Letters to My Agent

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

THE ARTIST’S WAY-STRAIGHT TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET

DEAR BETSY,           

People kept telling me to read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but I didn’t. Instead, I Googled it and did one exercise, something about “putting a price tag on what it would cost you to be completely creative.” You’re actually supposed to make a price tag with construction paper and scissors, but when I completed the assignment, I was too tired to craft.

              WHAT IT WILL COST-A FIDUCIARY ANALYSIS

            If you dedicate the next four months to writing fiction, the following will result:

Sleepiness in the afternoon; butt numbness.

Rejection letters using the phrase “we’re going to have to pass.”

Pale legs covered with dimples and veins.

Hair reverts to gym-teacher grey. Chop it off in desperation. Husband, though not a shallow man, leaves because marriage’s Hair Rule has been violated. Husband is adopted by Brazilian woman with “tresses” described as “luxuriant.” Children adore new Mom.

No longer entitled to cool lingerie. Forced to wear underpants of youth-big, white Carters briefs.

End up living on social security in a trailer in Garden City, Idaho. One leg becomes shorter than the other. Senior center provides substandard crutches. Fall down, break hip, don’t qualify for self-administered morphine pump.

Try to become vegan. Three weeks of grains and olive oil followed by 12-pack of Ken’s Donuts. Self-loathing cannot be worked into coming-of-age novel. Start over with short story about 65-year-old female motorcycle mechanic who tries to break into the stuntman’s union. But have sworn off Internet, therefore no online research about whether or not stuntman’s union exists. Story details ring false. We’re going to have to pass.

Total price tag for creativity: about one million dollars and change, minus $44 saved by not buying Hanky Pankys.

Affirmations are next, I just know it.

Yesterday I thought about Overeaters Anonymous and my first car, a 1967 GTO, but first I thought about rain. A wonderful thunderstorm seemed to be advancing on my area, but I checked Accuweather.com just to be sure, and learned that the day would continue fair and clear, at 95 degrees. Same forecast when I checked again fifteen minutes later. Looking away from the screen and out the window, I saw a wall of rain cross the street, without looking both ways. It slammed into my house, clattered onto the tin roof and kept going out to the rainwater collection system, where it collected in a very satisfying way. There is nothing ACCU about ACCUWEATHER, and I realized my computer had snagged my psyche in the same way the rose canes I’d been pruning dug into my clothes and hair. I stood on the back porch watching the rain and thinking A: Overeaters Anonymous, and B: that GTO. As we approach the end of this paragraph, notice that I thought about three disparate things while writing it. One might expect me to join them together somehow. Unfortunately, I’m a loner, not a joiner. A loud loner, but still.

Overeaters Anonymous was the most private club I ever belonged to. People unzipped their souls in a storefront on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, in a room with stained carpet and a burnt-coffee urn. Some of the women had binge-eating disorder, although that diagnoses had not yet been invented. There were no men at all-manorexia was also far in the future. I gravitated to the glow of the recovering bulimics, in their tiny, well-maintained clothes. (A recovering bulimic doesn’t eat smothered burritos while driving; her t-shirts have no green chile stains.) I wanted a beautiful ex-bulimic for a sponsor, and talked a few into it. But every time I heard the phrase “open your Big Book,” my eyes glazed over and my brain darted into the next room or back into a prior century. I wonder what Beautiful Sponsor Maureen is doing now, if she still has the Mustang with the zebra print bucket seat covers, and if she got over that thing about men seeing her naked. She would have had to, because surely she has four kids and is back in Jersey, although I don’t see her getting sucked into being Class Cupcake Mom. This isn’t very anonymous, is it?

I bought the GTO for fifty bucks in 1978, when I was twenty. Its hood and trunk were latched with pieces of baling twine. It had a 441 engine, I believe, but don’t quote me, and four bald tires. Furthermore, I didn’t know how to drive a car. But one day I got into the GTO, backed out of the driveway, and taught myself the intricacies of city driving in Berkeley, California. But my skills were limited–just a few months later, I crashed the Ouchmobile into a concrete barrier that had somehow loomed up. The car got further crumpled and wouldn’t start, so I just left it there. A few days later, sure enough, it had been removed. (At twenty, I was a champion at walking away from problems. I seem to have lost the knack.) I went on to own too many motor vehicles to count, although that’s what I try to do when I can’t fall asleep. Today I felt nostalgia for all of them, especially that GTO, because like most people, I’ve been assiduously not driving. Driving seems as rash as scarfing up caviar with a plastic spoon. OPEC or Big Oil or Mother Nature or whoever these people are have taken all the fun out of driving aimlessly around in a big car. I consciously enjoyed this pleasure for thirty years, so I don’t feel cheated, but the way things are going, my dream of buying a backhoe is turning to dust.

The two things I taught about today end up having something in common. Initials!  OA, GTO. Will you look at that!

Tomorrow I plan to think about bugs. And cornbread.

Dear Betsy,

I have this great idea for parenting tale–think The I Hate to Cook Book meets Seven Years in Tibet. This “volume” will be “slim” enough to get published in no time flat, for practically nothing. Not that we should do that, though, because it has big fat moneymaking potential. All you have to do is get stuck in a pediatrician’s waiting room for three hours with nothing to read but parenting magazines to know that young moms and dads are willing to throw money at everything from brain-boosting Mozart CDs to machines that compress a used diaper into the size and shape of a burrito so it can be thrown, space-savingly, into a landfill. Anyway, no reason why these parents shouldn’t pay big for this book. Hell, let’s add cute photos and make it a coffee table tome. Maybe hire that photog who puts squeaky clean babies inside flowers or something?

So here’s the concept. I spend 24 hours with my ten-year-old daughter Gus-at her pace. That means never saying “come on, let’s get going,” or “if you don’t put on your seatbelt I can’t start the car,” or “will you for God’s sake put shoes on your feet so we can start this excursion?” In other words, I allow this child to meander through life the way she would if some timeline-obsessed adult weren’t always nudging her.

Sound cute? It ain’t. Anarchy, as opposed to anecdote, will ensue, and the fallout will land on me. Though no Gus will be hurt during this experiment, because she won’t notice it’s happening, it’s a plenty risky idea all the same. But still, if people are so all-fired fascinated with Shackleton, wouldn’t they like to read about this terrifying trip into the belly of the juvenile beast?

See, for their first twelve years, children think they’re still living in a womb, only with more square footage and lots of natural light. Its boundaries are mushy and forgiving. It exists to nurture them. They can be turned upside down inside it and not get dizzy. Here is one concrete example of where this mindset leads:

A kid stands smack up against the driver’s side door of your car, chatting or humming. You can’t unlock the car door, much less take your place in the driver’s seat, and the prospect of the child realizing that she, too, has a designated place to sit, and a place to go, seems very remote. The only solution is to gently seize the child by her shoulders, propel her to her side of the car and insert her into it, all the time trying to keep track of the epic story she’s telling. That, or use the phrase “honey, you’re going to have to MOVE!!!!”, the word “honey” dripping with aggrieved sarcasm.

Those were my only options-until now. Now I will just stand there, near, and yet so far, from the car. I’ll be well-hydrated and wearing a sun hat, maybe even have done some meditating aforethought. It will be about 8 a.m. As a matter of fact, we may never get out the front door. I may still be sitting at the breakfast table watching my daughter read a cereal box. Anything could happen. Or not happen.

There’s your tension. For dramatic arc, we have the passage of time-always a winner. And for a sequel (I think of everything, do I not?) we spend the next 24 hours with a 13-year-old who has moved out of the imaginary womb and into a mental condo so pseudo-sophisticated it could have been designed by Hef. Front-desk security guards usually keep people my age out of this sacred space, but I’ll get around that, maybe with alpha-hydroxy cream, or a session of aerobic boot camp. We’ll clean up the details after the contract is inked, eh what?

Anxiously awaiting big advance check, I remain,

Robin