Celebrations Various

The Demon Chernabog terrorizes Bald Mountain:
A feature of the “Storybook Land” boat ride —
May it get no scarier than this.

It has been a busy week in Paris, culminating in a quiet, rainy Easter weekend. My Texas godsons and their mother visited me for several days, offering me abundant reminders that I’m glad I’m a godfather. (As well as a few reminders that I’m glad I’m not a father.) I feel it’s part of my duty, perhaps even part of the job description, to expose the boys to ideas and experiences they may carry forward in their lives: Paris is meaningful to me, and perhaps some day it will be meaningful to them, too.

For the moment, however, Disneyland seems to have held more allure. We divided ourselves into teams, according to age and taste: the boys sought out the grownup rides, and their mother and I stuck to the kiddie rides. Let it be said that the occasional dips and rises and momentary tilt of the “Casey Jones, Jr.,” train are about all that Karen and I are prepared to handle, at this point in our lives. Meanwhile, the boys grumbled that “Space Mountain” didn’t live up to their expectations — then they dashed off to ride it again.

The trip afforded us all kinds of opportunities to bond. Will is 15 now, and one evening we went out to drink beers and talk about women, while I tried very hard to forget how recently he was a wrinkly pink earthworm asleep in my arms. We are men of the world now, he and I.

Seasoned travellers

Tom is 12, and our bonding was more physical. I was surprised when he told me he wanted to take the “It’s a Small World” ride: he is, after all, a little old for that. But hardly had we taken our seats in the boat before I understood his real purpose: a scientific experiment, to see whether drinking the water in the “Small World” canal really would induce hallucinations like those experienced by Lisa on The Simpsons. Since the force of my argument would not dissuade him from his mission, I resorted to the force of my arms, and held him in a death-lock for the duration of the ride. Some day he will thank me for saving his life.

The rest of the week was devoted predictably to monuments and museums, and less predictably to shivering under awnings and waiting for the freezing rain to stop. We didn’t get around to about three quarters of the things that I normally consider to be absolutely essential. I always tell friends that the most important thing about any trip to Paris is that it will not be the last. In Will and Tom’s case, that’s neither reassurance nor advice; it’s a command.

I’ve now introduced Paris to all of my official godchildren and one unofficial goddaughter, Grace from Los Angeles. I feel I have done my duty by them. I’d like to think that these introductions will have an effect comparable to that of the introduction to opera that my godparents, Ann and Blair Coleman, gave me, many years ago. But at least I know that, no matter what happens, we’ll always have Paris. And that is cause for celebration.

As is the 78th anniversary of the birth of my father, this fine Easter Sunday. I suppose I would celebrate Easter, too, if I were in a country that knew the meaning of marshmallow peeps.

Ceci n’est pas une peep.

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Où sont les toilettes?

Elaine Sciolino, Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, today offered her readers a few hard-won lessons she’s learned during her years here. One point of etiquette she has shared with us before. Namely, she says that when one is dining in a private home, one must never ask to use the toilet. In her experience, the word is considered vulgar by Parisian hostesses and must be avoided. How to do this? Today, Sciolino recommends that one not use the toilet, neither the plumbing nor the word, at all; previously, she has recommended that one ask instead to wash one’s hands.

Though I appreciate the need for discretion in any encounter of any sort in France, Sciolino’s advice has me baffled. In most of the French homes I’ve visited, the toilet and the wash basin, or lavabo, are not in the same room. Often they are at opposite ends of the house. (The lavabo is most often in the bathroom — which is situated near the bedrooms and contains the bathtub, but not the toilet.) Ask for directions to one, when you really need the other, and you’ll wind up in trouble.

What kind of chic dinner parties has Sciolino been attending, anyway?

According to today’s article, Sciolino is wrapping up her tour of duty here in Paris. Maybe she’s just tired of holding it in.

I’ve never quite understood, par ailleurs, why the French do keep the wash basin so far from the toilet. They are fond of telling me that they invented hygiene, or anyway Pasteur discovered germs; and also that they invented soap, or anyway the only soap worth using. One would think the French, of all people, would be the first to make it easier to wash one’s hands.

Or maybe, after all this time, I have finally discovered what a bidet is really used for.

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The Golden Star of Denise Acabo

Arranging the Bernachon chocolate bars:
A long way from Hershey

UPDATE: As of spring 2014, Mme Acabo has closed her shop. Signs posted on the storefront thank her customers for their unshakable support.

I remade the acquaintance last week of Denise Acabo, the proprietress of what must be one of the most distinctive candy shops in France, not least for its location — which is just off the Place Pigalle. Improbably nestled among sex shops and kebab restaurants, l’Étoile d’Or (The Golden Star) looks like any respectable neighborhood candy shop in this country. Once you walk inside, however, you quickly discover that there’s nothing ordinary about the place, and that Mme Acabo is no ordinary bonbon-monger.

Seldom anywhere and never in France have I met anyone who takes more pleasure in her work: she is nothing short of inspirational. I arrived the other day with a friend who was visiting from New York, and we found Mme Acabo in an expansive mood, eager to share with us the stories behind each and every candy.

Because she specializes in high-quality products direct from the regional makers, and a number of certifiable classic candies with venerable (and sometimes titillating) histories, she has abundant subject matter — and she loves to talk (and to sing) about these things. You’d be amazed, as we were, to learn how many candies were used as aphrodisiacs, or to ward off venereal disease, or to feed the starving during plague years. Some of the candies are made using recipes that are hundreds of years old (or thousands, as in the case of the Graines d’Anis, candy-coated pellets originated by the Greeks), and many (Bergamottes from Nancy, Calissons from Aix) are symbols more important than any flag of the discrimination and flavor of the towns they come from.

It must be said that I’d heard of many — most — of the delicacies on display, although I’d sampled only inferior specimens in other places, never the really high-end wares that Mme Acabo sells. I didn’t dare tell her so.

“I love good food,” Mme Acabo declared at one point, “but if it’s not the highest quality, I’d rather eat nothing at all.” She told us that she seeks out the best and most authentic variety of each candy, and in many cases you can buy a particular bonbon either from the maker or from her, and from nobody else on earth — or at least from nobody else in Paris, which as we know amounts to much the same thing.

She’s especially keen on freshness, and when possible she sells candies made with organic materials. “You wouldn’t believe the artificial colors people try to sell,” she said. Well, yes, actually, I would; I’m from America.

Proving that it’s possible to own a candy shop and still have good teeth

She’s been in the business for some 30 years, she told us, but she has the enthusiasm and fashion sense of a schoolgirl: she wears jumpers and plaid skirts, and keeps her hair in pigtails.

One would speak of a kid in a candy store, except that she’s a shrewd businesswoman — and moreover, on my first visit to the shop, a year ago or so, Mme Acabo was assisted by her granddaughter, a little girl of seven or eight, who was as sober and reserved as any grownup. The lesson: Candy is serious.

But candy is also magical, and I’m reminded of Mrs. Corrie, a character in the Mary Poppins books. In her sweet shop, she sells gingerbread (as does Mme Acabo), and on each piece of gingerbread is a gold star. Children aren’t allowed to keep the stars; they must return them to Mrs. Corrie. And then one night, Jane and Michael Banks look out their window to see Mrs. Corrie atop an immense ladder, held in place by her two very tall daughters. With a pot of paste in one hand, she’s sticking those stars against the sky.

I’m betting Mme Acabo could do the same thing, if she chose to.

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The Emperor Has No Taste

All Hat, No Cattle: Bush serenades the Gridiron Club

I may never say this again, but in my more lucid moments, I’m glad I’m not Jon Stewart. How can one be expected to make satirical jokes at the expense of politicians, when the principal object of one’s mockery already does the job so thoroughly? What’s left to say? Moreover, Stewart’s jokes are constrained by good taste and decency, while George Bush’s material, apparently, is not.

Hard on the heels of President Bush’s dance recital came his vocal recital, at the Gridiron Club last weekend. He parodied the old Porter Wagoner song, “Green Green Grass of Home,” joking about how good it would be to retire to his (horseless, cowless) ranch back in Crawford, TX.

Something struck me as wrong here. I remembered the song being about a soldier coming home from the war in Vietnam. Which, given Mr. Bush’s service record during that particular conflict, would be in pretty poor taste.

But I was wrong. It’s not about a soldier. It’s about a prisoner awaiting execution, and dreaming of the home and loved ones he’ll never see again. And that’s what the President — an enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, who as Governor of Texas oversaw more than 150 executions, breaking the records of recent history — chose to make fun of.

Yep, it turns out that his taste is even worse than I thought.

“Oh, give him a break,” you may say; “maybe he didn’t know the song’s origins.”

If you believe that the President’s staff includes no one capable of doing what I did — namely, looking up the title on Wikipedia — well, good luck to you.

His handlers should have been vetting his material with particular scrutiny on the subject of the death penalty, ever since, as Governor, he made headlines by mocking one of the condemned, Karla Faye Tucker. (“Please don’t kill me!”)

On Thursday, the President seized another opportunity to say something inappropriate about soldiers and war. Addressing Americans in Afghanistan via videoconference, Mr. Bush said:

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.

Of course, when Mr. Bush really was younger and not employed at the White House, he passed up the “fantastic experience” of fighting in Vietnam. Maybe it wasn’t romantic enough for him, or he didn’t consider it sufficiently historic. I’m sure he had a good reason. So he asked his dad to pull a few strings to get him into the National Guard, and then couldn’t even be bothered to show up for duty.

Now he’s getting wistful over missing out on all the fun in Afghanistan.

I suppose I should take some comfort in this rare bit of evidence that he hasn’t forgotten Afghanistan altogether. But Mr. Bush isn’t the only one who can’t wait for him to get back to the brown, brown grass of home.

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Ana María Martínez

There’s a widespread perception in Opera World that sopranos are: crazy, temperamental, self-centered, irresponsible, shrill, imperious, unprofessional, and not very bright. In short, prima donnas. The term “prima donna” means nothing more than “leading lady,” but some sopranos’ behavior has given it a bad rep.

In a survey I conducted for Opera News, the mezzo Susan Graham observed that these women ought to be called “sola donnas,” because they act as if they’re the only women on earth. In my very first interview, however, the soprano Beverly Sills told me that the temperamental soprano is a cliché at most, “Because they’d never be able to put on an opera at all, if some of those stories were true.”

Nevertheless, most clichés find their origins in truth, and while the sopranos I’ve known have been thoroughly nice women (who hate to be called “prima donnas”), I’m always relieved to find another who’s sensible. Such a one is Ana María Martínez.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York, Ana María has been in Paris the past few weeks; she’s wrapping up a run as Verdi’s Luisa Miller. It’s an extraordinarily good part for her, lying beautifully in her voice, with its richly rounded, warm, almost chocolaty sound, its lyric agility and sometimes surprising power. Luisa is a good acting part for her, too, drawing on her ability to project tenderness and vulnerability. I’d love to see her in a staging that was less static and gave her more freedom to explore the character, because Ana María never ceases to come up with insightful analyses that translate to unusually vivid performances.

Her father is a psychoanalyst, and it’s tempting — and reductive — to say that Ana María puts her characters on the couch. I’m sure her family background does give her a framework, as well as a willingness to dig more deeply into a character’s mind. But psychology is only a start, only one tool — and not the most important — in her work. She’s just plain smart — just plain sensitive.

And no matter how well I think I know a role, a conversation with Ana María invariably gives me some new angle to consider. Once, we were talking about the heroine of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette — who differs very little from her Shakespearean precursor, except that she sings more and doesn’t speak English. I offered up the observation that Juliette starts out as an immature girl, but grows into womanhood by the end of the story.

Ana María very politely set me straight. Taking her life doesn’t prove Juliette’s maturity, she said. If anything, it’s the opposite: she doesn’t understand the consequences of her actions.

Wow. In similar fashion, she’s enlightened me on Mimì in La Bohème, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Maria in West Side Story, and Luisa Miller herself. It’s gotten to the point that I’m spoiled: it’s not enough to hear her sing, I want to hear her explain, too.

Role of a lifetime: Loving mom

Dangerous is the singer who overthinks, and Ana María doesn’t. I’m not quite sure how she avoids it, except that these detailed analyses may be mere preparation — the way a Method actress can describe details of her character’s bedroom, or family relationships with characters who don’t appear in the play, things that may have little direct bearing on what does happen. But they’re resources, things she can call upon if she needs them.

It’s my impression that Ana María couldn’t sing a note onstage if she didn’t know why the character was singing. But once she does know why — she lets the music happen. Naturally.

All of that may help to explain why I admire her as an artist, but I haven’t said a word yet about how much fun she is. I had talked to her in preparing magazine articles, but we hadn’t sat down for a good heart-to-heart until two years ago, when she sang Amelia in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. We met for lunch on the Place des Vosges, in a little restaurant where one of the waiters had made a pet of her. He kept serving us tidbits and refilling our glasses, and we kept talking. The next thing we knew, nearly eight hours had passed — and we were old friends. (Although I have this weird feeling that people who know her better than I call her ”Ana,” without the María.)

She’s got a great sense of humor, and she’s a talented mimic. She does an Uptown Chica Borriqua so flawlessly, it’s almost like a Lily Tomlin character, not a generic imitation, and if there’s any justice on earth, somebody is going to write an opera that will let her bring that character to the stage.

Chad and Ana María,
with their most dramatic collaboration yet

Yesterday, we got together for lunch with her husband, the tenor Chad Shelton (whom I’d heard but never met), and their baby, Lucas — a sunny, friendly kid who, like Ana María, celebrates a birthday today. (It’s his first.) Motherhood suits her, and she says it’s the realization of a dream she’s cherished since she was a very little girl. We talked a lot about Lucas’ future, the determination of both Ana María and Chad to be “hands on” parents and not to let their careers get in the way. Lucas is going to have some terrific advantages, especially culturally: seeing the world, learning languages, hearing great music.

At one point, Ana María and Chad both sang for him, and I thought, “This kid is getting lullabies for free that audiences would and do pay to hear!”

I asked whether Ana María and Chad would be happy to see Lucas become a singer, too. Chad clearly hopes he’ll make another choice, though he says he’ll be supportive if it’s what Lucas really, really wants to do. Ana María said simply, “I just want him to be happy.”

This lunch lasted only a couple of hours, and there was no wine. We have agreed that we’ll have to wait until Lucas is in college before we have another of those get-togethers. But in the meantime, mi amiga querida remains a generous, caring soul — and a helluva good soprano.

NOTE: Among her several recordings and video performances, Ana María Martínez can be heard to especially good effect on a wonderful (and low-priced) CD available here. It’s an excellent introduction to her voice — and her versatility. Her Parisian Luisa Miller is coming to DVD soon. You can hear her with Chad Shelton in Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas, available here. It was while working on this opera that the two met.

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Lo, How the Mighty, etc.

Upon learning yesterday of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s implication in a prostitution scandal, my first thoughts went to my goddaughter. She’s attended school with the Governor’s daughter and, like many of her classmates, accorded Mr. Spitzer the kind of admiration usually directed by girls their age at rock musicians and stars of prime-time dramas on the WB.

It’s a tough thing for anybody when a politician disappoints us, but tougher still, I suspect, for a younger person. It’s like having your heart broken by your first crush, but it’s also a rude introduction to the sordid behavior of grownups. The fact that Spitzer’s conduct taps into so many issues of sex — a dad hires hookers — at the moment when my goddaughter is figuring out what it means to be a woman, only compounds the problem. I wonder how she’s going to cope. She’s a very private person (one reason I’m not using her name here), so I’m not sure she’ll tell me.

It’s possible that her generation may be unable to experience much idealism about a politician. My goddaughter was in kindergarten when the so-called Lewinsky scandal blew up, so presumably the idea that politicians (even crusading reformers like Spitzer) have feet of clay isn’t new to her. She may even see her former hero cling to office, like Larry Craig, the Senator from Idaho who, caught in a sex scandal last year, promised to resign — but didn’t keep that promise. (Cue Groucho’s “Hello, I Must Be Going.”) Politics is a strange business, and Spitzer’s career may survive. In a way, though, that’s the problem, especially for young people.

When I was a little younger than she, Watergate was in full cry. I hadn’t admired Richard Nixon particularly. I wrote him a letter telling him that the Vietnam War was stupid, and asking him to pay more attention to ecology. (I got a very nice response from Rosemary Woods, who wasn’t yet famous.) But I’d grown up in the Cold War environment, in which the Presidency was held up in textbooks to be revered by schoolkids, and I was sorely disillusioned by Watergate. Up until that time, I’d pretty much intended to go into politics when I grew up, but during the scandal, it was the reporters, not the politicians, who were the good guys, and I threw in my lot with them. Fourteen years later, I went to work for Dan Rather. One could construe this as a happy outcome.

In recent days, another young woman, a Wellesley grad, has been complaining that she doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse any of the current Presidential candidates, and I sympathize with that, too. Based on my experience with John B. Anderson, the first candidate I supported actively, I now believe pretty firmly that any politician with whom I agree on every issue hasn’t got a chance of being elected. Holding my nose in the voting booth is something I’ve gotten used to. But politics wreaks havocs with young people’s emotions, and with their idealism, which could be so helpful and constructive to the jaded rest of society.

Nevertheless, my goddaughter has turned already toward another political figure who is stirring up the fires of her idealism — Barack Obama — and so her transition from starry-eyed enthusiast to disillusioned nose-holder may be smoother than mine. I hope so. We need people like her in this country. It’s a shame so many grownups seem intent on jerking her and her friends around.

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A Short Trip to Stepford

If you don’t follow the Washington Post on a regular basis, you may have missed one of the more interesting contretemps to dust up the (virtual) pages of a major newspaper in recent times. Last week, the paper published an opinion piece, “We Scream. We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” by Charlotte Allen. The piece caught my eye because it spoke of the phenomenon of fainting at Obama rallies, something I’d heard of only lately, but that was only one of the topics Ms. Allen touched on.

“I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, ‘we women,’ of course — aren't the weaker sex after all,” the article begins. “Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women ‘are only children of a larger growth,’ wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?”

“I meant it to be funny but with a serious point — that women want to be taken seriously but quite often don’t act serious,” she explained later, in an online chat. “Also, that women and men really are different.”

To bolster her argument, she attacked women’s television preferences (Oprah Winfrey, Grey’s Anatomy) and reading habits (Eat, Shop, Pray, which a friend has been urging on me, as it happens), and found statistics to “prove” that women are worse drivers, have smaller brains, can’t visualize three-dimensional concepts, etc. Having assembled (loosely, lightly) these arguments, she concluded:

I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

The story provoked protests (and a few cheers) in hundreds of e-mailed messages from readers, and a controversy in the editorial offices. The piece was badly written and should never have been published in the first place, it was said. (In truth, it’s a difficult kind of writing to pull off. Allen kept the tone light, yet it was hard to tell how seriously she intended her message to be understood.) Others argued that the paper would never run any article on other groups, such as blacks and Asians, and they wanted to know why it was okay to write about women this way.

The editor of the piece, a woman, declared herself unprepared for the backlash: she thought the article was funny. It’s a safe bet she wouldn’t have been laughing had the author been a man, and not many other people were laughing, either, as it was.

The Post called a few heavy hitters to weigh in. Katha Pollitt, the feminist author, assailed Allen’s statistics and the bases of all her arguments, while pointing out the lack of women on the paper’s editorial staff and among its opinion columnists. The paper’s own ombudsman, Deborah Howell, largely agreed with Pollitt and raised another good reason to dislike Allen’s article: it’s not funny. Caitlin Gibson, the paper’s legal administrator, and Rachel Manteuffel, a local actor and writer, co-signed an analysis of Allen’s article, asking, “What is it?” and “Why did she write it?”

Even before the backlash gained momentum, I shared the article with two of the smartest women I know. One, a Wellesley grad, was infuriated. The other, an alumna of Rice, was too busy managing her career and family to read the article closely, yet she immediately identified the dichotomy between women’s emotional and intellectual intelligence, which Allen confounded in order to buttress her claims.

Which leads me to my own reactions. I found the piece sloppily written and unsatisfying. It promised far more than it delivered: by the time I got to the end, I was already dismissing it. That doesn’t mean that Charlotte Allen is dumb — au contraire, she’s a highly intelligent person who works for a conservative think tank.

So why did she write the piece? Does she really want women to skip cheerfully off to Stepford? Does anybody want that? I mean — ye gods — how boring! For everybody!


I’m amazed that in 2008 people are still talking this way. The last time society tried to treat women as silly helpless creatures, the result was the 1950s, an era that’s fondly recalled by many: the streets were safe, the economy was good, people never complained. Oh, and the clothes were pretty. Forget about the witch hunts, the lynchings, the repression and frustration, — and the example of my late aunt Louise.

Louise passed away a few weeks ago. Sex and history denied her the opportunity to exploit her staggering intellect the way she would have preferred: fully. If she’d been born a few decades later, she’d have wound up a research scientist, a college professor. No such luck. She was never a Stepford Wife, and she did find outlets for her abilities, but she never shook off the resentment. Indeed, she could be incredibly unpleasant to be around. Is this what we want for our aunts — our mothers — our wives and sisters and daughters?

The question of women’s intelligence was answered for me before I was born. Both my grandmothers were college graduates — unusual, for their generation. Both were schoolteachers, and only because my maternal grandmother held a job did her family survive the Depression. My mother, my godmother, and many of my aunts were schoolteachers, as well, and outside the circle of my family, I have benefited from the lessons of smart, strong women: teachers, from Pamela Morton to Carolyn Heilbrun; role models, like Beverly Sills and Katharine Hepburn; and every one of my female friends.

As for the superiority or inferiority of either sex, Dr. Heilbrun liked to point out that all the qualities that we typically associate with women (nurturing, healing, teaching, and communicating) are those we associate with civilization; those we associate with men (fighting, fighting, and fighting) are those we associate with barbarism.

I suppose I owe Charlotte Allen a debt of gratitude for reminding me which side I’m on.

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