Gleefully Yours

May 27, 2010

Coach Sue Sylvester

William McKinley High School

Lima, Ohio

Dear Ms. Sylvester,

First let me say that I agree with you that Will Schuester looks like he spends an inordinate amount of time in front of the mirror, armed with hair grooming products. And his dimpled chin really does look like a baby’s bottom, depending on the angle and lighting.

And, as one fabulously amazing woman to another, let me add that I’m one of your greatest admirers. You show tough love when you need to, like your decision to oust Quinn from the Cheerios (that spandex uniform wasn’t going to hide her baby bump forever), and your determination to bring down New Directions demonstrates that you’re a force to be reckoned with – a gale force.

(Now, I don’t want to sound discouraging but that battle may not be as easy as you think – I, for one, already have 79 Glee Club songs on my little red iPod Nano and the school year isn’t even over in the Lima district – but there’s something to be said about your dogged persistence, peppered with a dash of manipulation and blackmail. Threatening to post that airline safety video on YouTube – you know, the one with Principal Figgins showing passengers the proper way to put on support hose to prevent leg embolisms on long flights – was sheer brilliance.)

And what can I say about your Vogue video? You put Madonna to shame. Beauty’s where you find it.

But it’s not those qualities – impressive though they may be – that have made me your devoted supporter. It’s because, like you, I have a family member with a developmental disability. My daughter Katie, now a young adult, has autism.

The diagnosis was a stunning blow, at first. There wasn’t all that much information about autism back then and all I could see were the limitations. We’ve spent much of the last 20 years trying to find the right school placement, the right recreational activities, the right adult program that would help Katie develop to her fullest potential. And along the way, we as a family learned that her life held way more possibilities than limits.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As challenging as it is to be a parent of a child of any age with special needs, I imagine it was especially difficult for you to grow up in a family where one member was so...different – your sister Jean.

Did having a sibling with Down Syndrome feel overwhelming? Did you feel that you always had to look out for her? Did you secretly wish that you could just wake up one day in a new – more normal – family? What was school like? Were you embarrassed or angry – or both – when you heard kids snickering on the school bus, or in the hallways, calling your sister a “retard”? Do you worry now about who will take care of her – who will read her stories and lie on the bed laughing with her – if you’re not around?

Now, I know what you think of the kids in Glee, and it’s not pretty. But did you hear that, just a few days ago, Kurt’s father Burt put that overgrown jock Finn in his place when he heard him call Kurt the “F” word (not to be confused with the “F” bomb)? Did you know that gruff old Burt said that using a hurtful epithet to describe gay men was like using the “N” word or referring to that adorable little girl Becky in your cheerleading squad as “retarded”?

Way to go, Burt!

He sure got the ball rolling about the power of words. But the job isn’t finished. And you’re the only person I can think of who can bring it home.

You’re the only one who can take on the “R” word.

Retard. Retarded.

I bet those words make you cringe, like they do me. When did it become acceptable to toss them around with such abandon? You probably still hear those words used around the corridors at McKinley High. And from what I’ve seen, you’re not a woman who’s going to take that lying down.

It won’t be easy. In fact, it may prove to be a task even more daunting than bringing down Will Schuester. Because if McKinley High is anything like most of the schools I’ve known, it’s not just the kids that will need to be set straight about the “R” word. You’ll have to stand up to parents who’ve incorporated it into their lexicon and send a message to their kids that it’s okay. You may even have to confront some of your fellow teachers, but you’ve already shown that you’re more than up to that.

You, Ms. Sylvester, are the only one with the authority and the ‘tude to take on, and take out, the “R” word, once and for all.

It’s time for you to take a stand, as only you can – for Jean, for Becky, for Katie.

With best wishes for success as nationals approach, I remain,

Most Gleefully Yours,

Martha

P.S. If you’re not doing anything on Sunday, June 6, maybe you and Jean can join Team Kate’s Mates at the Westchester-Fairfield Autism Walk. We’ll look for you there.

Requiem

As denizens of a city where the Naked Cowboy poses for pictures with tourists in sub-freezing temperatures directly across the street from where a zealous street evangelist preaches apocalyptic doom and street vendors hawk pirated DVDs and (what they would like potential buyers to believe are real) Rolex watches, New Yorkers aren’t easily fazed. But every now and then, something does manage to make us stop and do a double-take.

It happened on one of the rare occasions when Philip and I weren’t having lunch at our respective desks in The Interchurch Center (his on the 8^th floor, mine on the 10^th). We took a stroll across the street to pick up something or other at The Riverside Church gift shop. As we crossed 120^th Street on Claremont Avenue, there emerged from the rear entrance of the church a trio of victims who appeared to have been caught in a literal crossfire. With blood oozing from bullet holes in their foreheads, the mortally wounded walked out of the church, none the worse for wear. Behind them were homicide detectives from the 27^th Precinct, whose officers, for two decades, have been responsible for maintaining law (if not necessarily order) in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

Tonight will mark the end of an era as the last quip is uttered and the screen fades to black on Law & Order.

When the original series premiered in the Fall of 1990 – the year Victoria, my youngest, was born – the senior detectives were avuncular character actors, and the hot junior detective – Chris Noth’s tormented and volatile Mike Logan – was exactly my age. Twenty years later, Jeremy Sisto, senior detective Cyrus Lupo in the current cast, is young enough to be my son.

L&O production trailers are familiar sights outside our office building. Many exterior scenes are shot around the campus of Columbia University. Union Theological Seminary on Broadway and 120^th often serves as the setting for the show’s fictional Hudson University. If the trailers are parked on Riverside Drive, it usually means they’re filming the show’s trademark opening sequence, where a bickering couple’s bickering is interrupted when they stumble upon a dead body in Riverside Park.

But there’s another reason I feel connected to L&O: I have a shared history with some of the actors who have appeared on the show over the years. Two of my schoolmates at St. Michael Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school we attended in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have been guest stars on the original show (the “mother ship”) and its various spin-offs. (One of these high school acquaintances, who enjoyed a recurring role as a scheming defense attorney on the “Order” half of L&O, will forever be remembered for revealing the ultimate Citizen Kane spoiler. As we crossed paths in the hallway on the way to Sister Mary Michel’s English class, where we were to view the last reel of that classic film – and in technologically primitive 1970, it was a reel, of the 16mm variety – she announced in a stage voice that would serve her well in her future calling, “It was the SLED!”)

Like Law & Order, St. Michael’s received a cancellation notice this Spring. After a 136-year run, the high school is scheduled to close in mid-June – 40 years after the closing of the elementary school – the victim of low enrollment, financial shortfalls and ecclesiastical politics.

Yesterday, Victoria and I visited St. Michael’s. After a quick tour of the old parish church that had been my spiritual home as a young child, we walked around the corner to the school building. It being Sunday, everything was closed, and all we could do was shoot exterior photos – of the steps to the convent, which housed our teachers, the Sisters of the Presentation; of the huge statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, now safely encased, but which, for a long time, always seemed to be missing a few fingers; of the once-gender segregated entrances marked “Girls” and “Boys” dating back to the original elementary school – all showing signs of age. As we walked and clicked away, each picture had a story to tell – some serious, most funny, many irreverent, all sacred. And I could not help feeling that there were many more yet to be told, that now will not.

Goodbye, Law & Order. Goodbye, St. Michael’s. There were lots of possible storylines left for you to bring to life. But you had a great run.

Busted While Latina

I guess I won’t be visiting Arizona again anytime soon.

It’s sad, because Arizona is such a lovely place that you almost forget some of its messier history, like all that unpleasantness around the observance of the Martin Luther King holiday back in the 1980s and 1990s. Or that once upon a time, say about a year and a half ago, its senior Senator-turned-presidential candidate (who had also voiced strong opinions about the King holiday) selected a running mate so ill-equipped that on Election Day voters responded with a resounding chorus of, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

On a personal level, Arizona evokes a certain wistful nostalgia. To paraphrase The New York Times’ theater critic Ben Brantley, I lost it in Arizona. Not the big “It,” mind you, but an “it” that was no less a first.

Driving through Phoenix on my first visit to the state in 1991, en route to a church where a retired gentleman waited patiently to be interviewed for a now-defunct denominational magazine, I became so engrossed in singing along with the radio that it was only after pulling into the church parking lot that I became aware of the flashing lights and sirens that apparently had been following me for some distance – an adventure that resulted in my first, and to date, only, speeding ticket, for driving 72 mph in a residential zone. (The interviewee subsequently was considered too boring by said magazine’s managing editor and his story was never published; the moving traffic violation remained on my driving record, hiking up my auto insurance rates for the next 39 months.)

I’ve since gone back to Arizona several times – for meetings, conventions, sometimes with an extra day or two tacked on to the end of a business trip to enjoy the scenery.

But after last Friday, it’s unlikely I’ll be making a lot of voluntary trips there anymore.

SB1070, signed into law on April 23 by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and hailed in some circles as a necessary crackdown on illegal immigration, makes it a crime not to carry immigration documents, and gives the police broad latitude in detaining individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

I might get busted for being in Arizona while latina.

Now let me confess that in my natural distractibility, I’ve been known to lose important documents on a regular basis. Once, my passport went missing the same day I was to return to the U.S. and it was only by the grace of the U.S. Embassy that I was able to swear an affidavit and board a plane home just in time to be in the pulpit the next morning. (The passport, in case you were wondering, turned up a week or so later, neatly tucked into one of those little purse-sized bibles that zips all the way around.) And, it’s common knowledge among my colleagues that, at least once or twice a week, I manage to misplace the security I.D. card that lets us into the building where our offices are located.

So it’s not out of the question that I might saunter out on to the streets of Phoenix or Tempe or Tucson or Yuma one day, having absentmindedly left the necessary documents in a drawer or a suitcase – or maybe even in another bible. And what if, in the course of my stroll, I submit to a craving and stop at some Mom & Pop establishment and order up a serving of chicharrones? Will I fit the profile? Then what? Busted while latina!

Granted, as a cubana, I probably needn’t worry. After all, when I arrived from La Habana in 1957, my green card was already in my two-year old hand (or, more likely, in my mother’s). Existing “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policies favor cubanos even as they discriminate against other immigrant groups, so that once here, cubanos don’t have to be concerned with the threat of being sent “back to where we came from.”
 

“Where do you come from?”

It's a question I’ve heard all my life. And as the parents of a blended family of six meztizo young adults – three the biological children of una mamá cubana and a father with Scottish-Welsh roots and the other three born of an African American mother and a white father who traces his ancestry to the earliest English settlers in the Americas – Philip and I have witnessed similar “What are you?” reactions to our children. Two of our three matrilineally latino offspring are at times assumed to be white – my son Will’s kindergarten class roster listed a tentative “H?” under his race/ethnicity, until the teacher was assured it was okay to remove the question mark – while our three African American daughters, with skin the color of café con leche, are assumed to be latinas.

Every now and then, I regale them all with romanticized stories about the car trips we used to take from Manhattan to Miami when I was a little girl. Piled into the black 1957 Plymouth Belvedere my father had nicknamed Chucho, its sweeping tail fins slicing through the air, the windows rolled down all the way as our sweaty limbs stuck to the seats, we made our way down the East Coast. Because construction on I-95 was not yet completed, our southbound sojourns took us through small towns where “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards dotted the landscape and drinking fountains were still labeled “Whites Only.” It was in one of those towns that we pulled into a gas station late one day, needing to feed the gas-guzzling Chucho, only to see an attendant came out brandishing a shotgun, conveying more eloquently than words the unspoken message, “What are you? And what are you doing here?”

That memory has haunted me since the events in Arizona last week. Because when all the rhetoric about secure borders and job protection is stripped away, what’s left are the same ugly questions: “What are you? And what are you doing here?” Which means that no one – nadie – is safe. Not those who will be rounded up for fitting an arbitrary profile. Not my brown-eyed, brown-skinned offspring. Not me. Not you.

So, I won’t be singing along to Glen Campbell about the time I’ll get to Phoenix. I’ll pass for now on visiting the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley or Tombstone, and take a rain check on experiencing the existential high of standing in four states at once.

'cause if I’m gonna get busted in Arizona, at the very least I want to be singing at the top of my lungs and driving 72 mph when the flashing lights and sirens come after me.