Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Wordsmith and Rebel

My books are available on Amazon here or for an inscribed copy, write to ConsentingAdultPress@hotmail.com. Enjoy all of my low-priced books:

A Raisin in My Cleavage: short & shorter stories

Lillian in Love (a novel)

Lillian's Last Affair and other stories.

I'm available for interviews, readings, visits to book clubs, being the entertainment at your party, talking about senior sex at your senior center, talking about love in senior housing, and any other creative ways to get the word out about my work.

Some of these stories are 5,000 words long, some of them are 100 words exactly. Some protagonists are old and some aren’t.  Several stories feature gay men or lesbians, while several do not. So what unifies this collection? It is the interplay of heart and smart, facing off against the dangers of a viral wedding smooch, a scary staircase, a runaway supermarket cart, a disastrous online date, and a stolen sausage. Of course, you'll also learn about the raisin that falls where it shouldn’t.

Lillian’s life at 84 is tumultuous. She is moving to Manor House to be near Sarah, abandoning the demands of her own home, which has been colonized by her children. How will she and Sarah deal with the reactions of relatives, ex’s, and neighbors to their romance? How do two old women negotiate new love? Will slow-dancing, vibrators, and pot brownies help smooth the way?

 

“If I’m going to go after one more affair of the heart at 84, I’d better get my ass in gear,” says Lillian, speaking for all the characters in these six stories.

Ruby has a run-in with a waterbed and Catherine tokes her first joint in the bathtub with Victor. Elegant Anna’s introduction to kinky sex is bittersweet. And then there’s the neighbor with the strange attachment to the grocery cart. Sue Katz’s hilarious, tender, and impeccably written stories confirm that age fails to erode our eccentricities or dull our ardor.

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Do You Name Your Cantaloupes?

I don’t go indoors. Since March 11, I have not gone inside a store or salon or dance club or restaurant or, even more amazing, if you know me, a dollar store. I’m extremely cautious. I pay a shopper to get my groceries. She’s a sweetheart and shops for about 25 customers each week. She calls us, “My shut-ins.”

She’s been a shopper for several years. Before the pandemic it was just one of four jobs she had to support herself and her children. She lost the other three jobs as soon as everything shut down and has since beefed up her shopping business. She knows exactly where everything is stocked in every type of grocery store, so she’s incredibly quick. She is happy to add on other stops as well: she has picked up my prescriptions from the pharmacy twice already.

One has to learn how to be a shopee as well. Once I asked for two Dole cups of cut-up peaches (before peach season) and she bought me two packages of six cups each. I had to donate all of it, after tasting one cup. One must be very explicit. If I order broccoli, I have to write a note to specify that it be fresh, not bagged. A shopee learns slowly but surely.

And because she is shopping here, there, and everywhere all day, when she spies something that is hard to get, she grabs supplies for all her shut-ins. Early on, when disinfecting wipes were unavailable, she was in Costco when a big shipment came in and, voila!, she gifted me a box of wipes.

She’s efficient, flexible, reliable, and conscientious, but we don’t really see eye to eye on fruit and veg. It feels quite hit and miss. Last week I asked for a mini-watermelon and a cantaloupe. That was my first mistake. I should have said: small melon. Because I like all melons. She texted from the store that there were no mini-watermelons, but she could get me a pre-wrapped slice of watermelon. I asked for a photo of my choices, and she sent me one and I picked. I did not, though, think to question its size. That quarter of a watermelon was so big that it did not fit in my fridge: it was longer than the fridge is deep. I had to cut it into cubes immediately.

But it was nothing compared to the cantaloupe! The size, easily, of a basketball. The minute I saw it and struggled to lift the thing out of the bag, I texted her: “What?! I live alone. This cantaloupe could feed an affinity group for a week.” Later I sent her a photo and she LOL’d me back.

Too much cantaloupe is a problem. I’ve never heard of cantaloupe pie or cantaloupe sauce or even cantaloupe juice – not that I’ve ever baked a pie or own a juicer. One friend suggested, since I live alone and only see one person, that I make a friend out of my melon ala Tom Hanks in Cast Away with his volleyball friend Wilson. I tried developing a relationship, but the cantaloupe is insufficiently warm and fuzzy. Every name seemed insulting, from Big Head to Bulbous to Melonia. Particularly Melonia.

It is now 11 days later and I’m still consuming the cantaloupe. See the photo for the amount still remaining. I had to finish up the watermelon first – as it quickly turns to mush. But the cantaloupe just continues to hold up – bowl after bowl, mouthful after mouthful. I believe 2020 will be remembered as the year I had had enough.

Rating the Democratic National Convention: Highlights & Bummers

I watched the entire Democratic National Convention – all four nights, start to finish. Electoral politics has never been my gig but, like Angela Davis says, we all must vote for the Democrats this time. Absolutely must. I voted for Al Gore in 2000, literally 10 days after I returned from 24 years abroad. And was mortified to see the Democrats politely submit to Repug manipulations because they were just too genteel for a street fight. I remember friends from Europe writing to ask if America needed them to send an independent body to manage the USA’s chaotic and inconclusive elections.

I write this piece as someone who identified as a revolutionary as long as that was a relevant title in the USA: the 60s and 70s. Those were the days when one would introduce herself as an anarcho-socialist queer feminist anti-racist class-conscious activist. Now, in my dotage, under a proto-fascist administration during a pandemic, I find myself forced into dependency on an opposition Democratic Party that is Wall Street and Big Pharm funded, and that is impotent and weak, stuck with worn out leadership and resistant to the energy of the women (and men) of color who are unseating their friends. I write this as someone who is going to vote for the Democratic ticket and is going to encourage everyone else to do all we can to get rid of tRump.

Here are my Highlights and Bummers in no particular order

HIGHLIGHT
The music was often wonderful. Billy Porter wrapped up the first night in dazzling style. Billie Eilish accompanied the premiere of her new song with an incisive speech. John Legend is, I believe, the Frank Sinatra of our times. His performance of “Glory” with Common was strong and gripping. Prince Royce was spectacular as he strolled that long wall of graffiti. If I have to listen to the national anthem, then at least The Chicks did an interesting version.

BUMMER
What don’t the Democrats understand about the separation of Church and State? All four nights we had wrap-up religious benedictions that mentioned Jesus. Jesus! And the Trinity! The final night they threw in a Rabbi and an Imam, but piled on the God Blesses at the end of speeches. Jews were present throughout, but not named. However, Muslims had been absent, except for a couple of seconds of Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier viciously attacked by tRump. The whole emphasis on Biden’s “faith” was, if not pandering to tRump’s audience, massively inappropriate to the ears of this non-Christian.

HIGHLIGHT
I was transfixed the second I saw elevator operator Jacquelyn Asbie, who wore her tie proudly as she delivered the first nomination of Joe Biden. Check her out here:

BUMMER
I hated the inclusion of anti-choice campaigner John R. Kasich, and Colin Powell, a military general whose public lies to the United Nations in 2003 cost untold lives, both American and Iraqi. All this emphasis on “traditional” Repuglicans was irritating and unlikely to move many people. Absolutely worst of all was the prominent spot given to Michael Bloomberg. This oinker, who failed to buy the presidency, seems unable to recover from his disappointment in not being the arrogant narcissist who gets to replace the present arrogant narcissist.

HIGHLIGHT
Bernie’s speech on the first evening was the most practical, policy-based presentation of the Convention, in contrast to the usual patriotic pablum and platitudes.

BUMMER
While we were forced to listen to too many Repugs, Julian Castro – the only Latinx candidate in the primaries – seems to be the only former candidate (other than Marianne Williamson who surely has more fans than Kasich) who was not invited to speak. Why? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had 90 seconds in which to nominate Bernie – and then no other mention. This was a grave mistake. With well over 3 million social media followers, with stunning primary victories over Wall Street-funded establishment Democrats, she is the voice of the present many of us are listening to and the star of the future. Snubbing her was a slap in the face to her many constituencies: progressives, young people, Latinx voters, anti-capitalists, etc.

HIGHLIGHT
Michelle and Barak are clearly aghast at what is going on under tRump. I just wish they hadn’t waited till now to be speaking out and getting involved – although some say their timing is just right for strongest impact. I don’t see the point of elegance and restraint in their non-response to all these years of public abuse by tRump.

HIGHLIGHT & BUMMER
Three out of four of the moderators hit just the right note, staying in their role as MCs and moving things along: Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Kerry Washington, all women of color. Only on the final (and arguably most important night) did moderator Julia Louis-Dreyfus display her tin ear to give us a discordant “jokey” tone. It was an odd decision by the convention organizers.

HIGHLIGHT
The many clips of everyday people talking about their lives were powerful, not the least Mexican-American Kristin Urquiza, who lost her dad to Covid. She said, “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump.” Here’s the clip:

 

There were also stories of Joe Biden’s compassion – many many many stories – including the special speech by 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, a kid who stutters and who was encouraged by Biden, a former stutterer himself.

BUMMER
Three themes became excruciatingly repetitive:
1. Biden listens and cares
2. Biden is a man of “faith”
3. Beau Biden was a saint who continues to guide Joe Biden “from above” in all he does and thinks. The ghoulish focus on his dead son, over and over and over and then some more, became fetishistic. I was squirming. Biden’s other two children, themselves forced to speak about Beau when we finally saw them, must feel a certain way.

HIGHLIGHT
I had been complaining over the first days about the absence of spokespeople with disabilities – even in the midst of a strong commitment to diverse images – at least in the first days. So I welcomed the piece about Ady Barkan’s struggle for health care around his ALS. It was odd, though, that as a fierce campaigner for Medicare-For-All, that phrase was not included in his presentation.

HIGHLIGHT
It is widely agreed that the roll call (on night two) was the most brilliant chunk of the Convention. I was absolutely captivated at seeing so many different kinds of presentations from the States and territories, not the least Native people in their own clothes and settings. Let me finish on a high note by posting it here.

Collective Action on Hull Beach

I noticed that as soon as people left their area on the white sand beach of Hull, as soon as they went off to swim, the seagulls would circle around their chairs and sniff their bags. These seagulls were clearly regulars, used to humans and their accouterments. Some seagulls just planted their feet in an open spot and waited for a message to reach them.

All of a sudden I heard a screech. Someone had abandoned their blanket, but left their food bag open. This seagull grabbed a bag of chips which it ripped right open. But before that bag was even open, seagulls came flying in from every direction. Not two or three, but ten, then fifteen, then twenty, and perhaps more.

As more and more arrived and the bag was grabbed by one bill after another, the noise level elevated, and my questions multiplied. How could one bag of chips be shared around such a large posse? How did they know of the bounty, coming as they did from every direction and distance? Was it their sense of smell? Did the discoverer communicate to all in secret bird lingo? Are they born generous, with a tendency toward collective action and mutual aid? What happens to their digestive system when they eat greasy salty food? Can they distinguish between classic chips and those with salt and vinegar?

If you know the South Shore, you might have a different question. How did I get to go to the Hull seaside? A generous friend offered to arrange for my pandemic partner Barry and I to park in front of her parents’ home, less than a block from the bay on the left and about three blocks to the sea on the right. Each residential street running perpendicular between the bay and the sea on this peninsular town seemed to have its own path through dunes bordered by those thin wood and wire fences. If you don’t belong to the neighborhood, you don’t park.

For the first time this summer I got to play in the waves and splash in the salt water, especially as the tide started to come in and the waves became more energetic. The sea also, frankly, solves my won’t-pee-in-public-toilets dilemma – which has kept me close to home. I’m not a frequent beach goer, so I don’t have the right toys. I was jealous of a gaggle of straight teenagers who brought a boat-like blown-up rainbow unicorn to ride on the waves – and I knew they had no idea that they had mounted a gay icon. So goes cooptation.

Being an urban creature myself, I had to wonder how city-slicker seagulls get their dose of chips.

A Typical Pandemic Day: Except for the Fire Alarm

It’s around 90’ as it seems to have been for weeks and promises to continue to be in the near future. Or was that 90% humidity? In any event, I am wearing a nightshirt and crocs and nothing else. It’s a typical, if congested, pandemic day for me: I’ve done my 9:30 Silent Zoom writing session with my UK writing buddy Liz. I’ve done my 11:30 Zoom workout with my pandemic partner Barry. My weekly shopper has brought me my groceries. In a while, I have a video-appointment with my doctor followed by a Zoom gathering with a posse of friends in England and Ireland.

As I bake some chicken thighs using my friend Gilbert’s recipe, I think of the millions and millions of people – in this country and so many others – who are hungry. The lines of cars awaiting a food distribution would be ever more miles long except that people don’t have money for the gas. Everything sucks.

And then the fire alarm goes off! I open the front door – itself an action I rarely perform – and yes, the building alarm is screeching. I close the front door. What to do? It's covid-cooties vs flames. I text my landlord: The fire alarm’s going off. Is this for real? But there’s no immediate reply.

I need to dress. I throw on my workout pants, skipping the underpants. I put on a bra and the t-shirt I worked out in. Then I realize that if I have to walk down the seven floors, I need real shoes. So I sit down and put on shoes and socks. I'm dragging out the time - hoping it'll be turned off before I have to venture out. I used to worry about just this kind of situation when my neighbor across the way was still living. She used a wheelchair and was a decent-sized woman. I discussed with my landlords what would happen in case of a fire – how could I get her downstairs? They had already talked to her and instructed her to go out to her balcony from which the professionals would pluck her.

I open the front door again for a quick look. There’s a neighbor down the front end of the hall. He opens the double doors that lead to both the elevator and the stairwell, and yells to me, “I smell smoke.” I wave him towards me in the back of the building where I live. “Use the back stairs here,” and then quickly close my door.

What next? A mask, of course. Should I wear my face shield as well? What do I carry? I need to choose between my backpack with my credit cards and ID and other essentials, and my computer, with my life’s work. I pay for one of those cloud back-up services – plus I have most stuff on a thumb-drive, so I choose the backpack. What about a charger for my phone? Already I’m anxious about how I’ll get back up the steps with my dodgy feet.

And I’m worried about people who are isolating like I am but have nowhere else to go. I’m among the lucky ones – but I have been all along. I am in a pandemic pod with Barry and as discombobulating as it would be for both of us, I could find shelter there. And I think of all the people who have no shelter at all – and how many more there will be when the moratorium on evictions ends. I remember how the persistent problem of homelessness in Ireland was solved in ten days when the shut-down began: every single homeless person was housed, mostly in hotels.

The alarm stops. What to do? The alarm starts again. I head out.

Should I lock the door? I know the fire company is here – I’ve heard their sirens. In other instances, they’ve wanted to check every apartment – but I lock it anyway and start down the steps. The alarm stops. Just then a couple comes up the steps. I back up onto the landing so that I can keep my distance from them. “It’s okay,” they say. “The fireman said we can go back to our apartments.”

Inside, the phone rings. My landlord is on the line: “I’m nearly there.”

“It’s apparently okay, I tell him. Or so some neighbors told me.”

Back inside, I reverse my actions, peeling off the clothes I no longer feel comfortable lounging around in, not the least my bra. For the duration, I have unearthed old stretchy sports bras that do nothing but vaguely embrace my tits – no lifting, no squeezing. They are my pandemic bras for the rare Zoom meetings with strangers (seminars, arts gatherings, etc) or even rarer outings to the dangerous outdoors where other humans circulate. My perky bras are relegated to the back of the drawer awaiting a mystical time when my partner dancing life might resume.

“Have an emergency bag packed and ready to go,” my bestie Sandy said when I told her the story. “Copies of your passport and whatnot, a hunk of cash, your meds.” My meds! I hadn’t even thought of my prescriptions. Good thing this was just the alarm stretching its vocal chords when it smelled some food burning on the stove on the 5th floor.

My Pandemic Calm in Exactly 50 Words

This piece was published on the Boston Book Festival website in a section about being at home during the pandemic. This link leads you to the 10 chosen stories. Here's mine:

My Pandemic Calm in Exactly 50 Words

My underlying condition keeps me inside, overlooking Spy Pond from my seventh story window. I am calm, used to living alone in a room, used to being alone as a writer. I’ve been content, prepared for the long haul, until I saw the mouse. Now every shadow is an enemy.

 

 

My Nasty Mother Would Have Been 100 Today

Today is the 100th anniversary of my mother Phyllis’s birth. She was mean to me as long as she lived. She lied. She was violent. She was jealous. She was a tangle of affectations she thought made her seem middle-class.

My childhood memories are dim and unhappy – there aren’t long narratives to spin. So I have written about this period in chapters of 100 words. Exactly. Not 99 words and not 101. This form allows me to tell about as much as I am willing to recall of my childhood, one in which I was the captive of the nuclear family, a private turf where no one in the 1950s would think of intervening, even if violence and cruelty were obvious.

Here are three chapters that relate to Phyllis.

The Day I was Gendered in 100 Words
I was born in August Wilson’s Hill District projects. At 3 we moved to a tiny duplex and at 10 we moved to an attached row house – my mother’s determined ascent up the working-class ladder. I was a kid like other kids, playing summer kickball shirtless in the alley behind our row. Until one boy’s snobby mother turned up at our door saying she didn’t want her son playing with a whore. My mother dragged me from the alley by the ear and drove me straight to Woolworth’s to be fitted in the aisle with a training bra. Public humiliation.

Murder and Revenge in 100 Words
“Pets are dirty,” my mother said, forbidding them. Until at Woolworths I saw the turtle in its plastic dish, complete with a pond and palm tree. I had saved up enough dimes from scrubbing the kitchen floor to buy it for myself. That summer I went to sleep-over camp for the first and only time. My mother promised to keep the turtle pond full of water and the pet fed. On my return, I found the turtle swollen up like a ping-pong ball, dead in a dry plate. I buried it under her beloved hydrangeas bush, which never again bloomed.

Phyllis’s Shoe in 100 Words
My mother blamed me for a long labor during which my father abandoned her to go bowling. My dad, Saul, and I were always tight. My first memory is when I was 5 and Phyllis shrieked at me, “He’s mine! Get your own!” I was 11 when my mother scraped the side of the car in a parking lot. Later she told Saul it happened while we were inside shopping. When I contradicted her, she removed her high-heeled shoe to punish me for lying and for trying to turn Saul against her. I still have those scars on my thigh.

Finding my iPhone: My Mysterious Experience

This incident happened in late May.

Now that I have a medical mask and a plastic shield, I can go down the cootie-filled elevator of my building to my car and get out of my Pandemic Palace. I only see one person – my bestie Barry – who, like me, has been entirely isolated from other humanoids. While up until a few months ago I would have been in the midst of the protest crowds with my signs and shouts and comrades, I am prevented from such action by this plague and my age.

So on my maiden visit, we decided to take a drive. Since we went in his car, I needed nothing but my phone so I left my backpack behind. He lent me a sweatshirt, but once I got outside in the sun, I realized I didn’t need it and peeled it off and threw it into his backseat.

We drove around a very wealthy, very green suburb just a couple of miles away, snarking about the gorgeous oversized homes. Suddenly I realized that I could not find my phone. I looked around my seat and then removed my seatbelt to get at the sweatshirt in the back, flashing on a vague memory of having stuck the phone in its pocket earlier. It was not there. Barry called my number but there was no sound of ringing.

I was particularly agitated because just the day before I had downloaded my bank app in order to deposit my stimulus check. I have no password on my iPhone, and could not remember if my bank details came up automatically as they do on my computer. (Note to self – change that!)

We drove back to Barry’s parking lot and retraced every step I took. He was trying my number all the time and my heart sank when we mounted the steps to his apartment and there was no ringing at all.

Had I activated the “Find My iPhone” app on my cellphone? Was the sound turned on? Inside his flat, I found the website on my laptop and it brought up a smeary, unclear dim map (above) that showed the phone as a green dot! It was on Central Avenue, apparently less than two miles away according to a map search. I went to pee and we got ready to go look. I checked the site once more and the phone appeared to have crossed the street. I plotzed! Was it in someone’s hand? Was it still on the move? I waited some more, but it no longer seemed to be moving.

We rushed to the vague location the app’s poor map gave us, absolutely mystified as to how the phone could be there. Once in the area, I began searching up and down along the long tall fence that enclosed the front yard of a big house on one side of the street. I suspected this area had been the original location. Barry searched on the other side of the street, although there was no sidewalk there. I heard some people talking behind the fence and asked if they had seen or heard a phone. At first they said no, but once I popped my head into the driveway, one man, who appeared to be a gardener, came out and said, “Yes, I heard a noise down the end of the fence.” We walked there (photo of the fence) and I had Barry, across the street, ring my number.

The man lifted his head, concentrating, and then looked across the street. “It’s not here anymore,” he said, “it’s there.” A utility pole stood between Barry and the street. “I can see it,” the man said. He was young, and so were his ears and eyes.

Now comes the biggest mystery. Someone had built a teepee-like structure out of twigs, using a dirty discarded postcard for a shelf, and had placed my iPhone on it. You can see it in the photo.

I was weak with gratitude, borrowed a twenty from Barry to give to my savior, and only once I was back in the car, realized that not only was he only the second person I have talked to face-to-face since March 11, but that he wore no mask. I had kept my distance and am not worried, just reminded that everyday is no longer everyday.

I rushed home to check my bank account – which was undisturbed. And then noticed that my Otterbox phone cover (a very rugged rubber protector) seemed to be rather loosely attached and the inside quite dusty, as if it had been taken off and replaced rather haphazardly. Why? Had the phone been run over? And why didn’t the person who found it go to “recent calls” and ring the first couple of numbers there? And how did the phone get on a street where we had never stopped?

Mysteries must be matched with theories. I can only surmise that I put my phone on the roof of Barry’s car when taking off the sweatshirt before we went on our drive, although I doubt I have ever put anything on the roof a car before. Maybe the heavy rubber Otterbox kept it from falling off as we went out of his driveway, a skein of harsh potholes, and that as we progressed it somehow by increments inched itself to the edge and fell off well into the trip.

Why move it across the street? I imagine that the person who found it couldn’t figure out how to display it on that smooth tall fence and so took it across the street where there was grass and trees in order to build that exhibition stand for it. Why do that instead of taking the phone with them and waiting for it to ring or trying favorite or recent numbers?

Who found it? My theory is that it was someone who was fearful of being accused of theft. Perhaps children. Perhaps adults worried about a racist or anti-immigrant reaction.

And now to lessons learned. Use passwords for bank apps and probably for your phone if you’re going to have such an app in the first place. Although, an added password on my phone means a person wouldn’t be able to look up last calls or favorite numbers.

And then there’s the Find My iPhone website. Learn that at the bottom right corner of their splash page, in the smallest dimmest font every created by an out-of-touch young geek, are three alternative views. Really this menu is so hard to see that I didn’t see it. Until I got home with the phone. One view is “Satellite” and it is a bird’s-eye-view of every house and tree and driveway. This would have made locating the phone a breeze, had I discovered this view beforehand. I tested its reliability, by moving the phone across the living room and watching the change on the site!

The ultimate lesson I learned is that routine is your friend. Older people learn this lesson at one point or another. Take me, for instance. I always carry my backpack. It has all my essentials from phone to credit card to tissues that can double as toilet paper. Better to maintain one’s regular habits than grab out just one important item, leaving it orphaned from its customary resting place. For someone who has herself only been out of my apartment twice in well over 80 days, it was all a bit much and I was relieved to be tucked back into my room that evening, where the chaos is familiar, for it is my chaos. And where I never lose anything.

The Soundtrack of My Pandemic: A Grumpy View

The sounds of the pandemic are multiplying in peculiar ways. It used to be that via my iPhone’s notifications, I’d get the occasional ping or chime to announce a text or a message or to let me know that someone from abroad was reaching out on WhatsApp.

Now I’m dealing with a whole new soundtrack. Let’s start with 4:30 or 5:00 am when the birds, recognizing that their competition from early traffic has all but evaporated, begin to carry on. I live a half block from a pond, which attracts a high density of winged creatures. From early in the morning they are honking and chirping and cheeping and squawking, and flying around in squads or alone, big wingspans or little.

They are not alone. The general closure and the near-empty roads mean that sounds I should be used to after living here a decade or so are transformed into something threatening. It took me hours to realize that what I thought was a helicopter landing on my balcony was the idling of the fire engines in the fire station a block away, the building’s doors open and the motors reverberating. This was clearly going on all the time, but was masked by the main street traffic in pre-Covid times.

And then there is the teen drummer down the road a bit who has been making a clatter as long as I’ve lived here, and who is surely no longer a teen, but never before seemed to practice his instrument in my own living room.

Here, though, is the real audio clutter. I get infinitely more messages and texts and heads-up and phone calls nowadays than before the shut-down. My phone is a veritable orchestra of interruptions. At night, if I want the phone in the bedroom with me, I must either turn it off altogether or mute each app one by one to avoid being awoken mid-sleep by a friend from abroad for whom it may be a perfectly reasonable 9:00 am in Pietra Santa or Dublin or Tel Aviv – but is 4:00 am for me.

Even worse, if I am on a Zoom meeting, I hear the beeps and bings of all the people on the call who have not exiled or shushed their own phones. Or my space is flooded with the barking of their dogs – which is only slightly less disconcerting than the crying of their children, sounds that have never before darkened my doorstep. The variety of levels and quality of participants’ mics is an assault on the eardrums, mitigated only by those whose mouthed curses when they can’t find their own unmute button remain silent.

Part of the soundtrack is distorted. On any given Zoom-a-thon with three or more other people, one person will be enveloped in feedback while another’s mic will be cloudy and mumbly. The variety of devices through which we are all communicating makes the cacophony uneven and conflicting. People speak at once, or there’s an awkward silence, with folks looking down or around uneasily in their little online boxes.

Perhaps the most annoying of all is the confusion emanating from the television, especially the cable news stations that feature a chessboard of commentators whose gigs now radiate from their homes. I might have the news on in the background while I’m at my computer (which is all the time) when my attention is commandeered by a familiar ping or pong. First I have to find my phone; then I have to scroll through to see which app is summoning me, only to realize that it was the phone of this Senator or that virologist on the TV.

The problem with reduced urban noise is that it elevates and amplifies the sounds that are not only still coming through, but which have proliferated. I used to react to each notification, but my lockdown strategy now is to wait until the trills and clangs accumulate before checking to see if any of them are actually for me.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution – review in 100 words

The Crip Camp provided teens with disabilities a chance to join the “Woodstock generation” in an inspired summer camp environment that eliminated the barriers that had limited their lives: protective parents, separate schools, social ostracization. After meeting each other, they formed life-long bonds around courageous and witty activism. We watch the community go from the isolation of the 50s, through the struggle for the 504 legislation, and on to the famous 1990 crawl up the steps of the Capitol to win the ADA. This exhilarating film is the first documentary from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. Enthusiastically recommended.

Trailer

Circus of Books – Film Review in 290 words

Circus of Books is a genuinely interesting film that engages us in its unique story, while leaving too many contradictions unexplored. In 1982, a religious woman and her genius husband, Karen and Barry Mason, “accidentally” become the owners of a West Hollywood gay porn store that served as the gay male hub from the flowering of the liberation movement through the AIDS pandemic. They closed it and retired after 35 years.

Directed by the couple’s daughter, Rachel Mason, the film fails to challenge Karen on her pretense to holiness as she not only sells but also produces this porn (with a surprisingly charming Jeff Stryker, no less); on her claim never to look at the wall of dildos that are their bestsellers; and on her alliance with Larry Flynt, portrayed here as a pure freedom fighter. Karen frames the whole of her career as a small business venture, in a way that privileges the structure over the content. We’d like to know how Barry’s genius (he invented dialysis equipment to help his dad) evaporated into an ever-smiling sidekick to Karen’s big personality. And what about the secrets and lies underpinning their ostensibly standard nuclear family. How the hell did they keep their ownership of this well-known store from their children? When one son, who appears to be rather numb, comes out, Karen freaks out in a spasm of hypocrisy. In the end, she redeems herself by becoming a major player in PFLAG – the parental support and education group.

I certainly recommend this film for it describes, as they say, ordinary people doing something that, in their own terms, is quite extraordinary. But I moderate my praise with a sense that the narrative skips too lightly over deep and convoluted realities.

Trailer

 

I Sobbed and Sobbed for the First Time Today

My best friend, Barry, brought me some things today, with the main goal being to run my car which, other than a 5-minute idle, has been sitting neglected and deserted in the basement garage of my building. Barry lives in a different town, 35 minutes away, and this is the first time he has taken a drive since we both locked down in our separate apartments. “As long as I’m in my car or in your car, I should be perfectly safe,” he said.

When he appeared down below in my parking lot, I burst into fierce sobs, from some very deep place; sobs that, once begun, continued for a long time. First some backstory:

I am going through this pandemic with many friends, but most especially two precious people to whom I speak every day at least once: Sandy – sheltering in northern California in the middle of the Redwoods, and Barry. It makes a big difference when you have two people checking in every day. I know that outside this isolated reality of just me in my little apartment, I belong. Someone cares. And someone knows.

I have been okay since March 11th , 50 days ago, when I came inside, never since to open my door to a human (except for a single terrifying accident). With all the technological ways to stay in touch and all my friends in many cities and countries, I have not felt as alone and abandoned as my car must feel. I haven’t cried – although I’ve teared up a dozen times from the news, from TV shows, from scary stories from my friends.

I wrapped up my car keys in bubble wrap around which I folded an old magazine, then stuffed it in a bubble envelope and tossed it down the eight stories below. It descended gently with the grace of a swan, the wind embracing it like a parachute. “Damn it,” Barry said into the phones through which we were talking across the vertical distance, “I should have filmed that.”

The next thing I see is my own red car being driven out of the lot. I cried harder. I remembered when I was free to come and go and thought little of it. Barry had a brilliant idea: he placed his phone in my hands-free holder, turning the camera outward so that I could do the drive with him. “Where do you want to go?” He drove past Spy Pond, which I see from my balcony at a frustrating distance, and I just sobbed with joy. He stopped at every tree that was flowering or heading to full leaf, and I got my first close taste of Spring. He drove down to the Capitol Theatre, an old-timey movie house where we often see films.

Then he had another brilliant idea: why don’t I order food. I have not eaten a single meal that I myself did not cook – and I really can’t cook worth shit – since March 11th. I called Twyrl, a pasta restaurant, which is giving a free meal to needy seniors for every meal someone buys. I ordered some Tagliatelle Alfredo. This is a win-win: my money not only supports a small local business; it also supports someone in need. They put your order on a table outside when you call to say you’ve arrived. I don’t go out so that isn’t an option for me. And I can’t get delivery because although they promise they’ll come up the elevator and leave it outside my door, most delivery services end up leaving things in the entryway without even ringing my apartment.

 

So I went to the outside of the restaurant virtually with Barry and then around the center of my town, Arlington, sobbing at every tree sighting and every revelation: there was so much more traffic, for example, both car and foot, than I had anticipated. After about 20 minutes he came back, parked my car, and then took the stuff he had brought me, including a couple of months of New York Times magazines, and put them on the elevator – which I won’t enter. He pressed the button for my floor and I grabbed them out, wearing a mask, and hurried back to my flat.

All evening my eyes burned, my nose dripped, I felt rung out and weak. The most I could do was watch “Death in Paradise” and “Doc Martin” as I ate my delicious pasta, before going to bed, pondering where to ask him to take me next time.

 

Note: My blog company changed some damned thing and I cannot upload photos in the normal way and cannot find the solution, so I've stuck them in as a work-around. Sorry about the unattractive formatting.

 

Call Me Katz

My mother, full of airs and graces, named me Suzan. I always hated it. As a child, some people called me Susie, and some called me Sue.

Once I went out into the world at 17, I preferred the name Katz, which I associate with my dad, whom I loved. It suits me so much better. I published all my essays and short stories in the 70s under the name Katz. Then I went abroad.

When I lived in Israel, people did not know the name “Sue” – it didn’t really sound like a name to Israelis. And the name Katz is full of meaning. It is an ancient name and is actually an acronym made of the first letters of the words Cohen and Tzaddik. The Cohens were the priestly class in the days of the Temple (1000 BCE), and the Tzaddikim were the Righteous or High Priests. Probably crazed Fundamentalists. So I could not really go around there with the name Katz. In the end, my students determined my name: Suekatz, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

When I lived in London throughout the 90s, my political and work friends knew me as Sue – Katz was far too a Jewish name to attempt in a country that had in the 15th Century expelled or killed all the Jews who would not convert. But the center of my life was dance, specifically “gay and lesbian dance,” as it was then known. Because I scored quite a serious job in London, with an international platform, I didn’t want to mix my writing with my work. I thought the queer things I wrote could lose me my job. It happened that my Boston friends Stan and Gladys were visiting and as we sat on the banks of the Thames, with much hilarity we came up with the pen name Spike (a name I used as a baby butch in the 60s for a quick minute) Pitzberg (a Jewish-ish re-spelling of my home town.) I wrote an article about our dance classes for the local gay paper and the next week, participation tripled. I was forever known, in London, as Spike because of that.

Since returning to the States twenty years ago, I’m running with multiple names. My very close friends from college, whose community in Vermont is the closest thing I have to “home,” call me Katz and Uncle Katz and Katzeleh. Some old comrades from the revolutionary days of the 60s and 70s call me Katz. One of them, my old buddy Maddog, calls me Q. If I had thought it through when I got back to Boston, I would’ve been more conscious about wanting to be Katz again. But I didn’t push it hard enough, which was a big mistake on my part. My friends from our group Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine call me Katz, Katzeleh, and even Katzilla – the concoction of a Swiss friend. But they are the exception: most new (since 2000) people know me as Sue.

The pandemic reminds me that, at 72, even with luck getting through this public health catastrophe, every moment is a moment that should not be wasted. Every available delight is one to be embraced. I’m using my best bowls and glasses – instead of saving them for gawd knows what. And as every revelation and every
connection and every means of finding comfort is precious, why should I be called by a name I don’t like, instead of one I love?

I want to break with the tyranny of the first name and return to my young adulthood when I claimed my last name. For who decides that first names must predominate, when one has such an honorable and ancient last name? Of course, as a writer, I remain Sue Katz. But in personal exchanges, if it doesn’t feel too awkward or too difficult for you, do me the pleasure of calling me Katz.

MY ONE-MONTH ISOLATION ANNIVERSARY

Today is April 11. I came inside on March 11 and have not seen a live human, face-to-face, since. My last group activity was on March 8, at the annual International Women’s Day tea party held by my friend Jennifer. We must have been 80 women crowded into a living room, telling our stories, eating Jen’s famous pastries based on family recipes, and breathing the same air at very close quarters.

On March 9 I cancelled my chiropractic appointment. On March 11 I had my last physical therapy session before going to Trader Joe’s and stocking up. That evening, Café Pride, a monthly dinner for LGBTQ Elders of Color that I often attend, was cancelled. After agonizing, I did not go to what turned out to be the last dance night held by my teachers Bill and Yuna. A well-loved dancer who did attend turned up symptomatic the next day. She got terribly ill, was negative for the flu, but never could get tested for Covid-19 because she hadn’t been abroad. The nightmare of institutional unpreparedness had begun in earnest.

On March 12, I cancelled my lunch with Gail; Amira’s Harvard lecture and dinner were cancelled; and the first West Coast session at Ballroom in Boston didn’t happen. My bestie Barry and I started doing weights training and other exercises via Facetime, something that is now our nearly daily practice. I cancelled my hair appointment and my friend Suzie decided not to hold her 70th birthday celebration. As the days passed, cancellations started to become ubiquitous and long-range.

Since I closed the door on March 11, I haven’t opened it again except to bring inside the things kind people deliver outside my door – either my mail or groceries or medicine; and except for my late-night journeys down the long empty hall of my apartment building to the garbage shute. I do not even go down to the lobby from the 7th floor to get my mail because I am afraid of the air in our single elevator, used by the whole building.

Why so strict? I have been battling erratic blood pressure since November and have gone from 200 mg of one medicine to 400 and now 600. My doctor added a second prescription, starting at 50 mg and now at 100 mg, but my blood pressure is still high and spiking. Since hypertension is one of the top underlying conditions that are attractive to Covid-19, and since I am 72, I’m well into the category of doom. In my town, 39% of the cases are among people 70+. 39%!! Only 15.8% of the population is 65+. I’m being as cautious as the kindness of strangers allows.

ALONE
I have it easier than so many others. I can afford my rent and my food. I am already retired from paying work and so I am not suddenly losing my job and income. I’m old, so I have Medicare health coverage. And I’ve been living alone since 1977 – except for year-long visits from my young people, first Oona and some years later Tomer, when I was in London. And most importantly, I’m a writer, so I’m used to long stretches in the apartment.

I have four visual privileges that make a difference. 1) I have a sweet new credenza that sits right across from my desk – that is right in my line of sight – assembled by my friend Debi, who is handy at everything. 2) On that credenza sits the exquisite marble sculpture given to me for my 50th birthday by the Tuscany-based sculptor Jaya Scheurch, whose image is on
the cover of my latest book, A Raisin in My Cleavage. 3) Above that on the wall are hung several giclees of the collage painter Sandy Oppenheimer, whose work graces my novel Lillian in Love. 4) Finally, my small apartment features a balcony which overlooks my town’s bike path and Spy Pond and provides me with the sunset: priceless.

But living in basically one room (I have a bedroom but it only fits a bed and clothes), means it is pretty crowded in here. I’ve become doubly cautious, because going to the hospital or even to Urgent Care seems like a dangerous proposition, daily life contains threats. Do you too have disaster scenarios that flicker through your mind? Slipping on a rug or tripping over an obstacle, when falling is always ominous for elders. The slightly irrational fear of dropping a pan of spaghetti in boiling water when moving it to the sink. Wondering if that random pain in my side is appendicitis. A toothache. I had an ocular migraine last week – but luckily it wasn’t my first, because the first freaked me out and sent me to the ER.

My eyes have gone wonky from staring at screens night and day. Facetime and Zoom and Messenger and text and email and phone have brought comfort, connection, and a level of non-stop socializing that sometimes
leaves me exhausted. On some days it’s hard to avoid overbooking. For example, on Wednesday I had my daily Facetime workout with Barry, followed by a Zoom get-together with overseas friends, a Zoom meet-up with an LGBTQ elders group, and then a Google Hangout Pesach seder. I was seeing triple by the end of it all.

But nothing is more annoying than a Facetime/Zoom call out of the blue when my expansive hair hasn’t been tamed, I haven’t put in my false tooth, my nightshirt’s collar is kinda shredded, and I haven’t yet had my second cup of tea. Hey, friends, especially those of you abroad on a different time scale, give a lass a head’s up, could ya?

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS & FRIENDS
The changes in my blood pressure prescriptions just as I had settled in at home meant picking up new meds from the pharmacy. A woman I know from dance who lives close by, Lauren, along with her boyfriend Chris, picked up three months of my prescriptions and brought them to my door. When my Dr upped my script, Lauren went back for more. These were the first gestures of the generosity that would be keeping me safe.

My first grocery delivery was via a volunteer organized by a group in my town. It all happened within 24 hours of my request. My second delivery was via Peapod and I waited about two weeks for a delivery date. Then I found Amy, who has an indie shopping business. I was lucky to hear about her through a friend of hers on my town’s Facebook page. I tip all these people at least 35% because they are keeping me alive, some out of community spirit and some to earn money for their own food.

Early into my isolation a young friend named Hope kindly invited me to come shelter with her family in Maine. Hope works, studies, is a food justice activist, grows food, and takes care of her husband and two children. I declined but will never forget her munificence.

My friend Jane, who once heroically rehearsed with me when I was forced to act in my play when it was produced last summer, offered to pick things up for me every time she went out. Then an elderly friend she was looking after got sick with the virus and Jane had to stay home. We still check on each other nearly every day.

Katie, a friend from dance who rarely indulges in sugar and wheat, but who is artistic in all that she does, made a complicated stunning plaid cake called a Lumberjack cake, and was driven around the neighborhood by her pal to drop off pieces to all her local acquaintances, myself included. Later Katie picked up needed eye drops for me.

I asked on my town’s Facebook listserv if people had suggestions on how I could get my laundry picked up, washed/dried, and delivered back to my apartment door, as I fear running out of sheets and towels. Several people gave me links to various businesses, although they were overbooked when I called. One stranger amazed me with an offer to do it for me at her home. Then wonderful Candace, whom I met once for minutes in person but stayed in contact with through FB, messaged me with the same offer. I can’t impose this on individuals. So far, no clear solution.

Two Sundays in a row, my real-life friend Bren and her girlfriend Alicia have parked in the back lot of my building and yelled for Rapunzel. I go out on my balcony which is 8 stories up from the parking lot, and we holler back and forth. This is the closest to human flesh I have been for a month.

Mary, the owner of Maine’s premiere bakery Bread & Roses, sent me an over-the-top care package with a blueberry pie and a blueberry coffee cake because I had bemoaned on Facebook the end of my baked goods.

Over the last few days, my worst fears became my living reality. I became seriously constipated. This happened to me a few years ago and the situation landed me in the ER where I had one of the more gruesome experiences of my life. I wrote my Dr and also called the clinic and talked to a nurse. I had to come up with a bunch of meds that they promised would get my digestion moving. I didn’t know anyone who could go to the pharmacy for me – they wouldn’t deliver – but if I was to avoid the ER, it had to happen fairly quickly. I tried reaching out, but I didn’t find anyone.

Then I remembered a March posting on the town list by a college freshman named Mike who had been sent home from college. He posted on my town FB page that he’d be happy to help folks. For some reason I saved his info. Desperate, I called him. He brought me everything I needed within an hour.

THE FUTURE
When I closed the door of my apartment exactly one month ago, I said to friends that I didn’t expect to be out before my birthday – which is October 22. I haven’t changed that estimate. Perhaps extended it, as experts are now talking about 18 months. The more I read by doctors dealing with Covid-19 patients, the more blood pressure medicines stand out as a serious risk-factor. I’m not leaving here until I absolutely have to or a miracle happens and someone reasonable is put in charge of the country. I live differently now in little ways as well. I keep my phone charged fully all the time. And instead of putting the chain on the door from the inside, as I have done every single night of the dozen years I’ve lived here, I leave the chain off so people can get in if necessary. Stay safe. Stay home. Stay well.

The Angel Levine: Film Review in 100 words

Harry Belafonte chose to produce this captivating, potent film (1970) of Bernard Malamud’s story The Angel Levine as his come-back after a decade-long absence from movies. He stars alongside the excellent Zero Mostel (as the elderly impoverished Morris Mishkin) and the magnificent Yiddish stage actress Ida Kamińska (as Mishkin’s dying wife.) Belafonte plays the Jewish Angel Levine, or rather an apprentice angel who, in order to earn his wings, needs to convince the exhausted tailor Mishkin to believe in him. The two men grapple with issues of race, love, ethics, and friendship as the Angel tries to overcome Mishkin’s skepticism.

Here's the trailer:

How Shingrix supports National Napping Day

I had the old shingles shot (Zostavax) a decade or so ago. But for the last couple of years I’ve been urged to get the new shot, Shingrix. I would’ve done so immediately, but it is never available. Plus, it is hideously expensive, even on Medicare. It seems that insufficient amounts of this vaccine are produced in fits and starts and if you don’t happen to be aware that it is available, you have to hope that the next round might include you.

I had the first of two Shingrix shots, at last, on Tuesday. I thought my Dr’s office was going to administer it, but I got a call from my Rx insurance saying I had to have it at Walgreens, and yes, they cover it. It took my pharmacist two days to carve out time to vaccinate me and it cost me $185. I think my insurance kicked in a dozen dollars.

I was warned about the side effects: sore arm at the shot site (that more or less faded after 5 days); a rash (yeah, I got a small rash a few days ago which has faded away); and exhaustion.

Which brings me to today: National Napping Day. Since receiving the shot, I have found that my regular dozy afternoon slump has turned into a three-hour nap-of-the-dead. About 2:30 or 3:00 I crawl to my bedroom, fall onto the bed in all my clothes, and three hours later I come awake after a blacked-out sojourn in Never-Never-Land. This is happening day after day after day. Yesterday I was out of the house at an event so I didn’t get my nap and, damn it, I was wiped.

Why is this shot so important? Because shingles (a kind of reactivation, usually in elders, of chickenpox) SUCKS! I was traveling with my cousin when she got shingles around her torso, a thick band of weeping raw sores that were viciously painful and persistent. I will never forget how she heroically endured this gruesome condition.

So I’m not complaining about the naps which have become part of my day. In fact, I’m proud to fit in with the other celebrants of National Napping Day. I would continue with this post, but I feel a duvet calling my name.

PS: Here’s some additional info about the reason we’re being encouraged to take the new shot.

In the U.S., Zostavax and Shingrix are FDA-approved vaccines to help prevent the occurrence of shingles. In studies, compared with placebo, Shingrix significantly reduced the risk of developing shingles by 90 to 97% in subjects 50 years and older. Merck’s Zostavax, compared to placebo, significantly reduced the risk of developing zoster by 69.8% in those 50 to 59 years old, and by 51% in subjects 60 and older overall. However, in patients 80 years and older, Zostavax was only 18% effective while Shingrix was 89.1% effective in preventing shingles in this older, at-risk, age group. There are no head-to-head studies.