Notes from A Jewish Exploration of LGBT Musicals Part 4

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Session 4, last one about *Fun Home*, November 29


During our third session on *Fun Home*, I had meant to bring a printout of the portrait that my artist friend Riva Lehrer painted of Alison Bechdel, but I forgot, so I'll post a couple of links here -- the first to the portrait and Riva's narrative on it and the second, to a link, thanking Riva for giving a recent gallery talk in front of the portrait at the National Gallery. I'm always envious of visual artists because who wants to slog through a blog-post? It's so much more instantly moving to look at a painting, drawing or sculpture, especially by a gifted artist like Riva.

Riva can also paint with words; when we were in our 20s and both living in Chicago, where we met and where Riva still lives, she told me, "You remind me of a Carson McCullers character -- a fierce outsider with her nose pressed up against the window." I think I'm a bit less fierce now ....



The Graphic Memoir and the Play - More Comparison

The coming-out letter aftermath

We looked at pp. 77-79 and listened to "A Flair for the Dramatic". Both covered Alison's exchange with her closeted, gay father -- of whose sexual orientation she was not yet fully conscious -- after her parents received her coming-out letter.

The song version had a great couple of lines, where her father said, "The good news is, you're human."

"What does that *mean*, she asks herself, "What else would I *be*?"

Raising my hand and then speaking as Jonathan nodded to me, "I keep mentioning things my mom [z"l] blurted out to me, but this is reminding me of the time when I was 17 and she found a love letter to another girl that I had left on the kitchen table by accident/on purpose," I said, "Her first words were, 'Don't you marry some man and ruin his life!'"

"You're crazy! It doesn't mean anything!" I yelled desperately.

One of my classmates said, "Your mother had a lot of insight. How did she think to say that?"

"My mother [z"l] was very smart."

Unlike Alison's father, my mom (z"l) was paying attention to my reality, even if I wasn't yet prepared to. Before she was clued in by the letter, though -- perhaps when I was in 8th grade -- we had an informal "birds and bees" talk, but it was really all about my mother (z"l) asserting that I could enjoy myself with boys without spoiling my virtue. I don't recall her also explaining the pregnancy-danger angle.

My mother told me, "There's plenty you can do without having intercourse." I understood that sexual intercourse with a boy would wreck everything in terms of marriageability, but that I was being given permission/encouragement to do whatever else I wanted (with boys) -- not that she explained what that included.

 The scene in the car

We also read pp. 220-21 aloud and listened to Telephone Wire . Alison's and my parents (z"l) gave us so much just by giving us life, but also how frustrating it was to witness Alison's exchange with her dad during college. He was completely self-absorbed and made Alison parent him instead of rising to her occasion and being the parent.

The song version of the scene in the car reminded me of watching the Miss America pageant once with my dad (z"l). I was prepubescent and among my mother (z"l), two older sisters, my dad (z"l) and I, only my dad (z"l) and I watched the pageant; that could have been a clue about my future.

My father (z"l) also died young, at 56, and we, too, never had an explicit discussion about what I wanted for my future in terms of a spouse. In Alison's case, at least she tried to discuss her identity with her father. In my case, I was too scared at 17, which is how old I was when he (z"l) died.

Like Alison, ultimately, I did send a coming-out letter to my mother (z"l) and two more to each of my sisters and I mailed all three on the same day. I was a senior in college and my mom (z"l) must have expected it, since she had found the love letter to my girlfriend four years prior. She called me long-distance from Stamford to Ann Arbor and was purely kind. And for the first time ever, she didn't hurry our conversation due to the long-distance charges.

In the book version of the song, Alison and her dad were heading out to see "Coal Miner's Daughter". Once, when I was five, my dad took just me to see "Gigi" and then out to dinner afterward. It was my first Broadway play. I wonder if we could have experienced "Fun Home" together, and so much else, if only he had lived long enough.

*Fun Home*'s Design

Our instructor Jonathan started the session: Watch these two montages and jot down some differences you see between the Public Theater version and the Broadway version; collectively -- though mostly helped by Jonathan, who was more familiar with the footage and both productions -- we came up with:

• Cartoon panels were suggested in both productions, but at the Public, there were white frames on the backdrop behind the actors, and on Broadway, they appeared as lit-up, giant squares on the stage-floor.
• On Broadway: Alison unearthed her memories via the furniture that would emerge/pop up through the stage floor; the actors were lit from four perspectives; and the audience could see the audience's reaction, since it was theater in the round; and the follow spot[light] on the Adult Alison, "... made it look like she was floating through the memories" -- Jonathan.
• What I caught was less subtle: In the Public Theater version, the male babysitter had his shirt unbuttoned and his chest and underpants band were visible while in the Broadway version, Alison's costume was a shirt and underpants for the college scene, where she had her first intimate experience with a woman.

Jonathan explained that good scenic set designers aim to elicit audience emotions with what they design. We also learned, as an aside, that the Lincoln Center Library has practically every Broadway play and you can sit there and watch any one if you make an appointment. Who knew?

Here are links to the first, second and third in my series of notes on this course. The next four sessions are going to be devoted to *Falsettos*, another LGBT Broadway play that's currently in revival. So far, I'm noticing that the most Jewish parts of our exploration of these LGBT musicals are:

1. We, who are in the class and our instructor are Jewish.
2. For the Broadway version of *Fun Home*, the playwright, Lisa Kron, is Jewish. 
3. For *Falsettos*, the lyricist and co-playwright, Bill Finn, is a congregant of our Synagogue and Jewish.
4. Some of us share how we're relating to the play we're studying by sharing stories of what happened in our Jewish families that bear any resemblance to the play's plot.

Notes from A Jewish Exploration of LGBT Musicals Part 3

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.


Session 3, November 15

Since we continue to meet in the chapel, where congregants' relatives' yahrzeit plates appear on the far wall, my parents (z"l) still are auditing this class, effectively as a pair of brass-plated (dead) flies on the wall (see photo below). My dad's annual yahrzeit lamp was lit this time; it was his 34th yahrzeit on the 11th, so the lamp was staying lit till the following Shabbat:

Exercise: Create a curated exhibit of a day in the past week, or your past week altogether, as represented by three objects that you describe on three index cards and leave somewhere in this room near one another.


My cards, all from one day last week:

1.  Viva la vida-inscribed, watermelon-slice-shaped-and-colored key-chain from a street artist in Mexico City 
2. Damascened vessel in silver and bronze, with Arabic inscriptions from Medieval Jerusalem
3. [A memory of] Size 14 sneakers for skateboarding.

Give everyone a tour of your objects. We walked around on a guided tour of each exhibit and did not necessarily explain the significance of our objects; in my case, I simply described them.

"How does this exercise connect with last week?" asked Jonathan.

"Objects give an entryway into the story," I offered.

"Ok, and objects help us remember. There's something about going around the room to "look" at the objects that helps us recall and remember. It helps us encapsulate emotion. And jump off to go deeper into ... a specific set of events that are embodied by a number of objects."

I loved this exercise and will re-use it somehow. I loved it because it made me feel so invested and engaged in expressing myself creatively, spurred on by what had amounted to the most vivid objects of a particular day.

Video of Alison Bechdel, explaining her artistic process

We watched this video next and I recalled being lucky to go to a live lecture by Alison Bechdel at the LGBT Center in NYC several years ago, where she gave a longer description of her technique. I was amazed by its meticulousness. And then I marveled again at another artist's precise, original method of glass-blowing. I blogged about his demo and lecture and compared it with Bechdel's process a bit. You can see for yourself; just scroll down to the section, "Two Artists, Equally Inspired and Inspirational".

Next, we compared pp. 96-98 of the graphic memoir to the scene/song, "Party Dress".

Both the panels and the scene/song reminded me of a painful memory. My face was so troubled, I imagine, that Jonathan asked if I had something I wanted to say.

This just reminded me of a very painful memory. It was Deena Gans' birthday party and I was 12. [Nearly all of the girls in my class already needed bras, but I didn't yet, at all. I was ashamed that I was still wearing undershirts. I couldn't stand wearing an undershirt any longer, not even under the striped Danskin shirt I put on for the party.]

My mother insisted that I wear an undershirt. "No, I won't," I insisted back.

"Put on an undershirt  n  o  w  !'"

Instead, I ran out of the house and down our long driveway as my mother yelled out the front door at me, "Butch!" I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it wasn't good.

It was fresh, the pain of our exchange of more than 40 years ago. It was another five years before my mom (z"l) was even more consciously vocal about my lesbianism, when by mistake/on purpose, I left a love letter to another girl on the kitchen table. I was a high school senior and just weeks prior, my father (z"l) had died of bile-duct cancer and only my mother (z"l) and I were left in the house, since my sisters were older and had moved out. "Don't you marry some man and ruin his life!" my mother yelled as her initial reaction to the discovery of the letter. She came around to being compassionate and was greatly supportive for most of my life, but those early years were crushing for both of us.

Then we looked at pp. 189-190 and listened to "Clueless in New York". 

I had a couple of memories pop up during the panels and during this scene, too. The panels referred to a trip with Alison's father and her siblings to New York City for the Bicentennial. Along with my mother (z"l), my father (z"l) took my siblings and me to New York during the Bicentennial to see the Tall Ships. Compared to Alison's experience, it was one of the nicest family days we ever had -- we parked with many others in a parking garage near the river and watched from there with tons of humanity pouring out of other parked cars. My mom (z"l) had packed a picnic for us, and we munched our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while leaning against the station wagon and watching the ships glide by.

The scene in the play didn't refer to the Bicentennial, but rather to her father's cagey wish to find some excitement in what was the gay hotspot back then, Greenwich Village. It reminded me of me, 10 years after the Tall Ships trip, when I turned 21. My middle sister and brother-in-law invited me to stay with them in their apartment at the time, in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. To celebrate my coming of age for legal drinking, they gave me a bottle of champagne as a birthday gift. We drank some and then they went to bed. I told them I was going to go for a walk. The difference was that all of us were adults officially, rather than that I was a parent, leaving my kids alone in a huge, strange city, as Alison's father did to her siblings and her.

I left Kayla & Elliot's apartment, hoping for the adventure of seeing real lesbian and gay people, walking around the Village. I scouted for a bit and no one was apparent, not any women in any case, so I decided to do something wild and entered a neighborhood magazine shop to find something racy to read.

The only LGBT-oriented publication for sale was "Gay Community News", a weekly newspaper out of Boston. I didn't peek through it at all. I had the cashier stuff it into a paper bag and walked back to my sister's, where I planned to read it if they were already asleep. They were, and I was excited, till I scanned the headlines. Yawn. It was all straight news ... so to speak. There was nothing pulse-provoking about it. I'm fairly confident that Alison's father found what he was looking for on his Village jaunt compared to my thwarted exploration.

Exercise for Homework: Consider three iconic moments in my whole life that reflect an arc of experience and write/illustrate them; the illustration option is my inference, as the form that Jonathan handed us had three caption fields with space next to each for a drawing. I'll think about it. So far, here are some candidates without doing any refinement, prioritization or arc consideration:

• Learning to swim / ride a bike / recite the Ma Nishtanah (Four Questions) at the seder / to love rocks and minerals at Dr. Henderson's encouragement
• Helping complete a minyan by lying by omission at my mother's (z"l) encouragement; they thought I was a bar-mitzvah-aged boy when we were in Mayah Sh'arim, but I was a tall eight-year-old girl
• My mom (z"l), yelling Butch at me
• Noticing my physical interest in one of my best friends, rather than in her older brother, at 11
• My first lesbian experience, in Israel at 15
• My father dying when I was 17
• Going to college and exploring my sexuality, including while living in Jerusalem during junior year
• Getting fired from a job I thought I was too good for in 1990
• Beginning my relationship with Pat in 1992
• Starting up the LGBT B2B business development team at my company 
• Having my Master's sponsored by my company
• Going with my future wife Pat to India on assignment for my work for six months in 2007
• Marrying Pat legally in 2011
• Graduating with a Master's in 2012
• My mother, dying in 2014 ....

We have just one session more on "Fun Home" and then we switch to "Falsettos" in two Tuesdays, after Thanksgiving.

Here are links to the first and second in my series of notes on this course.

Home Again

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

And It's Good to Be

Being home with our kitties, Phoebe and Toonces, feels wonderful, much as it was fun to get away.

We enjoyed staying in a gay-owned B&B during our Maine vacation this past week. I was reminded of my senior year, when I lived in Osterweil, a co-op in Ann Arbor. The nicest part of living there was that the houseful of people became a community. In Ann Arbor, I learned about the environment from fellow Osterweilians, who studied in the School of Natural Resources, and at the B&B, I learned that there's a new biography of Jeannette Howard Foster, who wrote *Sex-variant Women in Literature,* a book I found during my early years of living in Chicago, pre-Pat.

Social Networking -- Online and Off...

For my work so far this year, I've dedicated time to building a community online, and considering the serendipitous, informal learning people can access through online social networking. Being at the B&B this week, I was reminded that the same thing can happen through face-to-face social networking.

For example, I learned about the Go Go PRIDE mobility scooter from a Canadian couple I met while walking on the Marginal Way; learned that Alison Bechdel is coming out with a new book this September from one of the other guests at the B&B; and another of the B&B guests learned from me to combine goat-cheese, hummus and walnuts with red peppers - a combo he'd never considered.

Socializing face to face and online both are valuable to me. My online class began last Wednesday and despite the bit of delay caused by the technology used by my grad school, it was a decent learning experience. And I was approached electronically by two classmates -- one a Leadership Development leader at a large firm in New York and the other, an animator in Los Angeles. To me, whether in person or online, profound learning and deep socializing is possible when the people involved have an abundance mentality.

The point about having an abundance mentality reminded me of something surprising I learned last week, when I spent a day at the Teachers College (TC) library: An administrator of "PocketKnowledge," the social archive of TC told me that more people haven't yet posted their research, perhaps, as they're afraid of people stealing their work. That made no sense to me. In my case, I posted my collection of some of my best writing and research so far (I think you need a TC UserID and password to access it) because I want to promote the notion that I'm an emerging scholar in Adult Learning and Leadership.

The scarcity mentality extends to simple socializing, too. There are good people with whom I come into regular contact, who discount anything that's not face-to-face and I need to let them feel that way, and I wish that all of them would let me feel as I do, which is the opposite. In my experience, people, who are super-sociable and generous online are typically also giving and sociable when face to face. It's a silly stereotype, I think, that people, who are active online, somehow are less able to socialize with "real" people....Even as I write this, I know it sounds defensive.

It's true that I'm more comfortable being fully self-expressive in writing than when I am in conversation with people, typically, but still, I feel equipped to have a substantial interchange offline as well as online. They're different. And one is not better than the other, I am coming to see. I used to over-simplistically subscribe to the position that face to face contact was always superior to any other sort of exchange. I'm growing and recognizing that each way of communicating has its virtues and drawbacks.

Socializing with Animals

After a week of socializing with new friends and classmates both online (for class) and offline (for vacation), I'm ready to socialize most of all this weekend with our pets, Phoebe and Toonces. I hope I can finish the great book I found at the start of our vacation, by Temple Grandin, *Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior*. I want to understand our cats, as I didn't grow up with pets. So far, it's amazing. I feel much closer to them after just 75 pages.

Graphic Novels and Culture Klatsch

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Book Lust

Last night at dinner, Pat said, "I put The Elephanta Suite on your night-table. I think you'll like it, and it has big print."

I frowned.

She smiled.

Pat's a super-fast reader. I am a slow reader.

Malgudi Days, which I'm loving, is right up my alley. Simple. Essential. Touching.

I've written here before that I'm a slow reader, but a relatively fast writer. Probably, that's why I prefer to write than to read.

Growing up, I was ashamed of my slow reading speed and I know it's why I majored in Comparative Literature. I needed to prove I could read and comprehend in not one, but two languages (English and Hebrew).

Also, it's probably why I like graphic novels. In our three-plus months here, I've read both of Sarnath Banerjee's, Corridor and The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers.

When I was buying the ...Wondrous Capers book at Blossom Book House in Bangalore, a pretty woman looked at it in my hand and smiled, saying that she appreciated Banerjee's books, too. Pat was right there and enjoyed listening to the exchange, she told me later.

Also, later, Pat and I agreed that while at the bookstore, we felt in the thick of the society, like we did when we were with mostly Indians on that early-Sunday-morning Lal Bagh tour.

"Have you read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel?" I asked the woman, "It's actually a graphic memoir, and amazing!" (I wrote a bit about it previously here.)

"No."

"You'd love it! It's the most literary book of its kind you've ever seen! It's Fun Home, and Fun is short for Funeral, like, Funeral Home."

I like the manga Buddha series, she said, pointing to a daunting stack of titles. Wikipedia's great because now that I've scanned the info. on the Buddha books, I'm interested in going back to the bookstore and trying at least the first one.

Deathly Digression

The bookstore didn't have Fun Home, but said they could order it. I said, "That's OK. I own it already, and it's amazing." Later, it occurred to me that "funeral home" might be a bit of a foreign concept here, since most of the dead are cremated.

I must admit that I'm willing to be ignorant about this for now, as I don't feel like researching the Indian funeral home industry, or lack thereof. Ideally, one of the people who finds his or her way to this blog will know and will educate me.

Digging for Discrimination

The latest Banerjee novel is the closest I've come to meeting a Jewish, Indian immigrant, and the character's fictional(!) as well as multi-century and multi-geographical. The book is stranger than his first, and compelling.

As a non-fiction Jew myself, when I read about how the character is a merchant for the rich, I found myself digging for an anti-Semitic sub-text, mostly without any satisfaction...namely, I didn't really find one.

From experience, though, I became nervous, looking at cartoon depictions of Jews by a cartoon-artist who wasn't Jewish. Historically, and even currently, they were not typically flattering.

Still, even without anything overtly anti-, the character's role reminded me of a conversation I had a month ago with one of the otherwise smarter people in India.

"I wouldn't guess you were Jewish," she said.

"Why not?"

"Well, you don't seem like a bean-counter."

"What do you mean?"

"Jews are known for being careful with their money, though nothing compared to the Chinese!"

"Where did you learn that?"

"You just seem more fun --"

"I didn't think there were enough Jews in India for anyone to have an opinion about us. What have you read?"

At that point, another of the smarter people in India, who was listening, interjected, "Anyone here *would* have read."

"What? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I heard that that was big elsewhere in Asia, actually."

They looked at me blankly, and so I inferred that the nutty rag didn't ring a bell. "What if I made a generalization about Indians?"

"We wouldn't mind. In fact, we're terrible to ourselves. If you walked into a restaurant here with a disabled Indian friend, who needed assistance, they'd help you first because you're white."

I've never felt so white as I do here. I've always thought of my skin as greenish and definitely not pink, like full-fledged white people (like white people who are not on the hate-list of the Ku Klux Klan). And yet in India, I feel like a white person.

At a glance in the United States, of course, I am registered as white. I do not feel as white there, though, both proportionally and culturally. That is, there are many more white people in the United States than here, and so there's a hierarchy of whiteness, I feel, that is absent here. Instead, there seems to be a hierarchy of brownness. It is definitely all relative.

To India-based Indians, in my experience, Jews are mostly literary characters or occasional figures in news from Israel; we're not part of their basic frame of reference, and so here, I'm just white and also assumed to be Christian.

I can't recall if I wrote this here or not, but during our first week, staying at the Windsor, we asked the concierge to see if there were a synagogue or anywhere for us to worship with other Jews during our Sabbath.

At the end of the week, she reported hopefully, "There is no synagogue, but I have the address of a Methodist church if you like."