So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.
Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.
I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.
I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.
I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.
Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.
One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.
Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier. If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!
I have a couple of personal memories of Tom Hayden, who has just died of heart disease at the young age of 76.
The first time we crossed paths was when he came to my apartment in Inman Square, Cambridge, to teach us the Japanese Snake Dance – must’ve been 1967 or 68. At that time I was working for the New England Resistance – a movement against the war in Viet Nam. Tom had learned this formation from leftists in Japan, who fashioned much more structured demonstrations than we ever did. It was a non-violent technique for breaking through police lines by linking arms in a certain secure way and moving forward rhythmically.
We were operating church sanctuaries for men refusing the draft because of their opposition to the disastrous war in Viet Nam. We were mobilizing people on the street. We were in constant friction with the police and needed ways to cope.
I had a kind of driveway path to my scuzzy ground-floor apartment and Tom came there to teach us the Snake Dance, which we actually used (to little effect) in subsequent confrontations with the police.
Some months later I was in California for a movement meeting. This all happened between his early 60s marriage to Sandra Cason and his 1973 marriage to Jane Fonda. Tom offered me a bedroom for a couple of days in his Berkeley commune.
There was a huge St. Bernard in that commune – I think it may have been Tom’s. I was awakened by something beating against my face. It was this dog’s dick – and it was huge. Think baseball bat. The dog was all over me, thrusting his massive cock at me – the strangest sexual assault I ever experienced. I was scared, screamed, and Tom came and took the dog out of my room.
I don’t recall much about Tom personally. But not a dog goes by that I don’t remember his beastly animal.
I saw Gladys’ solo act last night in the City Hall auditorium in a former industrial town called Lynn about 23 miles away from where I live. Born in 1944, Gladys is now 72 – three years older than me. She looked (from the excellent seats we snuck into once the lights went down) like someone in her 40s or early 50s – cool haircut, bling-decorated blue gauzy pants outfit, and high heels that she surely wanted to kick off at her first opportunity. It was those heels that bothered me the whole 96 minutes (no intermission) that she was onstage. I kept thinking that wearing them at this point in her life for every show was just about too great a price for any woman. What, after all, is the point of becoming an elder (she has sixteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren) if you can’t rock elasticized pants, upholstered shoes, and braless / spanx-less outfits? Or am I projecting?
Gladys Knight has had four husbands, but the most wrenching separation for me as a fan was when she left the Pips to go solo in 1987. In the early 1970s I was lucky enough to see them live several times. I realize now that for me, the Pips (made up of her brother Merald "Bubba" Knight and her cousins Edward Patten and William Guest) were the key to my love of the act. I saw them about the time they were wrapping up with Motown ("If I Were Your Woman" and "Neither One of Us - Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye”) and moving over to Buddha Records ("Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me" and “Midnight Train to Georgia"). I didn’t just love the Pips: I wanted to be a Pip. I wanted to wear those matching suits and do those smooth moves. (See clip below.)
This City Hall auditorium is Lynn’s main venue and it resembles a 1950s high school auditorium, complete with perfectly functional bathrooms that seem scaled down to say 2/3 the size of today’s stalls and bathroom fixtures. Worked for me. The audience seats were simple but more comfortable than most movie houses. The staff and volunteers were proud, chatty, and excited to be hosting big stars. The sound system was cranked up to an unfortunately murky level and the speakers seemed unable to handle the high level of reverb. I love supporting regional performance and theatre venues, but it’s hard to admire a singer whose sound is being muddied.
Her performance was more Broadway-diva than Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame. It was all about her astonishing pipes and the fact that, without the slightest doubt, she still has it. She did Streisand and her four young backup singers did a set of Prince. She did a lot of diva covers, numbers from musicals and whatnot, and only a few of her hits from the days of the Pips. For those following her career all along, that was fine I’m sure. For someone like me who stopped buying her LPs when she and the Pips parted, it was not exactly what I was hoping for.
Her patter between songs was long and canned, full of homilies that were vaguely spiritual and perhaps reflecting her 1997 conversion from Baptist to Mormon. There was little spontaneity, although there were two raw moments. She made a quick, quiet side comment about missing the Pips. (Me too!) And she made an uncharacteristically snide remark about Marvin Gaye stealing “Heard it Through the Grapevine” from her. Her 1967 version was Motown’s best-selling single in Motown history up to that point, but when they released Gaye’s recording the following year, it became a much bigger hit. (Apparently, though, he had recorded it before her but Motown released hers first.) Gladys Knight did go on to talk about Marvin’s genius and all.
The crowd was my age, her age, and mixed Black and white. I expected that people would be dancing in the aisles, but in fact that only happened on her last song, when she told us to stand up and party.
Watching her all made up and perfect and thin and gorgeous and singing all around the stage at 72, my overwhelming feeling was gratitude that I was no longer ambitious and that being beautiful was never for a moment a goal I set for myself. The flawed sound system did not stop her fans from being amazed at her vocal longevity. And she herself reminded us, from start to finish, perhaps a dozen times, that she is an elder, that she is old, and that aging is her dominant present reality. I could relate.
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