The Reluctant Skiier

Skiing, like golf, was not one of those activities that strengthened the marital bond. Nothing like being tricked onto a descent that is beyond one’s ability, concentrating desperately on making it to the next turn, while spouse cheerfully schusses down slope offering annoying advice, or worse still abandoning you to catapult down and land face forward, backside and legs up…like a sprawling cockroach. Might have screamed from top of slope with vocabulary that would shame a fishwife.

Advice from random man in the gondola: “It’s better to look good than be good.”

Children: the three that are old enough to ski or snowboard are all better than me now. They’re not even teenagers and already patronizing. Every dollar spent on ski or snowboard school is well worth it. Can I keep them in those programs until they are 18?

This feeling was compounded by experience riding in lifts with Other People’s Children, especially their surly teenagers. One sixteen year old girl whined: “Mo’om, I can’t believe you got me this grody sunscreen,” before flicking it off in disgust towards her father. My sister and I had couldn’t resist having fun with this one.

“It’s so hard to be your age, isn’t it?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to get to our age with fair skin like that and no sunscreen. Sun damage! All those unsightly wrinkles.”
“Not to mention the cost of laser treatment to get rid of those liver spots.”

Might be a bad mother: on another gondola ride, proudly explained to a woman that my advanced snowboarder daughter is still in classes so she can do things like the terrain park, where she needs more professional instruction. She replies: “Oh, in the local ER where I work, we call that the trauma park.”

Vocabulary: Seriously cannot imagine myself picking up the jargon. Am I the only one who thinks “Got a face shot in Pow!” sounds like manga porn? On the other hand, did find myself learning useful words like “white out”, for skiing in extreme low visibility and “graupel”, for the precipitation that’s somewhere between freezing rain and snow, and generally flays your face.

Skiing powder: Um…vastly overrated for people of my ability. More like sliding over ice patches and into snow drifts. Hubby’s advice: “Just go faster and you’ll glide over it” not particularly easy to apply when you’re already scared out of your mind.

Must be lacking in adrenaline response because don’t feel need for speed. Can’t get image of people who ski better than me and come home from vacation in various casts out of my mind. It’s hard keeping up with four children as it is; can’t imagine what that would be like if I were in need of massive physical rehabilitation.

Ski boots are: an instrument of torture.

Ski equipment is: a pain to keep up with when you have four children--all those face masks, goggles, mittens, helmets, boots, poles, skis. Not to mention complications when child utters most dreaded word in skiing vocabulary: “I need to pee.”

Ski food: $60 to feed family of five on junk food at the top of the mountain, anybody?

Best part of skiing: kids are fully occupied, ditching afternoon skiing (am tired by then anyway) to sip hot chocolate by the fire and read a book or bake Nestle Toll House cookies and watch the classic movie channel!

What is Thanksgiving?

An English woman asked me this simple enough question today. Thanksgiving is the biggest American family holiday. It takes place on the last Thursday of November and is also the biggest air travel date in the US. As a family holiday, it is associated with all the things people usually conjure up when they think of family obligations, and people they only see once a year, with whom they may or may not get on well. My favorite movie about Thanksgiving and the modern American family is Home for the Holidays starring Holly Hunter.

In grade school, American children dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and are taught how the Pilgrims escaped religious persecution in England and gave thanks for their very first successful harvest in the New World, with a celebratory feast to which they invited their new friends, the Indians. Of course some of these escapees of religious persecution didn’t turn out to be the most tolerant people themselves. Then perhaps the Indians weren’t thankful when we later killed them and took their land, but only kill-joys bring that stuff up.

Thanksgiving also comes with various required dishes that many Americans hate, but prepare anyway because otherwise it wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving—the chief ones are turkey, sweet potatoes, wild rice, cranberries and pumpkin pie. Depending on your individual tastes, the recipes you select, and your cooking ability, these dishes can either be mouth-watering or stomach-churning. In my case, having a Mother Who Could Cook turned me into the worst of both worlds--a judgmental eater, who never bothered to learn any of the basic holiday dishes because there was always somebody there willing and happy to cook them for me and everybody else.

Since I will be away from home and want to cook my own Thanksgiving dinner, my good friend has suggested I go to the Butterball website, which even has a turkey hotline. Whenever, I despair of my country, I am comforted to see this return to our roots and thoughtful marketing, aimed at me, the consumer. The Butterball website dispenses useful information like how long to bake your turkey based on its weight, how big a turkey you should get based on the number of people you are inviting and a recipe selection that caters to the two Americas—those whose lofty and unachievable ideals that lead them to attempt a demi-glace once a year, and those who happily grab the bouillon cube and water; those make their own pie crusts and those who grab the ready-made variety off the freezer shelf at the grocery store. In the US, there’s even a new option for centrists—the roll-out circle of pie crust that you can feel good about pressing into your pan, sometimes it’s even made with real butter.

A family member who once worked in Unilever’s baby foods division described the middle-ground consumer as the Holy Grail of Marketing. I asked her what Unilever thought about women like me who breast-fed for a year and made their own baby food? She said: “We don’t even bother to try and market to people like you. Our ideal consumer is the guilt-ridden mother who is willing to pay more to give her baby healthier off-the-shelf options.” After four children, whom I duly breastfed and made healthy home-made purees for, that woman is me! I’m glad to learn that I matter, that someone cares. Thank you for giving me those choices Butterball!

By the way, it was once brought to my attention in blog comments, some of you are offended by the fact I and other citizens of the US call ourselves Americans. Yes, some of us are aware that we are only one country in the continent of North America. However, if you can’t find any grossly more offensive use of imperialist, Euro-centric, US-centric linguistic manipulation to focus on, shame on you. Please devote your energies to finding and marketing a better alternative, preferably identifying with the struggle of indigenous native peoples…and not a16th century Italian mapmaker.

Book Review: The Hemingses of Monticello

I picked this up as an impulse buy at the book store, and I'm glad I did. Like most Americans, I associated Monticello with Thomas Jefferson. Although I hadn’t read any Jefferson biographies, what I had read about him lead me to admire him as a Great Man of the Enlightenment—humanist, writer, builder of nations, universities, and of course, his own very lovely neoclassical house on a hill—Monticello—Italian for little mountain.

I wasn’t ignorant of the contradictions of the writer of “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” being a slave-owner, who had a long-term relationship and fathered multiple children with one of his slaves. I just didn’t see the interest of commenting on the obvious contradictions or indulging in historical “what if” fantasies. Thankfully, neither does Annette Gordon-Reed.

Her book is not about de-bunking Jefferson. She’s more interested in members of his family, about whom much less is known—the eponymous "Hemingses of Monticello". Gordon-Reed focuses on the Hemings for two convenient reasons: their connection to a well-known American historical figure, the fact that, due to this connection, there is somewhat more documentation about them than their peers in the plantation South.

What did this South look like? Gordon-Reed describes a pre-Revolutionary population of opportunistic frontier pioneers, living off tobacco as a cash crop. The English govt. gave the settlers land based on a head-count system—a certain number of acres for themselves and every other person whose passage they paid to the Colonies. Over time, the primary labor for the plantations evolved from English-born indentured servants to imported, enslaved Africans and their descendants. She explains that the typical Colonial plantation-owner was deeply indebted, usually to English trading firms and speculates that the self-interest in canceling that debt, as well as the Colonists’ desire to further encroach westward into the Indian lands (limited by Britain pre-Revolution) were less lofty ideals that may have accompanied “no taxation without representation.”

The story begins with Elizabeth Hemings, the daughter of an African-born woman and an English ship’s captain. There is some evidence to the effect that Hemings’ father recognized that he had a daughter and may have wanted to free her, but could not because her mother was the property of another man, who refused to sell her. She explains how, the word mulatto, for mixed-race people of African and European descent comes from the word mule, an animal that cannot reproduce itself—that the Colonies had laws against miscegenation but they were only applied to poor whites or situations where the mother was white and the father was black. When plantation-owners like Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, took slave mistresses, like Elizabeth Hemings, and fathered children with them, the law looked the other way.

The growing number of these mixed-race children and the constant fear of slave revolts, caused the colonists to significantly depart from English law. The English tradition would have granted the child the legal status of the father, which would have meant freedom. Instead the Colonies looked to Roman law as inspiration, basing a child’s legal status on that of its mother—thus the children of free fathers and enslaved mothers, would remain enslaved.

The Hemingses were Thomas Jefferson’s family in the literal sense, not just from a paternalistic plantation owner’s view. Many of Elizabeth Hemings’s children were his wife’s half-brothers and half-sisters. When he married Martha Wayles, Elizabeth and her children came with her to Monticello. One of these half-sisters was Sara (called Sally) Hemings, who became Jefferson’s mistress and the father of his children, after his wife’s death. Gordon-Reed explains how the Hemings family’s mixed-race status and blood connections to the Wayles/Jeffersons gave them a privileged status at Monticello—many of them were taught to read and write, they were given better clothes than their enslaved brethren, taught trades, exempted from field labor, given more freedom of movement. Some members of the Hemings family eventually received their freedom, something that would not be an option for the enslaved people of Monticello, outside that family. Gordon-Reed makes the point that house work, while physically less taxing than field labor, was certainly arduous enough and presented the stress of negotiating emotional and physical proximity to the plantation masters. It also cut them off from the more Afro-centric traditions/culture that the fieldworkers were able to maintain.

Gordon-Reed is careful about not generalizing or making assumptions where they cannot be made. She notes that an enslaved woman, like Elizabeth Hemings, could not refuse sex with a white man, whether the children that resulted from these relationships were the product of rape, or whether there existed some emotional attachment with the children’s father depended on individual circumstances, not documented for the historical researcher. She notes that the same was more or less true for white women and their husbands. While these women had a relationship that existed “in law,” they often did not necessarily choose or love these husbands.

One of the more striking facts that I learned about Jefferson is that his wife died from complications resulting from her frequent pregnancies and childbirth. Gordon-Reed points out that while he apparently loved his wife and was inconsolable at her death, he could not have been ignorant of his role in the circumstances causing her death. On her deathbed, Martha Jefferson made her husband promise never to take another wife, a promise Gordon-Reed speculates was likely motivated by her own experience with two stepmothers and the desire to protect her children. Jefferson kept his promise to his wife, and later when seeking another outlet for sexual companionship, looked no farther than with her enslaved half-sister, thus keeping it all in the family, with a woman who did not have a legal status and could never be a step-mother to his children in the eyes of the law.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but it does shine a not-very-comforting light on a not-so-distant era, a world where the children of the plantation owners would be given an enslaved child their own age to be a companion and later servant, a world where the house on the mountain is a symbol for the desire to aesthetically and morally distance oneself from the harsh realities of the plantation economy and the enslaved peoples that make it work; a house that was literally built and run by Jefferson’s own mixed-race family members; a reminder that the leisure to pursue the accomplishments achieved by Thomas Jefferson were underwritten by the enslaved labor of the people who tended to him, to his family, and his plantation. It also gives a face to those enslaved people, and looks at how they carved an identity for themselves, particularly, how a mixed-race family like Hemings both benefited from and paid a price for the different and ambiguous status they occupied within the Peculiar Institution.

She's Still Not Preoccupied with 1985

I first heard this song waiting for carpool pick-up in my Volvo SUV☺ Not very nice to mothers are you Bowling For Soup? In cheesy recent pop, we much prefer Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom (has got it going on)” thank you very much. While I did (and still do) enjoy a lot of 80s music, I was also happy to put that decade behind me—no snakeskin miniskirt, boyfriend, or Duran Duran concerts to wax nostalgic about there.

My memories of the high school in the 80s have a lot more in common with Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep than “The Breakfast Club” or “Sixteen Candles.”

So it is not without irony that I find myself shopping for an 80’s theme party at H&M, where clothes from that decade seem to have made a comeback. They are playing “Blister in the Sun,” a female-vocalist, Euro-pop version that lacks all the angst of the Violent Femmes original. I score a pair of leatherette leggings, fuchsia satin top and black Members Only-style jacket. Paying for these clothes, wearing rather conservative and uninspired “bourge-y” sweater, slacks and Ferragamo handbag, I’m sure the register girl at H&M thinks I’m schizophrenic or have a whole alternative night-life as a street-walker.

After the H&M experience, I feel the need to explain to the 20-something sales-girl at Sephora the objective behind my request for shimmery fuchsia eye shadow: “I’m buying this for an 80s party” meaning “I don’t normally have this bad taste.” The sales girl with the dyed black hair and nose ring (who definitely was not born earlier than 1980) is impressed. “Una fiesta, anos ochenta, que guay!” She explains this to her gay male sales associate with the Clark Kent-style glasses. He’s impressed too. “Una fiesta ochentera! We wish we were going.” Are the 80s suddenly cool again, even for people too young to remember that decade?

Actual items of clothing or accessories worn by Nathalie MF in the 80s

1) Baggy sweater and leg warmers
2) Stirrup pants
3) Jellies shoes
4) Neon socks
5) Shirts with shoulder pads
6) Large hoop ear-rings
8) Stonewashed jeans with zippers at the bottom of the leg. I babysat many hours to save up the $50 for that pair of Guess jeans.
9) Overalls
10) Catholic school-girl plaid skirt, white shirt with Peter Pan collar, knee socks and penny loafers--until my transfer to “The John Knox Institute” which didn’t have a uniform, but did have a strict dress code
11) Lots of Laura Ashley floral skirts and dresses. Embarrassing but true. I spent a lot of time ironing yards of floral fabric to perfect this look.
12) Bermuda shorts and argyle knee socks.
13) Kelly green and electric blue eye-liner
7) Pouf-dress for prom
14) Total write-off year? 8th grade: braces, bad Farrah Fawcett haircut, put on a few pounds, but did not grow taller, had chicken pox the summer before, which was not good for skin, almost failed Algebra…

Then vs. Now

Favorite High School Reunion depiction—30 Rock Episode where Liz Lemon goes back to suburban Philadelphia for her 20th reunion: their private plane gets stranded in the bad weather and Jack accompanies her. She says nobody will believe he’s young enough to be their classmate and he counters: “Rich 50 is like middle-class 37.” She remembers being a nerdy outcast, but they all remember her as being mean, sarcastic and intimidating. She plays spin the bottle and winds up with Jack. They not only don’t kiss, he decides her classmates are right about her.

Sure I was: Nerdy and sarcastic, but most definitely not intimidating.

Happy I grew up then because….no cell phones, messaging or Internet. The stupid things you said and did were confined to throw-away notes or your high school yearbook--not broadcasted, mass-distributed and memorialized in the ether.

Moved on to the 90s for:

Curtis Sittenfeld “Prep” fame-whore/narrow-miss media humiliation

Graduated from college in 1994. Pitched my failure to find a job, combined with large number of interview opportunities to Rolling Stone writer for their “Gen X column—looking for the first job episode.” Used winning lines like “I discussed this with my grandmother and her friends and they said “Honey, we just don’t know what to tell you. When we graduated from college, we joined the Junior League and started playing bridge’;” “I used to write about Personality and Artistic Theory, now look at me, I’m writing about evaporators and batch digesters;” “I picked which college recruiting meetings to attend based on the quality of their buffet spread;” “I failed my interview for a derivatives sales and trading position at a large multi-national bank. I don’t think it mattered so much that I didn’t know what a derivative was…it was the moment I discussed my senior thesis on Samuel Johnson’s theories about being un-able to enjoy/live-in the present because we are constantly fixated on a past or future, which is either far worse or impossibly idealized compared to the ever-vanishing present…where The Head wrote me off as not possessing the driven, goal-oriented Derivatives personality.”

Almost (sort of, not) briefly Infamous

The article never got published and I got three good meals out of this (including one at an upscale restaurant!) on Rolling Stone’s tab.

Will never be representative of my generation because

I actually know most of the lyrics to Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”…

The Beauty Issue

My husband and his friend both assume that another friend of theirs is quite a hit among the ladies. Apparently high school and college were good times for X. “Can you imagine that they used to call him the 'Devastator'."

The irony is that neither my husband, nor his friend, bothered to ask actual women, including their own wives, what they think of X. The man in question is nice enough looking, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about him. The truth is that all above-average looking people are simple abstractions to me, unless they’ve written, said or done something that particularly piques my interest.

I don’t relate too well to the (outward) absence of obvious flaws in other people—like being too nice or too beautiful. No doubt this stems from an instinct to preserve dignity. One wonders if the unnaturally beautiful or virtuous might be applying their own (higher) standards to us: aka “could use an extra hour of treadmill every day,” or “needs to use more age-defying facial moisturizer” or “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.”

Even worse, if I suspect that an above-average good-looking person spends a lot of time improving or maintaining their physical appearance. Extreme self-discipline also makes me uncomfortable—seems too much like a self-mortification fetish. I, myself, last tried a diet in 2005—the South B(i)tch ™, which is exactly how carb-deprivation made me feel. Every time I’ve made an effort to diet or exercise more, I’ve lost the same five pounds, which immediately come back--since I haven’t been willing to make a Permanent Lifestyle Change. I do love walking and hiking, for the pleasure of these activities, not because they are connected in my mind with Self-Improvement. The irony is that all these men who spend hours buffing up in the gym would probably get more female attention if they did something like join a cooking class or book club or learn to dance.

On the self-improvement note, I recently received an email inviting me to a book signing by a former high school classmate who has written a book of lists to help people cope with those life-changing events—buying a new house, getting married, having children, getting divorced, dealing with death, and even the impossibly improbable like the World Trade Center Bombing on 9-11. I thought about this. I make lists too. This gives me a convenient sense of accomplishment, while enabling me to further procrastinate from the tedious things I mostly don’t want to do. I put things in neat stacks or star emails in my in-box. My rationale is that if something is important enough, somebody will remind me to do it and it will then pop back to the top of the list, and eventually I’ll take care of it.

Are women less judgmental about physical appearances than men? I thought about men who would not fall into the category of Somebody Whom Other People Consider Exceptionally Attractive that I would find interesting, like Salman Rushdie, for instance. I loved The Enchantress of Florence. What sort of woman, I wonder does a sensitive, deep writer-type like Salman Rushdie find attractive? Wife number four, Padma, model, celebrity chef. She's beautiful and she can cook, what went wrong there? Apparently, she wasn’t supportive enough of his career. What could the source of the “connection” he feels with most recent girlfriend, Pia Glenn be? Oh wait, that didn’t work out either…because he couldn’t get over Padma. He may write like an angel, but he appears to have the emotional maturity of a 16 year-old…

The interesting thing about getting older is that, for most people, it’s a great equalizer. Apparently X has been going to pick up his children at their school, and noticed that the high school girls in their plaid mini-skirts and knee socks still look cute, but they don’t give him a second look. However, he feels that his appearance is quite appreciated by these girls’ mothers. Sorry “Devastator” you’re cougar bait now.

Hola! or La Prensa Rosa

“I moved back after five years, and nothing had changed. It was like re-discovering old friends.” The two French women and I were talking about the Spanish magazine “Hola” and the cast of characters that regularly grace its pages. In Spain, these people are called “Los Famosos.” Outside of Spain, with two or three exceptions, nobody has heard of them. The fact that three foreign women living in Spain, with respectable educations and otherwise challenging intellectual preoccupations and jobs had become aficionados of Hola! was intriguing, to say the least.

My Spanish mother-in-law explains it this way—“It’s a mental vacation. I can read the same article a second time and not even realize I’ve read it before.” Hola! was started in Barcelona, in the 1940s to focus on “la espuma de la vida”—(poorly translated by me) as “the frothy side of life.” Someone once told me it is the largest circulation magazine in the world. I have not verified this. What I do know is that Hola! pays people for exclusives and that many of its regulars earn all of or a decent supplement to their income selling “exclusivas”.

The Hola! formula never wavers: the photographs are authorized by the subjects and, to the extent that such a thing is possible, are always flattering. The call-outs inform us that the Hola’s cast of characters are “ready for love”, “in love”, “deceived by love”, or “recovering from love.” “So and so is thinking about getting pregnant”, “is pregnant”, "offers us exclusive photographs with her beautiful new baby.” These people give us exclusive tours of their homes, discuss their deceptions, tragic losses, projects and aspirations.”

Sus Majestades Los Reyes

At the top of the Hola! pantheon are their Majesties the King and Queen; their two daughters, the Infantas (my French friends agree there is the nicer looking daughter and “la moche”—the ugly one); the heir, Principe Felipe, who usually looks very dignified; and his brunette Barbie wife, Leticia; and the grandchildren. Their Highnesses are in Hola! by grace of who they are and tolerate the media attention with a certain bored “noblesse oblige.” Unlike the British Royals or the Princesses of Monaco, the Spanish royal family generally behaves itself and doesn’t offer much in the way of juicy scandals. This makes them less entertaining than the sub-deities of Hola, who make a concerted effort to maintain their status as regulars in its pages.

The Woman Who is More Noble than Everybody

People who know about Spanish history will tell you that among the Grandest of the Grandees of Spain, are the Albas. The Duquesa de Alba is so noble that if she were in the same room as the Queen of England, the Queen of England has to give her precedence. This is because back when the Queen of England’s ancestors were backwater Hanoverian electors, The Albas were Somebody’s. When Spain ruled the Holy Roman Empire, the Duque de Alba was at the center of things, suppressing rebellions in the Netherlands. He was immortalized as a bogeyman for later generations of Dutch children: “If you’re not good, the Duque de Alba will get you.” One of the Duquesa de Alba’s ancestors may have been the model for Goya’s “Maja Vestida” and “Maja Desnuda.”

What does the Woman Who is More Noble than Everbody look like? She has a distinctive white person’s Afro of frizzy gray hair and a face that sports the plastic surgery Masque of Death—facial skin pulled tight and immobilized by Botox, the Surprised Eyes, lifted up and pulled at the corners, and the Joker Mouth, stretched wide and tight for a perma-smile on the sides, offset by the puffy Collagen Lips. The Duquesa de Alba has an affectation for “hippie chic” clothes that might be in the closet of your teenage daughter. Occasionally, she has a health crisis and is wheeled into the front page of Hola! with mini-skirt hiked up around her waist and wild pattern stockings on her frail legs. The Duquesa de Alba has a “novio” or boyfriend. He is her son’s age and has some sort of time-punching, civil-servant job. Before her current novio, she had a second husband, a former Catholic priest, named Jesus. Real toffs debauch their Jesuit confessors. Before that she was married to some nobleman who fathered her five children.

When the Duquesa has a health crises, which happens more frequently these days since she’s getting on in age, her novio wheels her around and otherwise appears attentive to her needs. Hola! is very interested in the progression of her relationship with her novio. The Duquesa’s children are also interested in the progression of her relationship with her novio. If this relationship progresses too far, it’ll cut into their inheritance. None of these children appears to have done anything interesting with their lives besides appearing in Hola!

Tita Cervera—dite la Baronesa Thyssen

Tita Cervera also sports the plastic surgery Masque of Death, but instead of the grey Afro, she has a blond beauty shop “do”. Her wardrobe tends to Couture and is more restrained than the Duquesa of Alba’s (when you’re born Very Noble, you don’t need to make such an effort). I don’t know who Tita Cervera was but apparently she likes Art. At some point in her life she married Lex Baxter, an American actor who played Tarzan. Baxter was as a Stepping Stone. Thanks to him, she got a villa called Mas Mananas (More Tomorrows) and an introduction to the better sort of Society. In Society, she met a rich old German, called the Baron Thyssen, who inherited lots of things and also liked Art. Tita Cervera married the Baron, and became a Very Great Lady, or at least a very rich one. At some earlier point, she had a son. Nobody knows where he came from, but the Baron Thyssen adopted him. The Baron Thyssen finally had the good taste to die and leave Tita Cervera with lots of money and lots of Art. Tita Cervera had the good taste to make sure the Baron left a lot of this Art to Spain, so now you and I can go look at it in the Thyssen Bornemisza museum.

Tita Cervera has a son who looks a bit like a Spanish redneck—or maybe that’s just the rockero wardrobe and all the tattoos. He appears a lot in Hola! with his wife and their son, giving exclusive tours of their villa in Ibiza. Apparently, his mother doesn’t like his wife very much because she demanded that her “grandson” submit to a DNA paternity test. I guess that’s publicly calling your daughter-in-law a whore. Much ado about the DNA test, but the grandson passed. I think the only reason the son and daughter-in-law put up with Tita Cervera is because, otherwise, they’d have to give up their villa and get real jobs.

Tita Cervera may have the last laugh. She either adopted or genetically concocted (lots of speculation here) twin daughters. All we know is that she got them from some birth mother/rental womb rental womb out in California. Now we see lots of photos of the beaming Tita Cervera with her (not-so-cute) twin toddler daughters. Apparently it’s not just enough to triumph over the physical indignities of aging, but the limitations of childbearing as well. In the process, you can show up your ungrateful oldest son and his trashy wife.

Isabel Preysler, or How to be a Successful Ex-Wife

Isabel Preysler used to be married to Julio Iglesias and is the mother of some of his children. I think she also married a succession or combination of the following: Political Bigwig, Captain of Industry and Member of the Nobility. I can’t keep track. Since they didn’t have the good grace to leave her a widow, she divorced them or maybe they divorced her. My mother-in-law has a theory that powerful men like to be collectors, so they seek out women whose CV lists the names of many of their peers. She also says that La Presyler is rumored to have a special trick of passing out during the er, “little death.” Powerful men must really go for that too.

Isabel Preysler either has a better plastic surgeon than these other women or has the good fortune to possess the holy trinity of aging well—good skin (likely due to her Asian ancestry—she’s Filipina), good bones, and not putting on weight. My mother-in-law adds a commentary here based on the Spanish expression: “Las mujeres se enjamonan o se aparchimientan.” (With age) Women either become ham-like or parchment-like. She also offers some consolation for those of us who might be leaning in the ham direction. Subcutaneous fat does one have one advantage. It smoothes out your skin. The Hams can always console themselves with the fact that they’ll have fewer wrinkles than their Parchment friends.

La Preysler’s age-defying looks serve her well because she is one busy woman. In addition to posing for Hola!, she appears in print ad campaigns endorsing various products. Twice a year, she travels over to the US and takes a picture with George Clooney to promote Porcelanosa. There was some disagreement among the French people at the party as to whether Porcelanosa is a line of “chiottes” aka plumbing fixtures, or tiles. I think the tiles won out. To be fair, la Preysler isn’t the only one. Once you come to Europe, you realize how many “serious” American actors supplement their income here pimping out various products. George Clooney is also the face of Nespresso coffee and Hugh Laurie did a big Schweppes Campaign.

Isabel Preysler has one successful son, Enrique Iglesias, and a few other children who don’t appear to do much of anything besides appearing in Hola!

Carmen Lomana in “The Rich Also Cry”


I used to wonder what Paris Hilton would look like in her 60s. Now I know. She’s going to look like Carmen Lomana. Actual Hola! readers may wonder why I included a B-lister like Carmen Lomana. They may not even know who Carmen Loman is. That is because they haven’t seen Carmen’s YouTube video hit “The Rich Also Cry”—“Los Ricos Tambien Lloran”. Unlike her younger counterpart, Paris Hilton, Carmen Lomana’s video does not involve any physical exertions. Thank God! Carmen’s Chilean industrial engineer husband had the good taste to die at 49 and leave her a very wealthy woman. Her male-servicing days are over, thank you very much. What does Carmen Lomana do in her life/video? She shops, trys on clothes and shares her opinion about La Crisis. Researching Carmen Lomana on the Internet, all I learned is that her cleavage is a “feat of engineering” and that she wears a lot of Couture. Her interview with the journalist includes such gems as:

“Do you have lots of closets for your clothes?”

“I don’t have closets, I have rooms?”

“What do you do with your time?”

“I don’t know. What do you do? I get up at nine, I take my breakfast in bed. I spend an hour there reading the papers. I look at my agenda. I take calls from my bankers and lawyers to discuss business. I plan my day. I have a doctoral candidate who’s writing a thesis on me. That’s the ultimate luxury.”

“Carmen, are you feeling the Crisis?”

“Not personally, but it affects you…seeing my friends…people who have lots of assets but don’t have “dinero cash” to go to the supermarket…I mean those that were always poor, you know--the ones that beg--they’re used to it…but it’s tragic to see somebody who used to have a job in reduced circumstances.”

“Are you doing anything for La Crisis. For instance do you go to mercadillos (flea markets)?”

“Well, I do try to shop less, out of political solidarity. I’m wearing things that I haven’t worn in five years, and you know what? They still look great"…”Mercadillos?” You mean like those ones in the villages? Oh I love them. I’ve never been, but I’m sure they’re great.”

Taken: American stereotypes of the Continent in Femme Jep

A recent email thread on the subject of fifth graders and why most of them do not need cell phones...let alone text messaging, called to mind this movie.

...Can't imagine why a fifth grader needs a cell phone for a school trip to France. I can barely figure out the international dialing prefixes from and to various countries, myself...but, then maybe I'm not as smart as a fifth grader. Do they actually think their child is in-danger, in their private school, guided tour over there? Reminds me of an in-flight movie I saw…

“Femme Jep” refers to a genre of movies featuring women (from the French word “femme”) in danger (jeopardy). It seems that some women have a statistic-defying penchant for encountering Mortal Danger. Or maybe it’s a vocation to one day appear as guest invitees, sobbing on the maternal bosom or sympathetic paternal shoulder of the host, saying things like “I know I shouldn’t have gotten into that car.” Think the whole tedious thread with Jack Bauer’s daughter, Kim, in the early 24s. The girl couldn’t make it further than 2 exits on the highway without encountering a psychopath or rapist.

Taken is the story of a down and out, ex-US Special Forces father (surprisingly cast as Liam Neeson), trying to build a relationship with the teenage daughter he neglected, back when he was making the world a safer place for democracy. He is nervous about his daughter and her girlfriend traveling alone to Paris. Rightfully, so, as it turns it out. Barely have the girls gotten off the plane at Orly (or maybe it’s CDG, can’t remember) when they meet a young French cheeseball, who offers to share a cab with them, on the way to their apartment. Lo and behold, he turns out to be a Spotter. Before the afternoon is even over, our two virtuous American girls have been abducted by a, get this, White Slavery Ring. Now, I know this sort of thing exists and it is perfectly awful, but the truth is they are far more likely to target girls from poor countries whose families (if they have any), can't afford to find and get them back. If I were an enterprising white slaver from Kryzhghfuckistan, do you think I would go to the trouble of abducting upper middle class American girls from the cab line at Orly, girls with ex-Spec Ops dads just waiting for a chance to Redeem Themselves, not to mention well-heeled stepfathers with private planes?

The highlight of the movie is an auction in the basement of an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris (definitely an Eyes Wide Shut “transgression among the rich and powerful” look to this scene), where wealthy buyers, including degenerate Arab sheiks, bid for the flower of our teenage American womanhood. Taken plays out like a de Sade plot, without the benefit of (intentional) social satire. Because, if you owned a multi-million dollar yacht, you’d actually need a pillowcase and handcuffs to get an attractive woman onto it?

Reading Wikipedia, I was surprised on two accounts 1) to learn that the movie had been financially successful 2) that it had been written and produced by Luc Besson. That would explain why the action scenes and suspense build-up did work well. Reflecting on Besson’s other work, I definitely like The Professional and La Femme Nikita better, but Not The Fifth Element! In the first two, the visual quality of his storytelling makes up for the limited plot.

As for Taken, part of what makes it a B movie--in addition to, as a by-product of?...the unoriginal story, and the uninspired storytelling, is its reliance on clichés—the young girl in jeopardy, the hard-boiled, yet tender-hearted father, the nefarious villains, the crooked cop. In this way, the film-maker can 1) by-pass the hard work involved in coming up with multi-faceted characters and plot 2) be assured that he is plugging into characters and themes with which his audience can easily identify. The only thing that surprised me, was that the underworld image of Paris, as such a dangerous place, was one them.