Area Woman Blows Gasket

by Patricia Pearson

  Hero strides into the Coliseum and comes across a mangy, half-dead cat: "The kitty, the kitty, I want to pat the kitty!"

  Hero's mother: "No, no! It's too daaaaangerous!"

  Hero (streaking over to glowering animal): "But I must, I must, the gods have willed it!"

  Hero's mother (grabbing him away in fear): "The kitty's not friendly!" Both wail in sorrow/anger: "NOOOO/ BUT I WANT TOOOOO."

  Breast beating and hair pulling ensue. Et cetera.

  We decided to stay in Capranica, a village forty kilometers north of Rome, where Clara could run around unencumbered on a hazelnut farm. Good plan. Gaze longingly at Rome from afar while small child mouths unripe nuts and poisonous mushrooms. This, of course, necessitated renting a car at Rome's Fiumicino airport. Very bad plan.

  My husband to Hertz car rental guy, upon arrival at the airport: "Good morning, here's our prepaid voucher for one thousand dollars for the automatic car rental?"

  Hertz guy (and here I paraphrase): "Ah yes, well thank you for the money, and have a nice time in Italy without your car, which we didn't bother to procure."

  "You don't have an automatic?"

  "No; but we liked your money very much, thank you, and have a nice holiday."

  Three days, many hundred dollars, and one car rental later (from the efficient and courteous Maggiore), Hertz coughed up a Chevy Opel.

  Good. Now it's time to get HOPELESSLY LOST on Italian roads for ten days with a small child in the back seat whose incipient tantrum can be sensed like a darkening funnel cloud. At least there was a frisson of suspense in our traveling: "Can we make it to the two-animal zoo in nearby Poppi before the thunder erupts? What's our contingency plan? A variety store in suburban Viterbo that definitely sells ice cream, for sure."

  So it was that we motored around Lazio and Tuscany, making many wonderfully spontaneous stops in supermarkets, with the occasional bold strike into towns of actual note. Siena, for instance, where Clara found and ate a piece of chewed gum with a footprint in it.

  We also managed Tivoli, the lovely hill town east of Rome where the Emperor Hadrian built his magnificent country palace. Hadrian's villa is a huge, rambling compound of evocative rubble rather like Rome's Palatine Hill. It can be toured with a toddler provided that the toddler agrees to stay in her stroller. Clara opted, instead, to conceal herself in a hedge.

  One notion that springs to mind, now that I've toured the shrubbery of Hadrian's villa, is that ruins and ancient monuments require a daydreamy engagement on the part of the tourist. You need to enter into a kind of reverie, imagining the emperor and his retinue striding past the marble columns. But small children force you to be highly attuned to the present, pondering the whereabouts of nettles in the undergrowth, for example.

  As a result, having no time to imagine the past, evocative rubble evokes very little, really. What you need, given how split your attention will be, is totally explicit, in-your-face culture.

  In other words, you need to hang out in a city like Rome.

  When we finally dared to drive into Rome, which involved getting lost on the infamous Grande Autostrada circling the city and being obliged to consult with two transsexuals in a bowling alley, we began to feel fulfilled at last.

  Clara still occupied herself by examining dog poo and crawling under tables, but the magnificence around us was so vivid and continuous that it hardly mattered. Whatever she did, my daughter, I still had my feast. I could sit with her all morning in the traffic-free Piazza Navona and bask in the beauty of Bernini's fountains while she pried ancient horse manure from the cobblestones.

  I could eat the most voluptuous ravioli in walnut sauce while she poured salt into her water glass, and I could watch gorgeous Romans saunter past while she rubbed peach-almond ice cream into her hair.

  So this was my lesson, which I'll pack with me next time: Surround your small child with exotic environs, and in between the spills and breaks and vanishing acts, you need only lift up your gaze to reap your reward.

  SOME THOUGHTS ON

  GRABBING WISDOM TO GO

  Brushes with Royalty

  Clara wouldn't speak to me all day last Thursday because I was going to see the queen and she was not. She was purse-mouthed and cross-armed. She kept fixing me with a stony glare, as if I were deliberately barring my five-year- old dearest from a rare and wondrous vision.

  Of course, children were not invited to Queen Elizabeth II 's jubilee gala at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, but I also felt I was protecting my daughter from the inevitable devastation she would feel upon realizing that the queen bore no resemblance to a Barbie in a cone hat. After a steady diet of snow queens and wicked queens and princess-andthe- pea queens, my daughter would be shocked by the real queen, with her steel-gray sausage curls and sensible coats.

  Still, there is an appealing thread of narrative continuity between her fairy tales and real life in the mere fact that there is, actually, a queen. This keeps open the possibility of there being flower fairies as well, and possibly even mermaids and elves, although ideally not monsters. So Mummy was dressing up to see the queen, and that was sufficiently exciting for Clara to eventually surmount her huff. I, on the other hand, was feeling faintly disturbed by the fact that I was going to see the queen. My mother, who is a Canadian senator, had invited me to this jubilee gala as her date. The occasion, my mother advised, was black tie and long dress, which is to say the fanciest party clothes I've ever been asked to don, ever, ever. Including to my own wedding.

  Yet it wasn't a party. It was a concert. It was the modern equivalent of Henry VIII clapping his hands at court and shouting "bring on the minstrels." We were all meant to gather together in the most sumptuous clothes we could find in order to sit in a darkened theater watching— as it turned out— the rock band the Tragically Hip. A very fine-clothed lady sitting ahead of me in row G hunched over and stuck her fingers in her ears as the Hip played, her silken blouse quivering on her shoulders as she tensed with displeasure. I found that rude. Would the queen do such a thing? Certainly not.

  In any event, with the evening still ahead of me, I went to Shoppers Drug Mart and bought some nail polish. I haven't polished my short uneven mommy nails in years, but it seemed necessary. The queen would expect dainty nails. Not that I was going to meet her. There was no receiving line. Getting fancy for my wedding was a no-brainer, but this occasion felt more . . . je ne sais quoi . . . qui va voir my nails anyway? Who would be there to admire my finery? If it was just a question of keeping pace with the queen, then I wasn't sure that a sleeveless brocade dress with threads of gold and lavender and a shimmering silk overcoat were appropriate. A sparkly tent-dress was more in line.

  Oh dear. Well, I hauled out my Yves Saint Laurent wedding shoes and figured no one would notice that my daughter had drawn on the heels with green marker. Then I donned my outfit and a gorgeous pair of gold earrings lent to me by my mother and snaked slowly along the walls of the house trying to avoid Geoffrey as I headed for the door. Unscathed by cracker spittle, we toddled off in our stilettos, my mother and I, leaving my daughter enormously impressed and jealous, as if she were Cinderella and we were the stepsisters. "Ta ta! We're off to the ball!"

  We arrived at six-forty-five and discovered that we had an hour and a half to kill until we could sit down, with nothing on offer but soda water and fleeting shreds of chicken satay whisked past us before we could reach out. So we milled about hungrily, now and then bumping into Mum's friends. Nobody seemed to notice that I'd polished my nails.

  The invitation list had been drawn up by the prime minister and consisted primarily of people over fifty with Liberal Party connections. I saw former Ontario Premier David Peterson, for instance, who has become the political equivalent of celebrities on the D list who are game to do Hollywood Squares, which is to say that you can count on him to pop up at galas. When we finally got to sit down in the auditorium, all the politicians began jumping up in their seats and waving at one another and cracking excited jokes
like school chums on a field trip.

  At quarter after eight, the Toronto Symphony suddenly started up a fanfare, and all necks craned leftward and upward for the arrival of the queen. Da da da daaah da da da da da dum dum. It was kind of thrilling. One felt fleetingly swept up in a current of genuine power. This was not the queen sweeping into a ballroom, mind you, but a queen creeping sideways into her seat in a theater, excuse me, excuse me, with one hand holding up the hem of her sparkly tent-dress. She was preceded by a small group of elderly ladies sporting pearl chokers and puffed blouses.

  "Who are they?" I asked my mother.

  "Those are her ladies-in-waiting."

  "No way!" All of a sudden I had this epiphany, like whoa! She's a real queen! Like those other queens from days of yore! Where are their cone hats?

  "What on earth do they do?" I whispered to Mum. "Do they help her put on her bra?"

  "I suppose they accompany her," my mother guessed vaguely, "and probably act as her confidantes about what have you." The queen is no longer permitted to chop off their heads, so relations are doubtless convivial.

  "Maybe they have an investment club," a friend of mine speculated later. "Or play Chinese bridge." Perhaps they go back to the queen's chambers after each minstrel show and succumb to the giggles. I could imagine them musing about the woman in the gala who belted out "MacArthur Park" with so much reverb on her mike that you couldn't hear any of the lyrics except for the preposterous chorus: "Someone left the cake out in the rain! I'll never find the recipe again!" This, with full symphonic accompaniment. A lament for you, Your Majesty, concerning wet cake, on the occasion of your golden jubilee.

  My overall sense of the occasion was crystallized in the videotaped tributes offered between live acts. Canadians commented on the queen's fifty years of ribbon cutting and waving. Good for you, for . . . uh . . . well, you didn't defeat the Spanish Armada or found the Church of England, b u t . . . darn it, good for you for being the queen! You wave, girl! Susan Aglukark pointed out that the queen had shared the same period of history as her own Inuit community, which is an observation of such indirect import that you could say it to a pigeon.

  But that's all right. We may not know what she's for, but we do love Her Majesty, and she loves us back. She even went onstage and shook hands with Canada's most beloved rock band. That is grace most becoming of a queen.

  And What News of the King?

  A few days after the gala, my friend Pier and I went to see a movie, and then decided to have a drink before heading home at midnight to our small sleeping children. The nearest bar was in Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel, in swankest Yorkville, the home-away-from-home for all the Hollywood folk who drift through town these days to make their movies on the cheap or to promote them at the festival.

  Neither Pier nor I had ever been to this overpriced out-of-towner bar before, but we walked in, worrying faintly about the fact that we were wearing jeans and juice-stained mommy T-shirts and might even be requested to leave. The sleek brass-and-mahogany bar was jammed with well-heeled customers smoking and yapping, so we felt lucky when we spied a just-vacated corner spot, tip and empty glasses still upon the table. We sat down and began pondering what to drink when the waitress came over and smilingly explained that there was actually a lineup for the tables and that the "two gentlemen at the bar over there have been waiting for this one."

  Ah, c}est la vie. We weren't surprised or offended. We got up and headed for the bar ourselves, figuring we could order drinks and just sort of stand about. En route, we bumped into the two middle-aged men who had dibs on the table, one of whom grabbed my elbow and started gushing about how grateful he was that we'd been kind enough to surrender our seats.

  "I have terrible back pain," he explained, blowing booze breath in my face.

  He was a faded, rumpled fellow with too-small eyes and a receding hairline, and I was thinking that it was a bit odd for him to be so profusely thankful when we'd so obviously jumped the queue. It's not like we'd volunteered to climb out of an ambulance for him, limping off with fractured tibias. But then, all of a sudden, it dawned on me that this man was the actor Liam Neeson, whom I had last seen towering elegantly over the throngs in the movie Schindler's List.

  Instantly my knees began to shake. I went from being puzzled and uninterested to feeling physically handicapped in one fell click of my brain. His celebrity, and nothing more, just the fact of it, had the power to alter my physiological state. How strange is that? I ask you. Now I needed the table back, and he had only himself to blame. Of course, being a WASP lady, I refused to even admit that I'd recognized him, instead simply grinned and uttered some reply— which, because I was trembling, came across as unintelligible, as if I were muttering at him in Yiddish. Then I accepted his offer to buy me and Pier a glass of wine and proceeded— after he'd settled himself down at "our" table, while we stood at the bar— to pick the most expensive Chardonnay on the menu.

  Pier and I speculated that Neeson had been so thankful to us because he wrongly assumed that we had given up our table to personally accommodate him, Liam Neeson. One reaches a certain level of fame and ceases believing that people observe decorum for its own sake rather than because they want to be sycophantic expressly to you.

  I was thinking about this strange, unanchored power of celebrity— how an otherwise unremarkable person can make your knees shake when you find out his name— when I attended the IdeaCity conference in downtown Toronto.

  The buzz among attendees at this conference was that the big names, like Peter Jennings, wouldn't be the interesting speakers. If you wanted ideas, you had to perk up your ears at the mousy scholars and shy inventors who walked onstage. So what was the function of the big names? When Jennings took the stage, he actually confided: "I haven't got the vaguest bloody idea why I'm here." I suppose it was simply to excite everyone with his presence. To eat muffins at a conference with Peter Jennings, why, is that not the ne plus ultra?

  With all due respect to the man, this is what's so vexing to me about our present culture. We live in a culture of celebrity, where famous people can make us tremble, yet they offer no substance— no ideas, no leadership, no inspirational models of virtue. They are, after all, mostly entertainers by trade; it was never their mission to reincarnate royalty. I'm sure this is why actors are always yammering on in interviews about how they actually have drug addictions and dysfunctional families and eating disorders. It is as if they are trying to deflect our hopeless reverence by pointing out that they're not heroes and revolutionaries and geniuses— they're just actors for chrissake.

  As Sue Erikson Bloland observed in an essay about fame in the Atlantic Monthly, people who achieve celebrity are often characterized by monstrous insecurity and self-loathing, these being the very qualities that propel them to grasp for approval. For us to take this neurotic drive of theirs and turn it into something worthy of worship is essentially ridiculous, is it not? All we wind up worshiping is the panicked pursuit of self-aggrandizement itself. There are exceptions, notable among them the Irish rock star Bono. His amazing efforts to become a gadfly to first world governments for third world causes reveal the rare alchemy of star dust and altruism. Bono showed up in Canada shortly before the federal election in 2004 to nag Prime Minister Paul Martin about increasing the foreign aid budget. Martin agreed, which promptly inspired an opposition candidate to complain. "I think that's just the prime minister trying to get some star power around himself," Stephen Harper told the press. "We all know what that game is."

  But Bono had a succinct reply. "Yes, I'm being used," he said cheerfully. "I want to be used. That's my job here, to provide applause when someone does the right and courageous thing and to provide criticism when they don't."

  One of my favorite speakers at IdeaCity was the Montreal crime journalist Michel Auger, who became famous for being shot, in the parking lot of Le Journal de Montreal, presumably by the organized criminals he'd been writing about. Ever since, he has won numerous national a
wards and invitations to conferences, and even an offer for a lucrative contract to promote Viagra. "This conference is supposed to be a meeting of minds," he wryly observed, "but I'm here for my body." With wonderful candor and humility, Auger was pointing out that the fame of the incident itself had conferred upon him greater import as a thinker.

  "I was a regular reporter," he explained. "And then, the day I was shot, I became a great reporter." Figurez-vous. With leadership and leading ideas framed this way, is it any wonder that truth is up for grabs and that its purveyors are increasingly mercantile?

  To Get Famous in America, You Must Set

  Your Alarm

  Going on a book tour is an interesting way to measure what it takes to be influential in the modern world. I remember the shocked revelation I had with my first book, when I learned that— well, I learned two things really— that it was a very bad idea to publish a book shortly after Princess Diana died in a car accident and that, furthermore, being influential in the world has very little to do with what you have written down on paper and a great deal to do with how coherent you are on early morning TV shows.

  I learned this because I once had the grand, amazing opportunity to be on Good Morning America. It was grand and amazing: They flew me down to New York; they put me up in a hotel; they arranged for a limo to collect me in the morning. The only trouble was that, being a new mother, I was equally captivated by the possibility of watching movies on the hotel TV without anyone bugging me. I could watch any old movie I liked! It didn't have to be the forty-fifth showing of Balto or a grainy BBC production of Frog and Toad. It could be something adult, and I could lie there like a barnyard pig flicking at flies with my ears rather than having those same ears tuned, tensed as a hunted fox, to the cries of a child down the hall. I ordered room service and had a major mud wallow. Indeed, I so reveled in this opportunity that I watched two whole movies. Two! And then, I slept through my alarm.