent the link on to me wrote, "I'm not sure how to respond to this.  Thoughts?"  To me, this question broadcasts an unwillingness to face Farrow's confession--we all want to blot it out.  Unfairly, I sent a detailed, enraged description of my own experiences, in essence the same, to my classmate, in a foolish attempt to jolt her into doing what I think everyone reading Farrow's story should do:  write to her and say:  "I believe you! Thank you for telling us! We support you!"

But that doesn't mean I'll never see another Woody Allen movie.  It means that I'd never let him walk into the same room as my daughter. 

*For further details, see Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html

Snowden's Snow Job?

Was Carl Orff a lousy composer because he appeared to sympathize with Nazis--even though he had a Jewish grandfather who'd converted to Catholicism?  The Nazis loved his music--they loved Wagner's music too, and Wagner wrote stuff that might be construed as anti-Semitic, if you can get through his prose that could be cut with a machete (try reading the proprietary lease to your coop, and then try reading Wagner, and then decide which is more difficult to understand).   Was Benjamin Franklin a lousy statesman because he tormented and then threw in jail his only son?  Did you know that the author of Poor Richard's Almanac also wrote Fart Proudly?  (Because that's what he was "really" thinking).

I love to listen to Carmina Burana.  I like "The Ride of the Valkyries" sections of Wagner.  I don't have to live with either of these guys, just their music, because I choose to do so.  

Was Clinton a lousy president because he enjoyed an illicit extra-marital fling with a thong-twanging nineteen-year-old nonentity?  (Why is anyone shocked that a guy with the balls to run for president has balls?)  If you knew what Dr. Seuss was "really" thinking when he wrote The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, or One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish--that the Japanese were bad people from whom Americans should be protected, and that they belonged in those interment camps in the desert because they were all traitors--would you read these childhood classics to your kids?

Yes, Dr. Seuss did write stuff that would curl your hair:  

But right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battle cry. If we want to win, we've got to kill Japs . . .

Because my grandfather was a pedophile--and he really was--does that mean I don't like his paintings?   Sargent would have been flattered, looking at them. I find, glancing at Wikipedia, that Sargent was said to be a "frenzied bugger."  Because Edward Snowden "really" thinks all those juvenile things he apparently wrote in chat rooms under the name "TheTrueHOOHA,"  if you follow Sean Wilentz, in his article for The New Republic, then Snowden must be snowing us all, out for fun and trouble and what-all.  So here's what renders Wilentz nearly incoherent with indignation:

<TheTrueHOOHA> save money? cut this social security bullshit

<User 11> hahahayes

<User 18> Yeah! Fuck old people!

<User 11> social security is bullshit

<User 11> let’s just toss old people out in the street

<User 18> Old people could move in with [User11].

<User 11> NOOO

<User 11> they smell funny

<TheTrueHOOHA> Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine

<TheTrueHOOHA> you fucking retards

Now, plowing through Wilentz's article--now up on my website with a few ripostes from other publications--I found poor writing and inconsistency, but the biggest fault of all seems a lack of historic, psychological and indeed artistic understanding.  Talented people, our heroes, our beloved writers, our admired politicians, tend to have large ambitions and larger appetites.  Remember when Dumbledore admits that because he's a man of large talents, his mistakes tend to be large as well?  Want another example?  How about David Petraeus.  Look was he was "really" thinking when he was solving military problems?  If I were his wife, I'd tear off the top of his head.  But does the public really want to do that?  They don't have to live with him either, just benefit from his brainpower.

Creative, talented people get their ideas partly from regressing (yes, acting like a two year old).   Try Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," in which the writer is complared to the child at play.  Remember Keats's idea of negative capability:   "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"

That state of mind can produce good ideas.  And a lot of bad ones you have to go through in order to get to the good ones.  Sometimes even bad behavior.  The NSA could stop their irritable reaching after fact.   The aftermath of September 11--suspicion, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the ruined lives, the young people so wounded that they turn to terror--is worse than the attack.   I think Snowden wants to counter this American fantasy that a virtual panopticon prevents terror, and worse--the fantasy that we can control and prevent every bad event.  Religion, philosophy, art, are all there to help when things go wildly wrong.  

But hey--would you read Goethe if you knew he was really thinking those scatalogical thoughts expressed in the poem about the guy who'd have lived longer if he'd had a good shit?  (see another post for gory details).

The Critical Mom's Stomach Flu

We've all gone down like ninepins with a flu not as bad as last year's:  then, I couldn't sit up.  Now,  I have the energy to watch You-Tube videos on Nureyev and on The Hunger Games and on Ten Children's Books You Didn't Know Were Racist (but no surprises there) and on anything that popped up on the screen before I stopped myself and said, "What the heck am I doing?"  If I have the energy to sit up I've got to martial it to do the stuff I'm paid to do.  But I'm so tired, after days of holding bowls for vomiting children and washing sheets that got vomited on.  Swabbing floors for the same reason.  Then that day when the washing machine went on the fritz just in time for the projectile vomiting of the younger son, and everything had to be stored in a bathtub for too long.  I'm just plumb wore out and meanwhile, back in Manhattan the wolves are sinking their highly sharpened fangs into my little co-op apartment, the one I've held onto with my fingernails ever since I took up residence in Deutschland.  Dear Reader, should you find yourself to be of a legal turn of mind and also friendly to the concerns of responsible co-op owners who want responsible caretakers in their beloved small one-bedrooms, the ones to which they return with joy whenever possible, caretakers who are also shareholders themselves and grew up in the building, well then this is your chance to advise me.  I'm up the proverbial creek without the fabled paddle, and I want to save that apartment for my kids. 

The Critical Mom's Hair Disaster

So I returned, the requisite eight weeks having more than elapsed, to get my hair cut before the Winter Semester break ended and I had to go in and teach.  The perfect hairdresser--as depicted in an earlier post--had evaporated, and a very kind, sweet young woman who remembered me and my family and had cut my daughter's hair appeared:  she had "always" wanted to cut my hair because she'd seen the two guys who used to work there cut it and she was sure she could do better.  Nervously, I announced that I wanted exactly the same cut as before, just a little shorter.  
"Yes," she breathed, "but with a few layers, it will look really good."  Did I blow dry my hair?  No I did not, I told her.  Almost never, that is.  Only when it's freezing cold outside--but I don't style it.  Never, not almost never, but never, never, never.  She found this very hard to believe and wanted to show me how very easy it was to have a great hairstyle--just "a few minutes."  By the end of the fifteen minutes that she considered to be "few," my hair looked spectacular.  
And all I had to do was buy a curling iron for about 170 euros or a styling brush and really, it was easy.  I went over to my office to pick up a few things and everybody noticed how great my hair looked.  And I have to admit it did look good, although I didn't look anything like myself.  My hair was bizarrely straight, helmet-like in fact.  And it looked so neat, too.  The hairdresser seemed as happy as I was dubious, since I was already wondering when I would ever have fifteen minutes to spend on my hair, or why I would want to.  I told myself it didn't have to be fifteen minutes and I didn't have to buy the dang curling iron; I could probably manage with that hair product she sold me and a nanosecond of blow drying and a regular brush.
This belief--entirely unfounded--got me through this morning, until I had to wash my hair and tried to flatten the bouncing, all-over-the place waves with the hair dryer.  I gave up.  I couldn't afford to be twenty minutes late to work.  So now, even my unbelievably tactful daughter says, "you know, it looks like of weird, Mommy," and to me it looks like a haystack.  With a few fences, broken ones, sticking out in weird places.  When it grows out, and oh, God, let it be soon!  Let it be soon!  I am going to find a hairdresser who understands that I don't have fifteen minutes to spend on--of all things--hair.  I just spent slightly less than that writing this.

It's the Night Before School and All Through the House the Critical Mom is Finding Things To Do

I'm upstairs in the study trying and failing to decipher the instructions on the wart freeze-off medicine for the nine-year-old when I finally break down and ask my husband . . . and find that my difficulties with the German language were not the only, or even the main, obstacle.  (I'm sure you're all aware that on those multilingual Ikea instructions, the German ones seem much longer, or advise you to call the electrician).  Meanwhile, while we're puzzling out the gizmo you insert in the little wart can to get the freezy stuff out, I hear from downstairs,

"uhhh! Ahhh, OOOOHM!  OHM!  OHMMY!" and realized I'm being paged, and that it's urgent, and that whoever is paging me has lost the use of his lips.  Which can mean only one thing.

My husband, who has turned away from his own urgent, overdue essay to help me, patiently waits while I say, "waitasec a kid is screaming,"

He smiles.  "Isn't it romantic?" he asks.

And as I am barreling down the stairs to the kid--who has just wrested his very loose tooth from his gums, Henry Huggins style--I think, "Yes, it is.  It really, really is."

So then I provide the kid with paper towels, then ice wrapped in paper towels, and since we have all just, yesterday, watched Julie Andrews dueling Dwane Johnson in The Tooth Fairy, we're really prepared.  And I have a lot more to say about all kinds of things, but the rice cooker just popped, the kid and I are about to start a new Rick Riordan book, various emails are overdue, and . . . stay tuned.

The Critical Mom and the German Ballet Class

In another life the Critical Mom, before her momhood, went to ballet class every day.  Sometimes she just went to a barre, then skipped across town to the Ailey school for a Jazz dance class.  New York had classes all the time, everywhere, and you could just fit them into your busy schedule.   You could smell a dance class before you stepped in--not just that comfortably steamy, sweaty atmosphere but also the Tiger Balm.  Or sometimes the peppermint oil.  Tiger Balm (menthol, camphor, mint, cloves) is the best thing in the world for sore muscles, with peppermint oil a close second.  Once my mother was on the bus en route from dance to home, and some guy asked, "What's that perfume?"  Since she never wore anything but Yardley Lavender, she told him it must be that.  He backed away.  

In our small city, ballet classes are as rare as hen's teeth.  The only good one near our house lasts only an hour, (should be at least half an hour longer than that) and the teacher has stopped doing grand pliés--maybe he's afraid the adult beginners will sue him.   Or he's overcautious, thinking they'll injure themselves since they only come once a week, or less.  So I do my pliés before class, holding on to the doorframe.

When I discovered a ten-day Tanztage offered in a neighboring city, I went four days in a row.  By the fourth day I was very sore, and rubbed some Tiger Balm into my aching back.

The owner of the studio appeared.  Did I want to poison them all?  She flung open windows. "You must want a lot of room at the barre," she cracked.

There is no greater torture, when you are trying to warm up for a ballet class, than an open window in mid-Winter, but these Germans love their Frische Luft.  And from the look on her face,  you'd think I'd have passed a lot of gas. (What actually did stink in the room was her husband's cigarette--he was taking attendance and accepting cash payments while chain-smoking.)   She sprayed a floral air freshener all around the room, consenting to close the window only after I begged her to do so and promised never to wear Tiger Balm again.

Here's what the Germans need to know about ballet class:  Fresh air is for mountain climbing, not dance studios.  Inhale that Tiger Balm and get back to work.  

You know, I've actually seen young German  dancers spraying on underarm deodorant before class.  Also, they all wear underpants.  Under their leotards.  Yuck.   How uncomfortable.

Sweating, they believe, is good for you in a sauna.  But they need to know that it's good for you in a ballet class.  It lubricates your muscles, enabling you to stretch and jump.  

Someday, when I run the world, I'll have a big ballet studio.  I'll never allow any chilling breezes to assault the sweating bodies of the dancers.   And we will all smear Tiger Balm all over ourselves.   The radiator will be on in Winter.  No air conditioners ever, except the kind used to dehumidify.  The room must remain warm.