My dance legacy

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

Rhythm in contrast: my parents

At relatives' simchas in the '70s, my Big and Tall father (z"l) would stand on the dance floor with me. He'd spend the whole song doing nothing more than rotating our clasped hands to whatever the beat. No other part of his body moved.

My mother (z"l) relished time on the dance floor till 2013. By then, her Rollator walker was her partner.

During our cousin Spencer's bar mitzvah in '13, I should have recognized that relatively soon my mom would die of old age. It was the first time she didn't dance at a family function. Instead, my mom watched her three daughters' moves. I was conscious of trying to dance well for her.

"How was that?" I asked after we exited the dance floor.

"Nice," my mom said with a wan smile.

One of my parents didn't like -- and maybe didn't even know how -- to dance and the other was a dancing devotee. I wish I had only my mom's dancing skills, but unfortunately, I have my dad's, too. I'm a mashup of the two when it comes to getting down.

This blog entry is Henry Alford's fault.

Henry Alford's And Then We Danced: A Voyage into the Groove is the first book I recall making me cry since Stone Butch Blues more than 20 years ago. Both books inspired me to empathize especially deeply with the protagonist, the narrator -- never mind one's a memoir and the other a novel.

Henry Alford's book, which I finished this morning, mostly made me laugh and hope. I didn't cry till the last few lines when a tear streaked my right temple as I read in bed. It's also the first book in awhile that has moved me to do some writing myself. I'm a writer because I write.

Good dancers' siren songs

After my dad died of common bile-duct cancer at 56 in 1982, my mom frequented older singles dances. She met some super-suave dancers, but never the kind she'd marry.

My mother had a theory about her favorite singles dancer, that he belonged to Norway's version of Hitler Youth back in the day. Still, he treated her well and tried to court her. My mom wouldn't allow it: "What sort of example would I be setting for my grandchildren?"

Fortunately, Pat and I met at the LGBT synagogue in Chicago when Pat already was on the path to conversion. My mom embraced Pat, who is an appealing dancer, though she never had the treat of seeing Pat dance.

Pat lets loose only among our lesbian people, and only when the mood strikes her. She has the effortless rhythm that I've not yet achieved, no matter my considerable effort.

In our early days, there was a popular lesbian dance club in Chicago called Paris. Pat would hold me close and emote with her gorgeous face along to one hit or another.

Her face entranced me. If I'd seen the two of us, and I'd been alone at Paris, I'd have believed in miracles. Also, I'd have wanted to slit my wrists at the contrast between the couple's happiness and my own aloneness.

In Pat's case, her dancing prowess was a bonus. I guess we always marry one of our parents.

I'm a dancer because I dance.

Henry Alford's book gave me permission to respect myself as a dancer. Talent didn't matter. Enthusiasm and action did. Alford's stories about dancing gave me mostly happy flashbacks, including:

1. Spinning around the living room as a little kid to my eldest sister Deb's "Tapestry" album, especially "I Feel the Earth Move." I would spin until I became dizzy and would fall onto the rugs, watching and feeling the earth move.
2. Winning a middle school dance contest with my childhood friend Amy, who choreographed a line dance to The Jackson 5's Shake Your Body.
3. Trying to keep up with my middle sister Kayla when she danced to "Fly Robin Fly."
4. Learning fox trot, waltz, cha cha, the hustle and more. My Phil Jones School of Dance partner David and I moved to classics and hits of the day, including YMCA. It prepared our classmates and us for the upcoming slew of bar and bat mitzvah parties.
5. Being paired with Adam in 8th grade for our school's fundraiser because I was already 5'8", nearly my full height of 5'9", and he was already 6'2". We glided to Erev Shel Shoshanim, the world's sexiest love song (see the English lyrics). Already, there was a No Exit thing going, since one of my (shorter) classmates had a crush on Adam, I had a crush on her and Adam didn't seem attracted to anyone.
6. Square dancing at Stamford High School during gym with 6'6" Steve. I felt camouflaged by Steve and ultra-free in parallel from the pure fun of it.
7. Dancing in big groups at high school dances every weekend when I was a senior. My dad had died that November. Although Judaism requires mourners to avoid music for a year, the dances saved me. They were more soothing than the grief group my mom sent me to for Jewish high school kids with dead parents.
8. Gaping at the Rubaiyat in Ann Arbor at 19 when I was a sophomore at Michigan. I stared at an unusually graceful woman as she danced with another woman. She came up behind me after Teena Marie stopped singing. She tapped my shoulder and practically commanded, "Dance."
   "No, I'm here with her," I answered, pointing to my heterosexual friend who had taken me to the club to help me come out. My friend scolded me for not dancing with the other woman.
9. Finding relief at the Bar Aton at the Mt. Scopus campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem weekly with another American student abroad. She wouldn't be intimate with me because she said she "couldn't relate," but joyfully, she and I'd dance to British and American pop songs in a group there most Friday nights.
10. Grooving with Pat at Paris in Chicago (see above).
11. Dancing with our friend Sheila during Adirondyke Weekends from 1996 - 2008. Since Sheila and I were the same age, and close to the same height, it felt like sweet reparations for being unable to dance with other girls in high school. Finally, we got to dance to songs from our high school years with the sort of partners we'd have wanted to dance with back then. It was redemptive.
12. Using my playlist to dance with Pat, my sisters, my childhood friend Amy and newer metro-Montclair friends at my 50th birthday party a few summers ago. I opted not to care how adept I looked and spent my birthday ideally, turning our backyard into a leafy disco.

Where will I dance next? And how will I get Pat to join me?

I googled Henry Alford videos to see one of him dancing and didn't find one. It was a relief. It's best in my imagination, I think, that he's a lot better than his self-characterization. He's perhaps a superb writer while being a decent dancer.

All of us are writers and dancers when we write and dance. I'm reminded by Henry Alford's book that if I can, I want to do both for as long as I live.

Lesbian Life BCE (Before the Cat Era) and Beyond

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


Crystalizing My Lesbian Identity

The other morning, I was finishing up stretching after my indoor-rowing session in our house in Montclair, New Jersey, in the sunny room downstairs with the triple-glass doors. Just then, Randy Crawford's "Wrap U Up" began playing, according to the algorithmic personalization of the free music that boomed from the black Bose box on the floor.

I sat down in one of the four Carolish-era Herman Miller Eames shell chairs I had inherited when my mom (z"l) died 20 months ago, cracked open a Costco bottle of water and swigged as I looked out into our half-snow-covered garden. Listening to Randy Crawford's molten voice, I remembered a winter-night date more than a quarter of a century ago, back when I was renting an efficiency apartment near Ashland and Addison in Chicago. The apartment wouldn't have had room for a rowing machine, even if I could have afforded one then.

At a friend's party the prior weekend, I had met a tall, Midwest-born-and-bred classical musician with classically beautiful features. Our first date included dancing to late-'80s music in all its glory at a then-popular-and-now-extinct Chicago North-Side lesbian bar. After a marathon of songs, we paused only to go to the multi-stall Ladies Room. I was ready to return to the dance-floor when she kissed me for the first time. Against the sinks, in the bathroom.

"I don't want this in here. It makes it seem dirty." With her graceful hands and tender mouth, she tried to change my mind, but I was repulsed. We were too beautiful to be doing something so gorgeous in such an unappealing place.

"Let's go for a walk," she suggested and I was relieved. We left the club and walked out into sub-zero wind. We walked against the wind all the way to the Lake. No one else appeared to be there in such forbidding weather. I could hear my teeth, tapping together. She smiled at me and took the mitten off of one of my hands, and warmed each one of my fingers, in her mouth.

CE - Cat Era

Thrilling as it had been with the musician, and a number of other remarkable Chicago-area women in my twenties, Pat emerged as the kindest, funniest, most appealing, brilliant and magnetic among them.

Yesterday afternoon, on our way home from an afternoon ride in our station wagon to Chester, New Jersey -- which my wife Pat and I had read was quaint, according to Yelp -- we stopped at a grocery store and I whispered out of the side of my mouth, "Pat, look, sisters." For the first time, she didn't turn to look. We kept walking and I said, "I guess it's no longer such a big deal, huh?" Throughout our nearly 24 years together so far, the term, "sisters", had been code for whenever we thought we saw an apparent couple of two women. It was always exhilarating to be reminded that we weren't alone.

Pat always said I could blog about whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't invade her privacy with my postings, so I'll step gingerly around this point: For our first decade and a half together, I could enjoy intimacy in our relationship practically whenever I wished, and then we adopted two sister-cats, one of whom sleeps with us routinely. (Just ran this paragraph by Pat and she acquiesced to my including it.)

The post-rowing Randy Crawford tune and the book *Carol*, and the movie -- which I felt improved upon the book -- awoke my BCE memories. And then Pat gave me an article by Frank Rich, where he wrote: "Even today, Todd Haynes’s mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel comes as a shock—mostly for how much lesbian culture remains invisible to America at large." 

This post is my humble contribution to increased lesbian visibility.

Fall Fever

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

Feeling Extra-alive

Bike rides for the first time in a decade ... treadmilling with Pat this morning ... learning of -- and seeing -- this striking couple of pioneers earlier this week ... reading a magnetic novel ... seeing a post by a Facebook friend, expressing gratitude for her "cute nurses" as she convalesced from donating a kidney ... considering swimming outdoors tomorrow when I'm in Phoenix for work ... the unseasonably warm weather in New Jersey during this mid-November ... all of these experiences and possibilities are giving me Fall Fever.

Typically, Spring Fever is when I notice the same sex more than usual and remember that although Pat[ricia] & I are loyal and monogamous to each other, going on nearly 24 years so far, and with no plans to change our supremely faithful status, there are times -- usually in springtime -- when I feel surrounded by a museum show of women who remind me why I identify first of all as lesbian.

Jewish Or Not...Lesbian Or Not

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

Realistic Appearance and Apparent Reality

This weekend, I read an article in the Sunday "New York Times" magazine, that focused on how particularly Jewish-American immigrants in Israel need to prove their Jewish identity when they wish to marry there, since marriage is overseen by the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, rather than by the government.

Yesterday, a friend told me that he felt somehow Jewish, though to his knowledge, he came from a family that even had its own crest. I woke up this morning, thinking of a Yiddish expression I've heard my mom use: the "pintele Yid" (the "Jewish spark"). She always applied it to reluctant Jews, who somehow seemed to be drawn back to their heritage in later-life. This was not the case for my friend, but still, it reminded me of the attraction my mom spoke of.

This afternoon, one of my mother's long-time, actively, culturally Jewish friends, who she hadn't seen in some time -- and who I hadn't seen in years -- said that her daughter had been with her female partner for 25 years and yet unlike me, the daughter had not yet wanted to be affiliated with any Jewish community [due to the Orthodox rejection of her as a lesbian]. "I need to work on her," she said.

"For me, I think I was nostalgic for the tunes and rituals I learned in [Modern Orthodox Jewish] school and so I couldn't stay away," I said.

Telling me goodbye, she said a bit urgently, it seemed, perhaps, in case we never saw each other again, "You look well and should stay well. I'm in the forefront of gay marriage activism [at nearly 90 years old]."

I kissed her cheek in response and said, "Thank you for your leadership."

If she didn't declare it, no one would know of her activism just by looking at her. And perhaps no one would know her daughter was a lesbian if her daughter didn't tell them explicitly; I had no recollection of "gaydar" [rhymes with radar and means being able to sense when someone is gay] being triggered in me by any of her children. No one would know about my Christian friend's paradoxical pintele Yid either, unless he told them.

When I worked in Schaumburg, Illinois, for the technology arm of Sears, Roebuck & Co., one of my colleagues wanted to know how it was possible that I was Jewish, since I had blue eyes.

I wrote about this here before, I think, but I responded, "Both of my parents have blue eyes; Russia, where both sides of my family are from originally, had a lot of pogroms, where soldiers pillaged Jewish villages, so maybe they're from that time; I don't know...."

What if I weren't really Jewish?

How ironic! During the era of the Holocaust, people had to prove they were not Jewish and today, in Israel, they had to prove they were. What a strange sensation -- to be worried that anyone would ever challenge the veracity of my Jewish identity, and what a luxury, I guess, compared with the danger my people had been in at various times historically, where they would have been happy to pass as non-Jews.

Blue eyes and tall height aside, growing up, I did always feel that people, who had met other Jews, and who did not yet know my name, which is a giveaway, wouldn't be surprised to learn that I was Jewish. (In my experience, the majority of Jews I have known have not been particularly tall or blue-eyed.)

My parents reinforced the identity so much that it never was a question for me until my colleague challenged me at work. And then, I provided a flippant, yet perhaps realistic, answer.

Fierce Pride

Just as my parents nurtured me to be proud of my Jewish identity, I nurtured myself -- with the help of the gay, lesbian, bi and trans (GLBT) community -- to be proud of my lesbian identity. And that identity got challenged a bit more often, oddly, since I felt, also, that I did not pass as heterosexual. My mother had a colleague, for example -- a fellow art collector, who was in his eighties -- who told me even after meeting Pat, "If I were 20 years younger, I'd woo you."

I just looked at him incredulously.

Today, I saw him again, a few years later and he said, "You're looking as beautiful as ever. Where's your partner?"

"She's not interested in the topic of the lecture."

"You're still together, though?"

"Yes, for nearly 16 years so far."

"That's longer than I was married to either of my wives."

I smiled at him and kept walking.

In the same edition of "The New York Times," this weekend, I read that "Tootsie" and "Some Like It Hot," both of which were films about men, posing as women, were deemed the top two funniest films of all time.

What was it about people, watching people, being fooled by mistaken identity that was so ultimately entertaining?

Why was it hilarious as fiction, but in reality, depending on the era, at a minimum unbelievable and at worst, highly dangerous? And how could my pride have been anything other than fierce with the challenging histories that the Jews and the GLBT communities have had?

Over the years, a number of people asked me why I was so earnest, particularly around role-modeling. Last week, I was asked again after saying that although it was a lot of pressure, I tried to be exemplary as often as I could....Now, I did not define what I meant by "exemplary," which when I considered it further, mostly meant, striving to be authentic; in any case, a black colleague asked me, "Doesn't that get exhausting?"

I wanted to respond, but did not: "I can't believe you can't relate. As someone from an historically-underrepresented group, I would think you'd understand the aspiration to be a leader despite your minority status, along with the importance of making it, so that the next generation of your people could see hope of success by your example."

Perhaps, I was just extra-conscious of my identity compared to most people....