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LET US NOW PRAISE SJ PERELMAN

Friday, October 9, 2009

You wanna know what’s wrong with this world? No one knows who SJ Perelman is anymore. And no one likes a snob who quotes obscure writers, so I don’t, but it’s hard work to stifle myself that way. I’m forced to stand silently, my jaws akimbo, because SJ Perelman loved words like “akimbo.” He gave his characters names like Akimbo; Akimbo, I see now, would be a good name for a 1930s movie producer. Having written several Marx Brothers movies, Perelman hated Hollywood, which he thought of as infested with juice bars, chiropractors and Tarot readers. I don’t mind any of those institutions, but I idolize SJ Perelman. I imitate him. I’ll imitate him right now.

Marcus Aurelius Akimbo alighted from his Pierce Arrow, a starlet in one arm and a jeraboam of Maalox in the other, only three hours late for our meeting.

He once described himself as “button-cute, rapier-thin.” Reading him is like getting on a bizarrely enthusiastic, self-mocking train to conjecture-land, with stops in absurdville. Here’s an excerpt from one of his stories about leaving New York for Bucks County, PA:

When I first settled down on a heap of shale in the Delaware Valley, I too had a romantic picture of myself. For about a month I was a spare, sinewy frontiersman in fringed buckskin, with crinkly little lines about the eyes and a slow laconic drawl…. After I almost blew off a toe cleaning an air rifle, though, I decided I was more the honest rural type. I started wearing patched blue jeans [and] mopped my forehead with a red banana (I found out later it should have been a red bandanna)…. One day, while stretched out on the porch, I realized I needed only a mint julep to become a real dyed-in-the-wool, Seagrams V.V.O. Southern planter…. I sent to New York for a broad-brimmed hat and a string tie, and at enormous expense trained the local idiot to fan me with a palmetto leaf.

Here’s a link to Richard Corliss’s Time magazine story from which I ripped that quote.

WWSPD? Yes, what would SJ Perelman do? In my own  grommet-cute, AK47-stocky way, I strive to do the same.

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PROJECT AMERICAN RUNWAY IDOL MILLIONAIRE

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Dear Betsy,

Integral to every author’s publicity “platform” is a smoldering photo of the writer after he has finished a 3-day stint of sleepless novelizing, but before he has tortuous, intellectual sex with you, the reader. But as a woman, comma, I resent and/or reject that image. (Even though my name is Robin and once someone wrote  my Westword editor demanding that she remove “that schmuck Mr. Chotzinoff.”) As for  female author photo options, I don’t have a tiny triangular face alive with bird-like curiosity, or, alternatively, a whole lot of shiny hair and cleavage. (Since Weider Publications hasn’t signed me yet, my not-too-shabby lats are irrelevent.) Yet I’m not afraid to dirty my feet in the sordid waters of self-promotion! My new “brand” is hot off the presses, or the platen, or whatever. Check out this indelible image!

robinrabbiYes! This is me leading a Rosh Hashanah service last week, premiering the 21st-century Baba-Yaga-in-a-prayer-shawl look! Please start promoting me as “an Eastern European witch,” “the amateur cantor with the Brillo-rific tresses” and/or “neither Hansel nor Gretel’s favorite person, but you’ll love her.” And if those What Not to Wear people call, slam down the phone. We need to stay on message.

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THIS I BELIEVE, OR DON’T

Monday, May 4, 2009

First of all, there’s an ode to zip-ties on my other blog.

And now: Ira Glass did a show called “This I No Longer Believe” and I loved it. So. . .

THIS I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE

(Continued)

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SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK

Thursday, March 5, 2009

 

I was thinking of writing a bittersweet essay about being a writer in a time when writing is clearly headed in the same direction as barrel-making and broadsword sharpening. The piece would end bravely – rallying all writers to come up with a contingency plan, and offering to go first by enlisting in the TXDOT maintenance crew. (And this is no joke. As of today, I have an “in” with these people.) But then I hit upon a simpler career transition, one so fluid that it enabled me to stop writing the  essay and just get on with my life.

With my love of small museums and costumed interpreters, my course is clear — I will become a Robin Chotzinoff Re-enactor. Because of me, future generations won’t forget – not just what writers used to do all day, but what they produced. They’ll discover that we cranked out things like butter churns and F-16 fighter jets, using nothing but home-made  words! Now, I know there are lots of museums featuring famous writers – I myself visited Hemingway’s house in Cuba – as well as people who walk around acting like Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein. The difference is that I’ll be representing what they call a “mid-list writer,” or, if you prefer, “the first type of writer to be thrown under the bus.”

I’m perfect for the part. For most of my 27-year career, I’ve been lower-lower-mid list, with some wild swings to the top – like that time I appeared on the same Barnes and Noble marquee as Clifford the Big Red Dog. It’s exactly this sort of life that will fade from memory if someone doesn’t do something, so that’s exactly what I’m doing right now! I’m totally in character, typing away at a desk in my home office, trying not to think about an offer of work so underpaid it makes me dizzy. Next, I’ll continue to avoid taking action by wandering into the kitchen to eat a spadeful of peanut butter, all the time wishing it were a Reuben sandwich. I may very well write a rhyming couplet about the dog’s disfigurement at the hands of cheap Petco clippers*. Then it’s back to the desk for more highs and lows of my seat-o-the-pants lifestyle!

My historically accurate costume includes reading glasses that list to one side, grimy cutoffs, bright green Rocket Dogs, one half of my head blowdried and probably some really original necklaces, but I’m too stiff from weightlifting to view my own neck.

When the next tour group arrives, I’ll tell them that writing, especially writing whatever comes into your head, isn’t actually all that difficult and would anyone like to give it a try? Sure enough, some brainiac 16-year-old will take over, continuing to text a mile a minute as he dashes off an email of divorce to the person who gave me that lousy assignment. The he’ll put in a call to the Food Network to talk over a TV-writing tie-in series that –

“What the hell are you doing, young man?” (I’ll scream.) “Lower-lower-mid-list writers are way too insecure to sell themselves! I would never call the Food Network unless I were drunk, and on the rare occasions I can stay awake long enough to get drunk, I pass the time by going to sleep. What you have just done is not authentic. Get off my desk chair!”

A 49-year-old female fiber artist will be next in line. I have a feeling she’ll know what to do.

This blog post sponsored by the National Historic Register, bailed out and back in bidness.

*”Electric clippers, poorly plied/A divot gouged in Jack’s backside.”

 

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EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

After years of wheedling, I still don’t have my own backhoe, so I can’t bury my time capsule. Besides, I want it opened in 6 weeks, not 6 millenia. So maybe I should just put the “materials” in a Mason Jar on the kitchen counter where everything else gets so efficiently lost in the sands of time. Attached by rubber band to the Mason jar will be a cute little ball peen hammer. Who wouldn’t want to break glass in case of emergency?

Yes, the capsule is intended to bring the person of the future back from the brink. The future being the next time Mercury is in retrograde or someone has a hangnail. The capsule contains a letter, written on acid-free paper in non-fading ink, possibly blood. The text is as follows:

If you’re reading this letter, you’ve lost your mind enough to break a Mason jar with a ball been hammer. Don’t bother to deny it. You’ve realized – very recently and all of a sudden – that you’ve squandered your youth and there’s nothing left to do but grow old and work at Home Depot part-time, if they’ll have you, which they certainly should, considering that plenty of other know-nothings work there, in the plumbing department, and all you have to do when “helping” a customer is pretend you work for a communist government, shrug, and say “no es posible,” or something equivalent in Russian. Furthermore, scrutinizing your husband’s habit of putting half-yogurts back in the fridge has brought you to the conclusion that your marriage is over. You are ALL ALONE, but that is the human condition, is it not? You feel almost as sorry for mankind as you do for yourself, but not quite.

Follow these steps immediately:

1. Eat one pint of ice cream, full fat, no sorbet.

2. Read 25 pages of anything by S.J. Perelman.

3. Wander sadly into the yard and become distracted by a piece of PVC pipe that bends.

4. Delete all your emails without reading them.

5. Call friend to say you’re “in crisis.”

6. Enlist friend to participate in role-play. Friend plays The Vengeful Universe and you play you. Run improv dialog until you fall down laughing your ass off. This can take up to three minutes.

8. Go home and beg your family not to hold you responsible for anything you said during the past week. Quickly change the subject by producing pizza.

9. You’re hungry, despite the ice cream. Go ahead. Eat.

10. Wait! The blessing! Baruch atah adonai, etc.

Welcome home.

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BREAKING NEWS: PORTENTIOUS, PORCINE

Saturday, January 24, 2009

I’m on message and I’m sick of it. The message never changes: I’m so, so busy. There’s no time for anything. I’m being swallowed whole by minutiae, ground up and spit out by economic uncertainty and thrown under the bus of staring at myself in the mirror to see if my hair is greyer. It would be one thing if I kept all this to myself, but no. Everyone who knows me is sick of it.

Well, spit spot, as Mary Poppins would say—although Eric’s preferred no-nonsense nanny is actually Marty Poppins, a former longshoreman—it’s time to snap out of it. I did this by wallowing in Craigslist, and what do you know, I found the distraction I was seeking. Going right to the Farm & Garden section, I window-shopped—Windows-shopped?—for pygmy goats and bale lifters. Two John Deere barstools were calling my name, and so was an antique scale from a cotton gin. Before I could seal any of these deals, a conspiracy broke out. Some outfit in Lubbock is trying to corner the wild hog market, in a very sneaky way. Only the most assiduous Craigslist reader would spot the maneuver. These pigsmen—let’s call them Hogs Unlimited—are offering:

1. Wild hog removal, at high hourly fees.

2. Guided wild hog hunting opportunities, at exorbitant daily fees, and

3. Wild hogs for sale, at ten bucks and up, depending on weight.

Is this a recession-proof industry, or what?

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LIFE’S LITTLE LESSONS: LYRICS 101

Sunday, November 23, 2008

My daughter Gus and I are sitting at the dining room table of a Sunday morning in our dusty, schmutzy home. Gus is making a clay model of the first flag of the United States of America and singing “yes, we have no bananas.” I am explaining that some people only write about themselves and that there is something wrong with that, no matter how interesting your life is. I’m trying to justify my opinion, but am not getting anywhere.

“Well,” she says helpfully, “if they really are interesting, it’s not so bad. But if they think they’re interesting, I could care less. Or if they’re interesting but they’re also full of themselves, I don’t really want to read about them.”

That seems fair, I think. I write it down.

“You should probably alter that,” Gus says, “and make it a bit more poetic.”

Here’s how I make it more poetic:

Watch the first person, Mary Jane/Or you’ll be, to your readers, a royal pain.

“Is `Yes We Have No Bananas’ a famous song?” she asks, busily coloring in the British flag of 1776.

“Yes.”

Apparently, the song was written in 1922 for a revue entitled “Make It Snappy.” Eddie Cantor sung it. I remember that my 18-year-old daughter Coco had an unlikely obsession with Eddie Cantor when she was ten, which is exactly how old Gus is now. She dressed up as a flapper for her fifth grade Famous Person Presentation, which was  very dramatic. The speech ended like this: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you. . .Eddie Cantor!” Then she hit the play button on the ol’ family cassette player and the rural, outdoorsy classroom of the 1990s-era was flooded with “if you knew Suzy, like I know Suzy, oh, oh, oh what a gal!” Her classmates were speechless.

The foregoing was not about me. It was about Eddie Cantor and Coco.

“Are you obsessed with any particular singer?” I ask Gus.

“I like Beck. I think it’s cool how he does all those different instruments and they all make up one song and it’s not just music. Plus, I like his voice.”

“Sing me a little snatch of Beck,” I propose.

“No!” 

“Recite me some Beck lyrics.”

“Yeah. I saw her–wait, no–her something tongue tied, her something paterrlives, this girl owns a vending machine, white noise, the bells are ringing, gonna take her for a midnight something. . .oh well, I forget the rest.”

“Yuh-huh. Now please compare and contrast those words with those of the song `Yes, We Have No Bananas.’”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I haven’t a clue.”

In fact, though, this child does know from lyrics. The other night we were working on a song called “You Gotta Wear A Noser” for an as-yet-un-named revue. The song, directed at our pitbull mutt Myrtle, deals with the fact that she has to wear a mean leash that encircles her muzzle whenever she leaves the house. This would indicate that she is a vicious dog, but she’s so submissive that the minute she hears the song’s intro, her butt begins to tremble and then she shakes all over with delight. So we were trying to improvise the lyrics less and cement them in stone more. Gus wrote this:

“So stop your lollygagging/And your gagging of the loll!”

This is a pretty good lyric, and does not use the first person.

I wonder what Eddie Cantor is up to.

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS DE-MYSTIFIED

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

 

            How does a writer’s mind work? Who cares?

            Let’s try again. How does a writer’s mind work? Glad you asked.

            First thing in the AM, a writer arrives at her desk and obsesses about applying to MFA fiction programs. But–

                        1. they’re expensive

                        2. writer is unqualified, having no bachelor’s degree

                        3. writer fears being pushed out of “comfort zone” by big-time professor            

            The writer moves on by reinventing herself as a crafter of nothing but bulleted lists. Nice niche market, very internet-able, fresh and new.

            But then the writer considers the fact that Mark Twain didn’t attend an MFA program, that he wrote in bed while smoking cigars, and that he sold quite a few books. Say-if the writer insists on becoming degreed, why not a steamship pilot’s license? That’s how Mark Twain knew so all-fired much about life on the Mississippi. Mark Twain wrote what he knew. As writing advice goes, that’s an oldie but a goodie.

            Exhausted in the brain, the writer goes off to do errands. But she doesn’t stop working, oh no:

            THE FIRST OF THREE BOOK PITCHES INSPIRED BY A TRIP TO WALGREEN’S

            A Hipster’s Guide to Pharmaceutical Crafting

            First of all, the only magazines on the market that are not withering on the vine are Maker, Craft, Readymade and the like. Making stuff instead of buying it is now the purview of the tattooed, the vintage-dressed, the tres chic baby shower gang and young newlyweds with two tech-industry incomes. So there’s your audience, and take that, Martha Stewart. Since plenty has already been written about how to hew your own shoes out of blocks of wood, weave strips carved from plastic water bottles into tatami mats and anything and everything sock-money related, I propose entering the bold frontier of pills and unguents. I mean, what couldn’t you make out of leftover antibiotic capsules? A cocktail coaster set, for sure. (Hot-glue these puppies onto mayonnaise jar lids.) How about an insulin-syringe tiara? Or giving your walls a faux-paint facelift by smearing them with first-aid ointment and blow-drying till it hardens into a cloudy glaze. You get the idea.

            If this book hits big, I could resurrect Office Supply Beauty Tips ‘n’ Tricks.

 

 

 

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LEARNING TO PONTIFICATE ON NOVEMBER 4TH

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

 

Dear Betsy,

Agents must get tired of dealing with bottom-of-the-list artistes and cashing the 35-cent checks they bring in. Certainly you wonder when I, in particular, will learn to “pitch” ideas–but  pitching is supposed to be a young folks’ game.

Really? How do you explain the success of the Phillies’ 46-year-old pitcher Jamie Moyers? Hey, that was the only baseball-related sentence I’ve ever written, but already I feel good about it. I guess I’ll go ahead and write pennant race, RBI and American League, which I’m quite sure is pronounced American Lig.

I make me feel so young, as Frank Sinatra said. My Morning Jacket, I mean.

I’m back in the game! Book ideas coming out my ears! Here’s one that can’t miss:

What’s Wrong With You People?

Here’s my ticket into the punditocracy. Positioning myself as a talking head, mostly through Max Factor Pankake makeup and power neckties, I’ll go off on anything societal about which I can manage to feel disdain. Penetrating essays? Hold the phone! My literary “voice” will be that of disapproving WASP parents who can’t get over the fact that Preston couldn’t cut it at New Haven and now attends Jim and Ellen’s Community College.

Possible topics for outrage: people who treat their dogs like kids, people who carry their dogs in purses, people who buy their dogs Halloween costumes. If I have to troll beyond canine offenses, no problem! I’ll rant about how straight marriage (and subsequent divorce) is sending the wrong message to our children and our children’s children.

TV and radio tie-ins here are obvious, and by today’s end, I should know if I’ll be getting a call from the new White House. Let’s give this baby the green light.

Yours in trenchant analysis,

Robin

 

 

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NAKED OLD LADIES: THE TIME HAS COME

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Dear Betsy,

Are you sitting down? My next book is Naked Old Ladies! Right, you say, send me a proposal, a sample chapter, a marketing analysis. But all you need are those three superior words-naked, old, and ladies. (I think the serial comma belongs in here, but your call.)

I have been incubating this fab concept for twenty years, ever since I first attended Ladies Day at the Northwest Denver neighborhood Jewish steam bath. This 1920s relic featured cracked white tile, metal gym lockers, a full deli serving pastrami with a side of cubed red Jello, and Mrs. Gertie Hyman, proprietress, who told us that shvitzing was “very aerobic” and urged us to take in more calories. This was easy because we all walked around draped in a sheet, with no zippers or waistbands to constrict us. You could get a $17 massage in a room that smelled of the cigars left over from Mens Day. You could get a shmeiss, which I found out a little too late was a large naked woman hitting me with scrub oak branches on the top shelf of the sauna. You could run into your friends and compare shower clogs. But mostly, and overwhelmingly, the experience was about naked old ladies who had been shvitzing since they were naked young women.

I have a habit of writing about people and their items. Who needs an outline when your subject is willing talk at length about, say, every retro Big Wheels in his collection? It was in this spirit that I longed to approach the old ladies. Tell me about this body you’ve lived in all these decades, I would say. We could all learn something. Meanwhile, a very congenial photographer would take excellent, respectful, coffee-table-type portraits. (Not Annie Leibowitz. I don’t think she likes me. Not Mary Ellen Mark. She is not respectful.)

Until now, I was scared to march up to naked old ladies and ask them to bare their bodies and thus, their souls! for my benefit, even though I sense they’d get something out of it, too. But no more! As it happens, I’m well on my way to naked old ladyhood myself, and by the time I get there, I want to make sure we have a big following.

Deal? Deal! Let’s do (clothed) lunch!

Robin

 

 

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