Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

BOOK REVIEW: Never Be Afraid: A Belgian Jew in the French Resistance

Never Be Afraid: A Belgian Jew in the French Resistance recounts Bernard Mednicki’s intricate memories of his courageous life history. Ken Wachsberger - author/editor/book coach extraordinaire - brings us this man’s unique narrative. “It’s his story, but I wrote it,” Wachsberger explains, clearly a feat of close listening and empathetic understanding.

From Mednicki's childhood, when his father moves the family to Belgium to escape the Russian pogroms through his marriage, his decision to pass as Christian after Hitler’s invasion of Belgium, his work with the French Resistance, and his arrival in 1947 to America (with its dramatic twist), Mednicki shares his emotion, describes the painful roadblocks, and discloses every clever survival scheme.

In Volvic, France, the description of the rats in the stable where Mednicki had to house his family caused me a sleepless night. The efforts he made to protect his sick son tore at my heart. But the tale of turning a porcupine into a rabbit and that into a rooster was a riot.

Fundamentally, this is a story of resistance which serves as a negation of the myth that Jews went to their death like lambs to the slaughter. Mednicki joined the French Resistance, spending his first night as a fighter with a group of men and women, hidden from the Nazis on top of a mountain. He managed to balance his two constant struggles: to keep his family and himself fed and to fight against the Nazis.

This is the Third Edition of this volume, a book that wants to continue to live, much like its hero Bernard Mednicki. Wachsberger is the respected writer/editor who brought it into life and who continues to nurture it, knowing that within these pages is an unusually textured picture of one Jew’s experience of facing down the fascism that defined the 20th Century. In a time when Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are sky-rocketing, this is a reminder of why we need to start now to fight the good fight.

REVIEW: “Seven Guitars” by August Wilson in Boston

Boston area people: If you want a superb theatre experience, see if you can score tickets to “Seven Guitars” by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project, appearing at Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall.

All the best elements are here: spot-on direction by Maurice Emmanuel Parent, seven remarkable actors, perhaps the finest 20th Century playwright August Wilson, and an intimate community theatre in which every seat is a good seat.

One of Wilson’s ten “Century Cycle” plays set in subsequent decades, “Seven Guitars” starts with the funeral of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton and then looks back at what led to this budding musician’s death. All the action takes place in the backyard of a house in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where both August Wilson and I (two years later) were born.

This production perfectly catches every nuance and complication in Wilson’s incomparable writing. Hurry to experience this reasonably affordable, accessible night out (there’s an elevator and plenty of free nearby parking); this show ends March 5th.

Book Review: “American Sirens” by Kevin Hazzard

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics (2022) by Kevin Hazzard is the inspirational story of the invention of street medicine, of medically-equipped ambulances, and of the profession of EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians). What made this history especially resonant for me is that this medicine-changing first initiative took place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, home of playwright August Wilson, the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, the Negro League’s Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team, and me in my early years.

The idea of creating an ambulance service in an area of town where the police and fire departments’ makeshift “ambulances” wouldn’t go to because of racism, was the brain-child of an acclaimed white Austrian immigrant, a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Peter Safar, an anesthesiologist. He was opposed by the other first responders, who had at most six hours of first-aid training and basically just gave a rough ride but no life-saving care to those in need, and by the local Pittsburgh government, particularly the white mayor Peter Flaherty, a nasty, racist piece of work.

Dr. Safar connected with the local activist non-profit Freedom House and they scraped together a way forward, recruited often uneducated, unemployed, sometimes unmotivated, but ultimately brilliant Black men from the community, and put them through the most rigorous medical and social training imaginable. Twenty-four men graduated. From their first calls during the uprising after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Freedom House service was a huge success from every point of view – except financially.

Their initial funding came from President Johnson’s job creation funds, but once Nixon came into office, that all dried up. A young white doctor, Nancy Caroline, took over the training of the medics and the running of the service with a fierce determination that kept them afloat until their betrayal by Pittsburgh’s politicians and police. She ended up writing the EMT textbook that would be used for many generations of students.

The author, a former paramedic himself, has researched this slice of progress and its roadblocks with remarkable detail, following certain of the players from start to end. It reads more like an action script, with valiant medics performing beyond their own expectations and the imaginations of all who were offended that Black people were spearheading an amazing new service.

For those with a connection to Pittsburgh, most especially the Hill District, you may feel, as I did, a special thrill to read of the familiar streets and institutions, to learn of yet another amazing moment in Pittsburgh’s hidden – or repressed - history. This non-fiction book has it all: challenges overcome, fascinating characters, heroes and villains, and adrenaline-fueled action from start to finish.

Postscript: In researching photographs, I discovered this 2023 Pittsburgh PBS program on the Freedom House ambulance service.

Photographer Hakim Raquib: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

If you are anywhere near Boston before January 30, bust your ass getting to the Midway Gallery (15 Channel Center Street, Boston MA 02210, everyday 8AM-8PM) to see the exhibition of Hakim Raquib. Titled YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW, it includes selected works of this sensational photographer, spanning 50 years. Luckily it’s run has been extended until January 30, so you have time to rush there. You can thank me later.

Hakim Raquib’s sublime Egyptian landscapes blew me away. I once spent two weeks on a camel tour of the Sinai desert and viewing his desert work was like returning there in emotional technicolor. His compelling manipulated images flashing back to the Civil Rights Freedom Riders, to the Black Panthers, to Spike Lee, moved me, reviving my own memories of that period. Click here to view his project on Winter.

As Michael Thierry, a senior art Director, said on Raquib’s Linked-In page, “Hakim is an amazing photographer of a scale beyond imagining. His work transcends and transforms the viewer.” I fully agree.

 

P.S. I took these photos myself, so they don't do the work justice!

The Kennedy Assassination Changed Us and Changed TV

I must have been 16 on Friday, November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. At school we were brought into the auditorium for the announcement and students and teachers alike sobbed. I cannot imagine a political figure today who could engender such a national tender reaction to their violent death (except perhaps Obama?).

Parents left work; we were sent home from school; and everyone was glued to their tvs. The Kennedys were so young and exciting compared to their predecessors Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. They brought color and hope and style into the White House for the first time in living memory. There are parallels with the Obamas. Barack brought Blackness to the Presidency; Jack brought Catholicism, which at the time was a major breakthrough. As I made my way home from school, I saw children and adults alike crying. It was intense.

At home my parents set up the card table in the living room where we had quick meals - like hot dogs - that didn't require much time away from the television. A dazed and blood-splattered Jackie stood beside Lyndon Johnson, at his insistence, when he was sworn in as President a few hours later aboard Air Force One.

On Sunday, as Lee Harvey Oswald was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail, I saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on tv. For all those who watched January 6th unfold live, you probably have a sense of the shock it provoked. But Ruby’s attack may have been the first act of fatal violence ever broadcast on television. It changed the way news was delivered. As a Pew Research report noted:

The nation collectively tuned in to non-stop coverage that pioneered a new form of wall-to-wall television news delivery. Veteran CBS newsman Bob Schieffer told Reuters, “The Kennedy assassination became the template for coverage,” while Newseum official Patty Rhule called it the moment when “America became a TV nation.”

It would be the start of a series of high-profile assassinations that would rock my world in the 1960s: Chaney, Goodman, & Schwerner (Freedom Summer) in 1964; Malcolm X in 1965; Che Guevara in 1967; Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy in 1968; Fred Hampton in 1969.

Here you can see what we saw when Ruby shot Oswald.

 

Duh, MIT. You just discovered that it’s a man’s world

As I was getting out of my morning shower, NPR radio announced that MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology – one of the most prestigious universities in the country) had discovered, after exhausting research, that: “overall, the [surgical] masks fit women’s faces much less closely than they fit men’s faces.”

Instead of just asking any woman whosoever, they have developed a “sensor, which measures physical contact between the mask and the wearer’s face,” and have concluded “that the masks that we use in daily life are not very suitable for female participants.” This is headline news? I remember the happy moment that my best friend found a KN94 mask that came in small, medium, and large. I now have a stock of many dozens of mediums and they keep me safe. Up until then, fully aware that other masks did not properly fit, I double masked.

Very little that we use in daily life is suitable to women. It took me two years to find a swivel chair small enough that my feet touched the ground when my own back was touching the back of the chair. There are few upper cabinets in my apartment that I can reach without climbing a step stool, not really the smartest move for elders. I once stayed at an Airbnb in which the entire bathroom mirror was higher than my head. Those kitchen islands with the high bar stools? I can’t reach the foot bar where others rest their feet – mine remain dangling. American packaging is impossible to open without major muscle. Perhaps most annoying of all is that women’s clothing rarely has meaningful pockets.

One of the scariest results of design built around the male body is the disaster known as air bags, which seem to injure as many women as they save.

You can probably add a thousand additional examples, and feel free to do so in the comments. And yes, I know that some women are taller than most men and some men are shorter than most women. Yeah, yeah. But let’s get real.

Without hiring women designers, men will not get it right. It’s like that facial recognition software that doesn’t work on Black people. How many people of color do you think were hired for that development team? As long as all of us are not included on the ground floor, we’re going to have situations like this. How many women died of Covid because they couldn’t locate a properly fitting mask in the first years of the pandemic? I would call this violence against women by design.

The Woman King: film review

Take a slice of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, together with a large dollop of Black Panther, add to that the stunning physicality of 57-year-old Viola Davis and her young, emotional co-star Thuso Mbedu, and you get a sense of the power, speed, and martial beauty of The Woman King.

With women in the roles of writer, director, producer, and many more behind-the-camera positions, it is an action film like no other, based on a vision that is absent any male or white gaze. There is violence, but not the kind that makes you look away cringing – other than some flashbacks to abuse. There is love, but it is forged in sisterhood and solidarity. And there are massive fight scenes with a cast of multitudes, brilliantly choreographed and impressively executed.

Underlying it all is the story of a struggle against slavers in Africa and their collaborators. I know there is a debate about the veracity of the historical interpretation, but I’m not in any position to judge. What I do know is that this is a glorious, cinematic spectacle.

Nanisca (Viola Davis) leads the King’s guard of muscular, fierce women warriors. He chooses her as his Chief Advisor over his vain, beautiful, over-adorned wife. Other men aren’t even in the running. Through a mixture of discipline, training, and loyalty, her corps seems to become unstoppable, despite the harrowing challenges they face.

The 99% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes hints at how exciting, meaningful, and luscious this film is. I was left breathless and electrified at the end.

The trailer

The Queen’s Funeral and the Lesbian Avengers

I woke up shortly after 5:00am and stumbled to my computer, turning on the TV for the news, as is my wont. And kazam, it’s the Queen’s funeral. I’m afraid I got completely captured and continued to keep it in the background for six hours as I did my morning ablutions and various tasks. I ended up writing a blog about fascinators, of which there were a plethora among the dignitaries in the churches, and other memories from my decade in England.

However, I cannot for one second allow anyone to mistake me for a Monarchist. To the contrary. The splendor of this imposing day sparkled with jewels and gold ravished from colonized countries. Clearly no cost was spared in marking the moment, despite the disintegration of Britain’s economy and especially of its health system. It was truly a Royal affair, that is, a let-them-eat-cake moment, full of quite excessive pomp to shore up a family who INHERIT their roles and their lands and their bank accounts. Some say princes; some say parasites.

This long day was soaked in two British colonial bulwarks: Christianity and military. These have been among the main tools in imperial British rampages and they were on proud display today. And who does military drag better than them? Feathers and gold braiding and dazzling regimental colors and drums and more drums. The choreography was mind-boggling – not a mis-step among the participants despite it being such an excruciatingly complex set of endeavors.

The guys whose specialized task was to carry the coffin around, put it in/out of the hearse, in/out of churches, up/down steps, no less, had their steps impressively coordinated, like a refined martial arts kata or a well-rehearsed line dance. And then the coffin was towed by ropes by 142 members of the Royal Navy in fancy outfits through the streets of central London as it sat on a gun carriage.

And yes, I appear to hold a minority view. So many hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets and the miles-long driveways to the castles, for a glimpse of a coffin on which sits a crown that embodies everything stinky about colonizers. And many people spent the night on the street to hold their places, and no one minded at all.

Things that stood out to me:
1) While the crowd had all the feels, none of the participants – from the King down to the drummers – showed even a drizzle of emotion – no tears, no sobs, no celebration, no amusing anecdotes. For myself, if I might paraphrase the anarchist Emma Goldman, If you can’t dance at the funeral, it must not be mine.
2) I did not see a single person in a wheelchair, not among the thousands with a role in the day or the throngs along the way.
3) The new Prime Minister fit right in with her dry monotone.
4) If it had rained, nothing would have been different.
5) I thought curtseying was no longer in vogue, that neck bowing like the boys was the done thing. Apparently everyone is watching too much historical costume drama.

My favorite part was when they circled the Queen Victoria monument at the end of London’s Mall (not the retail kind). It reminded me of the time we had the first London Lesbian Avengers demo there in September, 1994. You’ll find me right under the E in Lesbian.

The Fascinators and the Rip-Off

As I watch the Queen’s funeral in the background and the women in their particular head-gear, I am reminded of my neighbor in the Holloway neighborhood of London. I was quite new in town and needed to escape a nasty living situation. I was offered a sublet in a converted church on Chillingworth Street. The former church had been painted black in contrast to its white columns, and two stories of flats were built on its top. The main church area was divided into artist studios. My apartment was two rooms on two stories – one up and one down. I lived there alone, except for large chunks of one year when I shared it with my chosen niece Oona who came over as she turned 21 from Vermont.

Down the hall was a brilliant Black gay milliner who designed fascinators and hats, one-of-a-kind confections that were worn by women at formal events, most famously the Royal Ascot, a British racecourse which has high-falutin’ events. My neighbor was a freelancer, struggling for customers, and all the time turning out magnificent hats to order. For a visual of this genre, I have featured some examples of such items that Meghan Markel has worn since her marriage, as she frames them so well.

Before I found this apartment, I had lived on my arrival to London for several months in a moldy, smelly bedsit – that is, a poor person’s version of a studio apartment, a bed, a dresser, and a hot plate. The bathroom was down the hall. It was in the Hackney home of a “friend” and her dreadful partner, a coarse man who persisted in opening the bathroom door whenever I was sitting on the toilet. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly. They refused to put a lock on the door, her the pathetic enabler and him the sleaze-ball.

So when someone introduced me to the Canadian woman who wanted to sublet her flat in the Holloway converted church while she returned to Canada, I was hugely relieved. I lived there for a couple of years until my milliner neighbor, who had become my friend, warned me that an inspection was coming. Inspection? Yes, all this time I had been staying in a Housing Association apartment, low-income housing that my “landlady” had managed to qualify for despite her actually being a professional of some wealth. Of course I have seen parasites who have the resources to get themselves benefits intended for people without resources. Governmental institutions often make the process of obtaining these benefits so laborious and convoluted that it is the folks who hire lawyers and experts who score them. Ask any American who has applied for disability benefits.

And to top it all off, my “landlady” was charging me market rent, about twice what she herself was paying to the Housing Association, not only ripping them off, but ripping me off in the process. And now, back to the ornate, dour, and regimented spectacle of the Queen’s funeral, as the procession heads from London to Windsor Castle, where I was once, by the way, a keynote speaker at a European Union conference on volunteerism.

90 word book review: “Olga Dies Dreaming” by Xochitl Gonzalez

Loved it. Olga’s absent revolutionary mother looms over her life and that of her brother Prieto. Born and raised in New York, they have disappointed their mother, an underground Puerto Rican independence activist, by becoming successful. Olga is a wedding planner and Prieto is a politician who is blackmailed by greedy criminals. There’s a gay theme, a struggle against gentrification, deep family secrets, a dollop of organized crime, and plenty of romance. Gonzalez’s debut novel is a page turner that has strong content packaged in a swift and engaging read.

Nasty-Assed Ads

“Law & Order” is often my white noise when I’m doing the dishes or eating a meal. Apparently the re-runs assume an audience of my age peers, because the ads are usually for memory boosters or arthritis dampers.

Today a commercial break begins with a grimacing man naked under his robe, his foot up on the bathroom sink, and his arm reaching back into his crotch. Suddenly, a woman’s voice and person pops up saying, “Guys, we need to talk about your hairy balls.” This very phenomenon ("trimming balls") is news to me, although I admit my balls expertise is limited. The word, repeated multiple times, is jarring to hear on TV. But who is demanding bald balls?

Got one minute to learn about ball shaving?

As if that weren’t sufficiently surreal, another crotch-focused ad followed immediately. This one for pussy deodorant. Companies have been trying for decades to turn women’s crotches into swampy, smelly cesspools, and according to a completely random survey of my besties, they have never succeeded. But if they can afford an ad on “Law & Order,” they must be moving a lot of this misogynist product.

Wanna see their nasty-assed ad?

The anti-sex, body-shaming message of both these ads is that however you exist naturally, it simply ain’t good enough. More than that, your body is disgusting. Trim this, stifle that – otherwise your life will suck.

In fact, I find these ads so offensive that I’m hoping to once again hear about cancer meds, the meaning of “a1c” levels, and life insurance for $9.99 a month.

PS: A friend thought these must be Saturday Night Live skits. But no, I did really really see these ads during an afternoon “Law & Order.”