Posts: 5

1. 

   The Huffigton Press - Boshox

   11.Dec.07, 19:18 EST
   
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   Erika Schickel
   BOSHOX
   
   Posted October 1, 2007 | 06:41 PM (EST)
   
   Last night I snuggled up on my couch to indulge in the season premiere of my #1 guilty pleasure: House. The episode featured a plot line in which a woman, crushed in a collapsed building, was struggling against other, mysterious, life-threatening illnesses. At her bedside were her boyfriend and mother. The boyfriend was standard-issue dweeb, but the mother appeared to have some bizarre facial anomalies. Her visage looked calcified, her forehead hardened into an Eric-Stoltzian- in-Mask-like precipice. Clearly this was some horrific genetic issue that was now manifesting in her lovely younger daughter. I kept waiting for Hugh Laurie to look at the mother and immediately go, "Aha! Lionitus Fasciatis!" or "Myofacial Cementiasis!" or some such thing. But no, everyone kept relating to this character as though nothing were wrong with her and I grew more and more confused.
   
   House, of course, eventually solves the medical mystery by figuring out the mangled woman in the hospital bed is in fact, not the woman's daughter at all, but somebody else from the collapsed building and her actual daughter is down in the morgue. Cut to the mother receiving this tragic news. Naturally, she is devastated, but her own mysterious disease prevented her from registering any emotion. Her face was a veritable Mt. Rushmore of granite stillness. That was the moment I made my own "no-duh" diagnosis: this woman was suffering from that silent killer that is cutting down expressive, gifted, aging actresses across Hollywood: Botox. This actress' strain was so aggressive, so disfiguring that it had completely handicapped her in her work. Unable to furrow her brow as one surely must when learning that your only child has been squashed under a big building, she was directed to cover her face with her hand and turn away from the camera.
   
   Botox is a blight on our culture. It is destroying faces, personal histories and prime time television. We must stop this silent, disfiguring killer before it robs another actress of her most valuable asset, and us another second of our voyeuristic pleasure. All across TV Land, from House to Desperate Housewives, actresses are doing what is known in the theater world as "mask work" -- where they must express through their bodies what can no longer be read in the face. But we go to TV, film and theater to watch faces contort and crumple with emotion, to see ourselves, flaws and all, reflected. If it was only perfect stillness and beauty we were after, then all we'd need is magazines.
   
   You can help stop this epidemic by speaking out: tell a woman over 40 that she's beautiful as she is. Please act now. The face you save may be your own.
   
   Visit my page on the Huffington Post at:
   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erika-schickel

2. 

   Native Intelligence - Acceptance

   11.Dec.07, 19:09 EST
   
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   Acceptance
   Erika Schickel
   
   Two weeks ago our family hit the LAUSD jackpot: we got a call from LACES (Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies) informing us our daughter had been accepted into the seventh grade. LACES is the Holy Grail of LA public schools (Blue Ribbon, one of the ten best nationwide in test scores). It also happens to be two blocks from our house. For most parents, this was a dream come true.
   
   We were surprised - we had applied to LACES in an effort to game the magnet system, thinking we'd never get in, and thereby racking up points for high school. Our gamble backfired, and two weeks into the school year we were faced with an excruciating choice: yank our daughter out of New West Charter middle school, where she is happy and thriving, or pass up what is lauded as one of the best schools in the city
   
   LACES is a known academic pressure-cooker, with a menu of high-stakes A.P. and honors classes. Their reputation is for churning out college-ready superstars. In this era of hothouse child-rearing, to question achievement-oriented education is close to heresy. But my husband and I have always questioned it, and in the stew of consideration we were embroiled in, we found ourselves once again asking ourselves how we as a family define success. Is an elite college really our ultimate goal for our children? Franny's immediate reaction was to stay put at New West. But I took her to LACES for a tour, on the principle she couldn't make an informed choice without seeing the other school first. She ended up being pleasantly surprised. She loved its big auditorium and art studios, its community services programs and personable magnet coordinator who answered all our questions and put some of our fears to rest.
   
   Back at home we made a list of pros and cons. The biggest pro for LACES being that it goes through high school. In the parched public school landscape of Los Angeles, that is a huge consideration. Where would we send Franny for high school if she remained at New West?
   
   I had as privileged an education as one can get, from private school in Manhattan, to boarding school, eventually graduating from Barnard College. No one ever asks to see my degree, and when I look back on my own education, it was actually the four years I spent in a bohemian boarding school reading and writing about great books, shooting the shit with my friends and hanging around in the theater that shaped me the most. The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree and if my daughter were a young attorney or physicist in the making, she would be starting LACES next Monday and I would be thrilled. But she is more explorer than go-getter, given to dreaminess and poetry with a tendency to clam up when she's put on the spot. I worried she'd be lost in a large classroom full of over-achievers.
   
   After a day of puzzling it over, with a throbbing head, I found Franny in her room curled up with a book. I snuggled up with her and we batted the issue around one more time, both of us filled with worry that we'd make a decision we would later regret.
   
   "I don't know Mom," she said in a voice laced with emotion, "I feel like I fit in at New West -- like everybody sees me for who I am." At her old school she was teased for being "the quiet, good girl" but at New West her friends all call her "deep" and she has blossomed into a funny, outspoken member of that community.
   
   As I listened to her, I realized that all my reasons for wanting to send her to LACES were based on fear and laziness: worry about an uncertain high school future, anxiety that everyone else wants their kids to go to LACES, and the temptation of not having to drive a carpool. None of this had anything to do with the actual person next to me, who was already succeeding on her own terms.
   
   So we did the unthinkable -- we turned LACES down. The choice felt incredibly good, because we didn't vote for one school over another, but instead, cast our vote for our girl -- who she is as defined by herself, and not by the rat race that thinks she needs some kind of edge to succeed and be happy in life.

3. 

   Native Intelligence - Baby Steps

   11.Dec.07, 19:03 EST
   
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   Baby Steps
   Erika Schickel
   
   Baby Steps
   As I write this, my nine and almost-twelve year-old daughters are out, alone in the world, on the mean streets of Los Angeles, with only a cell phone and a fifteen year-old boy to protect them. They have gone with a pair of neighbors/friends/brothers up to The Grove, the nearby Rick Caruso-designed ersatz town square, masterminded to look just like the world did back in the forties, when children were safe to wander around the world on a summer's day.
   
   The boys they are with are responsible, experienced neighborhood walkers. Their mom Christie is the author of The Three Martini Playdate a book which espouses a joyous, hands-off parenting style, and man, Christie really walks the walk, letting her boys roam the 'hood. Thus squired by these boys, I have allowed my girls greater freedom and our four kids have been having a Rockwellian summer together, riding their bikes over to each other's houses, ankling up to the local video store or meeting at the neighborhood pool. But today's extended outing seriously ups the independence ante - its a long walk to a crowded place. The list of potential threats to my young makes me woozy. Christie is upbeat and ready to get down to a productive afternoon of writing. "Call me when you get there!," I call fretfully as my baby birds, sun-blocked and behatted flit off down the street.
   
   The mall is a scant two miles to the north as the crow flies, but for humans with shorter-than-average legs, its a schlep. I count twenty-three blocks on my Google map when I get back to my desk. Twenty-three streets to cross. I take comfort in the fact these are mostly quiet, residential streets.
   
   This is the moment to stop worrying, to seize the kid-free day as the gift it is and do something housewifely and constructive like mix up a martini and continue the search for my G Spot. But no, instead I surf over to the Family Watchdog website and type in my street address. A map of my neighborhood appears, an orderly grid, but then over the grid a festering rash of little red dots blooms, each dot representing a registered sex offender. There is a pox on my neighborhood. A quick count reveals there are no fewer than twelve rapist/pedophiles between my house and the mall. Helpful mug shots show twelve blurry, pock-cheeked, braided, bespectacled neighbors who are probably leering right now through dusty Venetian blinds at my meandering, pubescent daughters. Eyes front girls, I think hard, trying to send a telepathic warning to my young - don't dawdle. This was the mantra my mother taught me back in the seventies, as I soloed on the streets of Manhattan. She believed a purposeful gait was the best defense. Of course, those were the days before Polly Klass, The Silence of the Lambs and all the attendant parenting nightmares that have since taken over our collective consciousness and caused us to hide our children away from the world.
   
   I understand the predator map is meant to be helpful, but really it only makes things worse. What exactly am I supposed to do with this information? Like Dick Cheney's terror alert it only serves to amplify fear. I've done all I can to prepare for an attack. My daughters have both taken self defense classes and know how to kneecap an adult male, should it ever come to that. Now all I can do is fret at my desk, trying resist the manic urge to call their cell phone and check up on them, because if I do that, the predators will have won.
   
   In New York City it is common knowledge that you're never more than ten feet away from a rat. Does that stop anyone from dining out? No, you've simply got to put verrmin out of your mind and dig in. Similarly, you have to let your children learn to move around in the world. I know the days of kids hopscotching down the sidewalk, running a stick along a picket fence, stopping to pick up a lucky penny are over. But my kids should at least be able to walk briskly through their neighborhood and join in the glossy, fetishized version of life in the good old days being played out over at the The Grove.
   
   My daughter just called. They made it without incident. Now all I have to worry about is them wandering around that faux '40's fantasmagoria, easy prey for corporate predators and the hoards of loonies who think throwing their lucky pennies into a man-made pond while "That's Amore" is piped in over loudspeakers is a good substitute for real life. Its a big, scary world out there is all I'm saying. Maybe that martini isn't a bad idea after all.

4. 

   Los Angeles Times Book Review Alex Frankel

   11.Dec.07, 18:39 EST
   
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   BOOK REVIEW
   'Punching In' by Alex Frankel
   Adventures in the employ of the service economy.
   By Erika Schickel, Special to The Times
   December 7, 2007
   
   "Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee" is a title that promises risk, an exposé of corporate shenanigans. In his introduction, Alex Frankel describes himself as someone "hardwired with wanderlust," who sees journalism as an opportunity to "send dispatches back from expeditions as life-altering and character-testing as Ernest Shackleton's. . . ." With the bar set high, he strikes out on his own and bravely . . . gets a day job!
   
   Well, actually, he gets five day jobs in the course of two years -- at UPS, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the Gap, Starbucks and the Apple Store. Hiding his notebook in his uniform, he seeks to find out "whether the strong corporate cultures that companies bragged about were really as great as advertised, whether the foot soldiers serving vast brands were somehow made more of plastic than flesh, and how front-line employees are molded into certain ways of thinking, acting, and working. . . . The only way to understand the pervasive world of commerce was to explore it as if it were an untouched stretch of wilderness. By going native, I could see how a handful of companies turned out good people as efficiently as widgets. . . . " What he sees is what most of us already know: Working for the Man can be boring, exhausting and, yes, a tad soul-sapping.
   
   He begins at UPS in the pre-Christmas season, delivering packages in the Bay Area. Putting on the brown is enough to make him feel part of a team: "Wearing the uniform sped up my own process of inculcation into the UPS culture and served as an indicator of a special bond with the group." So does delivering upward of 150 packages a day and the camaraderie of the drivers. He sees himself as "part of the thumping, beating heart of capitalism." His experience at Enterprise is less fulfilling. After a rigorous training program in which he's drilled on lingo and learns how to push insurance, he's sent to a branch office familiar to any American traveler as "a timeless, placeless industrial space." The days crawl by as, chained to RALPH, the company's outdated computer system, he tries to "get trips" -- full-ticket, insured rental contracts. At this point, you realize that the only thing more boring than being an Enterprise rental agent is, perhaps, reading about one.
   
   It doesn't take the free-spirited Frankel long to acknowledge that he has "a hard time sacrificing myself for a cause I don't believe in." So it's nice that he gets to quit before the dullness becomes unbearable. It's less good for the book, though, because there's little at stake ("I had the luxury of knowing that I could leave at any time"). After "Nickel and Dimed," Barbara Ehrenreich's harrowing account of subsistence wage-earning, this kind of shallow dip into the job pool is almost shocking. It's also somewhat insulting to the millions of hourly-wage earners who aren't lucky enough to parlay university degrees into exciting free-lance careers and for whom the drudgery of clock-punching is all too real.
   
   Frankel catches some amusing details, but his essentially humorless approach slows things down, as in this description of organizing the denim wall at the Gap: "When you had all the pants folded and stacked in ascending order, you scrunched each six or seven pairs of stacked pants so that the stack assumed a semi-messy look . . . that would invite customers to approach and interact with the merchandise. . . . [A] scrunch was an invitation to touch." It's interesting stuff, but Frankel shares so little of his own life that we don't get the absurd, fish-out-of-water perspective this material sorely needs. He's diligent in relating the facts but short on nuance. On a visit to Worldport, UPS' gargantuan mother ship in Louisville, Ky., he tells us of watching the planes come and go but not what he actually sees. You long for the specificity and scope of John McPhee's New Yorker piece on UPS.
   
   Secrets of corporate control are always interesting, and Frankel offers some juicy tidbits. We learn that the Gap's "treating the employees as live mannequins is called wardrobing by the industry" and that when an Apple Store clerk says, "I don't know; let's find out," it's not just friendliness but a sales ploy. But if you really want to know how workers and customers are manipulated, read Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy." Frankel barely scratches the surface. He concludes that "many of the best companies have not only realized that humans matter but have also moved ahead of competitors by finding, hiring, and training great people to work for them" -- no surprise in a service economy. But it's comforting to know, next time you're ordering your double decaf macchiato, that the guy in the green apron has been carefully trained to treat you right.
   
   Erika Schickel is the author of "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom."
   
   Punching In
   The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee
   
   Alex Frankel
   
   Collins: 222 pp., $24.95

5. 

   Los Angeles Times Book Review Steve Martin

   11.Dec.07, 18:30 EST
   
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   BOOK REVIEW
   
   'Born Standing Up' by Steve Martin
   The metaphysician of comedy explains himself.
   By Erika Schickel
   Born Standing Up
   A Comic's Life
   Steve Martin
   Scribner: 210 pp., $25
   
   There is a YouTube video, shot at a Lincoln Center tribute to Diane Keaton earlier this year, in which Steve Martin comes onstage with his banjo and plays a sweet, twangy melody called "Father's Pride." The music is winsome and his execution heartfelt. After a few seconds, a rumble of laughter rolls up from the crowd. Then it dies. The audience can't seem to resolve the humorous visual cue of the banjo-wielding Martin with the sincerity of his song.
   
   Martin's memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," will similarly confuse those who come to it looking for laughs. It is a mostly unfunny yet oddly stirring book about the comedian's early life, beginning with his boyhood before moving through his 20s and on up to 1982, when he hung up his balloon hat and quit doing stand-up for good. Since then, Martin has done much to make us laugh, but he has also pursued other, loftier passions: essay writing, art collecting and a certain amount of armchair philosophizing. In all these years he claims never to have looked back at his beginnings, until now.
   
   Martin was the son of a frustrated actor father and a star-struck mother. When he was 5, his family moved from Waco, Texas, to Hollywood, where his father held a few jobs on the fringe of show business before becoming a real estate broker to pay the bills. "I suspect as his show business dream slipped further into the sunset," his son writes, "he chose to blame his family who needed food, shelter, and attention."
   
   Martin describes being "sick with fear" of his disapproving father. At 9, he suffered a beating that left him covered in welts. "I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts," he comments. "I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian."
   
   When Martin was 10, the family moved to Garden Grove, close to the newly opened Disneyland, a place that "seemed so glorious that I believed it should be in some faraway, impossible-to-visit Shangri-la, not two miles from the house where I was about to grow up." Soon, he had a job at the park handing out guidebooks to visitors. After his shift ended, he would roam the Magic Kingdom finding showbiz father figures to teach him essential trade tricks. He learned lariat-twirling from a cowboy in Frontierland, juggling from a Fantasyland court jester and slapstick and balloon animals from legendary vaudevillian Wally Boag. Eventually, he got a job at Merlin's Magic Shop, practicing prestidigitation and learning from old-handers Leo Behnke and Jim Barlow.
   
   "The daily excitement of my life at Disneyland and high school was in stark contrast to my life at home," he writes, in what can only be called an understatement. Family life was a grim affair. Martin withdrew into his hobbies and taught himself to play the banjo, practicing in his parked car with the windows rolled up so as not to enrage his father. His passions guided and protected him. The conditions were perfect for minting an intensely shy and private show-off -- which is exactly what he became.
   
   After Disneyland, Martin did a three-year stint at Knott's Berry Farm's Bird Cage Theatre, where he met Stormie Sherk, a peaches-and-cream beauty with whom he fell in love. His description of them dressed in period garb, wandering the park together and singing tender duets onstage can't help but bring to mind his scenes with Bernadette Peters in "The Jerk." It was Stormie who turned Martin into a philosopher by giving him her copy of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge." He enrolled as a philosophy major at Long Beach State College (now CSULB), and his classes in logic, literature and philosophy influenced his evolving act. By the time Martin had reached adulthood, the map of his career was drawn.
   
   Martin's success had little to do with lucky breaks but was a matter of discipline and audodidacticism. Gigging in local music clubs such as the Ice House, the Troubadour and the Prison of Socrates -- comedy clubs did not yet exist in Southern California -- he honed his bits, keeping scrupulous notes on how each one played. His act became a pastiche of sight gags, magic and drollery that at times bordered on performance art. "My show," he notes, "was becoming something else, something free and unpredictable, and the doing of it thrilled me."
   
   Martin was, and remains, an entertainment anomaly. Finding inspiration in the poetry of e.e. cummings and the topsy-turvy logic of Lewis Carroll, he created a humor hybrid that centered on contradiction and the juxtaposition of disparate ideas. In the 1960s, his square look stood out -- "like a visitor from the straight world who had gone seriously awry." He wasn't pushing the boundaries of decency, politics or race but, rather, experimenting with the laws of comedy itself.
   
   "What if there were no punch lines?" he was wondering by the 1970s. "What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension?" This led him to create, in the words of Richard Zoglin, "a more sophisticated kind of metacomedy, a comedy act in ironic quotation marks."
   
   Martin built an overstuffed entertainer alter-ego and then jabbed holes in it with jokes like, "I'm so mad at my mother, she's a hundred and two years old, and she called me the other day. She wanted to borrow ten dollars for some food! I said, 'Hey, I work for a living!' "
   
   He was doing postmodern comedy before anyone knew what it was. His legacy includes a lineage of self-reflecting comedians -- culminating in the blowhard, Escher-like character of Stephen Colbert, who is perhaps the ultimate expression of what Martin started almost 40 years ago.
   
   The double whammy of his 1976 debut on "Saturday Night Live" and his 1977 album "Let's Get Small" made Martin a certified phenomenon, filling stadiums with thousands of arrow-wearing fans. But by 1981, he says, his act had become "like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction." All his training in close-up work, audience interaction and sublime physical comedy didn't translate to the larger venues despite the trademark white suit he wore for visibility. Stressed and exhausted, he fulfilled his outstanding commitments, and took his final bow in 1982.
   
   In much the same way as "The Razor's Edge," or the magic how-to books Martin pored over as a kid, "Born Standing Up" is full of hidden information that is magically revealed to a perceptive reader. Here, he offers us a context from which to reexamine his post-stand-up choices, from "The Lonely Guy" to the essays he has written for the New Yorker. His narration is artless and sweet, as though a much wiser, though no less wide-eyed, Navin Johnson were telling the story.
   
   "Born Standing Up" also suggests a way to think about that Lincoln Center banjo performance and what it meant. Having watched him make a career out of mixed cues, out of blending lofty ideas with physical comedy, Martin's audience can get confused. He once predicted that if he withheld a punch line long enough, "the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation."
   
   And so, having been conditioned by the first 20 years of his career, we have a Pavlovian response to the mere sight of him: We laugh. Even if it is out of desperation, it's no less sweet. Erika Schickel is the author of "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom."