Sin & Ashes

It's time for some redemption on this blog. Perhaps my greatest sin here is my lack of total honesty. Even when giving my answers on the Ann Landers Teen Sex Quiz, I knew I was being coy, holding something back. Here I am, trying to be a Bad Girl, and yet I know that I will never share my worst behavior with you. It shames me too much, and I'm no Britney Spears, shaving my head for all to see.

Historically speaking, by the way, women have for centuries been shaving their heads as an act of contrition.

I'm afraid that if I reveal the truly bad things I've done, you'll reject me. So I just go on being coy. That's my way.

That said, I recently sinned against my precious husband and felt bad enough about it that I went to church to seek forgiveness. This is a good season for redemption, seeing how it's Lent. So after drinking a few martinis at the pub on Tuesday night, the following afternoon I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue to get an Ash Wednesday smudge on my forehead.

Note: I'm not Catholic, so I probably committed a sin by getting the smudge because I wasn't properly sanctified before getting it. I asked my friend Laura, an Episcopalian priest, about this, and she doesn't know if the Catholics require pre-Ash Wednesday smudging preparations. But she does say that may be one of the few things that they don't require preparation for. Anyway, if you saw the line of sinners circled all round the block, awaiting the smudge, you'd have a pretty good idea of just how many people of all colors and creeds are in sore need of that ashen cross on their foreheads.

Laura calls this smudging of ashes business "imposing," and she got to impose lots of ashes at the service last Wednesday where she served as a guest priest: "As I put a cross on each person's forehead I said: 'Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.' I tried to say it in a warm voice so it didn't sound overly Calvinistic (Calvin was big on our inherent baseness) or morbid. I wanted it more to be a helpful reminder of our mortality so we can live life to the fullest and have an appropriate sense of humility."

As for me, my St. Patrick's priest said: "Repent. Turn to the good news." Laura says that sounds quite contemporary. But to be honest, I would rather have heard: "Go and sin no more," which is definitely older, as in Biblical. I suppose this is because I don't get to church much, so when I do go, I like to be shaken to the core. Plus, I like the old Biblical language. It's grand and it makes me cry.

Maximum Respect to Tallulah

It turns out I've got a girlfriend who's related by blood to Tallulah Bankhead, a mighty, mighty bad girl.

Tallulah gets me thinking that I don't know nothin' 'bout bein' a bad girl. She used to strip naked at parties just for kicks. Can't say I've done the same. Oh, hang on, there was that one time...

But usually, I spend my time just sitting around writing about bad girls rather than going out and being one myself. Here's what Tallulah has to say on the subject: "It's the good girls who keep the diaries. The bad girls never have the time."

Thanks for that, Tallulah. It makes me feel good about not having blog-posted for a while, during which time I was a bad girl indeed. I might even tell you about some of it. Watch this space for a full-throated comment on sin and redemption.

Gogo's Ghost

I think I saw a ghost at the foot of my bed two nights ago. It was three or four o'clock in the morning, a good time for ghosts, and I was awakened by someone impatiently tapping on my knee. I opened my eyes, peered into the darkness, and saw the transparent and whiteish-gray figure of an old woman standing there.

She was smiling and waving at me, with a nimbus of short, old-lady curls around her head, and wearing a flower-print dress. She looked like she was enjoying herself, just come to say hello. Then her image shimmered back into the darkness and she was gone.

I'm not sure if it was a dream or real. I had just been awakened from a deep sleep, so I was in a sort of half state. Our cat Henrik was lying on my side of the bed, and Dave was sleeping soundly. I can't imagine either one of them had tapped me on the knee so firmly.

I think it was my Aunt Gogo. I was telling a friend about Gogo just the other day, so the telling must have summoned her spirit to my bedside. Gogo was born Helga Johansson in southern Sweden, in 1895 or so, and moved to America with her parents when she was two years old. She was the first of six children, one of them being my grandma, Nana Mildred Dolly.

Gogo was a nurse in Depression-era Chicago and would visit tuberculosis patients at home. She and her husband John never had any children of their own, so they spent a lot of time with my mom and Aunt Jeannie, taking them on trips, out for dinner, on picnics, to the beach at Lake Michigan. They liked to have fun. Gogo wore a big fur coat.

I only met Gogo a few times, and by the time I met her, she was old, and then she died when I was 12 or so. It was only recently, talking about Gogo with my mom, that I realized how similar Gogo and I are, both of us urban, childless career women who like to have fun, and who discovered an artistic passion later in life. For me, it's writing, of course, and for Gogo it was painting. When Nana died, I got some of Gogo's paintings, which now hang on the walls of my apartment in Brooklyn.

Why, just the other day, I was in the kitchen, cooking, and poured myself a glass of wine. I lifted my glass to the painting on the wall, a nature scene on a forested mountain, and said "cheers" to Gogo. Gogo. I miss her. I was kind of hoping she would visit me again last night, but I slept soundly till morning.

The Original "Cougar": Catherine the Great

I'm married to a much younger man. Lalalala.

I'm old enough to be Dave's mother. But if I really was his mother, I would have been one of those irresponsible teenage moms who would leave baby home with grandma all the time, claiming that I was just nipping out for some Pampers and smokes, then not come back home till four o'clock in the morning, drunk.

The thing is, I recently read an article in a back issue of Bust magazine about women of a certain age who call themselves "cougars" cuz they're always on the prowl for fresh young man meat. I kept rolling my eyeballs as I read, which made reading very difficult indeed, as these old birds went on about how they only date young men because they're such studs and how it's so easy and fun to pick them up.

I think the Bust article was supposed to fill readers with sisters-are-doin'-it-for-themselves admiration for cougars, but to me, the women they interviewed came across as supremely dissatisfied, restless and shallow beeyotches. Are we supposed to be happy that women have now commodified love and sexuality the same way that Hugh Hefner does when he gives open-call Playboy auditions for his new girlfriends?

You see, I'm very special and perfect, because when I found Dave I hadn't gone shopping for him. No, I found the love of my life as one should, meeting him when I least expected it then flailing about uncertainly as I tried to figure out what I was getting myself into and why I felt so powerfully attracted to then repulsed by this guy I couldn't get out of my mind.

Anyway, cougars aren't all that new. For centuries, women who've managed to accumulate power and money have gone after young lovers, just as men do. Catherine the Great is a classic case. When her burning passion for her older boyfriend Potemkin died down, he stayed close to the empress by helping her find beautiful young men to play with. And the older Catherine got, the younger her "favorites" got. She would keep them around for a year, have crazy sex, grow bored, retire them with a severance package of jewels, castles and serfs, then move on to the next boy toy. She thought she was in control.

Then, when she was 50, she met 21-year-old Alexander Lanskoi. There was something beautiful, sweet and feminine about him, like a teen idol. And he loved the Empress, really truly loved her. Catherine had grown used to choosing her lovers from among the cynical courtiers and cavalrymen who guarded the palace in Saint Petersburg. But Lanskoi was a pink-cheeked lad from the countryside, a tender young soldier who had gained entry to the palace’s royal guard thanks to his good looks and adoration of his country's ruler.

When Alexander met Catherine in 1779, he was eager to learn from her, loving her private tutorials on art, antiquities and gems. Poorly educated but hungry for knowledge, he read what she read and learned to speak French – badly. Catherine took great pleasure in playing private secretary to Alexander, calling him her General and taking dictation for the letters he wrote in French, correcting his mistakes along the way.

Then, after a year or so, she grew bored and found a new favorite. But unlike his predecessors, instead of just going away, Lanskoi freaked out. He came to her chambers, crying, and demanded to speak her, telling her he couldn't believe that she could just walk away from a love that made them both so happy. Catherine was stunned and powerfully moved by Lanskoi's passion and took her baby back into her arms, loving him another four years until her baby grew ill with diphtheria and died at the age of 26.

"I am submerged in the most acute sorrow and my happiness is no more; I thought that I myself should die from the irreparable loss which I suffered a week ago of my dearest friend," Catherine wrote in a letter to a confidant. "I had hoped that he would become the support of my old age: he studied, he profited, he had all my tastes; this was a young man who I was bringing up, who was grateful, gentle and sincere, who shared my grief when I had any and who rejoiced at my joys; in a word, between my tears, I have the misfortune to tell you that General Lanskoi is no more."

R.I.P. General Lanskoi. May every cougar get her mind blown by her own personal Alexander.

Money + Evil = Bad Girl$

As we know, money is the root of all evil as are wicked women. This is why money and Bad Girls have always gone so well together. Bad Girls have been poor, and they've been rich, and rich is better!

When I mention this to people, it seems to make them nervous and uncomfortable, and that of course leads me to believe that I'm on to something here. Let's face it, one of the gorgeous things about having a lot of money is that it gives you an opportunity to get totally absorbed in your personal goals and become even more self-obsessed than you already are.

Plus, if you have lots of money of your very own, it buys you power, which is another way of saying freedom. Madonna is one of my all-time favorite examples of a Bad Girl who's really good around money.

And please don't call me a capitalist, when in fact I'm a left-leaning believer in a social welfare state and regulated markets. The real rich capitalists of which I am not one just love it when poor working folk stay ignorant and fearful about money matters because that way the fat cats can retain possession of the world's wealth.

I just can't stand to see women get the short end of the stick when men are left in charge of their finances. And Bad Girls are good at doing cool stuff with their money once they've got enough of it. They buy houses for their boyfriends (Catherine the Great), they milk goats (Mai Zetterling), they back heavyweight prizefighters (Mae West), they adopt unwanted children (Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker not to mention Madonna and Angelina Jolie), they tour the brothels of New York City and hand out birth control (Victoria Woodhull).

In that spirit, let me tell you about my favorite charity, which I give money to whenever I have a few extra bucks lying around. Trickle Up is a microgrant program that gives seed capital and business training to make individuals self-sufficient in Third World countries, including Africa and Brooklyn. Oh, and P.S., about 80% of the money goes to WOMEN, because they're better at handling money than their men, and these women set up little market food stalls and sewing circles and savings clubs, and the money they earn goes to cool stuff like feeding their children and educating them.

That is all. Happy hols & see you in the New Year. Love, hugs & kisses, Joyce