The Write Thing

In 1968, the world of entertainment became mesmerized with a skinny young girl with a prominent nose who sang her way through the bittersweet life of theater and film actress Fanny Brice in the box office hit (both in theater and film) Funny Girl.

My admiration for Ms. Streisand goes back in time numerous years, to those darker moments of my youth when English was becoming a language of fate and a permanent shelter, without my knowing it. In the movie, there is a climactic scene where she rushes to catch a tugboat at the New York harbor, shortly after finding love in the arms of bon vivant Nicky Arnstein (played by Omar Sharif). Much as I would like to linger in my praise of Barbra as a consummate actress and singer, injecting pathos and passion in a character that to some extent ended up reflecting her quite a lot at some stages in her life, I will refrain from doing so.

The tugboat scene unfolds with the backdrop of a hurried Miss Brice trying to convince her entourage that her decision to live life beyond her success as a comedienne with the Ziegfeld Follies is final. She does this with a song, while everybody begs her to reconsider. However, she is adamant and will follow Nick to write the first act of a love whose epilogue will be a dark naked stage where La Streisand will render perhaps the best version of My Man ever recorded. But right now, if you can hold your breath enough to accompany the singer through the end of a belted note that grows above a mid-size orchestra, there is still a world to hope for.

The tugboat slides on a foamy sea, leaving a trail leading back to the harbor of departure. From a distance, it seems as if she could choose to go back and put such a preposterous idea of love well behind her. Curiously, the novelty here is that in the wildest act of love in the movie, the heroine does not sing of love, but of possibility….and perhaps that is what love is all about.

I’m gonna live and live NOW!
Get what I want, I know how!
One roll for the whole shebang!
One throw that bell will go clang,
Eye on the target and wham,
One shot, one gun shot and bam!
Hey, Mr. Arnstein, here I am …

I’ll march my band out, I will beat my drum,
And if I’m fanned out, your turn at bat, sir,
At least I didn’t fake it, hat, sir,
I guess I didn’t make it
Get ready for me love, ’cause I’m a “comer”
I simply gotta march, my heart’s a drummer
Nobody, no, nobody, is gonna rain on my parade!

Houston builds its own American routine in me. Wake up early in the morning to have breakfast at the hotel that “feels like home”, grab a portion of eggs (only twice a week, their impact on cholesterol levels was never clear to me), a standard cup of coffee with half-and-half milk, some orange juice, bread or bagel depending on appetite, and off you go.

Westheimer tends to be busy at all times, and I cannot quite tell what the rush hour really is here. Probably seven, as that was the only time when I was greeted with a terrible traffic jam on my way from the airport.
8.15 am – Just before the Derek hotel, left down the sideroad that runs parallel to the I-610, right on San Felipe road and again left on Briar Oaks lane where the posh St. Regis hotel stands out as a landmark. My rental car — a Ford Fusion that is larger than my needs which, mind you, are large as well — roars to the sound of Elena Roger recreating Mina’s famous hits. The CD is a gift from two dear friends of mine, E and her significant other, given to me in presentia before I left for this business trip to Obamaland.

I decided to take only that CD with me this time, innocently imagining that I would choose my rental car this time and it would come with a suitable aux plug-in for my Ipod. It turns out to be that Ford is automatic in everything, so it does not need any more holes, which means I am stuck with the radio — which I tried repeatedly, and almost cried at when Casey Cason’s Top 10 review blasted to me from the loudspeakers one cloudy morning — or a 6-slot CD player. Ironically, I only have one CD. Elena knows this, and she seems to redouble her efforts to please me as I slowly play the Mina Che Cosa Sei performance in 10-minute segments every day, relentlessly. If you are a music lover, or not, you may concur with me on this — there is always one song that you will want to replay over and over again in almost every album. In this one, it is Mi Sei Scoppiato, which I sing along although my vocal chords are gradually being taken over by an upsetting flu. The lyrics are cheesy, but I like this song, it has become a classic, and in a way a wish. Who would not want somebody to burst out inside us, or who has not ever experienced that?

Mi sei scoppiato
dentro al cuore all’improvviso
all’improvviso non so perché
non lo so perché all’improvviso
all’improvviso
sarà perché mi hai guardato
come nessuno mi ha guardato mai
mi sento viva
all’improvviso per te

7.30 pm – I leave the car inside the hotel’s parking lot, organize my schedule for the next day, answer T’s e-mail, attached to which is a magnificent picture of Lake Tahoe, where she is skying before we meet in two days, and then I get ready for dinner time. As I sift through emails and decide on how busy I want or can afford my next morning to be, I think about how some things happen. She intrigues me. She came to me just like that… perhaps…it may be all’improvviso, but I am just finding out.

Yesterday, I woke up in the small hours of the morning and was unable to fall back into sleep. Maybe it was the excitement of a busy weekend, in which I ran (or briskly walked my way through) my first 5K race and I almost blew a car tire when I added pressure to it — can anybody explain to me why in America, a country where even orgasms are digital, there is not a single tire pressure monitor with a regular display? Even Third-World Argentina has one, for God’s sakes!
Back to the exciting weekend. Well after my near-death experience, I had an appointment with two extremes of Superbowl celebration. One was an invitation from a work colleague, who is married to Jack, an artist here in Houston, and the other was a party with the office boys (age range: mid-twenties to late fifties) at a local bar, drinking beer and rooting for the Cardinals, the team that ended up losing an incredible game that I only understood 10% of.
So I arrive at 4.45 pm at the first party, which took place in another couple’s house, a fabulous and spacious two-story construction designed in a state-of-the-art fashion by the husband, a famous architect in town. The house is part of the art tour of the Heights, the hip and bohemian area of this city that would surprise the most skeptical visitors. I take my own little tour of the house, guided by my friend and one of the guests, the wondrous Loretta, a Croatian concert pianist that had drunk too many “fogs” — the infamous mysterious drink the party is named after. As an aside, after the tour, Loretta and I will agree that the closet in the main bedroom deserves a tour of its own — how can anyone be so tidy? Probably it’s an architect thing…

The party unfolds and I am introduced to most of the patrons of the arts in Houston, Museum directors, Film festival organizers, and the like. At one point, 62-year-old Botoxed Mary asks me what is my artistic specialty, and I start my speech on working for an oil and gas consulting firm. I can tell she is appalled and I only then realize that I should have lied…but she is too drunk to even get worried about my secular status, and I can always interject and say I used to be an amateur opera singer. That seems to relieve her while she looks at my neck and tells me I look so good for my age, as if I were in my mid-seventies. It dawns on me just then how much age matters in some circles…the reality of it becomes a burden and many feel compelled to find some surgical solution to the woe of growing old. At least Mary does look awesome at 62, although I personally think that has more to do with her post-menopause sexual drive than with the benefits of lifting and laser procedures — after all, she quite promptly tells me her man is nine years younger and that they go at it for hours.

In the sitting room we meet John, relaxing on the huge circular couch and sipping something as he quietly watches the game. When my friend asks him where he knows the host and hostess from, he simply says he saw there was a party going on, and he thought he might join in. I still think he was telling us the truth…Anyway, we are now halftime through the game. Now women want to pump up the volume and listen to the commercials and Bruce Springsteen is about to give a mini-performance. Venus and Mars, boys and girls, is a combination that never fails. Boys watch the game, women watch the commercials, but they all watch the Boss.

Taking my cue from the halftime call, I focus on keeping a ying-yang synchrony in my own reading of America’s biggest night event after Thanksgiving, and I leave for the Big Woodrow’s in Chimney Rock and Richmond Avenue, where my boys are hanging out. They are at a table outside, enjoying the weather in a mild Sunday evening and watching the LCD screens give a partial victory to the Steelers. As I arrive, the Steelers’ luck will change, and the Cardinals’ touchdown just a minute before the end of the game will light my workmates’ eyes with a glimmer of hope. A brief moment of joy. Only seconds later, the ghost of a tight victory vanishes before their eyes, as a yellow-clad boy holds the ball inside the court in a fantastic acrobatic move worthy of a ballet performance. The game is now irreversibly lost for the Cardinals, and hope gives way to a little frustration, although nobody is passionate enough in my eclectic group to get into a heated after-match argument — which I am secretly grateful for.

We all get into our cars and drive home. The night is over early in America, and I am in bed by 10.30…only to wake up a few hours later and amuse myself with the memory of a weekend to remember.