Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Washington isn't a great city for street performers. Checking out the scene with my husband the week before I started, we saw only two entertainers: a man singing Joni Mitchell songs and strumming guitar and another playing, "Someone To Watch Over Me" on the saxophone. "My people!" I remarked.

  "They're not your people," my husband replied. "They're good."

  Undeterred, I went to a costume store and bought a powder-blue princess outfit, made of polyester and lint, complete with puffy sleeves, petticoat, and peplum. When I previewed it for my family, the response was not encouraging.

  "This is catastrophic," said my husband, who literally shielded his eyes from the sight. "I am going to get a call from the day room at St. Elizabeth's saying I have to come sign you out."

  "It's OK, Dad," said my 7-year-old daughter as she inspected me. "You can see she shaves her underarms. That means people will know she's not crazy."

  I suggested that I could vastly increase the lucrativeness of this venture if I attached a large cardboard key to my back, then brought my daughter along and had her pretend to wind me up.

  "You are keeping our daughter out of this," said my husband slowly. Violating this decree, I could see, would result in him starting a file labeled "custody battle."

  I decided to make my first appearance at the downtown corner where Slate has its offices. For moral support, and protection in case the crowds became unruly, my editor David Plotz acted as my manager, standing a discreet distance away. He also conducted interviews about my work with the lawyers, lobbyists, regulators, and clerical workers who make up a D.C. lunchtime crowd.

  The hardest part was making my entrance from the Slate building onto the street. This must be how people who want gender reassignment must feel the first time they go out in public as a member of the opposite sex, I thought. Not making eye contact, I walked to the corner of 18th and M Streets and put down a straw hat—seeded with $1.35 borrowed from David. I laid my props next to me: tambourine, maracas, plastic pan flute, and a bag of beads with smiley faces embossed on them I planned to give as gifts to anyone who dropped money in my hat. I put a frozen smile on my face, picked up the maracas, and stiffly started shaking them.

  Washingtonians are not easily enchanted. These are people who are grimly important; the lanyards around their necks holding their IDs announce just how important they are. They were determined to ignore me. About a quarter walked by without acknowledgment. The other three-quarters lost a visible struggle with their facial muscles and smiled. But even the smilers refused to stop at the beckoning of my maracas and throw some coins into my hat.

  David, meanwhile was conducting his interviews. The reaction, I later heard on the tape, fell into two schools. My fans: "It's silly and fantastic." "D.C.'s not that wacky and this is nice and wacky." "This is very interesting. Is she a mechanical doll?" And my detractors: "Is she on something?" "She's stiff. She's got no dance, no performance." "I keep looking back at her to try to say something good, but sorry." "I thought she was possibly a little loony." Sure, everyone's a critic. These are the people who would have told the young Meryl Streep to forget that acting nonsense and go to law school.

  Hoping to loosen people's wallets with a change of instruments, I switched from my maracas to a plastic pan flute. But playing it turned out to be exhausting and dangerous. After a few minutes of hard blowing, David came over to remark, "Do you know your nose is bleeding?" But I wasn't about to let something like a possible aneurysm stop me, although I realized the trickle of blood was probably depressing the crowd and my income. I made a sad clown face and mopped myself up.

  Gratifyingly, at one point a high-school classmate of mine, whom I had seen two nights before at an event at the school both our children attend, walked right past me without recognition. I had David bring him over, but when he finally realized who I was, even after I explained what I was doing, he seemed deeply disturbed and scurried away. (The next day, when we were picking up our kids at school, his wife said, "I understand you're now working downtown as a mime.")

  My biggest financial score came from a man who watched me from his parked car for a few minutes then beckoned me over. He asked me if I could speak, hear, and write, but I just smiled and shook my maracas. He took out a business card,wrote his home phone number on it, and handed it to me with $2. Either he thought I had promise or he was into demented chicks.

  As I was about to pack up after 90 minutes of entertaining (total take: $4.15), a homeless man started to approach. I was worried he was going to steal my money. I watched as he moved in, then stepped away, then moved closer. I caught his eye, smiled, and shook my maracas. He smiled back at me and winked. "No lanyards for us," our looks said.

  Having not even made the equivalent of the minimum wage, I was determined to find a more congenial crowd. A couple of days later, I decided to take the Metro downtown and perform in front of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Again my husband expressed deep misgivings.

  "You can't ride the Metro in that outfit," he said. "You're going to be arrested." I assured him that though Washington was a town of stiffs, it was not yet run by Mullah Omar.

  I set up in front of the museum next to one of the concrete barriers. Immediately two security guards walked by me. I suddenly wondered, is it legal to perform as a mechanical doll on federal property? I smiled, blew my flute, and saluted them frenetically. They returned the salute and walked on. Older tourists gave me a wide berth, obviously having been warned not to make contact with any of D.C.'s depraved citizens. But the kids loved me, dropping coins in my hat as they stared in disbelief. One toddler was so taken with me that he tried to steal my act by scooping up all my instruments and running off with them. A couple of young women deposited a dollar, then one put her arm around me while the other snapped our picture.

  I felt looser and more in command of my act. To people talking on cell phones, I would make a yackety-yak motion with my hand. For a woman with magenta hair, I pointed at her head and gave her a thumbs up. I ran after a girl with a smiley-face sweatshirt and handed her one of my smiley-face beads. In 45 minutes I made $6.50.

  Then a huge bus slowly pulled up in front of the museum. I got so excited—I could harass each tourist into dropping money into my hat as they disembarked. I started jumping up and down and waving wildly at the bus. It stopped in front of me, the doors opened, and the bus driver gave me a long look. Then she leaned toward me and said, with a note of panic in her voice, "Are you our tour guide?"

  I sadly shook my head. I realized at that moment that I was not a true performer. A true performer would have nodded yes and led the crowd into the museum. Now, that would have been art.

  Hello, Moon

  Has America's low-rise obsession gone too far?

  By Amanda Fortini

  Updated Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

  America is in the throes of a crack epidemic. Sitting in a booth with a friend at an excruciatingly hip restaurant in downtown Manhattan a few weeks ago, I glanced up to see a fleshy forest of crevices and multiple folds of skin and G-strings that three women in their late 20s were displaying for the world. It was then that I knew: This low-rider style has gone too far.

  On the street, on television, even in the office, women of all ages and sizes are wearing tight, low-slung, butt-hugging jeans and pants that hit at, or often far below, the hip. The trend isn't new—it began around '95 or so—but what is new are the unlovely depths to which the pants have now, as it were, sunk. The crotch-to-waist measurement, or rise, on a standard pair of jeans (the sort we haven't seen much of since the early '90s) is somewhere between 10 and 12 inches. Early low-riders had a rise of about 7 inches. Over the past couple of years, the rise has dipped as low as 3 or 4 inches. Low-rise, it seems, has become synonymous with no-rise. Gasoline, a Brazilian company, has even created Down2There jeans, which feature a bungee cord that allows the wearer to lower her pants as she sees fit, as though adjusting a set of Venetian blinds.

/>   Usually paired with midriff-baring shirts—even tops that aren't cropped can't cover the exposed expanse of abdominal flesh—the jeans have redefined our collective understanding of cleavage. Then there's the oft-visible G-string that, like a bra strap, creates strange fleshy bulges as it strains against the body. But there are worse bulges yet. These are the love handles that materialize on even the thinnest women—models and anorexics excepted—because the jeans hit a woman's body at its fleshiest point, below the hips, just above the buttocks. Of course, the feminist in me wants to applaud the insouciance with which women of all shapes now flaunt their imperfections, but the aesthete in me objects. This is a style that suits only 12-year-olds and celebrities who have the luxury of devoting entire afternoons to sculpting their obliques. For the rest of us, wearing these jeans is like putting our hips and buttocks in some humiliating reality show.

  Yet the real problem with extremely low-riding pants is that they're impractical. Sitting is difficult: If you can't find a chair with a closed back, you have to tie a shirt around your waist—always highly attractive—or risk scandalizing the room. If you drop something, or need to tie your shoe, abandon all hope; bending over with dignity is next to impossible. You must perfect the art of squatting, back straight, head up, as though preparing to curtsy. Low-riders also tend to slide down, requiring the wearer to hitch them up repeatedly. In their way, low-rider jeans bear a creepy similarity to Chinese foot-binding—they constrict a woman's action, rendering her ornamental. And like foot-binding, the jeans can have deleterious medical consequences. In 2001, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a doctor's report stating that low-rise jeans can cause a condition called meralgia paresthetica, characterized by numbness or tingling in the thighs, by pinching a nerve located at the hip. Left untreated, the numbness can become permanent. Forget the question of style: This is a human rights issue.

  So, how did we go so low? In America, the first low-rise jeans, called hip-huggers, became popular during the late '60s, with the ascendance of the hippie counterculture and rock 'n' roll. Icons of rock like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison helped to popularize the style. In the '70s, the pants went mainstream and became a staple of disco culture—people danced "The Hustle" in their Wrangler hip-huggers. In the late '70s and early '80s, waistlines moved higher as the culture, and fashion, grew increasingly conservative. Throughout the '80s and into the '90s, as more women entered the corporate workforce, the high waist continued to reign. Even Madonna, who arguably is responsible for today's exposed abdomens, didn't wear low-rise. In pictures of her from that decade, her hip bones are always covered by the waistband of her pants.

  Then, around 1992, Alexander McQueen sent models down the runway in his shockingly low-slung "Bumsters." In 1995, Tom Ford's first (and wildly popular) collection for Gucci included his now-famous velvet hip-hugger suit, worn by Madonna, among other celebrities. By the mid-'90s, hip-huggers had infiltrated popular culture: Juliette Lewis wore a red pair in Natural Born Killers and Mark Wahlberg memorably peeled his off in Boogie Nights. But it took Britney, Christina, and Jennifer Lopez to bring the style, riding lower than ever, back into the mainstream over the past five years.

  By the time a trend hits malls across America, high fashion is already calling it déclassé. Vogue declared low-rise pants over in May 2002, and that spring Tom Ford himself showed a trouser with a higher waist, wider legs, and dropped crotch. In spring 2003, several other designers showed high-waisted pants for fall. And in August 2003, Sarah Jessica Parker, an arbiter of style, told Vogue that she doesn't consider low-rise pants to be age-appropriate for a woman like herself.

  It usually takes only a couple of months for a trend to go from the fashion magazines to the streets, and yet somehow, like the G-strings it popularized, this trend clings tenaciously on. It could be that the pants are a feminist statement, demanding as they do an ecumenical embrace of body type by wearer and viewer alike, and as such, women are loathe to abandon them. It could be that the dark fissures and peek-a-boo undies they reveal are physical emblems of our confessional culture, the sartorial equivalent of the tell-all memoir. It could simply be that letting your belly hang free is comfortable. Or that women, buying these pants for lack of choice, have unwittingly created a false sense of demand. But the strongest argument for the persistence of the trend might simply be that we want to dress like the '70s because we feel like we're starring in a reprise of that decade: Our economy is bad; we're entrenched in an occupation abroad; we mistrust our government at home.

  I'm not advocating that we abandon this style in favor of Katharine Hepburn-type trousers belted just below the rib cage. As a fashionable friend recently said, low-slung trousers, with their rock 'n' roll connotations, simply look "groovier." But moderately low-rise pants can be worn with style and class. There's a famous photograph of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, taken by the celebrity photographer Ron Galella in the early '70s. In it, Jackie walks along a Manhattan street, holding only her keys. The wind musses her hair, and she looks over her shoulder at the camera. Perhaps surprisingly, she is wearing hip-huggers with a slim-fitting ribbed knit sweater. Not surprisingly, she bares no midriff. And a G-string is nowhere in sight.

  My Life as a Phone Psychic

  Callers are paying $2 a minute for a supernatural adviser. They're getting me instead.

  By Emily Yoffe

  Posted Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 9:30 AM PT

  Not that I believe in this psychic stuff, but at one point in my life I was spending so much money having my tarot cards read at occult bookstores that I decided to do it myself. I bought a deck and discovered I had the gift. Each time I posed a question about my life, the cards so unerringly forecast frustration and disappointment that I finally stuck them in the bottom of a trunk.

  I dug them out again this spring for a foray into a career as a phone psychic—the latest installment of "Human Guinea Pig," a column in which I am supposed to explore intriguing corners of life, but in which, so far, I mostly humiliate myself. (Like here, for example.) Locating openings for my extrasensory services was easy. I went to an online job site and typed "psychic" into the search engine. I sent e-mails to the three companies listed, and two—I'll call them ESP Net and Chakra Con—sent me back contracts to fill out.

  ESP Net's online "guidance site" asserts that it is an "unrealistic expectation" for callers to assume psychics are psychic. But its contract is more ambiguous about occult powers. While it stated I could not claim a call was "anything more than entertainment," on the next page, awaiting my signature, was this sentence: "It is my personal feeling or understanding that I possess psychic or clairvoyant abilities." How could I sign this? Then I thought of my supernatural ability to read my husband's mind. Take the other morning when the dog, suffering from diarrhea, started whining at 4:45 a.m. I looked over at my husband, and despite the darkness I could see this sentence forming in his brain: "If I pretend I'm still asleep, she'll walk the dog." I signed.

  I quickly got back responses from both companies saying I would soon hear from them about getting approved for the job. ESP Net invited me to join its online chat site. The theme of the chats was that while psychics are operating in the spiritual realm, they have not relinquished their material needs. That is how I interpreted such posts as:

  "I still haven't gotten paid yet. I would love to take more calls but I haven't gotten paid."

  "[H]ow long did it take to receive your first check?"

  "When will there be a paycheck?"

  "Has ANYONE gotten paid???"

  After two months of me sending and resending my contract and ESP Net misplacing it, the psychic hot line announced via e-mail that it was accepting me as a reader, pending a phone interview. (Chakra Con had stopped communicating with me altogether.) The contract had warned that I had to be "tested extensively"—at least five sample readings before I would get my own log-in number. I spent another week leaving voice mail messages trying to schedule my first test when "Sandy," the ma
nager of ESP Net, called me back. As soon as she spoke, I sensed an aura around her of a person who had smoked one or maybe two hundred thousand cigarettes. " 'Debbie' normally does the interview to see if you're serious," Sandy said. "But she's had family problems, so you're not going to get a call from her. We've been short-handed, so log on as soon as you can. It's been particularly thin in the mornings from 8 to noon, so if you can work mornings, that's good. Any questions?"

  I realized I'd just completed my testing. Although she sounded eager to get off the phone, I did have a couple of questions.

  "What if someone sounds suicidal?" I asked.

  "Try to talk calmly. Give them some suicide hot line numbers and whatnot."

  "I'm just going to read tarot cards. What if they want something else?" I ask.

  "Just tell them tarot is your specialty. They just want help and advice," she said, adding, "Keep them on as long as you can. I think that's it."

  Sandy gave me the main number to call and the four-digit extension I needed in order to get callers routed my way. I followed the prompts and found I'd already been entered into the system as an expert on "love"—they were psychic! I recorded a message for callers in which I explained I was "Natalie" and that I would use tarot to answer all their relationship questions. ESP Net's online guidance site had a page-and-a-half-long, exceptionally sincere opening we could use on our callers: " … as soon as I heard your voice I saw the most beautiful aura around you … I felt immediately that you are one of the world's very special people … This is one of the most exciting readings I've done in a long time … I am the one person you needed to talk to, to receive the answers and the help you need in your life at this critical time. …" The true beauty of the introduction was that it would eat up the caller's three free minutes and get us on our way to meeting the company's 15-minute-per-call minimum.