Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Economic Crisis Brings Out the Witches

Three hundred women crowded into Somerset, England, to vie for a job. Most of them had wild hair, pointy big hats and a cackled laugh meant to bring on shivers. A tourist attraction was hiring a witch - at the unusually generous salary of 50,000 British Pounds. Unfortunately for the witches, that was actually going to be pro rata for holidays and events only.

According to one news source, "The job to teach visitors about witchcraft and magic attracted 2,319 applicants, including a London banker, after it was advertised in local newspapers and job centres earlier this month."

Carole Bohanan (see photo), 40, a small town real estate agent, won the position under her witch name Carla Calamity . She said that this wasn't much of a diversion from her day job, since she had to use a bit of witchery magic to move any property in the present market.

The BBC interviewer warned her that she'd have to live in a damp dark cold cave and she responded with a kind of desperate gaiety that, "You know I'm renting at the moment and I have puddles coming up through the flagstones, so I'm pretty used to living in a damp residence. This is probably going to be like living in a palace in comparison."

When a cave is a step up for a working woman, you know that times are rough.

When Star Trek Meets Sarah Palin

I've found Sarah Palin's resignation announcement on July 4th and her resignation speech this weekend depressing. The Empress Has No Words - or rather, no sentences and definitely no paragraphs. And yet, her bizarre body language, her confrontational attitude and her pointing fingers seem to be enough to convince some people that they "get" her.

I wrote the book on Sarah Palin, literally, but her continuing and willful distortion of Constitutional rights (her anti-press/media weirdness), her giant smile as she babbles stuff you know would be very mean if only you could comprehend it and her scoffing rejection of any hint that she is a quitter, despite having quit, make me wonder if we aren't watching a nervous breakdown in process.

So I haven't been gleeful at her incomprehensible behavior and I haven't been laughing at her verbal other-worldliness. However, the man forever associated with outer space, William Shatner, can apparently relate to her. Perhaps when she rode in on McCain's transporter from elsewhere, she felt she thrived in the mainland political ether. Returning to her own universe meant actual work and decreasing adulation, so she's decided to transport herself to another sphere. Clearly Captain Kirk is more likely to grasp these things than we are.

I'm no particular fan of Conan O'Brien, but I thank him for bringing out William Shatner last night to do this sober beat poetry reading of Palin's speech.

TV Review: Dance Your Ass Off

Here is how to create yet another tear-jerking competition show. Take people with some dance talent (think: So You Think You Can Dance), pair each contestant with a professional who choreographs and performs a new weekly dance with them (think: Dancing With the Stars) and add a weight-loss competition (think: The Big Loser). Now, set up a panel of three judges, ensuring that – like most such shows – there is an arrogant white British guy and a woman with a personality disorder among them.

Voila! You’ve got the new Oxygen network competition series Dance Your Ass Off. The contestants are a diverse crew, even including the charming Ruben, whose long-term boyfriend is fighting cancer. You need people who are happy to cry onscreen, whether it is because her super-size prevents her from finding love or because he is afraid of dying young from diabetes like his father did.

Be sure to spike their energy drinks with an inordinate amount of vigor so that they are screaming and jumping up and down whenever they aren’t actually dancing. Then build a massive center stage scale which the dancers mount for their public weigh-in following each performance. The combination of weight loss and judges’ dance scores determines who gets sent home.

These competition shows are all about the transformation. We thrill when a street popper defies the low-ball expectations of an haughty judge and performs an elegant fox-trot (So You Think You Can Dance). We cheer on Jerry Springer in his awkward but sincere quest to master the waltz before his daughter’s wedding (Dancing with the Stars). And the 66% of Americans who, according to the CDC, are overweight identify with many of the ways in which the Dance Your Ass Off contestants mourn their social invisibility or their role as an object of derision. It’s not news that American society promotes an excessively slender image of beauty and success while selling the greasiest, saltiest, bulkiest food with a gusto that makes fast-food one of the few industries doing well in this economic meltdown.

The producers know that many viewers are also hoping to unleash their “inner thin,” as they call it, and what better way to get there than to be a dance star? Pinky is bummed out to be excluded from her brothers’ hip-hop dance crew and believes that once she sheds the pounds, she’ll be deemed good enough. Ruben, by far the oldest at 43, used to dance in musicals and loves the stage. Brandon is the shy virgin who finds the partner dancing embarrassingly (thrillingly?) intimate.

The team includes the requisite work-out and nutrition experts and is hosted by the excessively big-haired actress Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony as Hairspray’s plump Tracy Turnblad on Broadway. As the elimination weeks roll by, I figure that if I can’t be a contestant, then I’ll be a viewing couch potato. I like my tearful transformations as well as the next sap.

This review first appeared on EdgeBoston.com and other Edge publications. I meant to post it here for you a few weeks ago, but forgot, blush.

Running – or Crawling – in High Heels

My local TV stations all seem to have gone blushingly international this morning, covering an event in Berlin. No, it’s neither the impact of the economy on Germans nor a peek at the German health system. They covered the Stiletto Run sponsored by Glamour magazine.

One hundred women raced in the Berlin streets wearing heels at least 2.5” high. There are demonstrations for justice around the world every day that gather a much bigger crowd, but we rarely hear about them. Even EarthTimes.com gleefully reported it, even though the site bills itself as covering “the human environment” and brags that they include the voices of “everyday men and women who are active agents of change and whose points of view are seldom heard in the mainstream media.” So stiletto road races of young women in running shorts are neglected vehicles of social change?

It isn’t enough that teenage girls associate heels with womanhood and the freedom maturity brings, now there is a product for infants that is getting a lot of media attention. As today’s New York Post says, “Now baby girls can really kick up their heels - in stilettos fashioned for the crib set.” When you get done vomiting, please get angry.

If you aren’t entirely aware of the damage high heels does to women’s health, then you haven’t been paying attention. Just google and gawk. “Podiatrists often comment that 75 percent of their business is caused by females wearing tall high heeled shoes.” From dangerously-shortened Achilles Tendons to distorted pelvic alignment to all sorts of bunions, hammertoes and back problems, it is a Western form of bound feet. And of course, high heels affect the mobility of women and that’s always dangerous. They keep women mincing instead of striding – which is why such a race is a curiosity.

“The car was a-rockin', so the law went a-knockin'.”

The Associated Press has reported on a story from which I’ve learned a lesson. A couple of lovers who for some reason did not “get a room,” were humping in their car. Unfortunately they were parked near the Randolph Air Force Base, north of San Antonio, Texas, where people call the cops if they see a strange parked car shaking and shivering.

Unluckily enough, the couple also had “enough equipment and chemicals in the car to start a methamphetamine lab.” What might have just been a ticket for public canoodling turned into some nasty drug charges. The lesson of this story? Check out the shocks before you buy a “1991 blue Oldsmobile 88.”

Pee-Powered Battery: Be the First on Your Block to Have One

Parents of young children, women of a certain age and men with puffy prostates are going to be thrilled to hear of their advantage in the realm of renewable energy. Pee-powered batteries are on the shelves in Japan. Such a battery, we are told, “can be recharged with a variety of liquids including urine and other precious bodily fluids, is supposed to last 10 years, and pumps out 500 milliamp-hours (mAh), which is equivalent to zinc-carbon batteries but a third of what an alkaline does.”

I’m not sure what all that means but I wonder if I can combine these batteries with use of my SheWee, which I discussed in "The Drip Dominatrix rules her bladder," one of my most popular blog entries (strange readers!) in 2007. Must run. All this talk has inspired me.

Do You Know About June Jordan?

"Jordan . . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."-Alice Walker

I’m a prose woman. Some poets move me – Verandah Porche, Charles Coe, Suheir Hammad – but usually I know them well enough to understand what they are writing. I didn’t have to know June Jordan (1936-2002) personally, though, to be knocked over by her integrity and the power of her work. It is the anniversary of June Jordan’s birth in 1936, as I was reminded by Campbell Ex, a valuable Facebook friend.

Unflinching in her approach to sexuality, race and justice, Jordan will always be remembered with honor by those involved in the struggle for Palestinian rights for her poem “Moving Towards Home.” It was written in the wake of the 1982 attack on Palestinians in Lebanon and it just happens that I am working on a novel about that same period. Here’s the last stanza:

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.

Her parents came from the Caribbean. She tells us in one article, "I am the daughter of peasants who begged and borrowed their way to these United States. They wanted an escape from no-shoes-no-drinkable-water poverty." She also wrote novels, plays and journalism. Wikipedia says that she “is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.”

I have seen her perform live and it was an amazing, energizing evening. She had a way of putting things – here are a few knockout comments:

“Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.”

“Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?


 “If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.”

And one of my favorites….

“The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.”

Birth and Death

This video about reproductive health – there’s a maternal death every minute – has been launched by the White Ribbon Alliance on the occasion of the G8 meetings in Italy. Lucinda Marshall, Director of the Feminist Peace Network, is spot-on when she calls it “an elegant presentation.” I found this riveting and beautifully done.

"Is Palin Bailin’? You betcha!" Listen to my radio interview.

Here's the link to the page with the recording (not sure how to link directly to an mp3) of my appearance today on Sonali Kolhatkar's great show, Uprising Radio: Subverting The Airways on KPFK (90.7 f.m. in L.A.).

Sonali Kolhatkar is one host who really does her homework and always surprises me with the level of her knowledge about current issues that progressives care about. No wonder she is syndicated on a range of stations. Her studio is in L.A. and if you're out of range, a visit to her website is always worth it.

Go to this link and then click on "Listen to this Segment" to hear our 15 minute discussion.

Finally! Some Clarity from Sarah Palin

The bottom line for Sarah Palin is, well, the bottom line.

Among the many entertaining puzzles in the Palin resignation speech that Shannyn Moore of Huffington Post called “a word salad”, one point is getting insufficient attention from the pundits.

“Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight.”

Sarah Palin is poised to use her appeal to the wacko-right and fundamentalist GOP base to get rich. It’s not just the book with its enormous advance and huge sales potential. As a speaker, Palin is likely to generate a gusher of shekels. She would be following the leadership of George W. Bush who “crassly told journalist Robert Draper that his chief post-presidential intention is to ‘give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.’" The figure of $150,000 is widely cited for Bush’s domestic speeches and quite a bit more for overseas gigs. Now Palin is going to present some daunting competition. Let’s face it, when it comes to delivering from a stage, Palin provides a more colorful act than Bush.

Higher Calling

Before the religious right convinced McCain that he had to accept Palin onto the ticket if he wanted any support from their troops – the only reliable Republican bloc – Palin was busy climbing the Alaskan political ladder. She was being closely tended by national Christian right figures, even from the days of her mayoral campaign in Wasilla.

Once she stood at the national podium to waves of adulation, it was hard to go back to the day-to-day responsibilities of running a state. Despite humiliating herself in excruciating public displays of flappy-mouth – from botched TV interviews to inappropriate winks to gleefully accusing the most popular man in America of hanging out with “domestic terrorists” – Palin found no fault with herself. That is because she has a “higher calling.” She’s never said otherwise. She is doing god’s work, so whatever she does, it must be just perfect.

It's more fun to make money.

Having acquired a taste for adoring, salivating, autograph-seeking attentions, Palin doesn’t want to give up the silks for her Alaskan fleece. It’s the stage she wants, more than the power. She doesn’t want to monitor budgets, set policies or negotiate anything more complicated than a TV talk-show contract or a role as Republican money-machine.

If she manages to become the top headliner at fundraisers for 2010 Republican campaigns, it would make her a happy bunny. She would be preaching to a receptive choir – who else would be at a GOP funder? – and they would be relieved that it wasn’t Romney or some other suit droning at them over their lobster.

She knows she’s right in everything – but the criticisms, ridicule and law suits get her down. She used to be a very popular politician in Alaska; now instead of friends she feels surrounded by obstacles. She feels a bit betrayed because she’s the same object of god’s ambitions that she has always been.

“Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year - the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate - I say others changed.”

The Mistress of Incomprehensibility

Palin continues to be the mistress of incomprehensibility, and she longs for an audience who appreciates that skill. Apparently the Alaskan legislature doesn’t. She insists that she is explaining with clarity why she is walking away in the middle of her term. Here are four of those transparent reasons:

1.    She grows sappy about her visit overseas to the wounded troops, who are “bold, they don't give up.” They inspired her to resign.

2.    She refuses to take the “quitter's way out,” so she quits.

3.    In her basketball analogy, she reminds us that “a good point guard knows exactly when to pass the ball,” (Oh how the ‘Barracuda’ must miss those uncomplicated days of sports glory featured in the photo!), without recognizing that the guard does not then leave the court and go home to her sunbed.

4.    And because she worries that “a problem in our country today is apathy,” she’s walking out of the job to which voters elected her.

She also is very conscientious about providing challenges for future students of language when they try to deconstruct her inscrutable homilies, such as “Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’”

Finally, reaching to more revered texts for guidance in the midst of chronic inarticulacy, she recites for us the hallowed words on her parents’ fridge door:

"Don't explain: your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe you anyway."

It’s a whole new configuration of Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell.