EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Boo! Ha ha, WATCH OUT!  What was THAT?

Dark things on the prowl tonight! Prey or be preyed on!

Plus…. Here comes the WIND! The whole thing puts me in mind of that other Robert Frost poem. Here it is:

“Once by the Pacific” (but you guys on the Atlantic aren’t safe either!)

(scary underlinings mine)

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;

It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

Last week I wrote a column where I maybe came off like the Mother Teresa of house plants, like I’ve never thrown away a pot of sickly violets in my life. The truth is, my mate says he’s afraid to get sick around here for fear he too will get carted to the dump. So OK at one point in my life I did throw sick plants away, but it was years ago when I first started following the teachings of Thalassa Cruso, here pictured, who out and out recommended such measures: “Your gardenia will only disappoint past their bloomtime,” she’d say. “Treat the plant as cut flowers and toss it.”

So I did toss my gardenia plant, and other plants too. But now I can’t throw anything alive away. These days my sick houseplants come to what I call the ‘infirmary,’ which is any place in the house I walk by often, so I can see them and tend to them.

Last week all 30 plants came in from the porch for the winter. Two of the palms have spider mites and the gardenia plant, which by the way is is almost three years old and blossoms every spring is experiencing ‘leaf drop’ as it pines for the humid outdoors.  I’m keeping it in the bathroom where I see it five times a day. As for the palms, they’re right here in the kitchen until I can take soap and water to every last inch of each little frond. Who knows though? They make the place look pretty cool right? Maybe they’ll stay here til spring! Anyway here are the sick palms as they look today just waiting for me and some Thursday night TV! (just out of sight to the left)

I’m not done with the topic of fashion quite yet. Forget that whole post about the fashionistas, let’s talk Real World. My Real World truth is this:  I don’t care how popular Mad Men is, I don’t want to dress the way women they did in the early 60s. I did it once and the results weren’t pretty. That’s my mom on the left. That’s me beside her in the Porky Pig hat, I know, say no more, right? I wasn’t set free until the day came when I could  choose my own clothes and ride all the way to Boston on the train to do it, landing – where else? at Filene’s Basement where females dug fast as foxhounds through bins of newly discounted apparel and changed outfits right out there in the open.

Filenes Basement closed in the summer of ’07, that wonderful get-it-for-a-song store in the bowels of its 1910 Boston building and for years as much of a tourist destination as the Paul Revere House over in the North End, as familiar to visitors as the Cheers bar just across the Common. I wasn’t much more than three the first time Mom took us there on a mission to buy her two little girls the ensemble that was the ‘look’ for all little girls in that far more formal era: a knee-length wool  coat, leggings to match and a little beaked hat. I remember we met Mom’s old friend and her two little boys at the Public Garden after, had a ride on the famous Swan Boats, had ice cream sundaes at Schrafft’s, then went to this woman’s apartment where the three-year-old peed on my leg, using this funny little faucet he pulled down his tiny trousers to find. It was my introduction to the difference between the sexes, the great engine that drives our small and weak species to keep on keepin’ on.

Impelled by this same engine, I went back to that great den of bargains again and again in my high school years. It was there that my groom bought the suit  he wore on  our wedding day; there that that I bought the dress I wore that whole summer, a true flower- child frock which I loved with all my heart though it was so short I couldn’t sit down in it.

Those were the days all right. Here’s a look-back. Watch it and weep.

Gloria Steinem has a button that says, “The Truth Will Set You Free (But First It Will Piss You Off)” which is funny because I can’t think of anyone who seems to be in less of a pissed-off state than this activist/ feminist/ lecturer/ author who spoke to a sold-out crowd of fellow Smith College alums last night at a gala celebration of her 75th birthday.

“SHE’S 75?” I said to myself when, lean and limber, she strode onto the stage at The Asia Center on the New York’s Upper East Side. That thought came right before I moved on to the equally silly “Could I possibly look like that at 75? If I gave up meat AND dairy AND wheat AND possibly Thanksgiving dinner too?” But within five minutes of the time she entered into her conversation with Smith President Carol Christ I was asking myself if I could ever BE like her, be like any person who carries her gifts this lightly, and with so much humor and heart.

“Empathy is the most revolutionary of emotions” Gloria once wrote and she sure feels like a person who has lived into that insight. Not that she never gets angry. When someone asked her last night what makes her mad today, she quickly said, “The fact that women are still doing two jobs, one at work and one when they get home.” And then she shared her most recent insight: “I figured out the other day that what women have are the jobs that can’t be outsourced. I mean to be a nurse you have to actually BE there, right?” But when at the end someone asked her to name the moment that had perhaps given her the most satisfaction, she described the morning she was crossing Lexington Ave. to get a bagel and a city worker popped his head up out of a manhole. “Hey GLORIA!” he yelled. “‘See that sign ‘People working’? It took us FIFTEEN FUCKIN’ YEARS to get it! Today my daughter is an electrician and makes as much money as I do! How great is that?’”

Pretty great, jaunty man. Pretty great, you Gloria of ours. Thank God for your 75 years here and may you get your wish and still be with us at 100.

“Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” an old vaudevillian once said but not to me it isn’t.  I’ve been making people laugh since I was four years old and first began doing my imitation of the old faster-than-a-speeding-bullet Superman prologue, which I’d rattle off in tights and bunchy underpants, a dishtowel around my neck for a cape.

No, to my mind, it’s not hard to make people laugh, provided you don’t mind sacrificing your dignity. If you ask ME for an epigram depicting one true thing, I’d say this: “Comedy is easy. Therapy is hard” and I found out just how hard when I enrolled in counseling under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan, maybe you’re familiar with it?

Doing therapy under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan occurs when someone you live with suggests you get counseling, although he personally wouldn’t open up in a therapist’s office if you dragged him there in chains and threatened to pull out all his nose hairs.

To be plain, my husband, whose nose-hairs I have occasionally eyed, said he thought I should seek treatment. Because I seemed sad, he said.

“Hey, all humorists are sad down deep,” I retorted, though I knew he was right; I was sad. Not long before, my mom had died, and I guess I felt too young to face life without her. Plus, she didn’t just die. She died in my living room. During her own birthday party. Within 20 minutes of when I offered the toast by reading a letter which her dad had written her when she was off in college, her own mom newly dead, and she homesick, grief-struck, eating too much chocolate and failing History. My reading it aloud these 60 years later made my steely mom cry, who never, ever, cried – something which I then somehow concluded brought on her death.

So, yes I was sad, if not plumb crazy. And I began seeing this counselor to try feeling better.Every week I drove to her office, all unwilling. Every week she asked me how I was. I could only tell her how everyone else was. I told her a million stories, most of them funn. I entertained the daylights out of us both, but I wasn’t getting at the problem, and I think we both knew that, and so, after 18 months, I quit.

And 12 years passed, and I was funnier than ever, still in full flight from every kind of sadness that had ever come my way. Then, one day, my oldest friend called to say she was doing counseling -  over the phone of all things – with a gifted therapist in Colorado, who was at first reluctant to work with someone in such an unorthodox manner.

“But it’s helping!” my friend said, and one day added, “and you know you should do it too.”

And so? And so I am doing it, though God knows it isn’t easy. I can’t seem to sit still as I talk to this faraway therapist. But because we’re on the phone, she doesn’t know this. Sometimes I scrub toilets while we talk. Sometimes I strip small pieces of furniture. nOnce though, she got wise to me. “Are you DRIVING?!” she said. I was driving all right.

But I am doing it, as I wish my mom could have done it, to ease her own aching heart.

I’ll say it again and you can take it from this old vaudevillian: Comedy really is easy by comparison; and therapy is very, very hard.

(This is the ivy at my window today…..)

So what if I just SAID HOW I FELT here every day and added yet another layer of sensitive wallpaper to the walls of this Enormous Room the Internet. Sensitive wallpaper: that’s what Garrison Keillor calls personal narrative of the kind everybody’s writing these days, me on my post-nasal drip, you on the heartbreak of psoriasis, me on my inability to kick prescription laughing-gas, you on how you’re stuck in traffic and OK yes my two examples are fictional.  My faucets are all that drip but they drip all the time - we finally had to install a cat under each one because in this house the cats drink right from the faucets babe – come on over for supper, we’re running a special on bacteria! – so no, no nasal drip really, and who needs laughing gas when life is funny enough in a world where you can come down to breakfast one morning, reach for your vitamins, quick lift the bottle to your mouth to shake one loose and find a tiny BAT snoozing inside the thing, all folded up neat as Jiminy Cricket’s umbrella.

That happened to me once.  And here’s what happened yesterday:

I drove six hours so Uncle Ed, on the lip of his 90^th year, could see the full-on New Hampshire-in-autumn foliage maybe for the last time. His body is aflame with the pain of arthritis and I have some sort of freshly revealed case of scoliosis that has my own little skeleton starting to sink and torque downward like the Wicked Witch of the West in her big meting scene. End result: this morning we’re both pretty sore but it was worth it because we saw those leaves. And because they made me remember the poem Robert Frost wrote about this season.  Read it and just see if it doesn’t express what we’re all feeling right now here in these northern latitudes. It’s called “October” and it’s from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. 1916:

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost–
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

Just so you know, that sailing trip I took last week wasn’t some lazybones cruise where you’re always waddling to the midnight chocolate buffet. It was a lean mean expedition where the rules were all about having the smallest possible impact on our poor little planet.  Example One: right from the start you were told straight up how UNCOOL it would be to wander around your little stateroom brushing your teeth and looking for your underpants with the water in the sink even on ‘trickle’. Example Two: you couldn’t flush your toilet paper ever, which is evidently the norm in many parts of Europe.  In fact sometimes all they have are ‘Turkish toilets,’ plain old holes in the ground over which you have to stand to relieve yourself, which can make you feel pret-ty peeved if you’re among the unlucky half of the human race NOT equipped with one of those dandy retractable gadgets the other half is so vain about.

Here’s some comfort though: On a morning’s trek through the ragged terrain of one Greek isle, the expedition’s botanist pointed out the female of the cochineal bug, which (a) lives on the prickly pear cactus, (b) secretes white fuzzy stuff  and (c) when squashed, yields up the deep red-dye that was first used by the Aztecs but after the arrival of those pesky Conquistadors became All The Rage back in the Old World too.

But it wasn’t until we were back  on the ship eating lunch with this same botanist that I learned the best part: the male of this species lives so very briefly – only long enough to get the female pregnant – that God didn’t even give him a mouth. So BOTTOMS UP and pass the popcorn, girls! Turns out there are compensation after all!

(some critters really don’t have mouths!)

Also: to see what these little kids at the top are saying click here

Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, left, is the very picture of fashion, yet in the film about that magazine, The September Issue, the audience groans every time she extends a well-polished talon and slices into some poor designer. In the movie theatre I was in anyway they gave their hearts instead to her second-in-command  Grace Coddington who is the film’s real beauty.

Coddington was  breathtaking in her younger days, before her 20 years at American Vogue and her 20 years at British Vogue – during the 1960s in other words when she herself worked as fashion model – until a car accident so twisted her face that even now after many surgeries she has a sort sewn-together, around the left eye especially.

Anyone can see that she makes no effort to follow in Anna’s footsteps in that she doesn’t seem to “try.” Tall as she is, and reasonably trim, she makes no effort at looking fashionable. Her hair is wild and she has no eyebrows. She wears no makeup, her clothes are baggy and her shoes look like Susan B. Anthony’s –  yet the audience loves her because she seems so kind, and real.

Think what this may mean as you click on the trailer here and ask yourself: Are we choosing the inner kind of beauty over the outer kind at long last? Is that great baby Western culture finally learning to stand up in its playpen? Stay tuned!  And when you get the chance go see The September Issue at a theatre near you.

This is Grace Coddington young:

Grace today, all kindness and humor:

Our guide warned us the minute we began picking our way among the rubble on the ancient isle of Delos: we could Look Where We were GOING or we could Look Where We WERE, lest we stumble – ‘bite the dust,’ as Homer said to describe what happens in battle. (Picture it: crying out in anguish as the solider falls and sees his mouth suddenly stuffed full with the muck undefoot.)

For the hour I spent in Delos’s museum I did only the Look Where You ARE Thing, living fully in the present as I gazed at this statue and the curve of its supple back. Like most moderns I spend much of my time Looking Where I’m GOING Thing, thinking “What next?” and “After that?” and “If the rain falls?”, “If I miss the train?” If I lose my job?”

If I’m honest though I’ll admit I spend most of my time Looking Back. Where is my mother who I think of every day, even these 22 years after her death? Where are the kitchens of my childhood, my baby feet in my naps as I so clearly remember seeing them? Where are they now? Where is this young person caught in stone? This couple of the exquisite garments? Where ? Where ?

My mom had an old flame who, on meeting her 40 years later, told her she looked like Greek ruins in the moonlight. Finally, I’m getting what he meant.

I’m IN ruins and this IS Greece and that old moon’s been shining so much I think it’s on the payroll of the Bureau of Tourism -  the Bureau of Whoopsixxonassis, to say it in Greek or some approximation of that. (I’m not doing too well with my street-Greek. I tried to order  fresh-squeezed orange juice and the kid behind the counter thought I wanted to buy the whole machine. “Ah too many moneys!” he sang joyfully. “Four, five hunderd Euros!”)

I say I’m in ruins but really I’m just vacationing. At first I thought I’d keep mum about my travel plans because what if news of my absence fell into the wrong hands allowing thieves to break into my house and steal the Queen size, Suntan, Sheer-from Tummy-to-Toe pantyhose that all the cool gals in my demographic favor? But then handy family members offered to move in so I can be honest:  together with Old Dave and a couple we’ve been vacationing with since the days  we thought nothing of packing whole duffel bags filled with crib bumpers and  potty chairs.

I’ve been in Athens since Monday morning in other words and now I’m bobbing like a happy cork just off the coast of Mykonos.

Speaking of real Greek ruins in the moonlight we could see the Acropolis from our rented treetop apartment from which by night it looked rosy and romantic. But hiking up there and seeing all those tumbled Tootsie Roll parts and those friezes in the museum full of lions with Halloween-style creepy-teeth taking bites out of these poor guy’s backs just made me sad. All that beauty and might crumbled to dust in spite of the fact that here were the only people God ever made who look good in pleats! It broke my heart.

To comfort myself that night I ironed everything in my suitcase and, as a kindness to our future shipmates, washed a few things using our little rental unit’s designated appliances. The only problem: the drier didn’t quite do the job even after 120 minutes in. Well a girl’s gossamer panties dry in the blink of an eye but poor Dave: off we went to the ship with four suitcases two carry-ons and one plastic bag filled with ten sodden pounds of extra-large Ts, tube socks and tightie-whities. As the Classical folks would say, Excelsior!  Onward and Upward!