My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (37 page)

It was my turn. I set my papaya juice on the counter, positioned my hot dog under the nozzle, and pressed down hard on the top. It blew up. Mustard splattered all over my hands and my shirt. Most of the hot dog remained naked; the bun had a small mustard-filled crater, made by the impact. A plug of dried mustard that had caused the explosion was somewhere east of my papaya juice. “I
told
you it was going to blow up,” the man said, shaking his head.

I looked at him and said apologetically, “I just moved here.”

Uplifting

If you’re the kind of person who gets a kick out of saying “bosom” and “breast” and “bustline uplift,” you ought to go visit the Maidenform Museum on East Thirty-seventh. That way, you can walk around the display with the curator, Catherine C. Brawer, and ask questions like “Did the bandeau that preceded the brassiere squish the breast or just
smoosh
it?” and “When did natural shaping supplant the torpedo?” and “Can you please elaborate on the nipple?” If you pretend to be a scholar, you can then pause for a really long time in front of the best pair of breasts in New York City—which are on a miniature mannequin, are perfectly shaped and absolutely firm, and have a one-inch forward thrust—and say, “The semiotic evolution of window displays sure is
interesting,
isn’t it?” and hope that Ms. Brawer is suddenly called away. If she isn’t—and don’t get your hopes up—she will probably stand there with you and point out that the mannequin with the terrific breasts is wearing a petite copy of a 34-B Interlude bra, made of Alençon lace and broadcloth, with trapunto stitching on the undercup, which Maidenform marketed in the 1930s for women who prefer “the rounded as well as uplifted bustline.” Then you will drop the scholar shtick and just observe that the Interlude and the other little bras made for this particular display—a teensy version of the Dec-La-Tay, made of fine peach netting with a lace edge and satin straps, and a Ves-T-Lace, which was designed for the fuller figure but, in this instance, would just about fit your thumb—are totally cute.

Then you might ask a reasonable question, like “Where did Maidenform get all these old bras for the museum?” and Ms. Brawer will answer that some guy who used to work for the company cataloged almost every single style that Maidenform made—the Chansonette, the Star Flower, the Tric-O-Lastic, the Twice Over, the Blue Horizon, the Maidenette, the Semi-Accentuate, the Hold-Tite, the Gree-Shen, the Allo, the Allo-Ette, the Allegro, and so forth—and when she is finished, you will definitely not say anything about leg men versus boob men. Because that would be childish. Especially when Ms. Brawer goes on to tell you that the museum has regular visits from the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders from IS 246 in Brooklyn and CS 211 in the Bronx and, to the best of her recollection, none of the students ever giggle. “They come here prepared,” she will say. “They are here to work.”

So you will work, too. You will take a lot of notes about the Maidenform war effort, which involved designing cotton-gingham bras, because nylon was requisitioned for parachutes, and also manufacturing carrier pigeon vests, which are almost as cute as the tiny 34-B Dec-La-Tay, and you will study the display highlighting the twenty-year history of the “I Dreamed . . .” ad campaign (“I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform Bra”), and you might even copy down the text from an “I Dreamed . . .” ad that ran in Denmark (
“Jeg drømte, jeg blev forfulgt i min Maidenform b.h.”
), commenting to Ms. Brawer that Danish is quite a poetic-looking language, just so you can take another long cheap look at some ladies in their underwear.

Okay. You’re done, you stared at lots of breasts, you managed to maintain some dignity, you believe Ms. Brawer may actually still view you as an adult. Then she says, “Oh, I’ve got to show you something hilarious,” and she leads you into a conference room and pulls out an atlas and turns to a map of the Grand Tetons—a name you always got a giant charge out of—and she says, “My husband and I went on vacation in Wyoming this summer, and, honest to God, we were looking at the map and look at
this,
” and she points to a spot between upper Moran and Leigh canyons, about three-quarters of a mile south of Peak 49, and there it is on the map: Maidenform Peak, elevation 11,137. “Can you believe it?” Ms. Brawer says, grinning. “And it’s a
twin
peak.”

My Life: A Series of
Performance Art Pieces

1. Birth

As the piece opens, another performance artist, “Mom” (an affiliate of my private funding source), waits onstage, consuming tuna noodle casseroles. Eventually, she leaves the initial performance site—a single-family Cape Cod decorated with amoeboid sofas, Herman Miller coconut chairs, boomerang-print linoleum, and semi-shag carpeting—for a second site, a hospital. There she is joined by a sterile-clad self-realized figure of authority (“Sidney Jaffe, MD”) who commands her to “push” and then externalizes through language and gesture his desire to return to the back nine. This tableau makes allusion to the deadening, depersonalizing, postwar “good life.” “Mom” continues “pushing,” and at last I enter—nude. I do this in a manner that confronts yet at the same time steers clear of all obscenity statutes.

2. Coming Home Extremely Late Because I Was
Making Snow Angels and Forgot to Stop

Again, an ensemble piece. But unlike “Birth,” which explores the universal codes of pleasure and vulnerability, “Coming Home Extremely Late” is a manifesto about rage—not mine, but that of the protonuclear family. The cast includes “Mom,” “David,” “Debra,” “Fluffy,” and my private funding source. In “Coming Home,” I become Object rather than Subject.

The piece is also a metaperformance; the more sophisticated members of the audience will realize that I am “coming home extremely late” because of another performance: “Snow Angels,” an earlier, gestural work in which, clothed in a cherry red Michelin Man–style snowsuit, I lower myself into a snowbank and wave my arms up and down, leaving a winged-creature-like impression upon the frozen palimpsest. Owing to my methodology, I am better at it than anyone on the block. Note the megatextual references to heaven, Superior Being–as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. “Coming Home Extremely Late” concludes with a choral declaration from the entire cast (except for my private funding source, who has returned to reading the sports section), titled “You Are Grounded for a Month, Young Lady.”

3. I Go Through a Gangly Period

A sustained dramatic piece, lasting three to five years, depending on how extensively the performer pursues the orthodontia theme. Besides me, the cast includes the entire student population of Byron Junior High School, Shaker Heights, Ohio—especially the boys. In the course of “Gangly Period,” I grow large in some ways, small in others, and, ironically, they are all the wrong ways. I receive weird haircuts. Through “crabby” behavior (mostly directed at my private funding source), my noncontextual stage image projects the unspeakable fear that I am not “popular.” In a surreal trope midway through the performance, I vocalize to a small section of the cast (“Ellen Fisher,” “Sally Webb,” and “Heather Siegel”) my lack of knowledge about simple sexual practices. Throughout the piece, much commentary about time: how long it is, why certain things seem to take forever, why I have to be the absolutely last girl in the entire seventh grade to get Courrèges boots.

4. Finding Myself

This piece is a burlesque—a comic four-year-long high art/low art exploration. As “Finding Myself” opens, I am on-site—a paradigmatic bourgeois college campus. After performing the symbiotic ritual of “meeting my roommates” and dialoguing about whether boyfriends can stay overnight in our room, I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of majoring in English and instead dare to enroll in a class called “Low Energy Living,” in which I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of reading the class material and instead build a miniature solar-powered seawater-desalinization plant. I then confront Amerika’s greedy soullessness by enrolling in a class called “Future Worlds,” walking around in a space suit of my own design, doing a discursive/nonlinear monologue on Buckminster Fuller and futurism.

Toward the end of “Finding Myself,” I skip all my “classes”—spatially as well as temporally—and move into an alternative environment to examine my “issues.” At this point, my private funding source actually appears in the piece and, in a witty cameo, threatens to withdraw my grant. Much implosive controversy. To close the performance, I sit on an avocado green beanbag chair and simulate “applying to graduate school.”

5. I Get Married and Shortly Thereafter
Take a Pounding in the Real Estate Market

A bifurcated work. First, another performance artist, “Peter,” dialogues with me about the explicit, symbolic, and functional presentations of human synchronism. We then plan and execute a suburban country club wedding (again, with assistance from my private funding source). Making a conceptual critique of materialism, I “register” for Royal Copenhagen china, Baccarat crystal, and Kirk Stieff sterling. Syllabic chants, fragments of unintelligible words like the screeches of caged wild birds gone mad—this megatonality erupts when I confront my private funding source about seating certain little-liked relatives. At the work’s interactive climax, “Peter” and I explode the audience/performer dialectic and invite the audience to join as we “perform the ceremony.”

The second part of the piece—a six-month-long open-ended manifesto on the specificity of place—culminates with “Peter” and me purchasing a four-and-a-half-room cooperative apartment with a good address in Manhattan. Conran’s furniture, Krups appliances, task-specific gadgets (apple corers, pasta makers, shrimp deveiners), and other symbol-laden icons are arranged on-site. Curtain goes down on the performers facing each other on a sofa, holding a
Times
real estate section between them, doing a performative discourse lamenting that they have “purchased the apartment at the peak of the market.”

The series will continue pending refinancing.

Shiftless Little Loafers

Question: Why don’t more babies work?

Excuse me, did I say “more”? I meant, why don’t
any
babies work? After all, there are millions of babies around, and most of them appear to be extremely underemployed. There are so many jobs—being commissioner of Major League Baseball, say, or running the snack concession at the Olympic synchronized swimming venue—and yet it seems that babies never fill them. So why aren’t babies working? I’ll tell you. Walk down any street, and within a minute or so you will undoubtedly come across a baby. The baby will be lounging in a stroller, maybe snoozing, maybe tippling a bottle, maybe futzing around with a stuffed teddy—whatever. After one good look, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that babies are lazy. Or worse. Think of that same baby, same languid posture, same indolent attitude, but now wearing dark sunglasses. You see it all the time. Supposedly, it has to do with UV rays, but the result is that a baby with sunglasses looks not just lazy, but lazy and snobby. Sort of like an Italian film producer. You know: “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Baby isn’t available at the moment. No, Mr. Baby hasn’t had a chance to look at your screenplay yet. Why don’t you just send coverage, and Mr. Baby will get back to you when he can.”

This is right about when you are going to bring up statistics about show business babies. Granted, there are some show-biz babies, but their numbers are tiny. For one thing, there isn’t that much work, and anyway most of it is completely visual driven, not talent driven. And everyone knows that babies lose their looks practically overnight, which means that even if Baby So-and-So lands a role in a major studio feature, she’ll do the work and go to the big premiere and maybe even make a few dollars on her back-end points, but by the next day she’s lucky if she’s an answer on
Jeopardy!
Modeling superbabies? Same. Remember those babies zooming around in the Michelin tire ads? Where are they now?

The one job that babies seem willing and eager to do is stroller pushing. Well, big deal, since 1) they’re actually very bad at it, and 2) am I the only one who didn’t get the memo saying that there was a lot of extra stroller pushing that desperately needed to be done? Besides, it’s not a job, it’s a responsibility. For a baby to claim that pushing his or her own stroller counts as gainful employment is about as convincing as for me to declare that my full-time job is to floss regularly.

Elevator-button pushing? Not a job: a prank. Unless you really need to stop on every floor. And have you ever watched babies trying to walk? Is it possible that they don’t work but still go out for a three-martini lunch? Of course, babies do a lot of pro bono projects, like stand-up (and fall-down) comedy and preverbal psycholinguistic research, but we all know that pro bono is just Latin for Someone Else Buys My Pampers.

One recent summery morning, I walked across Central Park on my way to my own place of employment—where, by the way, I have to be every day whether I want to or not. The park was filled with babies, all loafing around and looking happy as clams. They love summer. And what’s not to like? While the rest of us, weary cogs of industry, are worrying about an annual report and sweating stains into our suits, the babies in the park are relaxed and carefree and mostly nude—not for them the nightmare of tan marks, let alone the misery of summer work clothes. And what were they doing on this warm afternoon? Oh, a lot of really taxing stuff: napping, snacking on Cheerios, demanding a visit with various dogs, hanging out with their friends—everything you might do on a gorgeous July day if you were in a great mood, which you would be if you didn’t have to work for a living. That morning, I was tempted to suggest a little career counseling to one of these blithe creatures, but as I approached, the baby turned his attention ferociously and uninterruptibly to one of his toes and then, suddenly, to the blade of grass in his fist. I know that look: I do it on buses when I don’t want anyone to sit next to me. It always works for me, and it worked like a charm for this “I seem to remember telling you I’m in a meeting” baby. I was outfoxed and I knew it, so I headed for my office. As I crossed the playground, weaving among the new leisure class, I realized something. The reason babies don’t work? They’re too smart.