Virtual Reality

If you can't get to a reading, you might enjoy this video taken at a recent Berkeley event by my old pal, Ricky Friedman. If it seems like I keep looking at someone, my husband, Edward, was in the front row.

About Faith

I worked long and hard with a very smart editor at O Magazine named Deborah Way to figure out just how to articulate where I am with faith these days. The back and forth, draft after draft, was the closest thing to therapy that I've had in years. Although there is much left to resolve, I was able to come up with a couple thousand words about it and you can read them in the May issue, which has just hit the newsstands. Since this was written, I've dug into the Bible (a children's version, in particular), some C.S. Lewis, a refresher course on Greek and Roman mythology and a collection of poetry called In Praise of Mortality, by Rilke. Oh, and the 2004 novel, Gilead. Hard to say yet where it's all leading but it definitely feels worthwhile.

The photo that runs with the essay was taken in New York, in January, the same week The Middle Place came out. My dad was with me as the original idea for the photo was to get him walking into the Cathedral and me hesitating out front. [St. Patrick's Cathedral has a noon mass that my dad used to frequent before he retired and stopped commuting to New York.] But in the end, the shot they went to print with was one of the very last they took, while my dad was around the corner getting us coffees. Greenie, you were robbed.

I am very interested to hear from you about your faith (in God, yoga, nature, retail therapy, service--whatever you believe in) so if you have thoughts after you read the essay, please post them.

So Close Eddy

The Midnight Cough

You hear it. First, from a distance. Then it breaks through. You are dumped out of the island hammock that is REM sleep. You do not open your eyes but you roll them. Cough, cough. You pull the pillow over your head. You count. Five, six, seven— Cough, cough. She had it last night too. It never stopped. Not until she stood up. It’s postnasal drip, you can tell. Cough, cough. Nine seconds that time. Maybe it’s slowing. Cough, cough. You should get up. You might as well. It’s not going to stop. Would your husband get up if he were here? Not in a— Cough, cough. Will she wake up her sister? Why do they sleep in the same room? It was your husband’s idea. You could shoot him. If she wakes her up— Cough, cough. Get up. You gotta get up. Where are you slippers? It’s so cold. What time is it? Don’t look, you shout to yourself without speaking. Don’t ever look at the clock in the night. That insomnia article said— Cough, cough. Get up. Get up right now. Put an end to it.

You are up. A little lightheaded. You move towards the hall. Were you always this stiff? Is this why they say parenthood is for the young? Cough, cough. There is no cup in the bathroom. How could there be no cup in the bathroom? The cleaners. Why do the cleaners always take the cup—it’s like they hide it, along with your face lotion and your kitchen sponge— Cough, cough. You are down the stairs, in the cabinet, at the fridge. You press the cup against the door. The light—don’t look at the light. You’ll never get back to sleep if you look— Cough, cough. You are upstairs again. In the bathroom again. You have to turn on the light over the sink. You keep it low. Where is the Tylenol Cough? What’s this…Robitussin…from 2004. Is that expired? I’ve gotta throw some of this shit out. Cough, cough. Why do we have so much Motrin? Oh yeah, Costco. God, I haven’t been to Costco in years. Well, here’s some Tylenol Flu. Bad idea? Cough, cough. It’s all you’ve got. The little measuring cup—where is the little cup? Goddammit. How many little cups have we gone through? Don’t get mad, you say gently to yourself, it’ll wake you up. Cough, cough. You take the open bottle to your kid, oh and here’s a lozzie. That’ll help. You're at her bedside now. She’s hot and red. “Claire, honey, take a sip…”

CRY (as if dropped-the-ice-cream) “Okay, have a little water. Sit up. Two hands, there you go. Now,” you say as you bring the Tylenol Fl to her lips, “just a sip of—“ CRY (as if car-running-over-toes) “Claire, honey, you have to just take a quick sip so you can sleep—“ CRY (as if lion-charging–her-full-on) “Okay, forget it.” You put down the Tylenol Flu dramatically. “Have this lozzie.” Whimper. “It’s the lozzie or the medicine,” you say to her in the dark. “It’s too spicy,” she half-whispers. You tell her this is the minty kind. She succumbs. “Okay good. Okay lie down now.” Stroke, kiss.

You walk quietly back to your room and slip back into your bed. Still warm. You are so happy to be there. Silence. You imagine her sucking her lozzie on her side and then her back. Silence. Is she okay? Is she choking on her lozzie? You want to check. The coughing wasn’t that bad. You should get up. You are crazy. She is five. She knows how to suck a lozzie. Silence. She could swallow it whole. She could die. Tonight. Just so you could sleep. More silence. Did you put the cap back on the Tylenol Flu? What if she drinks it? All of it. Silence. You know what’s coming. You looked into the light. You know what time it is.

Essay from April Issue of Glamour

Glamour's April issue has a great collection of essays on friendship by writers like Jennifer Weiner, Julie Klam and, um, me. I have always felt slightly unworthy of my friendships, like I couldn't possibly have done enough to deserve them. So I was glad to have the chance to spill some ink on a few pals. I hope it gives a little honor to the many women who accompanied me through cancer, including Missy (in the photo at right). Whatever your crisis is--infertility, unemployment, divorce--I'm sure you can agree that when it's over, you're left with a tremendous sense of awe and gratitude for the people who showed up. Here's to you guys, a model for us all.

APRIL GLAMOUR: 7 Friends Every Woman Needs

The friends who show up

You never know until you know, you know? You hope your friends are what you think they are—loyal, deep, fast—but you don’t find out for sure until, say, a big lump in your breast turns out to be a bad tumor. Shannon called from vacation in tears when she heard my news. Mellie hired me a house cleaner. Carolann knitted me a warm, kicky beret that I wore for months until it began to fall apart and my husband said I looked like a 40-year-old pothead. One by one, in choreographed succession, Phoebe, Tracy and Missy packed bags and came from points east to California, because they “had to be with me.” They didn’t know what they were doing—my cancer was a first for all of us—but they came anyway. They brought things— art supplies for my two kids, books for my husband, slippers and sleeping caps for me.

And all this came as quite a surprise to me. Had I earned this much support?

I had lived most of my life in the company of men. When I was growing up, my older brothers dominated our house, as much with their giant bags of sweaty ice hockey equipment that filled the laundry room as with their epic tales of triumph at the boy-girl dance. I lived in the space that was left over, sometimes boldly (if ineffectively) inserting myself into the action, but mostly saving my voice for a later day. I’ve often pretended that I preferred hanging out with men. After all, I had learned how to cuss like a sea hand and tell a joke like a bartender and, damn it, I wasn’t going to rein myself in for a bunch of lily-livered “ladies” who bored me with their small talk about wrap dresses and Pilates and sisal rugs.

But it was the ladies who saved me, physically and emotionally. My surgeon was a woman, as were my ob-gyn, my chemo nurse, my radiation oncologist, my genetic counselor and the psychologist who gave us the words “cancer is like weeds in a garden,” a phrase my husband and I used over and over again with our small children (who are, incidentally, both girls). When my fertility was sacrificed to the cause, I found the empathy I so needed in the arms of Mary Hope and then Meg and then my mother, all of whom knew to listen for a long time (days) before reminding me that the two girls I already had were double-good, and would surely fill me up if I let them. Maybe it was the central role my breasts were suddenly playing in things, but looking back, it was a distinctly feminine time and one that left me wiser than it found me.

Since then, since I’ve become a regular person again instead of a cancer patient, I’ve kept a soft spot in my heart for guy friends, but I woo girlfriends. I cultivate and collect them because I know. Believe me, I know.

—Kelly Corrigan, author of the New York Times best-seller The Middle Place.

Revisiting Group Exercise

Kelly's column appears here with permission from The Bay Area News Group.

It’d been a good ten years since someone told me to “grapevine left.” In fact, the last time I was barked at to do a Triple Knee Repeater or a ‘Round The World, the only woman in America who had a headset mic was Madonna. I don’t exercise often and when I do, I try not to sweat too much, so last weekend at the Y, when I saw on the Group Fitness Schedule that Tina’s Basic Step class was “suitable for all levels,” I peaked in. Just about everyone in there was 10-20 pounds overweight. There were no fancy racer back tanks or chafe-free lycra pants. While I was sizing it all up, Tina herself waved me in and so, the next thing I knew, I was over at the equipment wall deciding how many risers to put under my step.

There is, as any honest person will admit, a hierarchy to women’s exercise. The truly fit (and centered) do yoga, Chi Gung, pilates or the Dailey Method. These women are lean and muscular and flexible, and I have always suspected that they were born this way. They like green tea, which they seep in reusable metal strainers, and can confidently pronounce their teachers names: Tuam, Karuna, Shotoa. Many of them are extremely attractive and consider a touch of Burt’s Bees on their lips to be fully made up. They know not the cottage cheese dimple.

Next are the spinners. Atop their stationery cycles, they are slightly less feminine and generally talk and walk louder and faster than the wispy, barefoot yoga-types. The spin class girls are competitive and bring lots of towels to class. They can tell you their heart rate at any moment. They read magazines about fitness, Women’s Health or something, while guzzling Gatorade and doing Kegels. If they’re running late and all the bikes are spoken for, they’ll slip into the back of a Body Sculpt class. They always do the advanced moves and the extra sets. When the instructor offers a low impact option, they just laugh, adrenaline flooding their system.

At my gym, in Berkeley, there is yet a third class of exercisers: the mind/body folks. Think Feldenkrais, Aikido, Karate. These people will probably save the world and at the very least, never yell at their kids, and for these reasons, are beyond my reproach.

Then, there are the people, often middle aged, who just love to move. I have a soft spot for this merry bunch. They do Merengue on Mondays, World Hip Hop on Tuesdays, Belly Dance Basics on Wednesdays, Salsa Fusion on Thursdays and then wind up the week with some TransDance, which integrates tribal motion, freestyle jamming and moving meditation. A woman named Tranquilla teaches this class. People hug on the way out.

Later, after time marches all over your back and drips cement in your joints, there is low impact senior aerobics (using metal folding chairs) and water aerobics with aqua barbells and something “New!” called The Noodle Workout. Perry Como is big in these classes, as is Liza Minelli. Afterwards, participants peel off their webbed gloves, dry off their hands and head over to an afternoon of oversized origami.

Then there’s me, in Tina’s Basic Step class, secretly laughing at my classmates—their funny pumpkin butts, their awkward clapping, their outdated scrunchies. I was yawning through the warm up, Basic Right, Basic Left, and held my own during the steroid version of Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back, but three songs into things, I started to feel dizzy. Nauseous. By the time we got to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” my vision was blurred. Pumpkin Butt next to me was fine, even thriving—this was her song! Silver Scrunchie was also high on endorphins—she seemed to love the Charleston/T-Step/Hamstring Curl combo we were doing. Was I going to have to stop? Take out my risers? I drank some water, eliminated any extraneous motion and, after twenty humiliating minutes, I heard the sweet tones of Enya. It was over.

So that’s where I fit into the hierarchy, right there at the very bottom—eating low-cal humble pie and passing out towels to my new role models in Basic Step and wondering if I could ever reach the great heights of TriYoga Flow III.


*******

Hey, if you're still with me, and if you know anyone in NYC, could I ask you help me get the word out about an upcoming event? On Monday February 18 (which is President's Day), I am doing a double bill with an old friend of my husband's who is a killer musician--a cross between Jack Johnson and Stevie Wonder (if you can get your head around that). It is a dream come true for me to "perform" with him and I think will be a very special night.

Just Another Citizen of Oz

I had read the descriptions the “rock star candidate,” “the tantalizing, highflying senator.” And I had seen him speak at the ’04 Democratic Convention, when he famously referred to himself as “a skinny guy with a funny name.” But the comparisons to Kennedy, that perfectly-maintained legend we barely knew, put me over the top. See, my dad, a Republican, told me that he met Jack Kennedy when he was running for President and that it was “magic.”

Ooh, magic. What I wouldn’t do for magic.

And so, when the invitation to a fundraising lunch for the one and only Barack Obama landed in my mailbox, I instantly coughed up more money than I spent on my wedding dress and booked a sitter.

The day finally came and just as I was finishing off my third bread stick, there he was.

He spoke for about 15 minutes and answered questions for another 15. I did not get the chills. I did not break into a sweat. I did not shout out in agreement. Barack Obama, it turns out, it just a man, a little older and a whole lot smarter than me, a man who values practicable solutions and incremental change. He has the self-possession of an elder statesman, a moniker generally reserved for retired or dead politicians. He is measured and astute and cerebral. He is (and this is not what I expected from a politician of any stripe) serene.

For days afterwards, I was, well, let down. I had wanted to be whipped up, swept away, lit on fire.

Nursing my disappointment, I found myself listening to the soundtrack from “Wicked,” a musical my daughters love about all their favorite characters from The Wizard of Oz. The CD was on Song 10: Wonderful, the moment in the show when the Wonderful Wizard of Oz is outted as a mere mortal, a nice and good man who had some skills and some potential but was not, alas, magic. He says: “Suddenly I'm here, respected, worshipped, even. Just because the folks in Oz needed someone to believe in. Wonderful! They called me Wonderful! so I said Wonderful, if you insist.”

Oh, but we do insist! Oh, how we need someone to believe in! Give us charisma! Genius! Virtue! But nobody too polished, or too inaccessible, or too formal. Why I do believe we’re just the sort of people to see a man come out of the clear blue sky and expect him to answer all our questions and solve all our problems.

And I think I know why. Not only does it make us feel safer, to have a superhuman on the premises, but it also allows us to go home. Personally, I want to go back to my kids, my husband and my novel--back to my regularly scheduled programming. I’d be delighted just to pay my taxes and have it all done for me: a Four Seasons government.

I know, I know. Democracy depends on active participation from the public. It starts, most obviously, with voting. I often feel, however, that I don’t know enough to vote. Even for president but definitely in local and state elections. I guess never forgot this quote from Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” Consequently, I don’t always go to the polls. I can only admit this publicly because I know that I am in the majority.

I might vote more if someone told me who and what to support -- which bond measures and propositions and congressmen. It’s not a matter of apathy; it’s honesty. What do I know about how to resolve Iraq? Health care? Farm Subsidies? For that matter, what I do know about local issues, where it is said all politics truly reside, like seismic retrofitting, etc. As Kennedy himself said, “the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

So if you’re someone who wants to elect someone you can trust, someone who is exponentially smarter than yourself, someone who is level-headed and methodical and absolutely devoted to the sane and rational course, I think I met your guy. If you want to swoon or faint, I recommend old Cary Grant movies. And if we are so fortunate to call Barack Obama "Mr. President," still, we’ll all have to show up to make the change everyone’s shouting about actually happen.

Best of Breed

I usually contribute to the holiday chaos with a regifting party, where my friends trade odd gifts we’ve received over the year—-a spooky Christmas angel that stutters in Japanese, a pair of panties made with candy necklaces, a Bedazzler kit. But this year, the season snuck up on me and so the best I can do is offer up a column commemorating the truly memorable gift.

At the top of my list: A can of tennis balls. You probably can’t imagine being talked into giving someone a can of tennis balls in the class gift exchange. You’d object. You’d refuse to go to school that day. You’d show up with nothing before you’d hand a girl three Wilson Pros in front of the whole 7th grade. Not me. I fell for the sell-job: “They’re brand new!” “She loves tennis!” “Look how the bow sits so perfectly on top!”

When I asked my husband what gift he’ll always remember, he too found himself back in adolescence, when his cousin from Kentucky gave him Jovan Soap-on-a-rope. This excellent product hung conveniently around the shower knobs and so was never subject to the softening and deterioration that could happen to untethered soap. So handy. And Masculine with a capital M. Here I quote from perfumebay.com: “Jovan Musk. The sexy smell of warm skin. Stroke it on, and it becomes a scent like no one else's. Because it works with your body's natural chemistry. (And later, with hers.) Jovan Musk lasts all day. Since a man like you can make things happen at any hour.”

Then there are the special offerings that make you snap your fingers and wish you’d thought of. I once watched my brother bring my mother to tears on a Christmas morning. It seemed he had been to a bookstore, because my mother loved to read, and not ten feet in the door, he was struck by a certain title, “Home.” “This is perfect for Mom! She sells residential real estate!” My mom smiled at her son as she slid her thumbnail under the invisible scotch tape and opened the paper to show a paperback novel. Oh my God, I thought to myself, it’s fiction. It could be about a mental institution, or an underground bomb shelter cum heroin lab, or a perverted mortgage broker. My mom loved it.

Later that morning, that same brother would give me a pack of Goody barrettes in a folded drugstore bag and maybe a deck of cards. It went on this way for years—-a bag of BRACH’s red hots (“since you love them!”), a Captain & Tenille 45, a pack of lined notebook paper. Life was good.

So this year, when someone hands you a homemade ham and nut pie or a tree garland made of printer cartridges, remind yourself that this gem…this choice doodad…this undervalued treasure will be the only gift you’ll remember in five years. And you and I both know that a good laugh and a story you can tell for the rest of your life beats an italian cashmere crewneck any day.

Have I driven you to the liquor cabinet yet?

I just wanted to apologize for the 6 or 7 emails you've gotten from Feedblitz lately. As you can tell, I have been updating the site to include all the relevant info about The Middle Place, which hits bookstores on January 8. In anticipation, I thought I'd share the backstory about the cover.

At first, it was set to look like this (that's my actual school picture from kindergarten):



But some people thought I looked a little alarmed in that photo, or like I had just been whacked in the ass with a paddle but was trying to remain stoic. So then it changed to this:



But then a few other memoirs that are coming out around mine seemed to have similar covers so the next thing I knew, they sent over this:



At which point, I was headed to the liquor cabinet for some self-soothing. Rather than crawl into a nice fat bottle of Pinor Noir, I opened up Photoshop and came up with my own little idea, which, it turns out, is being "a bad customer" and so I backed off and that's how the book jacket came to be this:



Which we are all very happy with.

At any rate, while all this has been unfolding, you've been peppered with emails about my site and I'm sure there's a simple way for me to control for that but the truth is, I'm no tech support and my husband is tiring of the role.

So, anyway, thanks for hanging in there. (6 people unsubscribed and mother didn't like that one lousy bit.)

And hey, if you want an advance copy of The Middle Place and you're one of those people who loves to evangelize about your favorite new book or movie or song, send me your mailing address. I only have 5 so "act now!"

Inviting Failure

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from The Bay Area News Group.

This column is part of an ongoing discussion series with Christine Carter, PhD, Director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. For more on increasing children’s tolerance for failure and the value of challenging children, go to www.greatergoodparents.org.

My daughter’s not big on trying new things. It’s particularly noticeable with her artwork. She’s currently in what will later be recalled as her great flora stage. Even the faint footsteps of failure in the distance will cause her to flip over the page and go back to her old standby: daisies. Not trees, not bushes, not even tulips. Daisies. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, defines failure as "the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective." That’s all, just a mark missed. Nothing so awful. Nothing to be ashamed of or chronically avoided.

I myself am on friendlier terms with failure, as we’ve known each other for so long now. I met her way before I shook hands with success. In fact, failure introduced me to success. Some of my standout failures were all eight years of French, which left me with as much fluency as any six-year-old walking out of “Ratatouille,” high school field hockey, where I never could stop loosing giant divots from the field, and all cooking beyond pasta. Oh, and I bombed my SATs.

After a lifetime of making mistakes so often it feels like my resting state, I’ve come to feel utterly undeterred by the prospect of failing. This freeing condition was facilitated by my parents, who were able to communicate a thousand ways that they didn’t care a whip about whether I made the team or got into a big name college. Their expectations were around things like respect—for teachers and coaches as well as teammates and myself—and what they called The Eleventh Commandment—Thou Shalt Laugh At Thyself. The most pitiable person in our house was not the poor student or the third-string athlete but the one who couldn’t tell a joke or the truly besotted who couldn’t even get a joke.

Another upside to befriending failure early is that you develop a certain knack for the postmortem, a medical term used here to mean a time of examination and reflection. Failure analysis, as they call it in product development circles, is the process of collecting and analyzing all available data to find the cause of a failure and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Is there a more useful skill, or a more capacitating one? Failure analysis, by its very nature, says failure is an event, not an identity and that future outcomes can and will be affected by our choices.

So, if failure’s so good for us, why aren’t we treating our children to more of it? Christine Carter, PhD, of The Greater Good Science Center, saw in her own research that kids who reported facing more challenges in their lives were far happier than the kids who reported fewer (or no) challenges. That means not only is failure critical to success but it’s also a cornerstone of happiness.

Challenge, in the elementary school context, could be anything from peeling that stubborn little sticker off an apple to fixing a princess crown to packing lunch. When I zip up my daughter’s sweatshirt or manage relations during her playdates or run her forgotten homework down to school, I am essentially covering her bet. She should lose sometimes, if only so she experiences for herself how sharp the initial sting is and then how quickly it subsides. An oddly carved pumpkin, illegible homework, a misapplied band-aid, I owe her these. Intervening—making things easier and more perfect—may inadvertently send the message that I think she needs my help, either because she is incapable in some way or because failing would be too traumatic.

As Christine said, "the thing we need to protect our kids from is not failure but a life void of failure."