Hustling Suffragette

I watched the soon-to-be-released film Suffragette this morning with maybe three other women in a cozy screening room in Beverly Hills. Those seats were cream-colored leather, wide and leaned back. The movie was moving and beautiful and informative, even for someone like myself who knows quite a bit about the English suffragette movement. It made me cry, and it made me angry in the same way that a war movie does -- the stupidity of it all, the energy wasted on oppressing human beings.  It never ceases to amaze me -- the mediocrity of oppression -- how men went to such lengths to keep women subservient, stripping them of their property, their dignity and even their children. The actors Carey Mulligan, Brendan Gleeson, Helena Bonham Carter and Ann-Marie Duff were all wonderful, and Meryl Streep had an excellent cameo. At the end of the film, a very effective list of the dates of universal suffrage for different countries in the world scrolled across the screen. I won't give it away, but it's pretty damn shocking.

After the screening we drove over to the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. I pulled into the driveway, right behind a shiny black Bentley with a license plate that read HUSTLR. I wondered if Larry Flynt was still alive, and later -- much later, like 5 minutes ago -- I googled "Larry Flynt's car" and sure enough, that was it. I looked for a man in a wheelchair when I walked through, but no Larry.

The three other women and I took an elevator up to a suite of rooms filled with twenty-somethings, none of whom spoke to us or even batted an eye or looked up, to tell you the truth, from their phones and laptops. They were arrayed all over the suite of rooms at tables and desks, on small sofas and standing in windows. I guess it was all the publicity and marketing people for the movie -- the business apparatus. I passed a small bathroom with some high stools in front of mirrors and make-up spread out on a table. Again, no one really spoke with us, and everyone seemed to know what they were doing, although it didn't look like they were doing much. I'm sure they were organizing, and making calls and arranging press junkets -- perhaps even hustling? No pun intended.

Again, the business of movie-making -- something to mull over -- suites in the Four Seasons to entertain the press and to high tea some bloggers. It's hard for me to not feel there's something gross about it all.

Eventually, we were led to another and larger room with two long tables laden with high tea -- or at least high tea, Four Seasons Beverly Hills-style. I saw some cucumber tea sandwiches, but I also noticed some lobster salad on blinis that placed me square in Beverly Hills in the Four Seasons in 2015.  Back in the last century, I was High Tea Girl at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. I  was a real hustler, then, no pun intended, making literally tens of thousands of sandwiches, and scones and Devonshire cream and tiny little tarts and chocolates (yes, real chocolates where you temper the chocolate and pour it into thick, frosted French molds that I later tapped on the edge of the marble pastry station and they'd fall out, shiny and perfect). But I digress. I took a scone and some cream and some lemon curd, filled a glass with French bottled water and placed a lime wedge inside of it, using silver tongs. Then I sat down at a round table with four other women and waited for the director, the producer and the screenplay writer to come in for the "roundtable discussion."

They were all lovely, and our conversation was spirited and interesting and mostly about how little people really do know about the suffragette movement, how much young women, in particular, take for granted their relative freedoms and how harrowing the path to suffrage. The filmmakers were then hustled, no pun intended, out of the room for their next meeting, so I ambled back downstairs, through the lobby and gave my ticket to the valet who brought up my sexy White Mazda, into which I jumped and drove off back to my normal life -- which I vastly prefer.

I do recommend that you hustle to see Suffragette -- take every boy and girl and woman and man you know -- and then say a little prayer of thanksgiving for those women that went before you. Oh, and exercise your right to suffrage, when the time comes. Hustle. Vote.









(I was not paid to write this post, but I did get a free screening of the movie, as well as delightful treats!)

The Semi-Annual Visit to the Dentist in Beverly Hills

So, yes, I stood across the street from that black sports car and took this photo while my boys went inside the building behind me for their semi-annual dental check-up. It's a Lamborghini, Mom, Henry said, dismissively, and it might cost $1,000, 000. I think he was serious, but don't quote me as you know I tend toward hyperbole, and certain apples actually don't fall far from the tree.

Anyhoo.

The fact that I'd just given him a hard time for wearing his gray, polyester gym shorts to the dentist that he picked out at Target despite my protestations (I despise athletic shorts when they're worn as clothes and not for athletics), made his dismissal of the million dollar car and the subsequent posturing of the various large men positioned everywhere, cameras hanging from their necks, seem even more jarring to me, still a bit of a star f**ker when it comes to celebrities. I might be reading War and Peace, but when it comes to star sightings, I'm as excited as the next moderately overweight middle-aged woman to perhaps glimpse Johnny Depp or, if lucky, Javier Bardem. Just the other night, I walked in front of Annette Bening at a local restaurant as she waited for her car, and I admit to a frisson of pleasure that I'd come full circle. It was just a few years back that I stood on the steps of Royce Hall during an intermission of King Lear, looked to my right and noticed that it was Warren Beatty standing right next to me. I nearly jumped into his pocket.

Reader, I imagine you're wondering whether a moon, worns as if it had been a shell  has lost its devotion to all things disability related and might be morphing into a gossip rag?

So be it.

After fifteen years in Los Angeles, a city that I never thought of as anywhere in particular other than the cover of an Eagles album when I was my sons' ages, I'm still a bit freaked out that I have two boys who are Angelenos. We're from LA, they say when we go back east, and I startle like I did when I took my first husband's last name and whenever I uttered Elizabeth Supercalifragilistic, saw the words in a cartoon bubble coming from my mouth. Being born in Los Angeles doesn't mean that you have blonde hair and skateboard in empty pools or even surf in Malibu before school, but it does lend a certain insouciance to the sighting of million dollar cars and people, and I guess that's a good thing.

I waited a bit outside the dental office and tried not to crane my middle-aged neck too far to notice who the paparazzi were waiting on, and after a few minutes someone came out from across the street, there was a bit of shouting and jockeying, the other big guys with the even bigger camera lenses pulled them up to their faces,  and some very large men pulled up right in front of the million dollar car and blocked it with their Exxon Valdeez cars so I really didn't see anyone or anything. For all I know, it was Beyonce getting a hair extension or buttock implants. I pretended to be a native, turned away and walked into the dentist's office to retrieve my sons who both got a good report -- no cavities, sparkly clean, and when Oliver asked why his teeth were sort of yellow despite brushing them all the time, the dentist told him that only million dollar teeth are that white. As reward for no cavities, I bought them each a cupcake from the fancy cupcake machine up the street, and then we walked up the stairs of the parking garage, got into our sexy white Mazda  and sped off.

Christmas in Beverly Hills

Sunday Still Life

Tamale Husk on a Corner in Beverly Hills, CA

For your edification, I've arranged a visit to Ms. Moon at The Church of the Batshit Crazy. Please attend.

Beverly Hills Baseball Field Signs (this is not a joke)

You see? In Beverly Hills, you have to be admonished not to drink martinis and smoke cigarettes while watching your son play baseball. And let's not even talk about the poor grammar (am I right that "is" should be "are?")

Damn.

In lieu of a real post

here's a silly post. I wonder how many times I've titled my post "In lieu..." -- no matter.

I still have nothing to say -- and everything to say, I suppose. But what I want to tell you is that today I had an appointment in Beverly Hills, and I hate going to Beverly Hills because with a few possible exceptions, it's a freak show over there. Crazy BMW drivers, mustard-colored Rolls-Royces, paparazzi on every corner, fifty year old women who are probably really eighty, slicked-back Porsche-driving metrosexuals -- well -- the list could go on and on and I just hate going there. But I had this appointment, so I drove my car into one of the large parking garages and as I climbed up the ramp in my car, a hot pink Beetle came down. On the side of the car was a large painting of one of those little Japanese dolls -- something like this, but just the head:

And the woman driving the hot pink car with the Japanese doll painted on the side WAS THE JAPANESE DOLL. Exactly. She looked exactly like the doll painted on the side of her hot pink car. I thought I might be hallucinating because I was in Beverly Hills overload, but there she was, driving her car like a normal person, right beside me.

It was fantastic. I have no idea who she was or where she was going, but it was fantastic.

Pink Sheets

The worst one can do in Beverly Hills traffic is to let down your window and simultaneously scream at yet another BMW that has nearly side-swiped you in its urgency to get somewhere, where? and shake a fist and perhaps reach in to the glove compartment for the gun that you have stored there in case, and the best one can do is close one's eyes for a moment, but only a moment, and remember the bell from the app on the meditation timer that you recently installed on your phone and that worked quite beautifully that morning, the first time you used it. Bong, it sounds, deep in your recesses and you still remember it, feel it, from hours before when you woke up, still dark out, your foot had ripped a tear out of the sheet and you'd only noticed it the day before, but this morning it was a hole, a huge hole, the softened edges frayed, the shiny mattress underneath exposed. Bong the bell went when twenty minutes were up and you opened your eyes, not realizing that the sound would bury itself just enough to make coffee and lunches and kiss good-bye but still be available hours later as your car wound up the endless driveway of a parking garage unable to park for the behemoths in compact spaces. A voice on the radio would declare that one candidate, (the one with white hair and many wives, the one who blows hard and long)  would say of the other candidate, (the one who is ramrod straight with five sons and a fortune) that he is out of touch with ordinary Americans. And you would wonder what an ordinary American really is because surely that candidate is not ordinary with his two ex-wives and his open marriage and his new-found catholicism and his wife with the booya! eyes.  Bong the bell goes, in your dark belly and up and out of your mouth as you turn the candidate's voice off and think to yourself that today I will buy myself rosewater linen sheets.


** guns in glove compartments are a figment of your imagination