Driving to a Tupperware party last week on one of those bright fall
afternoons in L.A., I got gloomy. Why was I going to an event organized around plastic vessels? What on earth did Tupperware have to do with me?
The answer was ostensibly comforting. I was going because this particular Tupperware party was being given by a locally renowned punk-turned-folk singer. An L.A. story if there ever was one, replete with kitsch-rich possibilities. Yet the punk element was not enough to completely erase all of my unappealing free associations with Tupperware: the drab ’50s bungalows, the career housewives, the bad meatloaf and the bad, bad plastic juju.
Tupperware was always one of those seemingly innocuous things that was actually the dark antithesis of creativity and cultural resistance. In my house, my Louisiana-born mother used tin foil and empty Cool Whip bowls to pack away extra food or to assemble care packages for Thanksgiving dinner guests. Tupperware was too ordered, too well-thought out; it was capitulation of the first, and worst, order.
Compounding the psychic challenge was the fact that the party was to be held in a lovely, hilly section of town east of Hollywood that I’d visited twice in 37 years. You had to drive over a charming little bridge to get there. I vowed to duck in, breathe the air as little as possible, take notes and duck out.
The house is one of those wonderful, rambling art-deco bungalow places
from the ’20s that became de rigeur habitat for L.A. yuppies in the ’90s. The predictability of the motif ended, however, with my arrival at its door. Phranc — the self-proclaimed “all-American Jewish lesbian folk singer” — hovered there, waiting to greet me.
She has a pleasant, slightly weatherbeaten face, a tidy crew cut and no jewelry. Her accessories comprise a spotless white shirt, a polka-dot bow tie and an apron with “Tupperware Lady” stitched across the bib. From her waist dangles a colorful assortment of Tupperware mini-goods mounted on key chains: a spatula, a pitcher, a grater. Phranc’s face is slightly flushed; the house is pretty full and this is only her second party. She smiles and encourages me toward the snack table, and I find her hospitality touching and disarming — perhaps she isn’t the only one feeling a bit displaced.
“I’ve always wanted to sell things, but I never have until now,” she confides
later. “I thought about advertising first, but you know, you have to have at least one degree, and I dropped out of high school. I had to figure out something else.”
That something else was Tupperware, a product Phranc says she was born to sell because she grew up with it and deeply believes in it. She has a Tupperware mini-bowl handed down to her by her mother that functions now as a kind of inspirational touchstone.
“I’m very old-fashioned, an Ozzie and Harriet kind of girl,” Phranc says sincerely. “I mean, look at my hair!”
And how do people react when she tells them she’s a Jewish-lesbian-folk-punk-rock singer who also happens to be a Tupperware lady?
“The first thing people do is laugh and laugh,” she says. “And then they say, ‘I need to order something.’”
Lunch is an acute childhood sense memory: toothpicked sandwiches,
Fritos, frosted animal cookies, Jell-O mold. I am feeling much better about being vacuously American; it feels not so much like a capitulation as it does a very necessary indulgence of social imagination, a piffle of a dream that serves to more firmly bind the grit and integrity of real life. The Tupperware display out on the sun-dappled deck, all bright blues and greens and raspberries, is such a vision.
Phranc straps on a guitar and opens the proceedings with a heartfelt ditty called “Tupperware Lady” (soon to be released as a single by Phranc on her own label, Phancy Records.) Her voice is sweet, reminiscent of Joan Baez, decidedly more folk than punk, and the group gathered outside — parents, children and singles alike — sways and nearly breaks into song. The Tupperware Lady then gets down to business, holding aloft and exhorting the wonders of such select items as covered ice trays, stainless steel ice cream scoops and the pihce de risistance, salad spinner bowls that double — no, triple — as colanders and strainers.
I am caught up in this simple magic, in the chorus of oohs and aahs, and my earlier doubt evaporates like morning haze. Phranc’s sprightly delivery has just the right blend of sly humor, showmanship and old-fashioned sales patter: “I love Tupperware because it’s fun, flexible, and … it supports me!” she declares, placing a bowl on the deck and standing on top of it in her black lug-soled boots, to a burst of applause.
She makes Tupperware seem both wonderfully frivolous, almost like objets d’art (“Isn’t this Healthy Baster a gorgeous blue? Pass it around!”) and rock-bottom essential. (“These sealed tumblers are great for kids … as well
as alcoholics who tend to spill their drinks!”) Everyone is cozying up
to the idea of Tupperware acquisition, from collectors to novices to those, like me, who almost never cook and have no real use for food contraptions.
One guest in his 20s admits to me that he lives in a one-room apartment by the beach, is rarely home and has no discretionary income to speak of. “But,” he says, sharing a Tupperware moment, as we all do at some point during the day, “I still eat my oatmeal out of a Tupperware bowl that I’ve had forever.”
After the show, Phranc breaks out order forms and a calculator in a
back room and the guests line up into the hallway, checkbooks and ATM cards in hand. The Tupperware Lady rings up $900 in sales, bringing her grand total to $5,000 in just three weeks on the job.
“This is the best gig I’ve ever had,” she says. “Tupperware rocks!”
It’s certainly proving to be more lucrative thus far than the music
business, which the 42-year-old Phranc has been a part of for nearly
20 years. In the late-’70s and early-’80s she was a fixture of the L.A. punk scene, playing in bands like Nervous Gender and Catholic Discipline alongside such punk notables as the Circle Jerks and X. But she also wanted to distance herself from a certain nihilism she saw in the genre, and with her first acoustic single, “Take Off Your Swastikas,” she officially
became a solo artist who could give free rein to folk inclinations.
Things went relatively swimmingly for years; she put out albums on Rhino Records and her own label, and opened for Morissey during his world tour in 1991. But everything stopped abruptly that same year when, during the tour, she got a phone call in Boston informing her that her brother had been murdered.
“My momentum stopped for a long time,” says Phranc. “I was so sad. I
needed to slow down and reevaluate what I wanted to do.” She began devoting much more time to artwork, something she had always done in the margins of her music career. The mostly three-dimensional pieces fashioned from cardboard, dubbed Cardboard Cobbler, are now a crucial part of her growing enterprises.
When she returned to music full-time in ’93, she was relieved to find
that she hadn’t been entirely forgotten. “The business moves very
quickly,” she says, “and it’s very easy to become invisible and stay invisible.”
Her new act includes a bit called Hot August Phranc, in which she does signature Neil Diamond tunes. If her Tupperware mien is any indication, Hot August is more of a salute than a sendup, a nod to the kind of passion that, in this age of irony, is almost entirely passi. Phranc doesn’t believe that the two — passion and irony, she and Neil — are mutually exclusive.
“Folk and punk, for example, have a lot more in common than people think,” she says easily. “Musically, they’re very similar — there’s two, or three, or even one chord. The difference is in volume and speed. They’re both music of the people that carry a message. Woody Guthrie and Nine Inch Nails aren’t that far apart.”
Neither, it turns out, are me and Tupperware. Far apart, that is. In
the afterglow of the party’s success, as Phranc efficiently packs up her display, one late-arriving guest in a Hawaiian shirt sits and muses, pretty unironically, on the whole Tupperware weltanschauung.
The stuff is as American as we wish we were, he says, the essence of
uncomplicated equipoise: square and definitive but clear and flexible,
airtight, supremely adaptable, consummately useful and, however much it is abused, virtually indestructible.
“It’s the perfect synthesis of rationalism and art — what Jefferson
called enlightened rationalization,” he waxes on. “What could be more rational than Tupperware?” And, he adds, “It’s timeless — past, present, future. It’s Jeffersonian andJetsonian.”
Phranc smiles brightly in agreement. Her personal heroes — and
heroines — in this business are Brownie Weiss, the first Tupperware lady from the ’50s, and a drag queen named Pam Teflon, who is currently L.A.’s hottest seller.
“He’s one of my greatest inspirations,” says Phranc, with a bit of awe. “I mean, before, he had nothing. Now he’s doing $5,000 a week with Tupperware and he has a show on Comedy Central. He’s so busy, he might have to give up selling.”
Not only does Tupperware inspire philosophizing, it makes Hollywood take notice. Talk about synthesis. Utterly woozy with a sense of possibility, I sit and fill out an order form for a pitcher, a commuter coffee mug and a set of modular containers called Packables. I have no idea how I’ll use them.
Phranc cheerily makes out my receipt and then, in a spasm of sororal feeling, invites me to a Tupperware rally next week. “Everybody is great, the
training is free,” she says. “At the rally I went to, there were about 200 housewives, a drag queen, and me. I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep. Tupperware is really all about family.”
And, she says, it’ll pay for her next record.
The older I get, the more my mornings become apoplectic. Getting up and out of bed is increasingly a trial, though not because I suffer from any age-related maladies, or because the weight of years is psychologically oppressive (not yet, thank God). It’s that I can’t seem to get dressed anymore.
Clothes, once my best of friends, have become polite strangers; not inherently threatening, but unknown. The gap between breakfast and shower has bloated up with so much clothing indecision that I make J. Alfred Prufrock seem like a man of heroic action. Each day, as the minutes tick toward 11 a.m. and the morning is in danger of disappearing altogether, my bedroom floor is littered with shirts, shoes, skirts, more shirts, tried on and discarded in fits of dissatisfaction. The clothes I used to rely on to look attractive, if not stellar — white t-shirts, turtlenecks — have faded into a chasm of fashion uncertainty. I am unable to distinguish anything except maybe a pair of Nike running shoes and only because I know exactly how and when to wear them. But a suit? A blazer? Who knows? Could I get away with wearing it with the Nikes? Do people even use the word “blazer” anymore?
Thinking about possible outfits during breakfast makes me break into a light sweat; a good half of the anxiety is over the fact that I feel anxious at all about something so completely trivial. I understand that many things in the ’90s have grown needlessly complicated or have been deconstructed beyond recognition: the shape of racism, political intent, soul music, communications technology. But why render incomprehensible something so socially insignificant as choosing my shoes?
My problem is that I don’t know how I want to look. Part of this concern is a function of age. I’m 36 and wonder, a little uneasily, how many more good miniskirt years I have left. Part of it is the utter devaluation of clothes as a measure of years, or taste, or style, or individuality. What, after all, does a 36-year-old woman dress like? More to the point, what does it mean to be 36, or any age, as far as a suit’s concerned? As markers of meaning vanish almost daily, it is perfectly ironic, and perfectly befitting this age of Orwellian logic, that we expect the slightest of things to provide us with a connection to the deepest. Not that it’s impossible — but fashion has been recycled and fragmented so many times over the seasons it’s lost its sense of adventure. Once the signifiers of everything from social status to political ideology, clothes are now side players to our overwhelming postmodern, pre-millennium angst; they make us nothing anymore except dressed. We have more retail options than ever now — from Gap to Barney’s to Gucci outlets — but that only seems to have diffused the power of fashion and further sapped it of its meaning. A million channels on TV and nothing’s on.
I don’t admit this to too many people, but I once set my fashion compass point to Madonna (the older, cheeky one, not the inner-peace guru of late). No offense to baby Lourdes, but I’ve been Madonna’s child for the last 10 years or so. The high priestess of presto-chango appealed to a lot of things in me: a lifelong theatrical bent and love of costumery; a spiritual wanderlust that seemed to be losing out to homing-pigeon tendencies, which grew stronger as 30 loomed. I wanted to be the divine Miss M as she appeared in “Desperately Seeking Susan”: coolly hip but humane; sporting dark glasses that acted as a one-way mirror, through which she saw the world perfectly while no one could see in; rolling around on an unmade bed snapping Polaroids of herself with a mixture of bemusement and solipsistic glee that I found engaging, and on point.
Madonna was trademarked with those rubber bangles and head ties but never married to them, inhabiting fashion moments fully and then slipping out of them like a snake out of old skin. Of course, the Material Girl could afford different outfits every day, and I could not; but that didn’t stem my desire to be, on a fairly fixed budget, as chameleonic as possible. I became a mall-troller, hitting the stores a minimum of once a week to hunt for those elusive wardrobe items that were current but not ridiculously so, eye-catching but not garish, substantial but cheap. In short, among the countless hangers I shoved apart over the years I was really searching for an equipoise in myself, which I believed needed only the right outfit to leap into definition. I figured I’d know that balance when I struck it, and so spent many hours in dressing rooms with my head twisted over one shoulder and eyes squinting, closed almost to a slit, willing the plaid to harmonize with stripes but clash enough to make a statement, hoping the elastic at the waist would hug, but not too much.
In this quixotic search for soul, I turned up no revelations, just stuff aplenty — shirts, scarves, trinkets — all of which served me well for six months, a year, two at the outside. Invariably I grew bored with it and packed it into shopping bags and sold it off to friends or sisters. I learned never to hoard these little worn items because I always needed ready space to accommodate the new clothes and baubles that speedily appeared. Now I seem to have finally run out of replacements, and it’s distressing. I haven’t bought shoes in forever (boots, sandals, yes, but no shoes) because, with loafers a sad lug-soled parody of themselves in every shop window, they have nothing left to say about me.
In his recent essay on loyalty, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that our virtues have no face anymore, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still yearn for that face, some visible assurance that we still stand for something. The considerable burden of maintaining a personal image falls to clothes — understandably, since they have always borne that burden to some degree. The irony is that as our belief in image has declined, fashion has amiably followed suit, to the point that clothing today has no more moral import than a politician’s campaign promises.
As lines of difference blur and everybody says everything, so everybody wears everything. Red patent leather shoes were once strictly for little girls and worldly women; now kids wear rollerblades that color. Lycra, after moving out of dance studios and into the street, was almost exclusively for disco queens and other diva-fied spirits who dared to bare themselves in shrink-wrap relief; now Lycra is the very soul of conformity, as ubiquitous among corpulent housewives as it is among the super-fit. As moral entropy reaches further and further into public space, we become less able to know where, or how to look anymore. Clothes reflect that myopia. They have lost their clear ability to shock, to affirm, to demarcate; it is increasingly difficult to determine from glancing at an outfit if the wearer is rich or poor, young or middle-aged, hip or hopelessly out of step. (Is she a Melrose hawk or did she merely refuse to take those bell-bottoms off 20 years ago?)
So the search for the right ensemble is not simply the search for the right thing to say — the ’60s and ’70s took care of that nicely, with blue-jean patches and T-shirt slogans like “Hang ten,” and “Have a nice day.” It’s also a search for the right thing to be. And it used to be that what you said was what you were: Surfer boys “hung ten,” humanists suggested that you have a nice day. But these are meaner times, and the compulsion to share a personal philosophy with the world by wearing it on your sleeve — or your car bumper — is dead (unless you assume that the people wearing the “Shut up bitch” T-shirts down on the Venice Beach boardwalk are actually advertising a philosophy, and I’d rather not).
The ’80s gave fashion a whole new cynical spin: Instead of clothing advertising people, people started advertising clothing. The point of dressing was no longer to convey message or style, but to act as style’s messenger: Guess? Members Only, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Polo, Louis Vuitton. If the label didn’t show, neither did you. The conspicuous consumption trend eventually died out, but not its grounding notion of exclusivity; Gap and Banana Republic may have proliferated in the ’90s with their just-folks ad campaigns, but they proliferated most in the cologne-scented pages of Vanity Fair and W magazine. Sharon Stone wears a Gap shirt with a ball gown to an Academy Awards show and we laud her for her insouciance. In our hearts we don’t really believe that we can get away with the same thing because we, after all, are not movie stars. Sharon Stone is being clever, subversive; you are merely tacky. The enduring truth of fashion is that it can only be democratized to a point: The other half of clothes is always who’s wearing them.
Which leads me back to the original question: Who, as far as the world is concerned, am I? I should have started out by saying that even as I deliberate every morning, I know that famous people are not supposed to matter. I am supposed to be my own best role model. The latest, neo-leftist clothing ad campaigns insist that it is enough to be oneself, be an individual, break color lines, recognize it’s a free country, think different — certainly they all implicitly warn against herd-mentality activities, like reading billboards. Forget it. When self-actualization becomes the stuff of Madison Avenue campaigns, conformity starts looking awfully attractive. I hear Madonna’s look has gone Eastern this year — gauzy midriff tops, sari-like wraps, vacant stare. Contempo Casuals already has it all on the cheap. With about $50 and regular advice from my 13-year-old niece, I should, at least for a moment, be able to get into the groove.
What is it about the pairing of young women with older men that Hollywood lately finds so appealing as to be practically de rigueur? I strive not to be ageist, but I can’t wrap my disbelief around the January-December romantic couplings increasingly found in today’s big-vehicle movies. More and more, grizzled vets like Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty and
Sean Connery — heartbreakers of another era who apparently figure they have some more breaking to do before it’s all over — turn up on the big screen with dewy-faced inginues often young enough to be their granddaughters.
A glaring current example of this is the terribly hackneyed “Entrapment,” in which new bombshell on the block Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the eager young acolyte to Sean Connery’s worldly wise art thief. Zeta-Jones’ only compelling moments come, tellingly enough, when she does an intricate, solo, silent dance to avoid a web of laser rays that lie between her and a million-dollar piece of artwork she’s set on swiping. So electric in “The Mask of Zorro,” in which she was allowed to sweat and cross swords with the most macho of them, Zeta-Jones fails miserably here at being the pouty young thing suited up in designer clothes. Even the usually unflappable Connery knows it.
Certainly older men have always had a certain cachet with women, and if
you hew to the Freudian belief that we’re all looking for our fathers, it’s a wonder that leading men aren’t more overwhelmingly gray-haired than they
already are. But I chafe at the cinematic notion that women are not only in search of an
ideal lover, they’re in search of a sage who can repair their prematurely screwed-up lives
merely by exposing them to a vast reservoir of life knowledge. As those of us in the
real world know, age does not necessarily confer wisdom, especially when men are concerned.
Filmmakers are doubtless taking some cues from the real-life industry, inspired by matchups like Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, the recently split Michael Douglas and Zeta-Jones, and 80ish Tony Randall and his late-20s wife, with whom he’s recently had a baby. Such pairings are hardly new in Hollywood, where marriages of power or social profit know no shame and therefore no boundaries of age (or anything else). But something else is at work, a venerable truism that has been sharpened to a vicious point by the last 30 years of unsparing, overmarketed American youth culture: Nobody wants to be old. Not even the most religious plastic surgery devotee believes he can stop time, but nobody wants to admit that time passing makes a difference. We must be impervious to time, or at least appear to be. That’s why you don’t see Sean or Clint or Warren on-screen wielding a cane, or shaking out handfuls of vitamin supplements, or dressing in anything less hip than the Gap. Or setting their sights on a woman much older than 30.
The most recent Academy Awards confirmed the new status of older (and flat-out old) as hot property. During a pre-show chatfest, Geena Davis was interviewing James Coburn about his resuscitated career in the wake of the critically acclaimed “Affliction.” Davis, 40 or thereabouts, suggested that she and the 70-year-old Coburn “burn up the screen together” at some point, and leered mildly in his direction. Coburn (whose wife is significantly younger than he is) at least had the grace to look startled. He should. He hit his professional stride a bit before the emergence of an intransigent, forever-young ’60s generation, whose founding members now seem to be the butt of that great cosmic joke called aging. The movie stars who built their legends during the establishment of the omnipotent youth culture and came to embody it — Redford, Hoffman, Beatty, Eastwood et al. — find themselves in the inevitable but highly untenable position of being cast out by that culture. (The exceptions here are Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, in my book. Don’t ask. It rubs our sense of democracy the wrong way, but certain privileges are inborn.) So they rage against the dying of the light by making sure the light stays burning in the form of nubile young women.
Coburn and his chronological confreres, like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Charlton Heston, were perfectly prepared to be old — sure enough, Coburn plays a vastly embittered old man in “Affliction.” But his filmic prominence reads differently in the context of today; his familiar irascible presence telegraphs not so much disappointment and emotional wounds — clear evidence of age — but proof that old men will be boys. No matter that he misbehaves, he’s still got the stuff. (Used to be that stuff referred to much more than sex appeal; it used to mean bearing and character. Walter Matthau was old when he was fairly young, a prickly Oscar Madison his whole life, and Lemmon was always less virile than prissily intellectual. Of course they’re comedians, who tend to be exempt from he-man status, though that’s increasingly less true of comedians today. It’s stud or nothing.)
The converse has not been true with the depiction of mature women on-screen, even though women were as revolutionized as men by the ’60s. The cruel difference is that while everyone expects women to stay looking young, nobody expects them to have much screen value (or social value) past a certain age. Men, of course, are allowed as many wrinkles and neck veins as the cameras can artfully conceal and still get over. Even though Sissy Spacek in “Affliction” was smart and modest and perfectly capable of being without a man — she finally had to dump ace loser Nick Nolte — Coburn taunts her across the kitchen table for merely being the age she is: “You’re gettin’ old, and there ain’t a damn thing a woman can do about that,” he fairly spits. Of course, this comes in the aftermath of her rejecting his odd, drunken advances, but its mean spirit still stings; even sensible Spacek flushes at the remark. And she’s barely 40, slim — where does that leave the rest of us? The best that a mature actress can do in a lead role (I stress mature, not bona fide old, because since the death of Jessica Tandy, old women haven’t existed at all as lead actresses) is lift her chin, grow old gracefully and focus on not corrupting the dignity of the process by pursuing a younger man. When she does she’s generally a harpy, a pathetic, self-deluded harridan ` la Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”
Consider Julie Christie in “Afterglow.” Though gorgeous and radiant, still unequivocally sexy at 60, she largely played a caged bird in a stultifying marriage. Her sexiness was not titillating so much as it was tragic for its containment, for its grand suggestion of such great vibrancy going to waste. Older women must be elegiac and poetic rather than actively lustful; however lovely, they express desire chiefly by staring longingly into space, pilloried by their own impure thoughts. By contrast, Clint at 60 was just getting started on the second phase of his heartthrob career. No matter that at times he was a reluctant Lothario — it wasn’t even about trying. Opportunity popped up when he was thinking about it least, when he was feeling his most uncertain, as in “In the Line of Fire,” when he played a Secret Service man haunted by a failure to act when it counted. Whatever men are agonizing about in their later years, it’s not sex — whereas it’s assumed that sex is all that older women are agonizing about. It consumes them, drives them mad, turns them into Ophelias, describes a life least examined. Unfortunately, that also seems to be true of movies being made for teenage girls, a fact that may ultimately be noteworthy for closing the generation gap a bit: Unfulfilled females of the world, unite. Sometimes there isn’t much comfort in numbers.
Here I feel I must mention “Bulworth,” the most egregious and salacious offender of the geezer-dish films in recent memory. It was bad enough that Warren Beatty was playing a wearily cynical politician who salvages his soul at the fountain of hip-hop (read: black) youth; he had to make Halle Berry sexual proof of it. Berry, who was 32 but was made in the movie to look and act like a fly girl of 20, was the consummation of Beatty/Bulworth’s wet dream of the ultimate white male power — he may have appeared hapless in her presence, but the overarching social and political realities he represented, including the popular regard of young black women as street ho’s, are the same as they’ve ever been. Berry’s diffidence also allowed him to recapture youth by playing the gawky but charmingly innocent lady-killer, the sexy stumblebum — the Beatty of old. For all the critical praise it netted for being revolutionary, “Bulworth” rather baldly perpetuated the racial and sexual status quo of its time. Bullshit to me.
On a cheerier note — well, it turns out there actually are a few. Take “Bridges of Madison County.” Maybe the book was hokey, as critics complained, but the film was downright subversive in its focus on a middle-aged woman’s sexual awakening. Not only was a Midwestern housewife the romantic lead, she actually realized the romance with none other than the eternal High Plains Drifter himself, Eastwood, who despite being considerably older than Meryl Streep and more weather-beaten, was obviously meant to be the brass ring she had missed up to then. The courtship is a real one, both sizzling and sweetly affirming: She goes into town to shop for a new dress for the first time in 10 years, he calls her in the middle of the afternoon for no particular reason, they slow dance across the scuffed kitchen linoleum to a song on the radio. The great letdown is that Streep chooses to return to the suffocating farm life she started out with, but at least the film (or the book) gave her the choice: She weeps about it, but with clear eyes. The message seems to be that first-time love is fleeting and tenuous, more so as you get older, but when it does happen it’s no less powerful at 50 than at 20. Coming from Hollywood, that’s radically optimistic.
And there are other renderings of three-dimensional love that provide more grace notes in the general old man/young chick cacophony. Though “The Horse Whisperer” paired Robert Redford with a far younger Kristin Scott-Thomas, they were evenly yoked in experiential ways, in weariness — she was a harried professional with a damaged teenage daughter, he had a carefully concealed past. Both were looking to break free of sorrow. “Living Out Loud” betrayed its own defiant spirit at points, but it triumphed at the end by affirming that a woman can be happily alone. I loved the closing image of Holly Hunter strolling through New York escortless, confident and smiling and over 35. She didn’t get the guy — not even an old one — big deal. The movie was less about coupling than about a woman’s inner conversation with herself, one we’re rarely privy to on-screen: a kaleidoscopic conversation not just about sex but about shoes, shirts, sealing wax, ice cream, babies, old boyfriends. This is our pacing a room with a cigar, our youthful aggression — emotional rather than physical, but no less aggressive for it. Rather than drown in what doesn’t get said, rather than suffer and soldier on, we hiss and boil over and slop water on our feet and electroshock ourselves into action. Who needs Sean Connery for that?
It’s been well over a year now since I became a devotee of Tiger Woods. It was instantaneous, highly combustible love, the kind that in a span of a weekend cheerfully made mincemeat of the fact that I’d never watched a golf tournament, set foot on a proper course or swung a club more than twice in succession. I fell for Tiger the same way the tomboyish protagonist of one of my favorite adolescent books, “Tunes for a Small Harmonica,” fell in love with her wispy English teacher, a man she despised until one morning, listening to him read aloud one of his favorite obscure poems, she sat up in her chair and fell in love in the tiny rhythmic pause between one stanza and the next, in the drawing of a breath.
Tiger happened to me like that. I was sitting on a sofa on a Sunday, the last day of the Masters last spring, dragged there by a friend who insisted that black history was being made and I needed to witness it. Somewhere between the 10th and final holes the heavens opened up over my head and the poetry of Tiger fell rapturously into place. I divined the meaning not merely of his pending iconhood, but the things nobody knew or cared to think about: the razored hairs running down the back of his neck, the constraints yet wild possibility of his youth, the touching sureness of his stride as he headed into the terrible unknown. Here were outsized puppy feet at heartbreaking odds with a lovely, perfectly formed face and the guileless eyes of either a saint or a complete madman — God damn if I wasn’t going to be the one to find out which thing he was. In a few hours Tiger reconnected me with a heedless kind of faith and a sense of journey I hadn’t felt in years; he made a Siddhartha out of me at a time in my life when, despite having potency of almost palpable weight, it couldn’t have had less direction.
It’s all the more remarkable because the last thing I ever thought would inspire me is golf. The closest I ever got to the sport was during childhood, growing up on a south Los Angeles street that dead-ended into a public course. On hot summer afternoons a group of friends and I would convene at the course fence, collect the balls that had accidentally been hit into our street and shamelessly sell them back to passing golfers for a quarter, after which we’d head to the neighborhood liquor store to spend our loot on ice cream and such. My best friend of the last 15 years, the one who lured me to his living room last spring for the Masters, is an aficionado who regularly held forth on the subtler glories of golf, but to little avail. I hated golf in the elliptical way I hated asparagus, not because I didn’t like the taste, but because the whole thing was so colossally unappealing I could never bring myself to taste it. In short, I didn’t see the point of embracing golf — until Tiger Woods, and the Masters.
Tiger made a fool out of me like I hadn’t been made since 1984 and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” tour, when I thrilled to a whole canon of images I had never seen or lived but felt nonetheless — a Jersey boardwalk, a dark road to nowhere, the small-town entropy of dreams. Words failed my enormity of feeling; at Bruce’s concert I could only throw up my arms, sway, waggle fingers in delirious assent. Tiger, in a very different but no less significant way, brought me to my feet and made me do the same thing in front of a television. If Bruce illuminated for me the redemptive power of despair — of a life poorly lived, of the chance at another — Tiger illuminated a similar power of confidence, of possibly getting your shit right the first go-round. Last April, at the age of 35, overburdened with caution and a sense that my dubious star had risen and was rising no further, that was a revolutionary thought indeed. Golf was suddenly the most salient of metaphors. Tiger was not only convincing me of my own native ability to tackle the unknowable, he was making history, and in the process agitating a tsunamic wave of sociocultural introspection beneath his golf-spiked puppy feet, introspection of a scale that hadn’t been forced upon this politically somnolent country since Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Which is not to say that we agreed on everything. Tiger and I had our political differences, which were sharpest at the points where he asserted he saw no skin color, that he felt affronted at being called only black. “Oh, bullshit, Tiger!” I shouted at the television screen as he sat placidly across from Oprah. Have I, who proportionately share the same genetic mix as you, along with scores of other black folks, been a Negro all this time for nothing? We had to talk. Still, I was hopelessly enchanted; Tiger was flawed, but magic, and more magic for being flawed. He couldn’t sing, but, like Bruce, he had a sheer force of person and could make things happen by lowering his eyes and wielding his golf club/guitar. I resolved to go out and buy all of Tiger’s greatest hits. In too many years of romantic misfires and running myself through maturity checkpoints I had grown to miss hero worship, that eager sense of surrender, the mindless postering of bedroom walls with an adored male image. I started hunting for posters and fantasized about things I would never do, but that revived me merely because I considered them: Tatooing a Tiger heart on my arm, stowing away in his private plane.
My boyfriend at the time, a sometime actor and longtime caddy, did not take kindly to my new interest. He was solidly with Tiger throughout the Masters triumph — “Kicked those white boys’ asses up and down the fairway!” he exulted — but quickly lost empathy when I began sighing over the latest Nike Tiger ad or gazing at a Sports Illustrated photo spread with a charged reverence he thought should be reserved for him. To admire Tiger as a bastion of racial uplift was OK; to consider him as anything beyond was blasphemous and unsettling. There was nothing my boyfriend could do but set about deconstructing a myth I had already made; of course he failed, and we eventually split. He took particular umbrage to the fact that a couple of girlfriends and I drove up to Palm Springs one weekend last fall because Tiger was playing in a tournament at La Quinta. None of us had ever been to such an event before, but we were willing to do anything (which wound up including changing a flat tire and enduring snubs by tournament officials) for a glimpse of the Man. “Tiger Woods!” my ex sputtered in the end. “He’s all right. He’s … a kid. Nothing special about him.”
“Beg your pardon?” I said, not bothering to conceal my sarcasm. “Nothing special?”
“Well. First of all, he looks like a whole lot of people I know. Common. Second of all, he probably won’t be around that long. I know golf, and golf goes away from you. You’re great one minute, a dog the next. There’re a whole lot of guys been through that.” He went on to detail how Tiger’s ferocious swing would throw out his back, how his quick temper and penchant for winning would always undermine the patience that was much more essential to success than he yet realized. He inferred that Tiger was a lot like a million other brothers out there who, however smart and however willing, were destined to lose their way.
Not that I’m trying to establish a pattern, but I’ve gotten similar Tiger wariness from other black men, men for whom athletes are a no-brainer when it comes to objects of admiration. Nor do they seem to mind when the women they’re close to profess an affinity for Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Ken Griffey Jr. But they are superstars to the point of seeming most real as video montages and marketing strategies, not people; Tiger is that rare superstar who seems unfinished, emotionally accessible, in part because golf grants him amazing space. He is a cowboy, a range rat. Rather than sharing turf with 10 other players or squeezing shoulder to shoulder on a bench, he is always alone with a vast green canvas. When he muffs a putt, he flinches for a gallery of thousands, and the world, to see. At one point in the tournament, flushed from the sun and having to hustle from green to green like so many foxholes, I was crouched directly behind him, right at his pants leg. He stood a couple of inches off, arms folded and lost in thought, tall and deeply brown and borderline skinny and, in the most extraordinary sense of the word, ordinary. My ex was right, but not in the way he thought; I could have swooned.
Close up, Tiger squirmed beneath his famous telegenic cool: He sighed, fidgeted a little, blew his nose, moved to take off his cap but thought the better of it, sighed again. In the dead spaces between strokes he didn’t entirely know what to do with himself, and couldn’t decide because he didn’t know who or what was watching him, so he could only stand looking a little bewildered and overly solemn. The constraints of his altar-boy composure were nearly palpable, and my heart went out to him; despite having obscene amounts of money, Tiger had to be in one hell of a spot. I wanted more than anything to express my sympathy, but golf etiquette forced me into that same damn silence.
A year later Tiger is not as routinely setting the world afire (neither am I, but I’m trying) and the world is growing impatient, sometimes nastily so. Consider: He finishes in the top five in all of the tournaments he plays for the first three months of the year, fourth in the Masters, third in the rigorous British Open, and it is not good enough. A sports analyst on cable television grouses that “Tiger has shown me nothing.” Oprah gets him back on the show so that he can publicly assess this slacking off. A recent item in the sports page of the Los Angeles Times concludes that Nike made a big mistake in sinking millions into creating a line of Tiger golf wear that is too funky for older people, too conservative for hip-hoppers — Tiger, alas, is essentially a man without a market.
The spotlight swung back to him, briefly, in the recent PGA Championship, in which he led on the first day of play with a record-setting score of 66. But other players quickly moved ahead, then eclipsed him, and though Tiger wound up finishing in the top 10, nobody would describe it as anything but a disappointment. All this doomsday is, of course, nonsense to me. Tiger still claims all the stars in my eyes and most of the space of one wall of my office cubicle. One homemade caption taped above a pensive magazine picture of him reads, OOOOOO BABY!! and elicits raised eyebrows from people unacquainted with my obsession. A glossy autographed picture sent to me from his management firm (but he signed it himself, I’m certain) is still tacked in an exalted place above my computer at home, just above postcard shots of my other muses — James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov. Bruce I long ago internalized, but that doesn’t mean I am not seized with the feral, familiar pangs of what life might be, of what is left, when I hear the opening strains of “Thunder Road.” Tiger and I have a long ways yet to travel.
