What Makes Us Crazy?

"The Last Flapper” a play by William Luce is based on the works of Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, better known to the world as Zelda. I’ve read most of the works of Mr. Fitzgerald and have picked up snippets of stale author gossip through other writings. But until seeing this play, I’d been ignorant of the history of her talents.
“Who gives a damn about convention? Climb to the top and live high,” Zelda says.
She was the youngest of a brood of Alabama children. Her father was imperious, and her mother infernally instructive in the ways a Southern lady should be. “A lady may cross her ankles but never her limbs.”
“Limbs,” we learn, are what a proper lady has rather than “legs.”
When Zelda longed to know how she had been as a child, her mother gave the disappointing answer, “All my children were exceptional,” offering no specifics.
Perhaps, after so many children, this mother simply didn't remember her youngest child.
Her father was inclined to answer her queries with “Ask me an easier question.”
It is little wonder she, at age 19, took off to marry that Northern novelist?
Her parents did not attend the wedding but did give her train fare as a wedding present.
Fitzgerald was a heavy drinker, and, perhaps, as is suggested in the play, a homosexual. Even so, all might have gone well with this marriage, and she might’ve stayed out of the mental hospital where she died in a fire, if Fitzgerald hadn’t worked so hard to squelch her multiple talents.
It’s claimed that she wrote many of the stories attributed to Fitzgerald, and he’s accused of lifting large sections from her diaries and letters for use in his novels. “Plagiarism begins at home,” Zelda says.
Was she born crazy, or was she made crazy? The play offers sufficient evidence to make the case that such a talented woman, given her family environment and marriage, had no choice but to escape to insanity.
There are powerful forces in human nature determined to sabotage the efforts of anyone daring to exhibit desire in the arts. Oh sure, they praise our finger paintings when we’re five, but soon enough we’re asked to wash our hands and become proper ladies (or gentlemen).
This treachery can come from within or without, and it’s pointless to place blame. But it's foolish to not admit the challenge, because a common result of this struggle is insanity, or, at least, misery.
Thank you, Zelda, for fighting the fight and for lighting the way.

How to Eat in Sri Lanka

I have a vegetarian pal who's been hanging out in in Sri Lanka the past few years. After she moved there, she got into a tropical state of mind, lost a few pounds and looked so good she could pass for 29.
Then, for reasons known only to the gods that rule middle-age spread, she gained back more weight than she'd lost, and she doesn't like the way she looks in a sarong anymore.
She tries her best to exercise and eat right. She even has a personal trainer. Who knew you could have a personal trainer in Sri Lanka? And now, she wants to know why all her good efforts aren't working.
Of course, I don't know the answer to her question. All I know is what happened to me.
I've never even been to Sri Lanka, but I was a "vegetarian" between the ages of 22 and 48. I put quotes around vegetarian because at times during those 25 years, I still ate fish, dairy products and eggs. Otherwise my diet was mostly fruits, veggies, tofu and whole grains.
I did pretty well on this diet for about 10 years. I was strong, had energy, and wasn't particularly overweight. But I was ALWAYS hungry, always thinking about food and always craving sweets.
I knew that sweets weren't good for me, and I pretty much stayed away from them, but I spent a lot of time thinking about them.
Still I was not TOO overweight for a few more years. Then, after about 15 years of being a vegetarian I started to gain weight. I wasn't eating more. And I wasn't exercising less. But somehow I couldn't keep from gaining. When I would try to eat even less, I had more and more thoughts about food. It seemed that the very thought of food caused me to gain weight.
It could have had something to do with turning 40. In the few years after I hit that milestone, I gained 65 pounds while trying to be very careful with what I ate, while walking 4 miles every day, and while doing other kinds of low-level cardio exercise recommended as the perfect thing for my age.
I thought I had a curse.
My husband was also a vegetarian when we first met. He was tall and thin, and spent a lot of time bicycling, but even he gained quite a bit of weight once he turned 40. He went from 150 to 200 pounds. On his 6'2" frame that meant he went from being skinny to normal. But he was always hungry, so he ate more and more.
One day I had an epiphany. I asked my hubby if he would go down to the corner grocery and buy a rotisserie chicken. He looked at me like I was crazy. We were vegetarians!
Somehow I convinced him, and he said okay. He went to the store, praying that no one would see him buying a chicken. Any kind of meat had been so out of our reality, he said it felt as if he were buying a pound of heroin.
We ate that chicken, felt good afterward, and that was it. We quit being vegetarians.
I'd like to say that we lost all the weight we had gained over the next few months. We didn't. We each lost about five pounds, but that was all. The good news was we stopped being hungry all the time. And we both stopped craving sweet things. And we both stopped gaining weight.
My husband was fine with the change, but I still needed to lose a lot of weight and wasn't sure about how to do that.
Then it was my husband's turn to have an epiphany. He said, "Guess what, we're going to join a gym."
In addition to walking and cycling we added weight training and yoga at our gym. After a year, my hubby was a lot more muscular. I lost 25 pounds. This isn't any magic weigh-loss formula, but I managed to lose that much weight without eating any less than I had been. Now I'm working on losing the rest.
I have more energy and strength than I've had at anytime in my adult life, even more than when I was 22 and decided that I would be a vegetarian.
Looking back I'd say one of the stupidest things I ever did was to give up meat. All my adult life I ate lots of good wholesome foods, but I believe the shortage of lean, high-quality protein in my diet messed me up for 25 years.
If my friend in Sri Lanka actually asked my advice on how to be healthy, I'd say eat lean protein (fish, chicken) at almost every meal. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Eat whole grains. Eat other things too, but consider sweets to be poison. Do yoga. Do some other kinds of exercise. Drink plenty of water.
I don't know what I'd eat if I lived in Sri Lanka. My friend says there's plenty of fish to eat. So if that was available and good, I guess I'd eat a lot of fish.
I hope it works out for my friend. Anyone who has the guts to run away to Sri Lanka deserves to look great in a sarong

Who Buys the Stamps?

In our house, a roll of stamps lasts a long time, long enough to need booster stamps. Rumors are they've solved that problem. Now when you buy a first class stamp, whatever price you pay, you can use the stamp forever.
But so what? Our current roll is the old kind, and yesterday I needed to remember how old. So I innocently asked my hubby, "What's the postage now?"
My dear husband, who reads the Wall Street Journal every day and speaks as if he knows EVERYTHING about rising prices, said, "How should I know?" And he said it with the exasperation of someone who had just spent the last thirty years locked in the same room with a two-year-old asking WHY? a thousand times every single day.
Of course this does pretty much describe the history of our marriage, but that's beside the point.
Using the basic principles of non-violent communication, I said, "Honey, when you speak to me like that I feel shitty. Next time I ask you something, and you don't have the answer, I'd like it if you politely said, 'Sorry, dear, I don't know. Why don't you try Wikipedia?'"
I thought I was being sarcastic big time, but he smiled and agreed that would be a better way to reply.
For the rest of the day, whenever I asked him something, instead of getting all bent, he shrugged and said, "Maybe Wikipedia can tell you."
One breakthrough for the day was great. But here's the kicker. That evening he gave me another gift -- my very own packet of "forever" stamps.
And they say nothing ever gets better.

Nominating by Sex and Race

There’s been so much media coverage on Clinton and Obama the past few months that most of my pals have turned to snoring. They say they’re leaning toward Obama, because, well...they just like him better.
Either way the nomination goes, these are amazing times. There’s a woman who’s a contender for the Democratic nomination for US President, and her viable opponent is a black man!
Call me sexist, but I still hope for the chance to vote for a woman this fall. The way things are going, I suspect I won’t be doing so this year.
However the race isn’t over yet, and there’s still plenty of time to puzzle over what it takes for a woman to be a player in this world dominated by men since dinosaurs roamed the planet.
No one can deny there’s been much progress in the past fifty years toward gender and racial equality. However this progress isn’t so obvious in every place in our country.
I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1950s. Everyone I knew as a kid was white, Protestant, and lived on a farm. There wasn’t much effort put toward any kind of human rights. We worked for the corn and the cattle. If women were in the kitchens, and men on the tractors, so be it.
For reasons that were never revealed, the rural grade school I attended had 9 girls and 41 boys. Perhaps it was the cosmos making up for all the men that had been killed in WWII. Or maybe most folks just drowned their baby girls like they might a sack full of unwanted kittens. It didn’t occur to me then to question the fact that I was the only girl my age.
I grew up playing with boys. I was sturdy and had my wits about me, so I held my own. That is, I gave out plenty of bloody noses, and I didn’t throw like a girl.
The slight attempt my female relatives made to socialize me as to “a woman’s place” was pale in contrast to the influence of my all-male peers.
It wasn’t until high school, when I was around girls my own age, that I was indoctrinated in how to be a girl. Half of me went with the “now I’m a girl” program, and the other half couldn’t forget all I’d learned growing up with boys.
My parents held conservative values, but at least their mindsets were forward looking. They sent me to college in 1968, during the chaos of the war in Vietnam when the culture was exploding with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
As might be predicted, my mind exploded (in a good way) with the possibilities of the cultural revolution of that era. I visited California (Santa Barbara) when I was 23. When I realized what a great place this was to be a woman, I moved here.
When I went back to Nebraska to visit, I felt the difference in culture like hitting a bank of cold air. All the “isms” were still alive and well there.
Now thirty-some years later, we’re in the midst of this incredible season of primaries. The pundits work hard at parsing out reasons that some will vote for this candidate, and others for that.
I try my best to focus on policy and personality and to erase my longing to see a woman in the US Presidency. Yet I do hope to see it in my lifetime. And I wish my mother could be alive to see it, too.