Now’s the Time: Three Women in Jazz

In some respects, the world of jazz resembles the Elizabethan stage.  There are the bare, unadorned sets on which the two art forms are displayed; there is the fact that in both cases, little of what is performed is reduced to writing; and there are no, or hardly any women.

Billie Holiday

There are, of course, female jazz vocalists, from Bessie Smith, to Billie Holiday, to Sarah Vaughan, to Ella Fitzgerald, to Nina Simone, and so on.  But if you had to name five female jazz instumentalists of note, you’d be hard pressed.

Mary Lou Williams

There’s Lil Hardin, Louis Armstrong’s piano player; there’s Mary Lou Williams, a pianist of the swing era; there’s pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, who with her husband, Lew Tabackin, kept a big band going for three decades.  And with that, as the lawyers say, I’ve exhausted my present memory.

Toshiko Akiyoshi

Why this should be so is unclear, but it is probably not the result of some nefarious plot to keep women out of a notoriously low-paying and insecure profession.  In jazz, as in many other walks of life, there is no women’s division; America’s greatest native art form has no WNBA equivalent. 

Coleman Hawkins

Jazz is a strict meritocracy that accepts only those who make the cut, both artistically and in terms of their personal dedication to a highly unremunerative profession; in the old days, when there were neighborhood jazz clubs in every city of even moderate pretensions to urbanity, a young musician made his way up the ladder through emulation, participating in after hours ”cutting” sessions. 

Charlie Parker

There were, however, no mulligans on this course.  Coleman Hawkins sent a cymbal crashing down towards Charlie Parker late one night when the latter horned in (I know, I’m sorry) on a Kansas City jam session not quite ready for the big-time.  Parker went off to lick his wounds, and eventually surpassed his harsh instructor.

Sonny Rollins

Or one can advance as the protegee of an elder statesman, but even then the guild maintains its standards.  In the ’70’s Sonny Rollins appeared at the Jazz Workshop in Boston with a young tenor player whom he’d taken under his wing.  When the time came for the apprentice to take his solo, he crapped out; Rollins dropped him, and he’s never been heard from again.

Terri Lyne Carrington

Which makes it doubly, or perhaps triply satisfying, that there are alive and working today three young women of accomplishment in the world of jazz, all playing rhythm instruments and leading their own groups, available for you to hear live or on recordings.

Fats Waller:  “Your feets too big!”

At 44, Terri Lyne Carrington is the eldest of the three, a musical prodigy who began playing at the age of 7 when her father, who had played with Fats Waller and Chu Berry, among others, gave her a drum set.  She received a full scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music at age 11, and her professional coming-out party was a date with trumpeter Clark Terry at the Wichita Jazz Festival when she was only 17.  She’s worked with Donald Harrison and Greg Osby, among others, and has a new CD out–More to Say.

Esperanza Spalding

Bassist Esperanza Spalding, like Carrington, has ties to Boston’s Berklee School of Music; she also received a full scholarship there, but Spalding had a tougher time, as she lived in Oregon while Carrington grew up in the Boston area.  Discouraged and broke, she almost gave up on music, but was encouraged to stick it out by Berklee alum Pat Metheny, who told her she had “the X factor”.  She took his advice, and after just one semester was asked to accompany Patti Austin on an international tour–”For Ella”–a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.

Linda Oh

Lastly, Linda Oh, a twenty-five-year-old Chinese-Malaysian bassist whose debut recording “Entry”, with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire, was recently released.  “Entry” is a concept album, not a collection of unrelated songs, and Oh’s music tends towards the blissful, a far cry from the hard stuff–Led Zeppelin and the Red Hot Chili Peppers–that first inspired her to take up the bass.

Perhaps there is progress in the world after all.

How to Score With Freudian Chicks

Back in my bachelor days, whenever I’d hit a . . . uh . . . dry patch, I’d consult with my friend Gino.

Maybe “friend” is too strong a word.  It’s hard to get close to a self-described “Italian Stallion” whose conversation is composed of little more than tales of his sexual prowess and the occasional sports anecdote, but Gino was a friend of a friend and he was good at breaking the ice.

Breaking the ice.

Where someone like me–introverted, diffident, haunted by the memory of being kicked off my 7th grade basketball team in Catholic school for hosting a boy-girl party–would lean against the wall in a singles bar looking at his feet, Gino would walk up to a group of unattached women and say something sensitive and thoughtful like “Hey, hey, hey!”, and all of a sudden the fun would begin.

She’s just waiting to spritz you.

Gino could get a phone number from a waitress, a stewardess on a two-day layover, or a perfume counter spritzer girl before you could say “Casanova”.  He could talk a dog off a meat wagon, or a fly off a shit wagon, if the animals in question were female.

Charlie Rich

And so it was that I found myself picking Gino’s brain one Friday night after work, a lonely weekend, as Charlie Rich would describe it, staring me straight in the face.

“It’s so freaking simple,” Gino said.  “All you got to do is talk to them.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I replied.  “The kind of women I want to attract tend to be somewhat more . . . intellectual . . .  than the bimbos you chat up in bars.”

“So?  All you got to do is adjust your settings,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just crank the I.Q. content up a notch,” he said.  “And hang out in the right places.”

“Like where?”

“Like a bookstore, you mook!”

I had to give the devil his due.  Gino may not have been the brightest guy in the world, but he had detected the fatal flaw in my strategy.  Like the Maginot Line, the fortification that the French built after World War I, I was preparing for the wrong battle of the sexes by hanging out in bars.

Maginot Line

“Okay,” I said.  “You seem to know your stuff.  Would you mind coming with me to a bookstore and just, like, get me started?”

“No problemo,” Gino said, lapsing into the bogus Italian that was one of the most powerful tools in his charmbox.

We paid up and walked around the corner from T.G.I.Friday’s to the Borders store that had been put into the old Exeter Theatre.  “First thing you’ve got to know,” Gino said as he tucked his gold chains into the white polyester undershirt that lay beneath his leather jacket, the better to be able to approach women with the startled-fawn look that I find irresistible, “is not all books are equal.”

“Ooo–you startled me!”

“How so?”

“Well, a lot of guys would head straight to fiction and pick something by D.H. Lawrence off the shelf,” Gino said, making a disapproving scowl. 

D.H. Lawrence and Frieda

“Sounds good to me,” I said.  “Can’t get any sexier than ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’, can you?”

“Problem is,” Gino said as we stepped off the escalator, “while Lawrence is generally viewed as a ground-breaking champion of human sexuality, a lot of your feminist-types object to his attitudes toward women.”

“Hmm–I didn’t know that.”

“Absolutely,” he said as he led me past the music and video departments.  “And have you ever seen a picture of his wife, Frieda?”

“Yeah, in the New York Times Book Review.”

“Save the manatee, huh?” he snorted.  “Nope, for my money, the guy who’s the A-number-one catalyst for sexually-suggestive small talk is none other than Sigismund-Schlomo-Freud.”

“Some cigars are phallic symbols, but this cigar is a Macanudo.”

“But,” I objected, “he’s so dry, so clinical.”

“That’s why he’s so great,” Gino remonstrated.  I was shocked–I didn’t know he owned a remonstrator.

*Gasp*–there she is!

“You want to start things off slowly–like dipping your toe in the ocean,” he continued.  “You go down to the magazine rack and read Playboy, how many egghead chicks you think you’re gonna attract?”

“Well, uh, none.”

“Precisely.  Whereas Freud was the guy who figured out how to talk about sex and get paid for it without drawing suspicion to himself.  He’s the master!”

I had to admit it sounded plausible.  “Okay–let’s do it.”

Gino stopped to ask directions from a bookish-looking sales girl.  “Where’s psychology?” he said, his voice breaking the silence that hung over the reading area.

“Aisle 5,” she said, batting her eyelashes coquettishly.

“Thanks, sweetheart.”  The guy just couldn’t turn it off.

We made our way past biography to sociology, took a right at self-help and came to aisle five.  I looked down between the shelves of books and saw–her!  Brunette, bespectacled, bodacious–a bookworm’s dream!

“Okay, pal,” Gino said under his breath.  “I want you to walk down the aisle . . .”

“And give her the eye?”

He slammed me up against the shelves.  “No, you mook–you completely ignore her!”

“Okay, sorry,” I said.  “Then what?”

“Then, you take a Freud title off the shelves.”

“Which one?”

“If I was you, I’d go for Beyond the Pleasure Principle if it’s in stock.  It just screams sensuality.”

“Okay, then what?”

“You begin to peruse it thoughtfully,” he said.  “After a while, you let go with a little laugh, then a snort.”

“A snort?”

“Not a big one, like unnnnk, like you’re snoring.  Just a little schnuk.  Then when she looks at you, you gave her a little smile.”

“Okay.”

“She’s gonna smile back at you, then you say ‘Listen to this’–and you read her a passage.”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter, you stupid dinglebrain!”  Gino seethed at me between clenched teeth.  “Just do it!”

I pursed my lips together, and took a mental inventory of my pathetic excuse of a life.  I could go home and watch Ghostbusters for the 39th time, or I could take a flying leap off the ten-meter spring board to whose edge Gino had led me.  Yes, there was risk involved, but the potential reward, a clean entry into a chlorine pool–I mean, the love of a simpatico woman–was great as well.

“Okay,” I said with determination.  “I’m going in.”

“Attaboy,” Gino said.  “I’m gonna take off.  Let me know how it turns out.”

“Okay.”  We exchanged a high-five, and he left.  I squared myself up and stepped confidently down the aisle, scanning the spines of the books–arranged alphabetically by author–until I came to the works of the master.  I picked a paperback copy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle–way beyond baby!–off the shelf and began to read.

I could tell that the woman was looking at me out of the corner of her eye.  I played it cool, opened the book, waited for a few moments, then gave out a knowing little laugh.  I allowed myself a peek to see if she’d noticed.  Yep–ol’ Gino had her number all right.

I turned back to the book and, after rolling some phlegm around on my soft palate, let go with the most sensuous snort I was capable of.  I looked up and saw her staring at me, an expression of concern on her face.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure, sure,” I said.  “I was just chortling over one particularly trenchant . . .”

“You mean insightful?”

“Yes–like ‘pithy’–passage in this seminal (was I spreading it on too thick?) work by Freud.”

“Oh really?” she said.  She turned to face me–she was interested.  She took a step towards me and removed her horn-rimmed glasses.  “Read it to me,” she said with a sultry tone.

“Sure.”  I looked down, then embarked upon the reading that could determine my current and future happiness, and the hair and eye color of my immediate descendants.  “What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world,” I said.

“Um-hmm,” she said, looking me up and down.  If there was a problem, it was too late to fix my fly.  “Go on.”

” . . . and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from”–here I paused for effect–“mental apparatus”.

“That is so true,” she said, fiddling with her little string of pearls.  “Sexual attraction starts with the mind–not the body.”  I could hear her breathing, and noticed her blouse undulating up and down.  “More,” she begged.

“Okay,” I said and cleared my throat.  “It is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space.”

The change in her countenance was sharp and sudden.  It was as if I’d stepped on her toe, or dropped a cold drink in her lap.  “What the hell does that mean?” she asked.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said.  I could have felt more sheepish than I did just then, but only if I could grow wool.

“So, you were laughing–and snorting–at something you didn’t understand?”

I could tell that the spell was broken.  “Uh, yeah.”

“Why?”

“It . . . just . . . struck me as funny.”

She looked at me as if I were a Lean Cuisine Frozen Lasagna, when what she wanted was a night out at an Italian restaurant.

“You’re weird,” she said as she turned on her heel and went back to her book.  I knew I’d blown it, but I tried to recover.

“Uh, what is it you’re reading?”

“Involuntary Laughter and Inappropriate Hilarity“ by Mendez, Nakawatase and Brown,” she said icily.  “You ought to flip through it sometime.  It might do you good.”

Networks Issue Retractions of Erroneous Levi-Strauss Obituaries

NEW YORK.  The three major television networks issued hurried retractions tonight after their evening news anchors confused French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who died Saturday, with the inventor of blue jeans.

Couric:  “Blue jeans came to be seen not just as an article of clothing, but an article of faith.”

“Journalists write the first draft of history and nobody gets everything right on the first draft,” said NBC News President Steve Capus.  “Still, we ought to be able to distinguish between a pair of pants and the study of digging stuff up.”  When informed that he was probably thinking of archaeology, not anthropology, Capus replied “Don’t tell me what to think!”

Ann-Margaret:  Nice . . . uh . . . hyphen.

Claude Levi-Strauss was the last of an imposing generation of French intellectuals that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Ann-Margaret, among other hyphenated eggheads.  His 100th birthday last year was marked in his home country by an official state visit from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the distribution of complimentary packages of La Vache Qui Rit snack-size cheese packs to schoolchildren.

Levi-Strauss:  “Who’s Katie Couric?”

Katie Couric of NBC is the only female prime-time news anchor for the three major television networks.  The other two are Charles Gibson of ABC, a man, and Brian Williams of NBC, an incredibly-lifelike cyborg.

 

Ha-ha.

Couric said that Levi-Strauss had discovered blue jeans while doing fieldwork in Brazil.  Gibson asserted that Levi-Strauss invented blue jeans in a fitting room at a Gap store in Paris, shouting “Watson, come here–I need you.”  Williams said Levi-Strauss had identified the blue gene while teaching at the College de France, but had exchanged it for a pair of plain-front khakis.

Dolphins’ Porter Takes Off on New England

MIAMI.  His Dolphin teammates laughed and said it was only a matter of time.  “You guys want a story?” center Jake Grove said to writers who had gathered around his locker.  “Go talk to Joey–he’ll give you one.”

Porter:  “I caught ‘em, and I’m gonna eat ‘em!”

Like a long-dormant volcano, outspoken Miami linebacker Joey Porter erupted yesterday, pouring forth a lava flow of provocative comments that are sure to provide hot bulletin-board material in the New England Patriots’ locker room before this Sunday’s game.

“I just don’t like New England,” Porter said as reporters scurried to get his remarks down on tape.  “Never have, since I was a little kid.”  Porter visited New England as a boy, and was told by a soda jerk at Howard Johnson’s, the restaurant chain founded in Quincy, Massachusetts, that he couldn’t have a milk shake.

Howard Johnson’s

“I started crying, man,” Porter said, growing emotional.  “Then the guy laughs and says ‘But I can give you a frappe,’” the term used for a milk shake in New England.  “Why you want to mess with a little kid like that? Don’t give me that frappe crappe.”

The Town Meeting, by Norman Rockwell:  “We don’t need a new fire truck.”

Porter says New England is overrated for other reasons.  “I’m gonna be in Tom Brady’s face all day,” he predicted.  “Their O-Line sucks, and the open town meeting form of government is just a bunch of loudmouths arguing about how much to spend on a fire truck–I watched it on cable.”

Lowell:  “You really think Porter can keep up with Randy Moss in man-to-man coverage?”

Porter blamed the media for egging him on.  “You guys want to talk about everything except football.  Yesterday some punk from The Boston Globe asked me ‘Agree or disagree: Robert Lowell is the greatest American poet of the 20th century.’  Hell, man–disagree.  “‘Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility
slides by on grease.’  That stinks.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “Names are like prunes.  One’s not enough, three’s about right.”

When reminded that Lowell had been praised by The Atlantic Monthly, the literary and cultural magazine founded in Boston by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others, Porter didn’t back down.  “The Atlantic Monthly?  Please.  They don’t even have a sports page.”

“And don’t get me started about Boston Baked Beans,” Porter said as he pulled on his helmet.  “They’re disgusting.”

Chief: Female Justices Deciding Cases by Cootie Catchers

WASHINGTON.  Chief Justice John Roberts today took the unusual step of publicly criticizing his two female colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court, saying they were deciding cases by “cootie catchers” and other modes of legal analysis that were inscrutable to their male colleagues.

Roberts:  “If you’ve got cooties, you should stay home from court.”

“When I get together with Justice Ginsburg for a few glasses of chardonnay, yes we sometimes have a friendly game of ‘cootie catcher’,” said Sonia Sotomayor, the third female justice in U.S. history and the most recent appointee to the Court.  “Is there anything so wrong with that, other than the belief that our lives are controlled by irrational forces that can be revealed by a folded-up piece of paper?”

Cootie Catcher

A “cootie catcher” is a fortune-telling device that is made by making a series of folds in a square piece of paper by a process that cannot be understood by members of the male sex.  Players take turns picking a number between one and ten, and the “catcher” is opened and closed that number of times.  When the process is completed, the player lifts one of the flaps to determine her fortune.  Sotomayor drew “Guilty!” in response to a question regarding a last-minute appeal from a convicted criminal on death row in a Utah state prison, and Ginsburg, the only other female justice, chose the flap that revealed “You will meet a cute boy at the Tysons Corner Galleria!”

Posner:  “This is what comes of allowing women to teach anything other than spelling.”

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner scoffed at the superstitious pastime, saying it was a reflection of declining standards in legal education.  “Next thing you know they’ll be playing jacks in judges’ chambers and writing dissenting opinions on Nancy Drew mysteries,” said Posner, who is frequently mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee but has been passed over several times because he does not watch sports on television.  “I’m not a guy’s guy kind of guy,” Posner noted, “but that’s no reason to appoint a girl ahead of me.”  

 

A case before the Supreme Court is commenced by a petition for a writ of certiorari, and legal correspondents listen to the Court’s two female justices at noon recess for clues as to how they will rule on upcoming cases.

Nina Totenberg:  “My head hurts right here.”

National Public Radio’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg recently scooped her male colleagues when she participated in a “double-dutch” jump rope session with Sotomayor and Ginsburg that produced the following couplet.

We got your petition but we’re really sorry–
We’re not gonna give you a writ of certiorari

Shrink Mag Gives In, Will Add Nude Pix Next Issue

NEW YORK.  The Journal of Psychoanalytical Studies, the leading academic publication dedicated to the thought of Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants, says it will give in to economic pressures next month and add nude pictures of leading female practitioners and patients to the magazine’s pages beginning with the spring issue, due to arrive in libraries and analysts’ offices in January.

“You appear to have an oral fixation, a repressed libido, and a bodacious set of ta-tas.”

“Freudians have always been accused of having sex on the brain,” said Editor-in-Chief Brian Schletzschoff.  “I don’t know why we ever let Playboy get out in front of us when it comes to breasts.”

Skinner:  “My pigeons will spot you five points and still whup your sorry ass in ping-pong.”

Freud was criticized in his time, and his influence has waned as more rigorous research has demonstrated that men are more interested in televised sports than sex, but he remains one of the most imposing figures of modern intellectual history. 

And you thought I was kidding about the ping pong!

“After Freud, the next most important psychologist of the modern era is B.F. Skinner, who seemed more interested in teaching pigeons how to play ping-pong than human sexuality,” noted Karl Friedrich of the University of Illinois-Chicago.  “If Skinner’s ideas had prevailed over Freud’s, the consequences for western civilization would have been enormous,” Friedrich noted, “with hybrid human-pigeons walking the streets naked, eating from discarded snack food bags, much like a Big 10 college campus on the morning after a big game.”

Kinsey:  “How many times a day do you consider ’a lot’?”

The only other claimant to the throne of top dog of twentieth-century psychology is Alfred Kinsey, the American biologist who embarked upon a monumental study of human sexuality after abandoning his first love, the gull-wing wasp.  “After Alfred discovered that a woman sitting on his lap felt better than a gull-wing wasp down his pants, he was a changed man,” noted Louise Boganovich, one of Kinsey’s last research subjects. “He came to prefer women, even though the wasps were cheaper dates since they didn’t eat as much and weren’t interested in movies.”

Anna Freud, Gisele Bundchen:  Who’s hotter?

The first centerfold to be featured by The Journal of Psychoanalytical Studies will be Anna Freud, the sixth daughter of Sigmund who Schletzschoff says is “remarkably well-preserved” for a woman who died in 1982.  “We were lucky to get her after we found out Gisele Bundchen was busy.”

Devastated by Halloween Losses, Homeowners Vow to Fight Back

PRIDE’S CROSSING, Mass.  In this upscale community on Boston’s North Shore, residents are used to dealing with property damage from wind and rain off the Atlantic.  “We’re a hardy, sea-faring people,” says Charles “Biff” Watson, a descendant of one of the early traders who built their fortunes selling spices they brought back from China.  “But this,” he says as he indicates scattered wreckage on his front lawn with a wave of his hand, “I can’t understand what kind of sick individual would do this.”

Possible perps caught on closed-circuit camera.

Watson is referring to an uprooted mailbox, into which a gang of teenagers has stuffed a pumpkin, befouling an assortment of Christmas catalogs that were delivered while he and his wife Trixie were away at their vacation home on Cape Cod.  “I thought flour-bombing was banned by the United Nations,” Trixie says as she shakes her head.  “You’d think those Trick or Treat for UNICEF kids could act as peacekeepers or something.”

 

The Hiroshima of TP’ing

Property and casualty insurers say Halloween 2009 was the most devastating on record, with eggings, shaving cream and toilet paper damage approaching a billion dollars nationwide.  “For some reason we had a real upsurge this year,” says Nolan Evasherkski, an actuary at Modern Moosehead Insurance Company.  “Last year 15.1% of all homes were vandalized,” he says.  “This year, the figure was 15.2%.  I don’t know about you, but that’s enough to set my heart racing.”

“I couldn’t stop myself–my friends egged me on.”

Some blamed the poor economy and the feelings of alienation among young people that a tight job market and lower household incomes have generated.  “We won’t know until the Federal Reserve releases its ‘beige book’ for the fourth quarter of the year,” said Washburn University economist Norwell Salley.  ”Until then, I’m following popular singer Eydie Gorme, who blames it on the bossa nova.”

Eydie Gorme and Yanni:  “You always blame it on the bossa nova!”

Residents of this town are especially upset because many took precautions designed to ward off the young hooligans.  “We bought a tastefully offensive set of Smith & Hawken Yanni-themed wind chimes,” says Mindy Farber, whose 6-bedroom colonial was egged.  “Whenever I play his music in the house, my cat’s hair falls out in clumps.”

Ballot Questions Show Americans United by Deep Divisions

ARLINGTON, Virginia.  As voters head to the polls for off-year elections tomorrow, a survey of ballot questions reveals a nation deeply divided by partisan differences that nonetheless unite people with common viewpoints, or something like that.

 

Tatum:  “You have to ‘keep it simple, stupid,’ without letting people know you think they’re stupid.”

“The measures that will pass tend to be very simple statements of bedrock principles,” said George Mason University political scientist Gerald Tatum, “or else people ganging up on an unpopular minority.” 

“Here comes a guy with Mass. plates now.”

In Vermont, for example, the tax on a single package of cigarettes could rise to $14 million, enough to close that state’s projected budget deficit.  “All we got to do is sell one pack to some hedge fund guy from Massachusetts driving through in his Lexus, and we’ll be able to pave a lot of state roads,” said Lyle Hampton, state Highway Commissioner.

Here is a rundown of initiatives in other states:

Porkepyn pork despyne.

Tennessee:  Voters will consider a measure to ban ”porcupine racing,” the practice of putting two live members of this spiny species of hog in a laundromat dryer, throwing in a sheet of ”Bounce” fabric softener, setting the timer for twenty minutes and pushing “start”.  “If your porcupine survives, you win,” says State Fish and Game Warden Oliver Crawford.  “It will come out fluffier as well, although there may be guts stuck in the lint trap for the next customer.”

Bounce:  Adds softness to even the toughest spinous hog.

Wyoming:  A broad-based coalition of public policy groups and churches is pushing a measure requiring mandatory condom use by all funeral home workers.  “While most of our mortuary scientists have a pretty clean record when it comes to necrophilia, it’s the 95% who are bad apples that spoil it for the good guys,” said State Department of Health Secretary Ronald Golson.  “The last thing you want is for a loved one to become pregnant after their health insurance has run out because of death.”

Drive-through funeral home:  What’s the rush?

Michigan:  An initiative petition here would require heterosexual couples to use gay wedding planners.  “Your hard-core left-wing types think they can cram this kind of social engineering down the throats of good, hard-working people,” says Marriage Must Mean Something spokesman Charles “Buddy” Montgomery. 

 

“That doesn’t look like Marilyn Sue on the right.”

“I for one am not going to stand idly by while my daughter has to hire some fruitcake who’s going to talk her into a dark chocolate wedding cake.”  The measure is projected to pass narrowily but some early ballots were disqualified because they were scented.

“I’ll let you though, but it’s gonna cost you cause your hat says ‘Go Blue!’”

Ohio:  This state will vote to tax out-of-state fans who attend Ohio State football games.  “Some people look at the world the way it is and ask ‘Why?’,” said Earl Bucholtz, Commissioner of Revenue.  “I look at all them Michigan fans traipsing through this state and say–’What the hell?’”  The State of Michigan has challenged the new law by filing an appeal to the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

“Wait–I should be on the right because I’m Vicki and you’re Ruth.”

Massachusetts:  A law legalizing the possession of marijuana by the terminally well-organized is likely to pass in this liberal Northeastern state.  “We are trying to help women who alphabetize their spices or save their receipts for six years to understand that not everything has to be in its place,” said petition drive organizer Mark Warden.  “In fact, has anybody seen my car keys?”  Warden says he is depending on late-counted absentee ballots to put his bill over the top.  “You can get an absentee ballot if you’re absent-minded, right?”

With Rodrigo Ordonez, Matador, In Dewey Square, Boston

It’s Monday morning.  I emerge from the Au Bon Pain at South Station bearing my large mocha latte–$4.06 with tax–and think about how different things were when I was a young legal beagle starting out in the practice of law three decades ago.  Back then, a mocha cost sixty-five cents.  On the other hand, my hourly rate was about what you’d pay for a plumber today, so I guess these things even out.

I stop at the curb before stepping into the ganglion of an intersection–Dewey Square–that I must navigate in order to get to my office, cars coming at me at high speed from four directions on three different streets.  I look to my right and am surprised to see Rodrigo Ordonez, a matador on the American Express-Brooks Brothers Senior Bullfighting Tour.

Rodrigo Ordonez:  Sorry, I can’t make tildes on the internet.

“Excusa me,” Ordonez says.  He has apparently lost his “tilde” on his journey to America.  “Is thees the famous intersection of Atlantic and Summer Streets?”

“That it is,” I say with smug provincial pride.  “Also Surface Artery–you don’t want to forget that street.”

“Thees Surface Artery,” Ordonez asks, seeming puzzled, “how did it get its name?”

“It is so named,” I say with the polite patience that Bostonians are known for when explaining quaint and curious local customs to out-of-towners, “because it forms a surface on which vehicles travel.”

His cuadrilla

Ordonez seems confused.  “But, so does every other street.”

“I know,” I say.  “It is a mystery, like Virgin Birth and the Holy Trinity.”

“So–it is like an ‘area’ rug, which covers an area?”

“Si, senor,” hoping by the use of my rudimentary Spanish to put him at ease in our notoriously unfriendly city.

I hear steps and the sound of men running, and turn to see Ordonez’s cuadrilla–his team of helpers–rushing to join him.

“Senor Ordonez,” one of his picadores says, slightly out of breath.  “We took the Green Line from Park Street, but you reached here before us.”

“Ah,” I say, admiring Ordonez’s strategy.  “This was wise of you.  In Boston, it is often possible to walk faster on the surface than to ride the subway beneath it.”

His cuadrilla looks at me in wonder.  “In Boston, the legs of a human–they can go faster than the iron horse?” one of them asks.

“Si–again, this is a mystery for which there is no explanation.”  It is my turn to ask a question of them.  “What brings you here, to the Corner of Death, my friends?”

Ordonez gives me a look that speaks a volume–it is in fact Volume 4 of the Encyclopedia Americana, Birmingham to Burlington, which includes the subject of bullfighting.  “So many reasons,” he says.  “You are clearly a busy man.  Shall I tell you them all, or are you called away by the siren song of the tiny print Terms & Conditions that must accompany every gasket and flange . . .”

“Don’t forget doo-hickeys,” I say, insisting upon the dignity that is rightfully due the American legal profession.  “Please–my ears are all yours.”

One of his bandilleros steps forward with a sword to take a whack at me, but Ordonez stops him. 

El abogado:  He has read muy bookos.

“Antonio–no!  The ear may only be awarded by the presidente, the official who presides for the day over a bullfight.  I am sure el abogado was speaking–how you say–figuratively.”

“Si, this is true,” relieved to know that I will not have to hold a handkerchief to my head all morning to stanch the bleeding from a hole where an ear used to be.  “You were about to tell me why you have come to the most dangerous pedestrian intersection in all of Nuevo Englandado.”

“It is a constellation of reasons,” he says, his forehead plowed with furrows of seriousness.  “First, los amantes des animals,” he says.

“Ah,” I exclaim with recognition.  “So, like PETA?”

The caudrilla confers amongst themselves.  “Pitas–like whistles?” one of them asks.

“No, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.  They are lovers of animals, except the human kind.”

Bullfighters for Breast Cancer Research Day

“Ah, si,” Ordonez says.  “I understand.  Second,” he continues, “there is the challenge.  Even the strongest bull, it cannot compete with the Dodge Ram 1500 4X4 Pick-Up for best-in-class hydrodynamics, towing and payload, and exterior styling!”

“You forgot to mention the lifetime powertrain warranty!” I say, gently chiding him.

“Si, mi culpa,” he says sheepishly.

“But,” I ask, “Is that it?”

“No, there is one more thing–the most important of all,” he says as he looks off into the rising sun over the Atlantic.  “Even the meanest bull–he is no match for the fury, the innate malice, the brute stupidity of your native beast.”

I know whereof he speaks.  I look in the eyes of his cuadrilla, and I see–fear.

“You mean–our Boston drivers?”

“Si, senor.  I am ready for the ultimate challenge.”

“Well,” I say, taking a sip of my drink to steel myself for the gory spectacle that I’m sure is about to unfold.  “You are a brave man.”

Ordonez is wearing a traje de luces, or “suit of lights”, and as he steps into the intersection the reflection of the fall sunrise creates a glare that blinds drivers trying to turn left on the Surface Artery.  He has adopted a brilliant strategy–to disorient the raging toros de los roados, the better to prepare them for the kill.  A crowd of taxis, delivery trucks and commuters slows to a crawl, and los banderilleros move in to place gaily-colored darts into the beasts.

Adolpho Reyes positions himself before a gold Toyota Scion, and plunges them into the car’s air filter, causing it to choke and gasp.  Amy Nugent, a graphic artist on her way to work in the western suburbs from her loft in the Fort Point Chanel district, is outraged.

“Are you freaking nuts?” she screams at Reyes, but it is too late.  La Faena de la muleta, or “the work of the cloth”, begins as Ordonez steps forward into traffic.  He wields a sword beneath the red cloth known as the muleta, and Nugent is distracted.  “That would look good in an ad campaign for . . . a bank . . . or a restaurant . . . or a set of high-end cookware,” she says dreamily of the brightly-colored instrument of distraction.

Ordonez moves in for the kill; he executes a derechazo, then a manoletina.  Nugent weaves back and forth but other drivers honk at her, forcing her to face the matador squarely.  He inserts the estoque–his sword–through her grille, cutting the cable that controls her hood latch.  She is finished.

A crowd gathered outside a Dunkin’ Donuts bursts into applause and a chorus of ole’s, and Ordonez takes a low bow.  He draws his sword and cuts through one of Nugent’s loopy earrings, and presents it to the proprietor of an illegal two-bananas-for-a-buck fruit stand at the edge of Dewey Square.

“No, my friend,” the presidente says.  “The goofy-looking piece of jewelry–it is yours.”

“Gracias,” Ordonez says, but Nugent isn’t through with him.

“That’s a hand-made earring I bought at a New Hampshire crafts fair!” she says, her face red with rage.

Ordonez sizes her up, just as he has taken the measure of so much other bull in his life.

“Senorita,” he says, his voice an iron fist of skepticism in a velvet glove of compassion.  “You have traveled many miles to avoid the 6.25% sales tax of your native state.”

Leftover Halloween Candy a Godsend in Wartorn Freedonia

DOS FLEDAN, Freedonia.  An American C-17 Globemaster cargo plane touched down on a bombed-out landing strip here today with the first shipment of leftover Halloween candy from the U.S., bringing sustenance to a nation that has had to get by with little more than hope lately.

“Our prayers are answered,” Flen Gleboltz shouted over the noise of the jet engines. “I hope there are many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the belly of the great songbird of mercy!”

“The kids didn’t take any of the Bit-o-Honeys.”

In a makeshift hangar, a group of Freedonian women begins to ululate in a rhythmic, high-pitched chant–“Alla-lalla-kitta-katta-breaka-barra!” they sing over and over.  What does it mean, this reporter asks Gleboltz.  “It is a traditional jingle,” he says.  “It means ‘Give me a break, break me off a bite of that KitKat Bar!’” 

Human rights groups have criticized Western indifference to Freedonia’s plight, but Marcy Wilbur, a housewife in Shaker Heights, Ohio, says she isn’t callous, just confused. “You’ve got the Greater Curds, the Lesser Curds, the fundamentalists–how the heck am I supposed to tell them apart?” she says as she seals a package of leftover candy. “I can’t have this candy in the house, though. I’ll gain ten pounds, and I’ve got the charity ball season coming up.”

Greater Curd freedom fighters.

Marcy has adopted an ecumenical approach, sending slightly-stale candy to everyone involved in the conflict, just as she made no distinction when she handed out treats last night for Halloween. “I know some of those kids put shaving cream on my Lexus, but my policy is, kids will be kids. Everybody gets a treat!”

Freedonia has been beset by armed conflict since the end of World War I, when the nation was created out of Moldavia, Serbia, Disneyland and leftover mashed potatoes from a Thanksgiving dinner that ended in a family dispute. The principal aggressors are the Greater Curdish or “Large Curds”, a militia organization whom the Freedonian government has assisted in their attacks on the Lesser Curdish or “Small Curds.”

Cottage cheese:  There is no middle ground between the Large and the Small Curds.

“This is more than a fight over cottage cheese,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.  “We call upon the nations of the developed world to ship their leftover Milky Ways and Three Musketeers bars to Freedonia, which I understand is located somewhere in either Europe or Asia.”  The former South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade was seen filling his pockets with Snickers candy bars as he left the news conference. “I used to love these things as a kid,” he admitted with a guilty smile.

Ki-moon:  “I could really go for a Snickers right now.”

The US declared the conflict genocidal in 2006, at which point the UN commissioned a study. Two years later the UN released a white paper stating that the situation was “a crisis”, but the report’s final draft referred not to the loss of life in Freedonia but to the lack of parking near the U.N.’s headquarters in New York.

“Look–a Security Council member.  Isn’t he a hunk?”

When asked if the UN would eventually join the rest of the world in treating the conflict as genocidal, Ban Ki-moon demurred, saying it was not his place to tell U.N. delegates how to vote. “I can’t get them to agree on the menu for the Miss Universe contest,” a UN-sponsored beauty pageant, he said with frustration. “Finally I have to say–’Chicken, fish, prime rib–those are your only choices!’”