Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Words I Hate: Job Creator

Words I Hate: Job Creator

For years I have railed against particularly deceptive, misleading, euphemistic words and so I’m going to start an occasional series of blogs dealing with these words.

JOB CREATOR
Tom Steyer, the multi-billionaire vanity candidate for president who built his wealth as a hedge fund manager, has assaulted us with a barrage of TV and radio ads. He brags: “I started a tiny investment business and, over 27 years, grew it successfully to 36 billion dollars.” His argument is that he is a superior capitalist pig to tRump. With no governmental experience whatsoever, he brags that as a “job creator,” he is capable of running the world. His campaign has spent $17 million on ads so far.

What does it mean to be a job creator? McDonalds and Walmart and other minimum wage companies – they’re all job creators. They’re also union haters, do not pay a living wage to their employees, and in most cases offer no benefits. I don’t know how many or what type of jobs this Steyer “created” – these hedge funders usually just buy, ransack, and then sell companies. But what he really means is that he managed to exploit the labor of enough people to make him so rich that he can attempt to spend his way into the position of president of the USA. As a “job creator” he wants to create that one additional job – for himself.

Travelogue: Sedona, the Grand Canyon, and Surrounds in 9 days

ARRIVING
I begin to understand my experience of Arizona when I learn that only 17% of the state is in private hands. The rest either belongs to the Navajo Nation (about the size of 1/4 of Texas), or is designated National Parks, National Monuments, and National Recreation Areas. If you long for eye candy, if you want to immerse yourself in a cascade of pretty, welcome to Arizona, where the roads are in fine nick (no snow/ice/salt damage) and a car is a basic necessity.

I have eliminated the first several pages of this travelogue, cut out extensive sections of the first three days of this trip in order to spare you the saga of a car rental gone bad (shame on Alamo/Enterprise). I won’t burden you with the car that filled with toxic fumes, the one with the trunk that no one could open, the one with headlights that pointed straight to the ground, with the inappropriate or non-existent “swap-outs” we were or were not offered, and the countless hours on phone-hold leading to no rectification; but I will simply assure you that on the third day, my travel-mate and bestie, Barry, and I drove to another town to pick up an actual functioning little auto and set out to salvage the rest of the trip.

The drive back and forth to the Phoenix airport was a nightmare, with drivers who were apparently trained on Boston’s 128/95, only at much higher speed limits – the legal limit went as high as 75. But once away from that massive, crowded city, the trip to Sedona is a visual gift. The geology is constantly changing as we pass the magical desert scenery where the fields of saguaro cactus, tall pleated cacti, are unique and only found here. There are dry flatlands full of grass bleached a lovely pale yellow, and then increasingly impressive rock formations the further north we go.

We spontaneously take the exit to Black Rock, a little town of a few thousand, just to see what a little town looks like. My conclusion – it looks like the set from a 1950s Western movie. However, they actually have a tourist board shop (the guest book showed one visitor per day) and a thrift shop!!

Our main destination along the way, the heritage site Montezuma’s Castle, is a stunning 45-50 room pueblo apartment house built into the limestone cliffs over the Beaver Creek – an oasis in this desert environment – by the Sinagua people about a thousand years ago. The National Parks Service has constructed a 1/3 mile trail for viewing, which is precisely the maximum I can go on these sorry feet of mine. On another day we will visit Tuzigoot National Monument – a similar ancient Sinagua pueblo, where the visitor path is likewise 1/3 mile. We can say one thing about the Sinagua folks: they must've been Black Belts in the skill of ladder climbing.

As we approach Sedona, a large sign says Scenic Drive, and we turn off, only to discover that this new road is literally named “Scenic Drive” and there is nothing much scenic about the crowded new development of southwesternish McMansions that offers us Model Homes to view. Which we don’t. It is the only scam signage I’m to see my whole trip.

Once we settle into the Airbnb we have rented, we follow our host’s recommendation to eat at the nearby Cafe Jose – economical, cheerful, delicious, and swiftly served. It offers a classic breakfast all day, has a full menu of Southwestern entrees, and the service has won awards over many years. It becomes our go-to restaurant destination, not the least because I admire the unusual page of the menu that includes a list of small servings of comfort food for “Kids and Seniors.” I only hope this inclusive idea catches on.

SEDONA
Café Jose is located in what I would call a strip mall – a line of connected stores. The main drag of West Sedona – the tony section far from the tourist madness of downtown – is one long commercial road (89A), peppered with such strip malls, and in the same style as all of Sedona: adobe in earth colors with a splash of teal. Even the McDonalds had to forgo its otherwise universal golden arches in favor of teal arches. The houses are low-lying and fit in with the surrounding environment. Where there are mansions, they adhere to the color palette and square design.

Sedona was recently designated as an International Dark Sky Community – its starry night skies are highly promoted – so all exterior lights around buildings must meet rigorous standards. In fact, the city's Land Development Codes rule the built environment, which has an appealing unified sensibility – from fences to benches to beauty shops. Such harmony does not come cheap. Specialist architects must be raking it in.

The thrift shops abound: Twice Nice is especially wonderful (they support a women’s sanctuary) and has the best selection of used books ($1). The Goodwill is the cleanest, most systematic branch I’ve ever seen. I attribute that to the abundance of retired volunteers available in Sedona.

The average age in Sedona is 60; the average age of homeowners is 68. The number of children is shrinking. The 11,000 (mostly white) permanent residents absorb 3 million visitors each year! Most residents seem to have left lucrative corporate lives elsewhere and fled to Sedona. Nearly all service people – servers, tourist advisers, etc – wear name tags with their town of origin underneath. It’s a “thing” here – the assumption that you are from elsewhere.

Almost every dwelling has a gob-smacking view of red rocks – the geological phenomenon that marks this area with its unique towering splendor. We are staying at the foot of Thunder Mountain (aka Capitol Butte), which is the first thing I see in the morning. All day it morphs into varied textures as the sunlight and shadows change.

RED ROCKS
It is raining all day, sometimes as hard as a monsoon, sometime just dripping. Interestingly enough, we find this just adds to the intensity of the colors of Red Rock State Park. Although most people come to the area for the hiking, this is a road trip, because my feet aren’t wont to do much else. Luckily, the Arizona park system has established frequent pull-off viewing points that make perfect frames for the rock formations.

We spend several days exploring in all directions, soaking in the scenery, the sunsets, the sumptuousness of Southwest nature, but many times we are stopped along a road by gates and guards who prevent the peons from crossing into the fenced-off heavens of the bourgeoisie. Such golf resorts and housing developments are for the bloated – who claim for themselves the most exquisite of views. The Schnebly Hill Drive is perhaps the most imperfect combination of splendiferous views and exclusive 1%-only closures.

For a view of the famous Sedona sunset, we drive one evening to the Airport Mesa which involves a muddy climb up a lofty rock. I make it about 2/3 up the steep side, but when the stepping stones stop, so do I. My descent is on the arm of a West Virginia Eagle Scout, a sturdy bloke who saw me floundering on the way down and stopped to do a good deed, hopefully earning a new patch in the process.

One of the craziest spots – in an area full of vortexes (defined as “swirling centers of energy that are conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration”) and ghosts – is the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Cross, built right into the buttes (steep red rock hill with a plateau.) It was commissioned – perhaps in a fit of jealousy – by heiress Marguerite Brunswig Staude following her encounter with the new Empire State Building, and constructed on Coconino National Forest land, after the late Senator Barry Goldwater pulled some 1% strings.

It is raining and cold when we arrive and a scruffy employee in a golf cart offers to drive us way, way up to the Church and then fetch us a half hour later – and seems only to be looking for a $5.00 tip. It is the closest I am to get to these magnificent rocks and the highest view I’ll see.

JEROME
The unique town of Jerome is in total contrast to orderly, ordered Sedona. An historic copper mining town – with a reputation as “the wickedest town in the West” – way up Cleopatra Hill, Jerome was founded by miners living in tents. The rich copper find propelled it into the fourth largest city in Arizona, with the population peaking at around 15,000 in the 1920s. By the 1950s the demand for copper plunged, as did the population. The remaining 50 to 100 residents promoted Jerome as a Ghost Town.

Artists, freaks, bikers, and ghost lovers moved in and now Jerome is a serious tourist attraction. The 450 permanent residents sell arts and crafts, run restaurants and music venues, and live in rehabilitated old structures, precariously clinging to the Hill, that they have decorated with flair and fancy. There are art galleries, several parks, a couple of museums. Because it is built on a number of levels at the top of the Hill, I am limited in how much I can walk around. Jerome is fabulous fun, although it is best explored by the mobile.

GRAND CANYON
The smartest move we make is following the weather closely and changing our Pink Jeep Tour to the Grand Canyon from a day on which rain was predicted to a day with better weather. December is not a classic month for visiting this world wonder, and just a week earlier it had been closed due to snow.

Barry and I book seats on a 12-seat luxury van (Mercedes) for an all-day tour from Sedona to the Grand Canyon, lunch included. I’m a bit pushy at their office about getting front seats because I tend to puke when I’m riding in the back and looking out side windows. They seem remarkably confident that I can have whatever seat I want.

When we turn up with layers of clothes on this chilly day, we discover that we have our driver/guide Mark (formerly a corporate guy in Wisconsin) all to ourselves. He is knowledgeable, flexible, and tells us that when rich people want a private van trip to themselves, they pay $2,000. We have lucked out. We drive past Flagstaff (pop 100,000) and through the large sovereign Navajo Nation, about ¼ the size of Texas, but with a population of only 200,000. Beef cattle and tourism appear to be their main industries and we stop at a large multi-structure tourist magnet to peruse the goods and use the toilets. The huge main tourist center sells every sort of trinket, jewelry, and beaded belt imaginable, but another of the buildings holds stunning historical and contemporary artifacts for sale, including hand-made beaded moccasins and leggings from the 19th and early 20th Century costing many thousands of dollars. I am amused by the signs by the side of the road that say: “Do not stop by the side of the road to play in the snow.”

I will not attempt to repeat all that Mark explains to us about the geology along the way and in the Canyon, which you can look up. But I will mention that when we enter the Grand Canyon Park, the workers at the gate tell Mark that we are just the 3rd paying customers of the day.

As a result, Mark is as excited as we are for he is able to park freely at many spots he can’t approach during tourist season because of the crowds. Since the space is open, he brings what he calls “binoculars” – but which are really like twin telescopes mounted on a tripod. We look a mile down to the very bottom the Grand Canyon and see rafters in the river (which is always 47 degrees F)
and then at another spot a couple of miles across at a rescue team wearing red jackets. Mark takes photos of these long-distance images, impossible to see with the naked eye, on my iPhone through his giant binoculars.

Two buildings really catch my eye, both designed and built by the same woman: Mary Colter.. One of the few women architects of her time, Colter was one of the “Harvey Girls” – educated white women who worked for the Fred Harvey Company. Harvey was a Southwestern mogul, known for his railway restaurants and for his unusual hiring practices.

Colter’s four-story Desert View Watchtower (1932) was meant to be a kind of whimsy to draw people to one corner of the Canyon. The walls inside are decorated with Hopi art and from the top one has a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon. I make it to the balcony of the 2nd floor and admire how Colter fit it so perfectly into the environment. Around it are outbuildings that serve drinks or house toilets as well as benches for quiet viewing of the Canyon.

Later Mark drops us at the Village, the most built-up area of the Canyon, where we see Colter’s first building, the Hopi House. Outside and inside, the Hopi House is meant to reflect ancient native culture, including reproductions of wall art that have been destroyed.

The plethora of facts and figures Mark imparts serves to contextualize the unbelievable dimensions of one of the most visually exciting landscapes a human can see. The striations, the rusty red rocks, the dark volcanic basalt, the white limestone, the beige sandstone layer after layer and created by the river, the continental tectonic plates colliding, the volcanoes, earthquakes, and other cataclysms is truly a natural wonder. The many animals he points out to us are another treat – from the fearless ravens used to people to the lovely mule deer to the bighorn sheep.

On the trip home, Mark tells us that Pink Jeep Tours is the largest employer in Sedona, and the best one to work for. I heard from other tourists that there are coupons available – but there’s no senior discount.

THE VERDE CANYON RAILROAD
When I mentioned a trip to Sedona on Facebook, my first cousin Elissa contacted me to say that she and her husband and her eldest son would be in the area at the same time. Elissa, the eldest daughter of my mother’s brother, is the same age as me, but we hadn’t seen each other since 4th grade. We reconnected digitally on FB, but when she invited us to join them on the historic Verde Canyon train, it seemed like a great idea.

Since I’m unable to do much hiking, this train ride is a sensational way to get close to the rocks. The four-hour trip begins in Clarkdale, just a half-hour drive from Sedona, and tootles as far as the fascinating Perkinsville ghost ranch and back. Along the way, following the Verde River, we skim pass towering rock formations and ancient Indian ruins holding more cliff dwellings. We rattle over a rickety bridge and through a tunnel in which you’ve got to keep your arms inside, we learn via the delayed recorded guide tape several minutes after we’ve cleared the tunnel. Between each railroad car is a viewing platform where we spend most of our time with a (live) guide who tells tales and points out the sites. Known as the “other grand canyon,” it’s a rugged terrain full of all sorts of wildlife and a perfect setting to get to know my lovely cousin in her adult incarnation, comparing our childhood impressions and sharing secrets about our parents and other relatives.

On our last day before departure, we visit Cottonwood, as I’ve been anxious to see where the people live who provide the labor to keep Sedona running. They sure can’t afford Sedona. Cottonwood, founded in 1879 and named after a circle of 16 super-gorgeous cottonwood trees at the Verde River – the heart of the copper industry – is located in the Verde Valley, about 20 minutes from Sedona and at the bottom of the hill where Jerome is. It was a farming town which is now rebranding itself as a wine center. And it is much cheaper than Sedona and clearly with no rules restricting building colors and styles.

My last Arizona experience is a battle with the TSA officers at the Phoenix airport which I have written about in a separate posting in order to avoid a closure of this travelogue that belies the gorgeous time I had and my sense of truly being on vacation, off the grid and the political grind, but instead immersed in magnificent visual splendor.

New Credenza: It Takes a Village

I am actually decorating my living room – not a thing I’ve ever done before. I’ve always lived as if in a furniture shop, with lovely 2nd hand pieces lining every wall, things I was given or found on the street or bought on the cheap when I needed more stuff in which to stuff more stuff.

First I did a clear-out – what they now call de-cluttering – giving away many of those old pieces, even lovely art deco oak furniture (on left) that I brought with me from England but which have always been too imposing for my tiny apartment. I dispersed all my precious knick-knacks, picked up from places I traveled, or presents from… well, I hardly remember from whom. I even gave away four or five large cartons of books.

I have always lived in clutter and chaos, leading to my practice of going elsewhere to write for weeks at a time. But as I age, and as the airlines have become so dedicated to propagating misery, I’m less enthusiastic about cat-sitting in South London or Las Vegas in order to have a beautiful calm space in which to write my books. Besides, in thinking forward now that I’m in my 70s, there is not a person in the world who wants to be responsible for disposing of my copious possessions: it’s time to get a head start.

My new living room carpeting provided the excuse to do all of this. The carpet is a gorgeous grey that matches my newish little couch. In order to have it installed, I was required to pack up every single thing from every single piece of furniture and pile it all in my bedroom so that the furniture could be easily moved around as the carpet was changed. That made it easier to eliminate the heavy wooden furniture, leaving my possessions in a gazillion cartons. I had help moving those heavy boxes from Barry and Melsen and Bren and Mags over a couple of months. And on the day the carpet was replaced, Barry heroically unplugged every item that works on electricity, marking each wire, and then re-plugged them all afterwards. This was not a job I could have easily pulled off for myself.

For months and months, I have been searching for a long white credenza with simple lines and a lighter, modern look which will provide 80+ inches of storage and be soothing to look at from my desk. But I’ve found nothing to my taste. I enlisted the help of a long-time friend Debi Levine who roams online auction sites. Still nothing. Then my friend Bren, as we sat in front of my computer searching some more, suggested that I try looking for a color instead of white.

And then I finally came across a cabinet, just 48” – but I could easily fit in two – that came in slate blue. After consulting with Bren and Sandy and Jaya and Barry and Judy and Victoria and Sue O, and after seeing it on multiple sites for twice the price, I ordered two. However, it comes in a box and needs to be assembled, a task far from my own skill sets, which tend to congregate around words – spoken and written, dance steps, and my refrigerator.

Debi, however, has golden hands. Her mother calls her The Mastermind. She agrees to come and assemble them. I change my schedule so that I will be around on Wednesday for the promised delivery – intending to put up all sorts of signs in the building’s entrance to convince the delivery people to bring them up to my apartment for a hearty tip. But to my distress, the furniture arrives while I’m out at a Dr. appointment on Tuesday. They are propped up against the building’s wall of mail-boxes in the entryway, each cardboard container twice as wide as me and a foot or two taller, each weighing 99 pounds. Other tenants are buzzing my flat in fury at being unable to access their mail. I appeal to my landlady in the office and she rustles up two of her brothers – my landlords – and they somehow carry both of them up.

Debi offers to come on the Wednesday to whip them together – hoping to finish in an over-optimistic 90 minutes. However, it turns out that each cabinet has about a dozen planks of various sizes and a huge cache of hardware. Undaunted, Debi wrestles the slate blue participants into perfect order, crawling around the floor, bending over them when they resist, standing them up, screwing them tight, and lord knows what. My friend Judy comes over to offer moral support to The Mastermind, joins us for lunch, and helps me haul out the debris.

I have a chiropractic appointment I must leave for at 4:45. Debi has been working non-stop since 10:30 am, with a quick break for my tuna salad and cranberry sauce. The doors are the last piece to be assembled and they have, for both cabinets, been the hardest to subdue. The clock is ticking: 4:20. 4:30. And then, at 4:40, The Mastermind shuts those doors smoothly, helps me move the two cabinets side by side, as if they were one, gathers up her enigmatic tools, and we leave together – her exhausted by hours of demanding physical labor and shrewd problem-solving, and me dazzled by the brilliance of her competence and confidence.

It has taken a village but now my living room, for the first time in my life, looks like a grown-up lives in it. Now it is time to write those books that long to come alive.

 

Don’t Get Burned by Niagara Falls

Our road trip took the three of us from Pittsburgh to Niagara Falls in late October, stopping overnight in each direction at Lake Chautauqua. About 50 miles from Niagara, a service station advertised that it provided tourist information for Niagara Falls – and that it was the last stop before Buffalo, NY. Of course we stopped.

As Jaya, Sandy, and I came in the door, the booth was set up so that everyone had to pass it. It featured piles of maps and brochures and leaflets and a jolly guy who was happy to talk to us about Niagara. All three of us love to chatter with strangers and this friendly chap was our match. Eventually he asked about our plans for the Falls and confided that he could secure us tickets for the best tour ever. It would include all parking fees at the various sites, all entrance fees, and a ride to four of the best views – altogether eight attractions. We would have a chance to spend a half hour at each stop, photographing and incredible views. It would take four hours and only cost $108 each.

“What about a senior discount?”

“Included it already,” he smiled.

“We’ll talk to you after we use the bathroom,” I said and off we went. I reminded my friends that there was no way I was going to stand around on my dysfunctional feet for half-hours at a time – and certainly not on such an extremely windy and chilly day. “Sounds like torture, not fun.” So we didn’t grab this bargain.

We got to the Falls and parked for $10. We never had to move the car. We went up to the main observation point and got our first free views of the Falls. Then we went on the exhilarating, amazing “Maid of the Mist” boat ride around the foot of the falls, dressed like everyone else in the pink plastic rain capes (with breast cancer ribbon designs on the back). We had befriended a guy at the info desk and he had given us big plastic bags and rubber bands for our shoes – we were the only ones on the Maid whose feet stayed dry. The wind was insane – so the mist was seriously whipping people around. And that was kinda wonderful. It cost us $20 each.

Afterwards we went on the Trolley (jump on / jump off) provided by the Niagara Falls State Park. It goes to all those eight attractions mentioned by the tour guy who had tried to sell us the tour. But it turned out that several of the attractions were already closed for the season and others were inaccessible due to road works. But the Trolley and its informative driver were fabulous – we got out at the premiere spot for viewing and photographing and then got back on later. The tickets cost $3 each.

So that’s $10 for parking, $60 for three tickets to the boat, $9 for three tickets to the Trolley. In total $79, and it was a full and exhausting day. If we had gone on the painful standing-around tour, it would’ve cost us $324.

How infuriating that this for-profit tour company passes itself off as a “tourist info” spot, even advertising on the highway and being placed immediately as one comes in the door of the last service stop. My feeling was that Niagara Falls is a State Park and therefore looked after us in an affordable and safe way. Don’t get burned – just get to the Park itself, preferably not, as staff told us, on the windiest day of the year.

 

Raise Hell: The Life & Times Of Molly Ivins - A Review in 100 words

Raise Hell: The Life & Times Of Molly Ivins

A Review in 100 words

Now here’s a documentary to see, indeed. Molly Ivins started her life of raising hell by resisting her rich authoritarian father. ‘I remember my dad and his friends sitting around fixing the price of oil.’ Later she said, “My teenage rebellion lasted 35 years.” Six feet tall and a devoted intellectual, her young years reading in her bedroom well prepared her to be a rebellious journalist who splintered glass ceilings and spoke truth to power. Her hilarious wit – unfortunately fueled by heavy drinking – and the confidence privileged kids inherit, combined to make her a sterling, popular syndicated journalist and author.

 

Just me and Billy Porter hangin’ out...

So here's the story: A generous talented friend took me to see the unmissable, funny, deep, brilliant play "The Purists" which was directed by Billy Porter, presented by Boston's Huntington Theatre Company (same building where my own play appeared this summer) -- and written by Dan McCabe.

She also got me into the after-party where Billy stood in one side room on seriously elevated platform shoes taking pictures. He was standing between two young blond women for some photos. The second they finished I asked him, "Do you take pictures with old dykes too?" He laughed, pulled me to him saying "Get over here, girl" and I snapped the moment.

(I was so star-struck that I forgot to mention Pittsburgh, our mutual hometown, and it never occurred to me that I shoulda brought A Raisin in My Cleavage to give to him.)

Is This Karma or Clutter?

After my mother – a mean-spirited woman – died, my friend went through the jewelry she had accumulated throughout her life. Much was tacky mid-century plastic and gaudy Florida flea market stuff, but my friend did identify a few items with a bit of value: a gold chain, gold bracelets, a necklace with a diamond, some diamond earrings.

It was 2009, deep in the Recession, and selling/buying gold was big business. I contacted a gold-buying guy who had a big ad in a brochure featuring varied
Cape Cod businesses. He turned up with a tray, a special light, and one of those lenses (known as a monocular loupe) that screws into one eye and apparently lets jewelry experts see deep into the item. I was one of a bunch of such buying stops he was making that evening. It was his profession over many decades, but business had really picked up because of the Recession, he said with glee. If I recall, he gave me $250 cash for the lot and left. Two days later he called to say that he had screwed up on the assessment of one of the pieces and wanted to return to my house to take back $100. I said no.

After his call, I realized that I did not recollect what I did with the cash. I scoured my apartment but never found it. This loss has stayed in the back of my brain. My mother had treated me like crap all my life. Luckily I’m not superstitious or spiritual – or I might think she was messing with me from her grave.

Fast forward over a decade and I’m in the midst of a de-cluttering blitz. Among some very dusty papers, I found that Cape Cod business brochure. Inside was $350 cash. So it was more than I remembered and it was right where I had laid it over 10 years earlier. Now I have enough money to pay the woman I’ve hired to help me organize this attempt to tame the chaos of my tiny crowded apartment.

Review in 100 words: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Review in exactly 100 words

Combine Toni Morrison’s fascinating life and fulsome talent with an elegant documentarian, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and you get that rare film that is both comely and edifying. Add in talking heads who love Morrison – from Angela Davis to Oprah to Walter Mosley to Fran Lebowitz – and you have a wondrous film. The racism and sexism she faced in her eventual journey to the Nobel Prize were countered by the 48 black writers who signed a statement deploring the lack of establishment recognition for her. Greenfield-Sanders showcases not only Morrison’s personal beauty, but also the soothing Hudson River view from her home.

 

Sharing My Dad’s Feet

I had a sweet dad and a dreadful mother. Saul didn’t protect me from her, but he stood up for me in other ways. He drove me to my black boyfriend’s house and then drove us around when Pittsburgh was too segregated for us, at 15 or so, to be open about being together, and he let us kiss in the backseat. Unlike my mother, he accepted my girl lover the next year and my lesbianism the rest of his life. In fact, we used to armchair cruise the passing women when we were hanging out together somewhere public. He was a brilliant dancer and in later years we used to lead the women at the elders’ tea dances side by side.

I used to look just like my dad – I have his beautiful eyes – and I loved that. But as I age, I look more and more like my nasty mother and that freaks me out. I see my hands and arms turning into hers – despite how much I loved my dad’s muscular forearms and veined hands.

For the last year I have been having terrible trouble with my feet and ankles. The result is that I can walk less and less and in fact at this point even a block or two does me in. I can’t stand in one place for more than a couple of minutes, which generally prevents me from attending dance lessons. I’ve seen six medical people, received six diagnoses, and been subjected to six failed treatments. Only one of these people has ever followed up to see how I’m doing after their failures. Combine that with a knee they say needs replacing, but which I can’t replace until a solution to my feet problem works, and you can understand why I am now the owner of two canes and one disability parking placard for my car. I am learning how to stay in the game of my beloved West Coast Swing, by perfecting a way to lead without really dancing, without really moving.

My dad died in 2004 and my mother three years later. I had three days in Pittsburgh to clear out their apartment and I took big garbage bags and emptied their file cabinets into the bags and threw them out. I had a charity come get all the other stuff. I made up two boxes of papers I noticed while dumping the rest that I thought I’d want and I sent those boxes home to Boston, where they have remained unopened.

This week I opened one of the boxes. First, I found a folder of interesting papers from my dad’s service during WWII. Underneath that was a manila envelope full of funeral stuff and obits. And then an astonishing two-page official-looking letter from 1996 turned up. It was from a vascular specialist physician to another physician, apparently my dad’s primary care person. It is titled “Saul Katz” and it describes him as a 78-year-old dancer with mysterious feet and ankle problems (the doctor calls them “interesting symptoms”) that the original doctor couldn’t figure out. The Dr. describes Saul as “overweight, awake, alert, and oriented” – which fits me too.

The vascular specialist did a complicated work-up on my dad but could not figure out the problem. He observes that the pain comes from walking or standing but that Saul, like me, is pretty much without pain while sitting. He writes: “I don’t have a perfect handle on this,” and goes on to make multiple speculations. In the end he says, “I’m sorry that I can’t give a definitive answer.” Nor have any of the six medical people I’ve seen. What a disappointment that medicine does not seem to have progressed around feet since the 90s.

I always thought that my love of dance was a reflection of my dad’s influence – and my commitment to leading exclusively as well. I am freaked that I have inherited this mystery disability as part of the genetic package. I am my father in so many ways, but at least I haven’t gone bald. Yet.

I write this at night, just as Father’s Day is ending.

Film Review: Amazing Grace: Aretha Franklin

Do you want to take a break? Do you want music that lifts you up, talent that brings tears, and comfort all around.

Go see the movie of Aretha Franklin: Amazing Grace, made in 1972 when she was already a massive star. I fell in love with her brilliant, warm mentor James Cleveland and was moved by his Southern California Community Choir. Most of all, I was transfixed by Aretha Franklin's transcendent voice, which is a crucial part of the soundtrack of my life – and that of several generations.

The film was shot during the making of "Amazing Grace, which was both Aretha’s biggest selling album and – to this day – the best-selling live gospel album ever. Sydney Pollack, who was directing for Warner Brothers, made a terrible technical error, which left the audio out of sync. Producer Alan Elliott devoted decades to saving the film, but faced a lot of resistance, including from Aretha herself. A new technical fix and Aretha’s death allowed him to bring it to us now.

It is raw and real and sweaty and full of bloopers, such as the film crew stepping in front of the camera by accident or turning up behind Aretha messing with wires. Interesting guests dot the audience – from her father (oddly invited last minute) to Mick Jagger, hanging out in the back of the room. The vast majority of the audience is members of a Los Angeles Baptist church where they filmed over two nights.

It's simply wonderful. “Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel,” said The New York Times.