Yes — that ravishing, raving, cold and calculating McQueen show at the Met. It took me by the shoulders, bit my cheek, and made me see that ‘fashion’ could carry the depth, evocations, and provocations of art.
moodswings
Amanda's diary entries
Miss Lonely-Hearts Speaks
— on the death of a friend, and other departures
As for myself, I did not pray for him. I did for him. As he grew increasingly compromised, my free attention tended toward lending a hand with the practical matters of his daily life, his husband’s too.
Plight of a Gazelle
existential vulnerability at the office, black magic, and one blue moon.
Once in a while, we look at ourselves, at the long hours we keep, at our life and death devotion to what much of the world could care less about, and we shake our heads and smile together.
It’s only advertising, we murmur, it ain’t brain-surgery.
My Toast to the Laddies in the #MeToo Age
(this ain’t a ‘moment’)
Robbie Burns Day – 2018
I gave this Toast to the Laddies at the home of Ken & Setenay, where we gather every year to celebrate the poetry of Robert Burns and others by reading aloud our favorite works. We march behind the haggis, drink scotch together, eat neeps and tatties, and fill our bowls from a vat of delicious vegetarian chili, anachronistically served. The fellow who was to give the Toast to the Lassies was unable to attend this year. So mine to the laddies was the only toast given. Because of its vulgarity, I did not read aloud the contents of the text message mentioned. That text message is reproduced here.
Well, lassies. Well, laddies. Fasten your seatbelts, because I’m going to get right to it.
It’s been strange days for the likes of us lately, hasn’t it? So much conflict, so much tension exposed in the news. So many secret crimes - against women and girls mostly - all in the open, all of a sudden. Never have we seen the laddies lose public esteem so precipitously, in such numbers. Key figures in sports, in culture, in politics. You know them. Bill Cosby. Louis CK. Poor, foolish Al Franken. Even Garrison Keillor.
How strange it all seems. How disorienting and upsetting. Setenay and I were talking over lunch about it, and that’s when she asked me to give tonight’s toast to the laddies. A toast to the laddies being the last thing, at the time, on my list of things I felt inspired to do.
So, being a contrary sort of woman, I said, ‘yes.’ This is my toast.
Here’s a story.
When I was nine, I was walking my little dog one morning, and a man drove up and called me over to ask for directions. I approached his car, and he had his dick out. It was surreal for a little girl, to see this homely object. I remember his pubic hair puffing out of his zipper. I had not seen pubic hair before. Or an erect penis. Both were unappetizing in the absolute. Gross. And frightening.
I walked away very fast, pulling my little pug-dog along by her leash. Again – I was nine. Of course, that was not the last such encounter I was to have, growing up in New York City. Far from it.
Here’s a different sort of story. Different, but still an example of what certain laddies feel entitled to do, or to say to a lassie. The sort of thing a lassie would never say to a laddie.
In 2017, a man I counted as a contemporary, fellow artist, and friend took me out for drinks. He was rattling on about his experiences on Tinder, his swipes, his hook-ups. I must have glazed-over because he stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said in all earnestness, ‘but, Amanda, at your age, you’re invisible, aren’t you?’
Later in 2017, my friend’s 25-year old grad student roommate sent me a text message with a sexual proposition so ugly, my friend expelled him from the household. The text read, ‘how are you? i wish i could come over and watch youtube in your bed and relax, then fuck you in front of your dogs.’
This roommate – I am old enough to be his mother. But he thought it was absolutely fine to assault me with a text message, for whatever uninvited reason, in 2017. This hyper-educated, professional young man.
So – between the ages of nine and today – there have been decades of this. These unprovoked shocks. And I am sharing here only the lighter fare. I’m leaving the physical violations out.
Another story, jumping back in time again. My first day in first grade, the first thing another student said to me was when the little boy sitting at the desk in front of me turned around and – apropos of nothing – declared, ‘I’m a boy, I’m better than you.’
He was telling me something I didn’t know yet. But he believed it. He was so certain. And I could feel a wound in me opening up. A question. Was this true?
Is this true?
He planted doubt in me that day, a terrible doubt. And the more I was in the world, the more that doubt was affirmed by the aggressive acts of other individuals and the persistent rigidity of cultural structures, the harder I pushed against it.
And I tell you now – the push has proved exhausting. And it never fucking ends. On the street, at home, at work. I look at my road ahead, and I feel despair. And if I told you, laddies – if any woman told you – if we were totally open and honest about our lives and what we endure year after year, lifetime after lifetime, you would want to tear the grass from the earth with your teeth.
Or – more likely – you simply wouldn’t believe us. You wouldn’t believe it could be as bad as all that.
Until, perhaps, now, with the #MeToo movement. Oh, the many sins of many men revealed, beloved heroes brought down by their misbegotten, unquestioned sense of what their rights are above the rights of the woman sitting beside them.
It’s crushing to hear about it all.
One feels – aha! At last.
One feels – oh no! I don’t want it to be true. I mean, I knew, I knew it was true. I just didn’t want it to be that true.
One feels – not vindication.
But nausea.
#MeToo has been such a big topic lately. I was at a holiday dinner with friends, and we were all talking about it. I spoke of some of my own #MeToo experiences, things that happened at work and elsewhere. A man at the table, tall, white, with liberal-looking hair, said, ‘your sample size is quite small.’
He said, ‘I have never abused a woman.’
He said, ‘I don’t know any man who has.’
He said, ‘I am a feminist.’
He said, ‘And – anyway – in your stories, what is the common denominator?’
The room looked at itself. Somebody said, ‘men?’
He said, ‘No. It’s Amanda. Amanda, it’s you. You are the common denominator. Your bad experiences are the result of your bad choices.’
The room froze.
And I said, ‘Fuck you.’
Quite firmly.
I then said, ‘Fuck you.’
The two best possible words. So good, I spoke them twice. I couldn’t believe I’d said them in a roomful of middle-aged, educated, mostly straight, mostly white, professional people. People just like us here tonight.
My friend, Vivek, a gay man of color, said, “Bill – you’ve gone too far.”
Vivek was the only person present who spoke up for me. Besides myself.
Later, as I was leaving, Bill made an aggressive apology. He caught up with me in the foyer. We were alone there. He was taller than I, and he kept stepping forward, into my space, looming, apologizing, trembling.
Trembling with what? With rage?
I said, ‘hang on now, you are pushing on me,’ and I put my hands up to indicate a physical boundary. He said, in a loud voice, ‘Oh, what – you’re the victim now? You’re the victim?’
I said, ‘Do I look like a victim to you?’ I grabbed my coat and left. Walking down the street, I found myself laughing aloud. I sat in my car, aghast & amazed. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing. The way we women do.
Because – well. Let’s look at what this feminist man said:
He said, ‘your sample size is quite small.’ Discrediting my data.
He said, ‘I have never abused a woman.’ Asserting his data.
He said, ‘I don’t know any man who has.’ Asserting his data.
He said, ‘I am a feminist.’ Asserting his superior expertise in the matter.
He said, ‘You are the common denominator. Your bad experiences are the result of your bad choices.’ Blaming the victim.
He said, ‘You’re the victim now?’ Here, he was apologizing.
VIvek also left the party and followed me home in his car. Once we got there, we embraced, laughing. Just dying of laughter. And I said to him – ‘now I get it. I finally understand what white fragility looks like.’
And it’s true. I get white fragility now. I got a lot out of that evening.
OK, look. The way women love is maternal. The way we lassies love you laddies, have always loved you laddies, is because of yourselves, of course. All of the wonderful things you are. But it is in spite of yourselves, too. We love you in spite of yourselves, as mothers will do. It is a big job. Don’t think it isn’t. You don’t always make it easy.
So, what kind of a goddamn toast is this? Is this not a moment to shower you all with praise?
No. That’s for every other night of the year.
Tonight, I am asking you laddies to give us lassies a new reason to toast you.
I know some of you. Maybe just a little, but enough to know something of what you have been through in recent times, how you have suffered. Bitterly suffered. The world is a beautiful, terrible place, and no one escapes the horror of its indifference. No one. I know how brave you have been. How strong. I know how you have stood firm for your work, for your communities and your families. I know some of you laddies to be quite principled. Soulful. Gentle. Generous to a fault. Kindly-natured and goodly-hearted. I know a few of you have daughters. And so, I am asking for more. Yes, more.
Typical lassie, asking for more. When will it end!
Here’s the thing.
I know the stories I’ve told tonight are hard to hear. But I’m not a celebrity. I’m not someone in the news. I am someone right here. I am with you.
It won’t do to back away from #MeToo, to disavow it, to say, ‘hey I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me, I would never.’
Brothers, This Ain’t All About You, Personally. There are others.
And it won’t do to say, ‘I don’t know men like that.’
Because, guess what, brothers. You do.
I am asking for you to shake off your hurt feelings if I’ve hurt them tonight, shake off your pride, trepidation and wariness, and to stand up for us, your women, your sisters, your own dear lassies. Don’t stand by while a woman is being belittled or mistreated – even if she isn’t in the room. Speak out.
Call out micro-aggressions as you see them, and macro-aggressions for that matter. Don’t let Vivek be the only guy to stand up for a woman in-a-spot. Hey – I know. I’m strong. I am an accomplished person. I have good posture. I speak well. I have wonderful hair. I look like the last woman on earth to need your help. But, sometimes I do.
We do.
This is about something other than chivalry. It’s about decency. It’s about showing up for the lassies. In a consistent, principled way. Out there. In here. It won’t be easy. We know this.
So, laddies, though you have given us lassies much, so much already - give us yet a new reason to toast you. Your opportunity will surely come.
In the meantime – I do lift my glass to you. I lift it in faith, in hope, and in motherly affection, for you are a promising bunch.
I embrace you.
Here’s to you.
Here’s to us.
Here’s to the better selves we yet may become.
1/25/18 Amanda Moody
Pride. Vanity. Advertising. (a producer's tale of peanut butter and woe)
Amanda Moody in Berkeley
Pride & Vanity. Vanity & Pride. Both vying for precedence as The First Deadly Sin. How characteristic. Who, oh, who will win? Who would want to?
The rooster, the peacock, the Emperor in his new clothes. What are any of these without their haughty feathers or, for that matter, the mere idea of feathers? They are small, puny, naked things, mortified and ashamed. Pride always comes before a Fall. It’s just this side of Shame. Shame, which is not a Sin but the wooden nickel God gave us when he cast us out of the garden and into the world of Men without so much as a suit of clothes. How like an angry father. How quickly “I’m so proud of you” turns to “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
Pride is exclusive, which is to say it’s excluding. One of its etymological antecedents, the Latin ‘prodesse,’ breaks down into ‘pro’ which means forward and ‘esse’ meaning to be. ‘Pride,’ literally meaning to be before. So Pride is what we do when we put ourselves ahead of others. Apart. Above. It is the antithesis of Love. Pride requires no accomplishments to bolster it. Pride is so elitist, so proud, it needs only its own idea of itself to be.
And Pride is not the same as Dignity. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were, on the whole, dignified. Their opposite numbers, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were – to a man – frighteningly proud. Those old twin cocks, Bush II and Blair, along with their bantam opponents, Hussein and bin Laden, were all proud, all dangerous people. I don’t think of them as dignified. Here’s another example: I recently watched the 1965 Cambridge Union Society debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, the subject of which was “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” To hear Baldwin’s oratory, its beauty and clarity and confidence and rage and compassion, is to experience a dignity that opens the heart and the mind in a way that is both arresting and welcome. To listen to poor Buckley’s response is to endure the pitiful pride and vanity necessary to the technical execution of the opposing argument. It’s embarrassing to behold. I can look back on President Obama’s presidency – whatever its successes and failings might be – as one that has been acquitted with consistent dignity. A Trump presidency will undoubtedly be one marked, perhaps even disfigured, by Pride. And who can consider Trump without also considering Vanity, denoting as it does excessive Pride, especially in one’s appearance. Vanity also means Futility, as in comb-overs and spray-tans.
Here’s a tale. When I was a young commercial producer, one of our ad agency’s clients had developed a Revolutionary New Product. Something they hoped mall America would praise God for the good of. This new and needful thing? Low-Fat Peanut Butter. It was the kind of peanut butter that had label-warnings written in teeny-tiny letters, letters so minuscule they are, in the trade, called mouse-type. I suppose this was because mice are the last creatures on earth innocent of the inter-webs and TV (even my dog watches golf) and so maintain their interest in reading. Well, what the mice were being warned against by this label was the possibility – the slight, slight chance, mind you – that once having eaten this low-fat peanut butter, they might experience severe abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and leakage.
Leakage.
There. I said it.
The peanut butter was, whimsically, called Peter Pan. Peter Pan Peanut Butter. You know it. It’s been a supermarket staple forever. But now, Low-Fat! There was a picture of Peter Pan on the label, looking mischievous and slightly cruel. The winking image of an elf evil enough to devise a diet peanut butter that induced leakage. What else did he have to be winking about, after all? Was his heavily lashed, batting eye a sexy come-on to Moms everywhere? Eat me, he might have been saying. You’re going to love it. Or was the perma-wink Peter Pan’s invitation for Mom to join in on a private joke, just the two of them. An inside joke, as it were. Deep inside.
It was the ad agency’s notion that - given a choice between Peter Pan Low-Fat and the fully-fatted peanut paste offered by the leading competitor, Skippy, anyone would choose Peter Pan in a blind taste test. The advertising line was, ‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to choose Peter Pan Low-Fat,’ or ‘You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to choose Peter Pan,’ ‘You don’t have to be a child prodigy,’ and so on. In other words, any idiot would be sure to choose Peter Pan Low-Fat and that idiot, ladies and gentleman, was you. The creative team wanted me, the agency producer, to find, not actors, but real, really remarkable people to do testimonials about the wonders of Peter Pan. That is, they wanted to find a nuclear physicist, for example, to hawk The Pan. These real, really remarkable people had to be geniuses and had to pick Peter Pan Low-Fat in a blind taste-test in order to be cast. The only other requirement was that none of them have an adversity to leakage.
Let me cut to the chase and say that I did find these people, including a child prodigy mathematician who was, at the age of 12, already starting classes at Harvard. Unfortunately, his name was Mohammad and, this being the time of the Gulf War under George I, the client was shy about having a little brown person hawking their little brown paste. They covered by saying that Mohammad didn’t depict their user demographic fairly. I’m sure they were right. I’m sure there’s not a teaspoon of low-fat peanut butter to be found in all the Islamic world to this very day. Rocket Scientists were grossly under-employed under George I, and so it was no problem finding one of those to be in our spot. A hungry astrophysicist will eat almost anything, it turns out.
The hardest thing to find by far was a female brain surgeon with spare time enough to have issued and raised two young children (as the storyboard demanded), who was herself youngish looking and reasonably attractive. Oh, eye surgeons were easily found. Lower GI specialists, yes. ENTs, innumerable. But brain surgeons? Female? At the time, I located fewer than 20 lady neurosurgeons in the entire United States. Of the three who agreed to the pre-screening taste-test, one had to cancel. And so we had just two on the casting tape to choose from. The first was heavy set and smiling but didn’t pick our butter. The other woman was a good-looking forty-something, whose beauty was only slightly ruined by many years of study and sawing through craniums and tinkering with the brain’s vague, yet precision machinery. Dedication, intelligence and warmth radiated in faint sprays of crows-feet around her huge, genius eyes. Her youthful ambition had once been expressed in a stern jaw-line, a jaw-line which her life-time’s experience had lately softened, giving her a look of gentle steadfastness. She looked, in short, exactly how I would want my own brain-surgeon to look. Like Susan Sarandon, circa The Banger Sisters. Incredibly, she genuinely liked Peter Pan Low-Fat: we had her on a date-stamped tape doing a blind taste test that proved it. And she said she would do the spot.
Anything to be on TV, she said.
And I had to wonder, “Even if it means getting a little crap in your pants?”
Six weeks later, we were ready to shoot. We had flown the brain surgeon and her two daughters in first class from New York to Vancouver and put them up in a suite. It was two days before the shoot and I, for one, was eager to meet our lovely lady-doctor face to face. Not to mention wardrobing her and her kids. But when I called her room to make an arrangement, she put me off. “I’m not a morning person,” she said. Well, I caved in. I didn’t want to pressure her unduly. She was not, after all, a professional actress. She was a brain surgeon. She put me off twice more, didn’t want to sit down with the director, didn’t want to join us for a get-acquainted drink. So it was that I did not meet our star performer - and what a performer she was - until the morning of the shoot.
At 5:00 AM, we were on location, shooting in one of those bland, California kitchens whose sunny, light oak cabinetry says ‘middle class,’ ‘average,’ and ‘this should be you but it never will be so shut up and watch.’ We had taken over most of the house, using the sunken living room as a holding pen for the client and agency people, while one of the bedrooms was being used for wardrobe, hair and makeup. From a distance, I saw the brain surgeon come in with her children, and observed as they were escorted down the hallway to dress. They seemed to scurry down that hallway as if into a rabbit-hole, moving a trifle too nimbly for the early hour. Too nimbly, I thought, for someone who was not, as the good doctor described herself, a morning person. 6:00 AM came ‘round, then 7. I noticed a PA hauling a 20-pound bag of ice into makeup. Strange, thought I. By then it was 8 AM. At 10:00, I could see by the schedule that we were meant to have gotten off our first shot a half-hour ago. Just as I had this realization, the makeup and hair people emerged in their smocks, looking oncologically grim. As they came closer, I knew the patient was me. The makeup man was weeping, and the hairstylist was doing her best to prop him up. Apparently, I was terminal.
“Neber, neber, neber, neber all-my-life haf dis happen to me. Di eyez so black, di facez so swoll!! Dere’s nodenuff ice inna da whole North Pole gonna get tha’swollen down. Oh, my Ga-a-a-d!”
“Shhhh, darling, it’s gonna be okay,” says the hairstylist. Then, turning to me, “It’s true what he says. He’s tried everything. Everything. I tried to cover up the scars with her hair, but it’s no good.”
Scars?
“Dis what I try tell you! The docto-lady haffhad a faceliff!”
The Doctor Lady Have Had A Face Lift. Very recently, it would seem.
The cost of the day’s filming amounted to 175,000 dollars. To cancel meant a total loss, compounded by the consequent loss of our editorial contract of 30,000 dollars, not to mention the media plan which amounted to a multi-million dollar national network buy. The good doctor wasn’t a SAG member, she wasn’t even an actress, so there was no agent to call, no union, no one for our client to blame but us, the agency. The burnt hair stink of a lawsuit swirled in my nostrils. Looking ‘round me, I saw clustered the director, his producer, cinematographer, my creative director, copywriter, account executive, all of them freaking out, not a one of them under 45, all staring at me, waiting for me to pronounce the patient dead. Either that, or drop dead myself. Well, I was 27 years old. I wanted to live.
Shoot her, I said.
At 10:30, the account executive took the client to lunch, and at noon, the brain surgeon was trotted out. Clearly, she was having a Clockwork Orange sort of day. For the most obvious symptom of her recent surgery was that she couldn’t close her eyes. The lids were peeled back tight by swelling and by the few tiny sutures still cunningly woven into her hairline. As the hours passed, one eye began to ooze. I ordered a production assistant designated to stand out of frame and pass her bunches of tissue to staunch the flow. All in all, the doctor’s performance that day was disturbingly unblinking.
Smiling, however, was not a problem. There was nothing but smiling all day long. She couldn’t fully close her lips and was, therefore, mouth-breathing under hot lights for hours at a time. Every so often, she’d dip her finger into a pot of Vaseline and rub it on her teeth to prevent her gob shriveling up entirely. Her smile stretched across her face in an inflexible, enigmatic leer. Was she happy? Rueful? Sardonically amused? I’ll never know. Her tenterhooked grin gave nothing away save itself, the perfect answer to Peter Pan’s own sexless, unprisable wink.
By the time the client returned to set, it was mid-afternoon, and much of the swelling had subsided, drained mostly, I believe, through that one eye. The cinematographer had moved his camera away from her and resorted to long lenses, favoring her good side, the one that wasn’t oozing. The lines she was meant to say were, where possible, given to the girls, who were filmed in heartwarming close-ups, mumbling our sticky scripture through mouthfuls of low-fat Peter Pan.
And it all came off. We got enough in-the-can to fashion thirty mediocre seconds of peanut-buttery pitch. And the story of our travail never leaked – pardon the expression. We never told. Not the advertising agency heads. Not our client. And certainly not the good doctor. For the biggest lie of the day was the lie we never told her. Which was this: that no one had noticed. Nobody saw. No one was frightened, inconvenienced, or remotely troubled by her stellar infraction. Her face-lift was never, ever mentioned to her. For, to acknowledge the too-obvious folly of her vanity, her pride in her own appearance, would have been to shame her. And a good performance must always, above all, be shameless.
I’ve since marveled at these events, and often. She’d had the facelift some time between the blind taste test and the shoot. I mean, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know a facelift can take a year to get over. How could she have done it? I wondered if she’d worked out a barter deal with the plastic surgeon: I’ll do your brain if you’ll do my face. But really, after conquering medical school, her internship, building her practice and professional reputation, could being on TV mean so much to her? Did she want the television audience to see her as she remembered herself as a young pre-med? Played by Rocky Horror era Susan Sarandon?
At the end of the shoot day, I escorted the doctor to her limousine. While we waited for her girls to come out of the bathroom, I leaned in through the limo’s open window, took her delicate, neurosurgeon’s hand in mine, gazed into her one dry eye and said, “Doctor, I’ve been meaning to ask … did you do something to your hair?” Just then her daughters ran out of the house, looking a trifle green. They clambered gingerly into the car, the both of them packed full of Peter Pan Low-Fat Peanut Butter, tight as a pair of water balloons. As I watched the limo drive off, I smiled to myself. And winked. “Peter Pan,” I thought, “Do your worst.” For I knew, whatever gastrointestinal misfortune befell her or her little girls that long, hot summer’s night, the good doctor wouldn’t dare make a peep about it.
Because Pride is not dignified. And Vanity never tells.
4.23.2016, Amanda Moody
A version of this story was originally performed in San Francisco as part of A Cellar Full of Noise's 7 Sins Series, directed by James B. Judd