UPCOMING EVENTS I'LL BE MISSING

For a small city, Santa Barbara has a great array of lectures and cultural events. When I grew up here, I was out all the time, even when I was supposed to be in class at San Marcos High School, Santa Barbara City College or UCSB. And even today I often want to see two things that are happening at the same time. Of course there isn't the array or abundance of things happening here like there is in NYC, where I spent years running from one thing to another. But there's quite a wonderful lot.

Lately, though, I've had a severe bout of what I call Post Disaster Inertia. I want to go to things, but the months of fire, mudslide, numerous evacuations, knowing the losses friends endured and driving by the wreckage left both Ray and me exhausted. We left home so many times with so much uncertainty of the future that just lying in bed and forcing Ray to watch Forensic Files with me is a luxury.

It's strange to think back on how many things Ray and I would go to in a given day in NYC or even during the first two years when we moved back to SB, because at the moment I can handle one thing a day. Sometimes half a thing a day. I'm sure that we're not alone among Santa Barbarans, and I'm sure it's affecting the cultural attendance here.

But the fact is, when I think about going out to something right now, I can easily get talked out of it.

For example, I was pleased to see that Charles Hood, the author of a book I've enjoyed, A Californian's Guide to the Birds Among Us, would be speaking at the Sedgwick Reserve in Santa Ynez on May 12th at 7 PM.

 

Charles is a poet as well as animal chronicler and his book is witty, informative and fun. When I wrote Charles and asked him about the lecture, and said we'd like to go, he told me he'd just gotten back from photographing bats in Arizona and looked forward to talking about scrub jays with us.

He then said his lecture would be about the evolution and future of field guides rather than focusing on birds. Hmmm. Well, I'm sure Charles can make the art of the field guide interesting or at least poetic, but the thought of driving an hour to hear about field guides set off my Post Disaster Interia.

Then I thought perhaps it would just be fun to finally get onto the Sedgwick Reserve and we could go early while it was still light, take in his talk -- hey, I'd learn something about field guides! -- and especially fun to meet and talk to an author whose book I like and who knows a lot about birds. Now, birds may not be a subject you find interesting, but I find them endlessly fascinating. Ray and I are bird enthusiasts (some would call us bird crazy) and consider the Scrub Jays, Titmice, Juncos, Doves, Crows, Hummingbirds and company on our property our feathered friends. We give them names like Nipper and Kikki and Ed and even have framed photos of our birds on our mantle:

Now that I look at the photo above, I do think we are crazy. However, our birds raucously greeted us when we returned home after every evacuation. They did seem to be saying, "Great to see you're alive -- now you can return to giving us peanuts." But they're good birds, even if a little self-interested.

Another enticing aspect of the Hood lecture was that we'd been wanting to visit the Sedgwick Reserve. Plus there'd be the lure of a nice dinner afterwards at one of my favorite SYV restaurants nearby. So I wrote Charles and asked if he'd like to join us afterwards for dinner. We could yak about his recent visit with the bats and share bird stories. He wrote back that he was planning to go out into the night on the preserve with a flashlight to study mammals, so no dinner out, but he would have a bottle of wine. I wasn't sure whether he was offering to share the bottle of wine and the mammals with us, but if he was, maybe it would be fascinating to accompany him. Although I'm not keen on encountering mountain lions with only a flashlight and a bottle of wine.

Charles wrote back that Ray and I needed to let the event unfold as it will. I'm not a very unfolding person these days, especially when I'm hungry and worried about encountering a mountain lion, so I wrote him we'd have to pass. However, if you like birds or any other kind of animal, I highly recommend Charles' books, which you can buy (and should buy) from Chaucer Bookstore. And if you decide to go to the lecture please let me know what you learned about the art of field guides -- in just two sentences, please.

There's another upcoming event that at first got me excited. Ashton Applewhite, an anti-ageist activist and someone we knew in NYC, is going to be talking twice. First at the Public Library downtown on Friday May 18th, and then at UCSB on Saturday the 19th. I love attending lectures at the Santa Barbara Public Library in Faulkner Gallery. The photo below perhaps doesn't convey the excitement one can feel listening to an expert there on a topic that includes lots of stats, but it's a great venue.

However, when I read what the focus of Ashton's library talk will be, I felt a desurge of energy. The synopsis of her talk was listed as: "What makes aging different for women –- and so much harder than it has to be? How does the double impact of ageism and sexism affect women’s health, income, and well-being? And how does competing to “stay young” dig the hole even deeper?"

I can answer that without attending the talk. Women do it to women. Yes, they do. I used to go to a Park Avenue dermatologist who told me he was glad I hadn't asked him for Botox. I said, "Why do women do that to themselves?" He said "Their girlfriends tell them they need it. I'll always ask these women what their husbands think and they'll say 'he thinks I look fine and don't need it' and I'll say 'I bet your husband doesn't think you need a new dress, either.'"

So maybe the husband is cheap or maybe he's having an affair or maybe he really digs his wife. But the point is, from my own personal experience women can be pretty damn ageist about other women. The most ageist places I ever worked as a writer were the glossy women's magazines. I once wrote a column for Harper's Bazaar touting actresses over 40 and my female editor told me that old age, like not being 22 any longer, really depressed her.

Then there was my last birthday. A number of my guy friends, of all ages, wrote me sweet messages about how much better I get every year, my husband bought me chocolates and lingerie. And what did I get from a woman acquaintance? She sent me a photo of a decrepit Bette Davis holding up a pillow embroidered with her famous line "Old age ain't for sissies." Gee, thanks, lady.

So no go for me on the library talk. Then I thought about going to the UCSB lecture the next day. I remembered fondly how I first heard Ashton talk on anti-ageism at her Williamsburg home a few years ago. She was just getting her lecture organized and tried it out on a small group of friends to get feedback. I was impressed by her drive about the subject and admired her when her book "This Chair Rocks" got turned down by publishers, she didn't let it stop her and published it herself.

I heard her do the lecture several times and she got better each time. And her commitment to anti-aegism seemed to grow. When she came to hear one of my autobiographical shows at Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village she commented afterwards that she felt my referring to my mom as "still beautiful at 90" was ageist. Interestingly, when I also described my late father as "still crazy at 92" that didn't seem to bother her. Nonetheless, I admired Ashton's passion.

I wasn't surprised when she did a TED Talk or finally got a book deal from a mainstream publisher. I was pleased to see her success. But then I read one of her mass emails about This Chair Rocks last fall and I was dismayed. 

Why was I dismayed? Because it was all about her alignment now with all these other movements, like #MeToo. I despise the #MeToo movement, which is not a movement so much as witch-hunting and the equivalent of 1950s McCarthyism. Here's an article about the renowned Swedish theater director, Benny Fredriksson, who killed himself after being #Metoo accused of sexual abuse and none of the allegations were substantiated. Great going, girls, you destroyed a theater director who employed hundreds of actresses and gave them the chance to do meaningful theater.

What exactly have any of these #MeToo gals done that's creative? Nothing. They're just destroyers. Oh right, men have kept them from having careers. No, actually, if these MeToo women spent less time getting revenge on bad dates or imagined micro-aggressions and more time creating their own film companies and publishing houses I'd have a lot more respect for them. In a year when women in the food industry complained on MeToo about being held back, a number of other women spent their energy forging ahead with their culinary careers. Like the three Zitelman sisters in Philly who run their own tahini business, Soom Foods, and who were lauded by Forbes as an exciting upcoming business.

And then in that same email Ashton also mentioned something about "the patriarchy." Isn't it interesting how no one mentions the word "patriarchy" in a positive way? I sighed when I read that. I mean, aren't old patriarchs entitled to anti-ageist activism on their behalf? Maybe that's why it didn't bother her when I made my remark about my father still being crazy at 92. The truth is, men get subjected to a lot of ageism as well and not all men in their 90s are patriarchs who ditch their long suffering wives for hot young women. I've known men who were abused in their later years by their wives and by female staff members at hospitals and assisted living homes.

I wrote Ashton about my reservations, but never heard back from her. I've become used to that in the last year. Now, I consider myself a liberal, albeit in the old-fashioned 1960s/70s way when liberals actually believed in liberal things like freedom of speech. But I find some of my new-fangled "lib left" friends will spout their political opinions out of nowhere -- you can be talking about how nice the warm weather is and suddenly out of the blue they'll say in a loud voice "God, I hate Trump." As some Millennials like to say to excuse their own bad behavior, these people got "triggered" by something. Was it thinking about what a nice day it is in Santa Barbara that triggered them? Can they not have a nice day while Trump is in office? Do they blame him for global warming? Who knows what triggers them. And then they'll go on and on ranting and I've come to realize they just expect me to nod and listen because if I say something like, "Well, I didn't vote for him, but isn't it time we Democrats moved on, I mean, time's a wastin' and we don't have a viable candidate for the next election" they'll go silent, walk away, or say "we obviously can't talk about politics."

And these days that's enough to trigger me and my Post Disaster Inertia.

So I'll be missing Ashton Applewhite's two talks. I hope she'll drop the MeToo, anti-patriarchy and intersectionality and just do what she's great at, which is being an activist for anti-ageism.

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