Sense and Sensibility

Just Say No to Makeover, Susan Boyle

Say it ain’t so, Susan.

Susan Boyle, the Queen-size Scottish belter with frizzy hair and muskrat eyebrows, appears to be on her way to a makeover. The 47-year-old spinster, whose stunning rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on “Britain’s Got Talent,” made her a YouTube sensation, has reportedly plunked down $57 for a permanent and an eye-brow waxing.

Next, she’ll be fending off competing offers from NutriSystem and Jenny Craig.

Because that is the way it is with fame, which brooks no truck for the dowdy. In the immortal words of Jules Styne, “If a girl isn’t pretty/like a Miss Atlantic City/she should dump the stage and try another route.”

Not Susan Boyle, who is rumored to be negotiating a record contract after her debut on the gladiatorial “Gong Show.” So incongruous was her commanding voice to her decidedly dowdy appearance, that sneering spectators turned into howling supporters faster than you could say “YouTube.”

Within days, the Washington Post’s Robin Ghivan, who has so little to do now that Hillary Clinton has burned all her V-necks, was insisting that “the ugly duckling” get a makeover.

“The tale of Susan Boyle will not be complete until the shy spinster blossoms,” she wrote. “Those who have been entranced by her story so far should let Boyle’s fairy godmother finish her work.”

Ghivan’s 

counsel may seem craven, but anybody who’s seen Sarah Jessica Parker’s high school yearbook knows whereof Ghivan speaks. It’s why 55-year-old Oprah Winfrey looks better than 35-year-old Oprah. On the way up, we like our entertainers to be a little frumpy (think “Second Hand Rose” Barbra Streisand, circa 1963). But we’d like to think that all that fame and fortune actually does something for them, otherwise the whole vicarious thrill goes completely out the window.

What good is the house in Malibu if you can’t have abs like Julianne Michaels?

Dr. Robert Canfield, Professor of Anthology at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has published an academic essay about the Boyle phenomenon, “Susan Boyle And The Power Of The Moral Imagination.” Canfield says Boyle personifies our own doubts about ourselves.

“We can see in her an objectification of what we fear about ourselves,” he told one St. Louis reporter. “So when she comes forth with that voice, that music [Dash] as if we have discovered Judy Garland at the age of 47 [Dash] we are thrilled. She’s going to make it, we think…. And we unconsciously invest ourselves in her achievement.”

Boyle only feeds the fires of indignity when, in a question about the reaction to her success, she tells ABC’s Diane Sawyer, “The ones who were mean to me are now nice to me.”

Oh!

We think. The jerks! Let’s hear them croon “Melancholy Baby.”

One of the most magnificent sopranos of the last century was Australia’s Joan Sutherland, who was nobody’s idea of a beauty, but who almost single-handedly revived the bel canto tradition in opera. Granted, she didn’t have Boyle’s hirsute charms, but she didn’t need Botox either. Most of us, who don’t look like Kristen Chenoweth, and couldn’t come close to sounding like her, want to prove those nasty undermining creeps who don’t see our true worth, wrong. We want to hit that high-C, feel that tape snap across our chest, remember to thank our mothers during the Oscar-acceptance speech.

And we want to look like Eva Mendes doing it.

It is sobering to think that some of the most exceptional voices of the last century [Dash] Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Mary Martin, Barbara Cook or even Streisand [Dash] might today be stifled because of their possessor’s girdle size. Marni Nixon had a voice like an angel, but only a pleasant, ordinary face. So when it came to finding a Maria to swoon to “West Side Story’s” Tony, producers turned to Natalie Wood and let Nixon play vocal Cyrano. So, too, with Deborah Kerr in “The King and I” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady” [Dash] all Marni Nixon, the ghost singer who had no chance of matching the loveliness of these beauties.

Today, we can enhance voices and surgically manipulate bodies, but to hear the untouched richness of an instrument like Boyle’s voice is a rare and elegant pleasure. She will likely be slenderized, air-brushed, plucked and polished, but I prefer to think of her as she was [Dash] looking just like us [Dash] and sounding anything but.

Bees, Mothers and a False Security

My son has developed an irrational fear of bees.

Hyacinth bloom along the foundation of the house, bringing with them the menacing buzz of insects, many of them bees and all of them, in my son’s overactive imagination, out to get him.

He will not go outside.

This is ridiculous, I tell him. “You are the last thing on a bee’s mind,” I tell him, but he reminds me that I have no access to the mind of a bee, nor any particular aptitude for deciphering it, and so we are back to the absurdity of unreasonable fear.

This anxiety is of long incubation. Last summer, during Vacation Bible School, my son was stung by a bee for the first time in his life. Evidently the event sufficiently traumatized him to develop into a full-fledged phobia and has not incidentally probably ruined my chances for Vacation Bible School this summer to boot.

Scientists say that bad memories are particularly more tenacious than good ones for evolutionary reasons; the adrenaline involved in frightening experiences appears to seals in emotionally charged memories. Dr. Larry Cahill, a professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California-Irvine, found that emotional arousal helps us remember threatening events and circumstances – like my son’s bee sting.

So, my mother was right; we do remember bad events better than good ones, largely because benign memories don’t pose a threat and are, from the evolutionary standpoint, worthless.

My son falsely believes that I can defend him from the bees, a degree of faith I hardly merit.  But the problem is that all children believe their parents can shield them from peril, a delusion largely of our own making. “I’m here,” we whisper. “You’re safe.”  In the stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” now playing at TheaterWorks Hartford, Didion wonders about the deception inherent in maternal reassurance. “’Did I lie to you?’” she asks her fatally ill daughter, Quintana. “Did I lie to you all my life? When I said, ‘You’re safe, I’m here,’ was that a lie or did you believe it? Is a lie only a story that the hearer disbelieves? Is that the only definition of a lie? Or did you believe it?”

When I was 25 and living outside Washington, D.C., I became chronically ill with mononucleosis. I had trouble breathing. I couldn’t move without pain. I dreamed in sweaty, tempestuous whorls of color. I was unable to work.

“You’ll be fine,” my mother told me initially, convinced it was merely a virus. “You’re as healthy as a horse.” After six months with no improvement, my mother phoned me and, receiving the same bleak report, broke down in tears. “I can’t do anything for you!” she wailed. “When you were young and you fell, I could stop the bleeding and hold you in my arms and make it better, but I can’t do that now.”

That was the moment when I discovered that my mother was powerless against caprice, a shattering epiphany that baptized me into adulthood. We had both lost – she her magical curative powers and I, my ability to believe in them.

 When my son asks me to hold him as we pad through the garden, I feel empowered by the fervor of his trust, and complicit in this vital deception of childhood. Soon, sooner than I wish, I will no more be able to protect him from bees as I can from failed friendships, unrequited love or the indiscriminate ailments of mind and spirit. So much of tragedy is mercilessly bee-like, arbitrary and excruciating. The only way to steel oneself for it is by a little magical thinking, believing for a brief, evanescent while, that mommy can protect us from everything.

An excuse, any

It was a family reunion day for a killer.
If you could call it a family.
The defense wishes you wouldn’t.
They want you to believe that Todd Rizzo, who bludgeoned Stanley Edwards to death with a sledgehammer in 1997, had a lousy family. An absent mother. A useless father. Selfish siblings. A pig sty of a house.
That’s their argument as to why Rizzo, a wan, scrawny kid with a simian face and vacant demeanor, smashed in the brains of a 13-year-old boy. In the nauseating merry-go-round of this resentencing hearing, the defense scrounges through the measly life of this jellyfish of a killer and tries to scrape up an excuse.
Because that’s what this interminable ode to lost youth is all about. An excuse. Rizzo confessed to the crime almost immediately after committing it. Said he lured Stanley into the backyard on the premise of hunting snakes. Said he smashed his skull in with a 3-pound hammer. “I jumped on his back and rode him like a horse,” Rizzo told police.
So what are we doing here, dragging Rizzo’s mother, his brother, his sister, his father down through the slop of Memory Lane? In 1999, a jury sentenced Rizzo to death. But because of what have been ruled to be improper statements by State’s Attorney John B. Connelly and incomplete instructions from Judge William Holden, the sentence was overturned, and back we are again, in Courtroom 2B, leafing through Rizzo’s moldy scrapbook, still wondering: Why’d you do it, Todd?
And he has reasons. Plenty of them. And for anyone in contemporary America, they’re pretty familiar. Mom and Dad divorced. Mom had to go back to work. The house went to pot. Nothing worked. The heat went out. Kids washed their clothes in Rubbermaid tubs. Rodents slithered through the broken attic windows and made their homes there. The kids ate at friends’ houses, or found creative ways to eat Ramen noodles. Mom called in to check, but not often. She came home between jobs, and her beef was always the same: Couldn’t they pick up around here? Do a few dishes? Turn on a vacuum? Mow the lawn? Pitch in?
But they didn’t. Each of them shot off in different directions, like spores, floating through the neighborhood, looking for a good home. About 10 million kids in America live with only one parent, and 40 percent of those households headed by a woman are impoverished.
Maybe Todd was different than the others. Sickly, a bed wetter, sensitive, needy. At night, his mother testified, she would return home to find her middle son sleeping in the eerie blue glow of the television, a slasher movie playing endlessly, the blood-curdling lullaby to which Todd Rizzo went to sleep.
Anybody who knew Rizzo knew that he was infatuated by slasher movies. Horror. Gore. Serial killers. But when a 17-year-old jokes about becoming a serial killer, are you supposed to take it seriously?
In the hazy search for identity that strikes all of us in our teenage years, Todd Rizzo came up empty. He was puny, delicate, and mediocre, an amorphous entity searching for belonging, looking for definition. He found it in the tantalizing, edgy world of serial killers, few of whom, he must have known, got the death penalty.
If Connecticut didn’t have a death penalty, Todd Rizzo would have been left to molder in prison for the rest of his aimless, underwhelming life. But because the state has a death penalty, we are left to weigh whether the miseries of Rizzo’s shoddy childhood are rotten enough to offset the barbarity of his crime. If they do, back he goes, to rot in a cell. If they don’t or if the barbarity of his crime outweighs the mitigating woes his lawyers are soporifically laying out he gets the needle.
And that, really, may be what he wants. Todd Rizzo got what he aimed for on that night in 1997. He got a title: Killer. He got an identity: Murderer. He got headlines. And footage. And a place in the hearts and minds of those who knew him and loved him and still scratch their heads over how he could have done such a thing. Todd Rizzo heard the call of evil and responded. Now all he needs is the needle to complete the task.
It’s the one thing he may do well.
Tosh@rep-am.com.
c. Republican-American, May 27, 2005

Easter Lilies and the New Frugality

At Easter, the lilies appear.

They cluster under the gray, bud-less trees, wrapped in silly, fluorescent foil, their blossoms anomalous and expectant, a bit of an absurdity in New England’s brisk, mucky spring. Like their fat, squat cousins, the pansy, now assembling in the region’s otherwise bare garden centers, their appearance strikes me as ridiculous and hopeful. We need a little color these days, after this long winter of discontent.

Easter is all about hope and new beginnings, as is Passover, the Jewish celebration with which today is so intimately entwined. In Time magazine, I read that Americans need to hit the “reset” button, after a gluttonous spree in which our waistlines expanded while our savings shrank. In Forbes, I read about “America’s New Frugality,” a slogan inspired by the seismic 1 percent drop in consumer spending last December. Personal spending, the magazine reported, rose a “mere” 3.6 percent last year, the smallest gain since 1961.

For most of the last century, hope has meant more. Now it is supposed to mean less.

But whether a 21^st century American, raised in a home twice as big as that of his parents, shepherded around in cars as big as motorboats, suckled on 157 television stations and two dozen electronic gadgets, can rein it in is anybody’s guess.

After all, we’re talking about a country whose average home has three televisions, two DVD players or recorders, 1.16 digital cameras, one desktop computer and two cell phones. This country now spends an extra $200 it never spent before on these electronic gee-gaws, which may explain how per capita consumption in the last 20 years ballooned 45 percent.

Every year, the average American throws out 68 pounds of textiles. One fashion designer estimates that the typical American woman owns more than $600 worth of clothing she has not worn in the last year. We are similarly imprudent with food. One government funded study found that 14 percent of the garbage we throw out is perfectly good food, in its original packaging, not out of date – perfect, in other words, for a food pantry near you.

Fatally, among those we classify as poor, money is squandered impetuously and foolishly. Some 97 percent of Americans the Census Bureau classifies as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of the poor have air-conditioning, a VCR and a DVD player. Conversely, 61 percent poor families have no books in their homes.

No books.

This year, 18 million people worldwide will die because they don’t have enough food. If you want to feel a little sheepish about your own economic anxieties, read “The Life You Can Save,” by Peter Singer, who argues that doing more to stave off these deaths is well within our capability. One can certainly hope; the World Bank estimates that, because of the economic crisis, an additional 22 children an hour will die of poverty.

Hope, for those people, means something different than being able to maintain a gym membership.

After the “Miracle on the Hudson” on January 15, 157 fortunate souls who might have lost their life in the icy river, got a second chance. Many of them swore they would make their lives matter. They’d cut back on work. They’d quit smoking. They’d be more patient, more generous, and less selfish. A month later, The New York Times contacted several of the survivors and discovered that those commitments had waned. “It kind of lasts a real brief amount of time,” one survivor said of his vows. “Then the realities of life set in. I think it’s really easy to fall back into those old habits.”

I know what he’s saying. For my Lenten sacrifice, I decided not to speak negatively about anybody for 40 days. That lasted until about noon on Ash Wednesday. I would like to believe I will be more tenacious about my commitment to live frugally, and hew to that charming New England adage, “Use it up; Wear it out; Make it do; or do without,” but I fear that, like most Americans, that’s a resolution that will last, if I’m lucky, only until Pentecost.

Reply: Tracey@traceyosh.com