Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008 12:00 PM UTC
What is your poo telling you about your health? It's the burning question that has everybody's head in the toilet these days.
By Leslie Crawford
I looked, all right? This morning, I took a long and unflinching gaze. How do I say this without sounding boastful? There in the bowl was a real beauty, my reward for yesterday’s hearty oatmeal breakfast and black bean and rice dinner. It was the kind of (how do we settle on a comfortable euphemism?) ejecta that would make Mom proud.
I consulted “What’s Your Poo Telling You?
” my handy field guide to human stools, and discovered that mine had an ideal shape, sinking nicely to the bottom of the bowl. Because of its textbook-perfect hue — no alarming green, red or yellowish tinge proving my bile is diseased — I can be reassured that I and my hardworking colon are healthy. I can proudly say I’m an excretion achiever!
I am hardly alone in poring over “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” Not only does poo have a lot to tell you, but lately scores of Americans seem anxious to listen. Last spring, Chronicle Books printed 20,000 copies of the little brown book, mostly to be sold as a novelty in Urban Outfitters. Today it has sold more than 225,000 in big-box bookstores nationwide. Apparently its success is proof that at long last poo has come out of the water closet.
Indeed, what the book’s coauthors, Josh Richman and Anish Sheth, M.D., say was once regarded as “malodorous waste” can now be openly regarded for what it is: a miracle of creation, a crystal ball of intestinal health, a feng shui of the derrière. “Like a snowflake, each poo has a wondrous uniqueness,” they write. They deconstruct specimens such as the “log jam,” “a cruel reminder of your inability to perform,” and “hanging chads,” “stubborn pieces of turd that cling.”
And for those who aspire to leave behind a shameful history of faulty stools? “The ideal poo is a pillowy soft, singular bolus of stool that exits the body with minimal effort,” says Sheth. And that paragon of poo is achieved by consuming plenty of fruits, vegetables and fiber superstars: beans, peas, seeds and nuts.
But wait, there’s more on the fecal front. Author Danielle Svetcov is set to publish “The ‘Regular’ Gourmet Everyday: Sumptuous Recipes for the Gastro-intestinally Challenged.” Tens of thousands of Americans are signing onto the Cleanse diet, a sort of spiritual-cum-vegan Roto-Rooter for the intestines. “Functional foods” like Activia yogurt aren’t selling by the cases because they are low-fat. That’s so 20th century. They are being hyped for how they “maintain digestive health.” Cutting-edge Japanese toilets can read your droppings for dietary deficiencies. But there’s a far more convincing sign that poo has hit the big time.
Much as they did with eating disorders and sex obsessions, viewers of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” are being invited to stop withholding about this most intimate and private act. Encouraged by the charismatic Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiovascular surgeon who appears regularly on the show, we are being told to look before we flush, to study what we’ve produced as a talisman of health. When it comes to diet, we need to make “number two” our “number one priority.”
On “Oprah,” women are pouring out their troubles on the toilet. Susan talks freely about her constipation. Maureen, a mother of four, lets loose entirely. “My hemorrhoids feel so bad that it’s like grapes hanging out of my rear,” she confesses. “Sometimes they hurt so bad, I can’t get out of bed for two days.”
Clearly, says Oz, Maureen and Susan, like millions of white-flour-addicted Americans, aren’t listening to what their stools are telling them. (Really, who knew the intestinal tract was so chatty?) “‘Help! Help!’ Their big colon is saying, ‘I need something from you,’” says Oz. If Maureen and Susan stop eating their children’s leftover Happy Meals and start eating more lima beans, oh, the satisfaction, wastewise, they would realize.
“You want to hear what the stool, the poop, sounds like when it hits the water,” Oz instructs. “If it sounds like a bombardier, you know, ‘plop, plop, plop,’ that’s not right because it means you’re constipated. It means the food is too hard by the time it comes out. It should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco hits the water.” Oz makes a “swoosh” sound — the sound of an Olympian excrement champion.
So why poo, and why now? Well, when it comes to the success of “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” there are two good reasons that two men in their 30s, who were potty-trained with the children’s scatological classic “Everyone Poops,” would grow up to write an adult version that speaks to their generation. No. 1, now that baby boomers are decidedly middle-aged, they’re becoming ever more aware of physiological changes that make poop an important topic of conversation. No. 2, we’re experiencing a baby boomer boomlet, with millions of new parents focusing, as new parents will, on their wee ones’ output.
Moreover, this is the natural progression of a nation obsessed, and browbeaten, about eating healthy. So we’ve moved from mouth southward, from fretting over what goes in our mouth to what comes out the other end.
The moment is ripe to come clean about our inner workings, say coauthors Sheth and Richman, who met when they were undergraduates at Brown University (where else?). Sheth, along with other collegiate pastimes, developed what he calls the PQI, or Poo Quality Index, that he and fellow students would use to compare the superiority of their bowel movements. Years later, the pair reconnected when Richman, who works in Silicon Valley to develop clean-energy technology, got back in touch with Sheth, who’d since become a gastroenterologist fellow at Yale University School of Medicine. “Poo has been in a societal sewer,” says Richman. “It’s something people didn’t feel comfortable talking about outside a small circle of friends. What we’re seeing is a cultural evolution where it’s no longer a taboo subject.”
Reading Richman and Sheth’s book is similar to pulling an enormous ball of wax out of your ear. Although you know you should be disgusted, you can’t stop looking at and obsessing over it. Quite simply, theirs is a fascinating read. (“Two thumbs up! Gripping and loaded!”) You feel relieved to get to the bottom of so many rectal mysteries, to find out that certain bathroom experiences — sometimes seemingly weird and extraordinary — are not signs that you’re a freak of nature.
When a kernel of corn makes its rear exit and comes out perfectly intact, it’s not a personal failing that proves you’re a bad child who didn’t listen to his mother and failed to chew properly. Instead, this common phenomenon, “deja poo,” refers to certain foods like corn that have insoluble fibers that are difficult for even the most efficient digestive tract to break down. “Regularity” spans the range from three times a day to three times a week. And a case of nerves — whether before an important business meeting or a performance — can induce “performance enhancing poo.”
“With so many of these experiences, we’ve had a lot of people come up to us and say, ‘I thought that was just me,’” says Richman. He adds that since the book came out, people are so anxious to talk about their stools that almost every dinner party discussion descends into potty talk, conjuring up a scene straight out of a Buñuel film.
Who knew it’s better to squat than sit? Or that because of a heavy fiber diet, the national average for detritus in southern Asia is three times that of the waste-makers in England. Then there’s the rarely discussed form of toilet elation, “poo-phoria.”
“This poo can turn an atheist into a believer and is distinguished by the sense of euphoria and ecstasy that you feel throughout your body when this type of feces departs your system,” write the coauthors. “To some, it may feel like a religious experience, to others like an orgasm, and to a lucky handful it may feel like both. This is the type of poo that makes us all look forward to spending time on the toilet.”
Going to the john is no longer simply a process of elimination. No, the “unbridled elation that results from releasing the perfect poo” is now a transformative act, bringing the conscientious fiber-eating toilet sitter to a spiritual or sexual high.
Unsettling connections between defecation and sexual pleasure aside, health may be one of the book’s biggest benefits. An interesting point when you consider that Urban Outfitters shoppers aren’t exactly the Ex-lax crowd, paying close attention to their colon’s health.
Even for a relatively young and fit person, the book makes the reader want to achieve a healthier dump. After this bathroom read, you find yourself reaching for that binding banana or drinking loads more water; and to prevent those punishing pebble poos (they can, uh, hurt on the way out), an indicator of a low-fiber diet, you opt for that sensible, grandmotherly bran muffin over the constipating chocolate croissant.
On a serious and somber note, the book advises taking a look before you flush for indicators of serious internal trouble including liver disease (white or gray feces), pancreatic disease (yellow poos) and more. (Unless you’ve been eating beets, the proper response to any deep red or black stools is an immediate check-in with your doctor.)
A snarky yet smart book like this — a “Colbert Report” of bowel movements — is in sync with today’s Web-savvy population. “With the advent of the Internet, people want to know a lot more about their health,” says Sheth. “Gone are the days people go to their doctor and take everything on blind faith. As it’s obviously intermeshed with one’s diet, the whole aspect of taking health into one’s own hands has trickled down to poo.”
Getting to know your poo may also improve your mental health, says New York City child psychologist and parent educator Lawrence Balter, author of “Dr. Balter’s Child Sense.” More openness, and less repressiveness, about our bodily functions are a good thing, he believes, although he pooh-poohs resorting to such infantile words as “poo” rather than the more forthright “bowel movement.” “These words give the impression that there’s something wrong or unacceptable,” he says. “The fact that an adult book would use a word like ‘poo’ suggests it’s a childish leftover and a childish reaction to these things.”
What would Freud say? We may have a way to go to grow out of our childish anal stage; getting beyond fourth-grade humor and cutesy euphemisms may take years. But being more serious about studying our stools may be a sign our country is growing up.
Oz says that in old-world countries like Turkey, where he has spent much of his life, the connection between overall health and healthy bowels is part of the culture. Indeed, the practice of taking an informed and forthright look at one’s waste as a vital sign of good or ill health is hardly new, practiced by societies worldwide for hundreds of years. In his recent Harper’s essay, “Wasteland,” about sewage treatment, Frederick Kaufman tells of the great Kamchatka god Kutka, who created the world and every living being, “then fell in love with his excrement and wooed it as his bride.” Now, that’s poo love.
In the United States, alternative-health practitioners have proved to be ahead of the intestinal curve, looking at the health of the gut as an indicator of systemic problems. “This kind of awareness is a critical first step in taking better care of ourselves,” says Daphne Miller, a San Francisco-based integrative family physician and author of the upcoming book “The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets From Around the World — Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home.”
“When I do an initial assessment of someone’s overall health, I really focus on their digestion and I often find myself getting down to the nitty-gritty when it comes to bowel movements,” she says. Seemingly unrelated health problems, including skin rashes, allergy symptoms and hormonal imbalances, can have their root in the gut, an assertion that’s supported by recent mainstream biomedical research. “Over and over again, I find that by fine-tuning someone’s digestion, other health issues can improve dramatically,” Miller says.
Yet can so much fecal gazing be a bad thing? Absolutely, says James Dillard, medical director of Columbia University’s Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “All the neurotics are going to think this is wonderful,” he says. “The whole alternative side of life is a little bit self-obsessed. If you’re reading a book that has you focusing on your poop, you need to get out more. Instead of looking at your butt, you might want to look more at the vegetable aisle.”
Dillard says that focusing on excrement is “an irrelevant distraction” from necessary health habits, including a good diet, regular exercise, sleep and stress management. “There is no such thing as the ‘ideal’ stool,” he says. “This is a nonsense, pre-science concept. Obviously, if someone is eating only McDonald’s, they will get stopped up.” Otherwise, says Dillard, even the most laudable diet will show enormous variation in what comes out, all dependent on multiple factors like what you had for lunch, the amount of soluble and insoluble fiber you’ve eaten, hydration and — given that the gut is inextricably linked to the nervous system — your mood.
Dillard also points to the current fad for “detoxing” the body by regularly getting high colonics as an obsessively unhealthy one. “This is a manifestation that a part of you is dirty,” he says. “The colon has been around million of years and the wisdom of the colon predates us. This notion that we can somehow always intervene in some way so we can be intellectually or psychically or physiologically superior to this part of the body is kind of foolish.”
What’s more, obsessive stool reading may be a sign of an emotionally unhealthy culture. Since the turn of the 21st century, says private-practice psychologist Susan Lipkins, we’re increasingly panicked over the inability to control factors like terrorism, global warming and the government. “As Americans’ anxiety increases, it makes sense that we’d try to control everything,” says Lipkins, an expert on toilet training. Our recent enthusiasm for stool perfection may be yet another manifestation of Americans’ “obsessive, narcissistic” behavior, she suggests.
“Parents are trying to control their children, corporations are trying to control workers, and on an individual level, we’re trying to control our bodies, including our poop: when we poop, how often we poop and what we poop, including the right size, consistency and color.” As with all fads that strive toward the perfect body — be it the face, the pecs or the wardrobe — Lipkins says we’re missing something essential.
“You can be perfectly shaped and have perfectly shaped poops and still be an unhappy camper.” What’s more, says Lipkins, obsessing is not good for overall health, and certainly not for one’s bowel movements, since to poop with ease, it’s essential to relax. “But Type A people don’t have an hour to relax, so they take fiber to make sure they poop, so it fits into their schedule. Giving yourself time in the morning is a lot better than taking something so you can poop.”
In the end, as with all health practices, balance is key. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with analyzing one’s excrement,” says Dillard. “But if this is the center of your life, you need to consult a mental health practitioner.”
Tuesday, Nov 16, 1999 5:00 PM UTC
America's high priestess of chow has shown a nation raised on meatloaf that fresh, nourishing food, organically grown and simply prepared, ranks right up there next to godliness.
By Leslie Crawford
It’s impossible to fathom, but there was a time when fine, upstanding gourmets didn’t find words like “free-range” and “organic” on their dinner menus; a time when Americans thought frisee was a ballet position and mesclun a hallucinogen. But that was before Alice Waters had her way with our palates. Not only would the founder of Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse restaurant single-handedly change what we ate. She would alter how we thought, how we “felt,” about our food.
If Waters weren’t so passionate about the healing life force teaming inside natural foods organically grown and simply prepared, she would never have managed to communicate her message to a nation of people raised on canned peas and meatloaf. For we have Waters to thank for those sublime baby greens — the kind you see in profusion at even the most commercial chain supermarkets — that mercifully replaced iceberg lettuce.
And iceberg’s demise is just the tip of Waters’ contribution to our culinary evolution. We also owe Waters thanks for introducing our taste buds to simple pleasures, saying no to the overwrought cuisine that dominated “gourmet” dining for decades and abolishing the pretension that masked the elegant essence of unadorned, nourishing fare. As San Francisco food critic Patricia Unterman noted, “Julia [Child] set the stage for the culinary boom in America by teaching people how to cook, and then Alice Waters took everyone to the next step by teaching about ingredients.” We are in Waters’ debt for teaching us how to eat a peach, how to savor every bite. And to America’s small, organic farmers, she is, as the New York Times dubbed her, “a patron saint” who has shown chefs and diners alike that unprocessed, unadulterated, chemical-free food ranks somewhere up there next to godliness.
Among foodies — critics, gourmands, colleagues, farmers — Waters is the top of the food chain, an innovator whom the New York Times dubbed the “Mother of American Cooking.” Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker called her the “Materfamilias to a generation of chefs.” And not only American chefs. Waters’ aesthetic has had a dramatic impact on European cuisine as well, most notably in France (not a country that has taken kindly to America’s sense of taste) where, Gopnik writes, the legendary winegrower Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, “speaks of her in hushed tones.”
Indeed, she is regarded as a sort of high priestess — a spiritual leader who showed the way to serve and eat locally grown food in season. Yet for all the fanfare, Waters is a most unusual flavor of celebrity chef. Though she’s had an abundance of offers over the years, she has never marketed herself or franchised her restaurant. Neither has she starred in a nationally syndicated cooking show or hawked a line of frozen pizza or BBQ sauce. Her only commercial endeavors include a line of cookbooks and Cafe Fanny Granola. Compared with the likes of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck or Emeril Lagasse, Waters is a culinary wallflower.
Included in Waters’ family tree — those who’ve worked under her charge — are such renowned chefs as Paul Bertolli, founder of Oakland’s Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant and co-author of several Chez Panisse cookbooks; Mark Miller of Santa Fe’s Coyote Cafe; Deborah Madison, founding chef of San Francisco’s upscale vegetarian restaurant Greens; Jonathan Waxman, co-proprietor of New York’s Jams; and Jeremiah Tower, former proprietor of Stars, one of San Francisco’s trendiest restaurants in the ’80s. Gourmets worldwide make pilgrimages to her flagship restaurant Chez Panisse and the restaurant’s less formal upstairs cafe — both named for French author Marcel Pagnol’s Provengal hero Panisse — as well as to Cafe Fanny (named after her teenage daughter, who was named after another Pagnol character), a diminutive, Parisian-style cafe located a few miles away. Chez Panisse is at the heart of the “gourmet ghetto” of specialty food shops that have sprung up around it in the past 30 years.
President Clinton has dined at Chez Panisse, and Waters has been the chef at several Bay Area dinner parties given in his honor. And Martha Stewart makes a point of stopping at the restaurant when she’s in the Bay Area. Waters’ five cookbooks, most notably “The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook” and “Chez Panisse Vegetables,” are classics. Her cornucopia of food awards includes being ranked one of the world’s 10 best chefs by the prestigious Cuisine et Vins du France magazine and receiving, in 1992, the James Beard Foundation’s award for the Best Restaurant and Best Chef in America. Most recently, she’s been invited by the French to open a restaurant at the Louvre, a project that, if realized, will be completed in the next decade.
What’s so remarkable about Alice Waters is that ever since she began her mission more than 25 years ago, she has been at the helm of a revolution. What Waters has in mind is social change on a grand scale. She says that once we return to the land — spurning homogenized, mass-marketed artificial foods that deaden our spirits, separating us from our essential selves — we will return to one another. She believes that sitting down together for a family meal is the best way to instill family values.
Waters is committed to the idea that if we take the time and care to put nourishing food on our plate, we will in turn renew our communities, our world and ourselves. Eat junk, and you demean yourself and destroy the environment. Eat natural, organic ingredients grown nearby and produced in season, and you will improve yourself, the community and the world.
Alice Louise Waters was born April 28, 1944, in Chatham, N.J. She came of age in the tumultuous late ’60s in Berkeley, graduating from the University of California in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies. During her college years, she was involved with local politics, working for the congressional campaign of journalist Robert Scheer, who to her great dismay was defeated. Still, Waters was committed to doing good. While so many of her compatriots seem to have long ago abandoned their mission, Waters has maintained a crusader’s energy, intent on changing the world, one fava bean at a time.
At age 19 Waters had spent a year traveling in France. “I lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by osmosis,” she once told the New York Times. “This was my first connection with farmers’ markets and real food. I loved what I ate and I wanted that kind of food here.” What she came to realize was that “the best-tasting food came from the people who were taking care of the land and nourishing it. These were the organic farmers.”
When Waters returned to the United States, she got a job teaching. At night, she would cook for friends. “Chez Panisse began as an offshoot of dinner parties,” says David Goines, who has known Waters since 1966 and designed and illustrated “The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook” and “The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook.” “Alice wanted to have her friends to dinner every night. The only way to do that was to open a restaurant.” In 1971, Waters took out a $10,000 loan — her father mortgaged his house — and with her friend Lindsey Shere opened a Provence-style bistro in an old wooden house on Shattuck Street, not far from the Berkeley campus.
Goines says that her idea “was to cook foods quite different from the preeminent style” — in other words, haute cuisine. “The food began with very much a French country overtone, simple and uncomplicated. You served a fresh fish and left it alone. You didn’t tart it up with all sorts of sauces. This basic philosophy matured over the years into Alice’s search for fresh, pure ingredients.”
The people who cooked and supped at Chez Panisse during those early days resembled a cabal trying to reinvent the world, not capitalists hoping to launch a posh restaurant. Back then, “There was a joyful abandon in creating a completely inedible meal,” says Goines. “There were several memorable disasters. That was part of the experimentation.”
But the restaurant didn’t make money. For years Chez Panisse lost a small fortune. The truth is, it costs dearly to make a perfect, simple salad. Eventually, Chez Panisse grew up, becoming more of a business and less of a playhouse. And in the process it also became a shrine to new American cooking. Waters’ recipe for success was never a closely guarded secret. Her cuisine has always been basic and down-to-earth, just the sort of Mediterranean cooking Pagnol himself would have loved.
But newcomers to the restaurant can feel shortchanged by its apparent simplicity. If you’re looking for sculptured “art” food, well, don’t go to Alice’s restaurant. Dinner is disarmingly plain, nothing more elaborate than a small watercress and beet salad; a bowl of vegetable broth; grilled fish; and for dessert, a single pear sitting on a plate. And every morsel, perfection.
What does such an effete aesthetic possibly have to do with Waters’ call to arms? Chez Panisse is among America’s best restaurants and is priced accordingly. The five-course, prix fixe dinner costs up to $68 a person. Critics claim that Waters is nothing more than an armchair liberal espousing idealistic notions, meanwhile entertaining the wealthy and privileged. Goines insists that from the beginning, Waters has never aspired — unlike some of her hippie-turned-millionaire brethren — to make a killing off a good idea.
“Alice’s vision is extremely clear,” he says. “She’s not concerned with the restaurant. She’s concerned with good food. If you were to light a fire and burn the restaurant down, she’d keep going. She’s on a mission.”
Waters would argue that indulging in delicious food is not separate from doing good works. The two acts are inexorably intertwined. “The sensual pleasure of eating beautiful food from the garden,” she told the New Yorker, “brings with it the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing for the planet and for yourself.” Chez Panisse is not there to feed the masses. The restaurant is a model for others to aspire to.
In one of several letters to President Clinton, Waters calls on him to publicly address the need to abolish the unhealthy way we grow our food and feed ourselves, to “invigorate public dialogue by turning our attention to how food must be at the center of our lives.”
Why does she feel such a goal is so essential to our country’s future? “Communities are brought together when people care about what they eat,” says Waters. “I continue to believe that the very best way to bring people together is by changing the role food plays in our national life.”
But what about those who can barely get by on food stamps? In response she writes, “Often somebody will complain that it is all very well for me — the owner of an expensive restaurant with a sophisticated clientele located in a mild climate — to prescribe this kind of eating, but for most Americans it is a luxury that is all but out of reach.”
Not so, says Waters. “Fresh, nourishing food need never again be stigmatized as elitist. Wholesome, honest food must be the entitlement of all Americans, not just the rich.” (One is tempted to pause and wonder how much the president, unrepentant Big Mac lover, took to heart Waters’ notion that a reformed America is a junk-food-free America.)
However noble and well-intentioned, Waters’ dream will be a difficult one to realize. She may have changed the way the Brahmins eat, but how do you introduce such rarefied fare to a populace that can buy a Whopper at Burger King for a fraction of the price of a Chez Panisse appetizer? It’s expensive to produce and buy organic, seasonal, farm-fresh food. Which explains why even today Chez Panisse reportedly earns little profit. The ingredients — whenever possible, organic produce and free-range and chemical-free meats — are costly, and the preparation she demands is time-consuming. She lives her own life with as little pretension and as much simplicity as she demands of her food. She doesn’t live grandly. With her daughter, Fanny, and husband, Stephen Singer, a wine and olive oil merchant and painter, Waters lives in an unassuming, slightly ramshackle Berkeley house close to the restaurant. This is in keeping with her broader effort to reach a social utopia. Live, work and eat locally. Stay committed to your community; nourish it and in return it will nourish you.
And if you don’t have what you need in your own community, create it. When Waters opened Chez Panisse, she couldn’t find the kind of food that was so readily available during her idyllic days strolling through the French farmers’ markets. So she established relationships with local farmers and ranchers, encouraging them to grow healthy foods. Where most high-end restaurants have purchasing agents, Waters hired a full-time “forager” to find suppliers who produce quality, ideally organic, ingredients. “Unfortunately,” Waters said in an interview with Online Chef, “it took a long time to develop a local farming system to produce and support fresh, local ingredients.”
But what revolution happens overnight? It takes years for awareness to grow, but eventually that awareness spirals outward. Through the basic principle of supply and demand, everything from pesticide-free corn and berries to steroid-free chicken and beef have become more readily available. Waters’ relentless demand for local ingredients and her allegiance to healthy, organic food has nourished a national trend that encourages community-supported, sustainable agriculture. In the end, Waters has proven herself correct. “The act of eating is very political,” she says. “You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food. If we don’t preserve the natural resources, you aren’t going to have a sustainable society.”
At least in Berkeley and on the farms and ranches of the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area, Waters has helped create the sustainable society she envisioned. She buys from 75 different vendors. This tight society of food growers and merchants know one another and depend on one another to live. To drive home her commitment to the local farmers, in 1996 — to commemorate Chez Panisse’s 25th anniversary — Waters started the Chez Panisse Foundation. To date, the organization has donated a quarter of a million dollars to nonprofit organizations that promote sustainable agriculture.
In 1990, Waters learned of the Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail. The program, spearheaded by Catherine Sneed, served as job-training outreach, giving inmates an education in organic gardening and providing them with a place to work when they’re released. After seeing how dramatically the inmates changed their way of thinking after they got involved, Waters joined the project’s board and participates in its planning and development. For almost a decade, Chez Panisse has been one of the Garden Project’s most committed customers.
The county jail’s Garden Project inspired Waters’ own project: the Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Middle School. The cafeteria at the local middle school had long been shut down, only to be replaced by a “snack shack” that served packaged hamburgers, burritos and pizza. Waters proposed a curriculum to the school’s staff that allowed the students to plant and harvest their own food, then cook, serve and eat it for lunch. At the beginning, the notion seemed too idealistic, a far-fetched plan that would never be realized. Would junior high students who didn’t know from an heirloom tomato scoff at the notion of eating a lunch made from food they raised in their own organic garden? Today the half acre, formerly buried in weeds and cracked asphalt, is a flourishing vegetable and fruit garden.
This is only the beginning of Waters’ dream. She’s hoping that the Martin Luther King Middle School will inspire other schools nationwide. In Waters’ utopia, all children will be reaping the seeds they sow. We will all sit down and break the bread we’ve made together — stopping long enough to realize what we have before us, and what we’ve been missing.
Tuesday, Jul 27, 1999 4:00 PM UTC
He remains the unquestioned master of the art that dare not speak its name. That's his strength and the art's weakness.
By Leslie Crawford
Millions who have never seen him perform live, or even on television, have heard of Marcel Marceau. He’s, you know, that French guy in white face who for some inexplicable reason doesn’t talk. (Oh, but he can talk. “Never get a mime talking,” he says. “He won’t stop.”) Yet how to explain what a miracle he is. He’s toured the world with his show 40 times. He’s been in scores of TV movies, independent and feature films, including — if you can imagine it — “Barbarella,” and had the only speaking role in Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie” (he said, “Non!”). He’s written and illustrated several books. He’s received France’s highest artist honor — the French Legion of Honor — and two Emmys. Michael Jackson modeled his moon walk on Marceau’s walk-against-the-wind techniques (today, the two are close friends). There was a day dedicated to him earlier this year: The city of New York declared March 18 Marcel Marceau Day. He’s garnered honorary degrees from prestigious universities across America. He’s had three wives, four children, survived the Holocaust, joined the Resistance and marched in Patton’s army. All this, and he has a wickedly weird and original sense of humor. “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” Marceau once said, “for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
Even when you don’t quite get it, Marceau makes you think twice.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
I was a young girl, maybe 11, when my parents first took me to see Marcel Marceau. Under the spotlight in a Denver theater, this graceful, solitary figure in black and white — topped, maraschino cherry-like, with a single red flower — entranced me with his silent eloquence. As Marceau is fond of saying, he made “the invisible visible.” I vowed, to my parents horror, to emulate Marceau by one day becoming the world’s greatest female mime. By the time Marceau returned to Denver a few years later, I had formed a mime troupe with my neighbor Katy Burns. In hopes of meeting our one and only god, Katy and I sent a note to the theater requesting an interview for our high school paper. Unbelievably, Marceau said yes.
A few days later, I found myself standing before my hero. I was terrified. Intensely theatrical, Marceau maintained a dancer’s elegant, rigid posture and exaggerated out-turned feet, tapping the floor with his black ballet shoe — a trademark Marceau stage tic. Occasionally he’d vary his pose, gesticulating dramatically, his hands dancing in the air around his head like fluttering butterflies. His salt-and-pepper hair had a touch of Einstein’s brilliant unruliness; his thick mask of white pancake makeup and charcoal-lined eyes accentuated his wrinkles. The day I met him was his 57th birthday. To a teenager, he was ancient. I mournfully concluded that this tour would surely be his last.
Katy and I had come armed with a dozen questions, but managed only to ask one. I can’t remember the question, but I can recall that his answer, which lasted nearly 15 minutes so that the show started 10 minutes late, began somewhere with God, ended with Mozart and had an impressive number of Marceau references in between. He often spoke of himself in the third person. “It’s true, there is only one Marceau.” “In my heart, I feel that Mozart wrote his 21st concerto for Marceau.” “Even the Hollywood stars, they love Marceau.”
At the end of his monologue, he announced, “I must go.” But before walking away, Marceau gazed at me and issued a direct challenge: “Of course, you must study mime at my school.” And upon graduating from college, I went straight to Paris to audition. This second Marceau encounter was a tragicomic exercise in which I was asked to perform on a small stage before the master himself. “Allez, allez,” he said, standing below me in his school’s near empty theater, along with a panel of stern judges who would help decide my fate. There Marceau stood, holding the same statuesque pose and, naturally, tapping his foot. “Show me happiness. Show me sadness. Walk through a forest.” I grinned, I grimaced, I ducked under branches and feigned exaggerated horror at imagined snakes and long-toothed beasts. All of this I did, like so many Marceau wannabes, very, very badly. To my parents’ delight, I wasn’t accepted, which is why right now I’m writing this article, rather than tip-toeing after tourists at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf or in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Now, some 20 years later, I hear that Marceau is not only still, shall we say, kicking, but performing and teaching at the same, superhuman pace that he’s managed for half a century. Stop for a moment to consider this breathtaking fact. The man is 76. So he’s pushing 80, so what? So, you try bending backwards, head almost but not quite touching the ground, as you prance about under hot spotlights, thousands of eyes fixed upon you, and only you. Or how about, night after night after night, going up and down an invisible escalator (The back! The knees!); attempting suicide; personifying all seven sins; and acting out the creation of the world, from amoeba to man, in 10 minutes or so. Now assume a relentless schedule that demands minimal sleep and maximum physical exertion so that you can perform your one-man show, up to 200 nights a year, at every far-flung corner of the planet. (Keep in mind that you have no understudy.)
And yet, despite his fame and genius, Marceau seems fated to swim against the current. There’s the irrefutable fact that some, OK many, people just don’t like mime. They find it too cutesy, too annoying, a form of corporal punishment. As with sumo wrestling, opera or bagpipes, you either love mime or you don’t. You really don’t.
In his essay “A Little Louder, Please,” Woody Allen is so confounded by the antics of a “famed international pantomimist,” that he launches into a solo game of charades. “Pillow … big pillow. Cushion? Looks like cushion …” Alas, after all these years, mime — the art that dares not speak its name — still gets little respect. Anti-mime jokes tend toward the violent (If a tree fell on a mime in the forest, would anyone care? If you’re going to shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?)
The antipathy is often justified. With the exception of a few rare talents, most are nothing but genetically inferior spawns, mimicking the one true practitioner. The trouble is that these watered-down Marceaus rarely get it right — and in so doing have made mime a four-letter word. “There is,” as Marceau says, “only one Marceau.” Yes, he’s the real thing. He has an impeccable comic sense, and knows how to make you feel, in your soul, the tragic moment. It’s no accident that children are his best audiences, because his art demands active participation, imagination. His is a world fashioned out of thin air. You see a statue, a pickpocket, a matador, a lion tamer, a soldier, a man passionately embraced by his lover. Marceau’s highly stylized, lyrical sketches can be light and whimsical or bitingly satiric and dark. “Marceau in our time,” says New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, “remains the supremely eloquent voice of silence and poet of gesture.”
Perhaps true appreciation of Marceau requires a step back in time. Before Marceau broke out of an invisible box and stepped into millions of American’s living rooms on Max Liebman’s “Show of Shows” nearly 40 years ago, you could fit the number of people who knew or much less cared anything about the art of pantomime in a Citroen. What we know of mime — the mute theatrics, the exaggerated body language, the requisite black-and-white get-up — was essentially minted by Marceau.
From an early age, the theater seemed Marceau’s destiny. Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, he came from a lively Jewish family with socialist ideals and an artistic bent. His extended family included many musicians and dancers. By the age of 7, Marceau was entertaining neighborhood friends with his comic talent. “I discovered I could make people laugh and cry without speaking,” says Marceau, who wasn’t “doing mime.” He was, in fact, imitating Charlie Chaplin. (Indeed, Marceau’s thickly lined eyes and mouth and black-and-white silhouette evoke Chaplin’s silent-screen image.)
When Marceau was 15, his life unraveled. On the day France entered World War II, his family was given two hours to pack. Marceau and his older brother, Alain, fled to temporary safety in Limoges. Alain became a leader of the local French underground, and young Marcel joined in. To hide their Jewish origins, the brothers changed their family name to the solidly patriotic Marceau, a famous general in the French Revolution.
Marceau’s wartime activities presaged his later artistic role as illusionist. Using red crayons and black ink, he altered the ages of French youths’ identity cards, proving them too young to be sent to labor camps. And later, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on a hike in the Alps, he saved hundreds of Jewish children’s lives by smuggling them into Switzerland. No surprise, then, that his most affecting works — notably “The Trial,” “The Cage” and “Bip Remembers,” which recounts Marceau’s own wartime experiences — are highly political.
In 1944, Marceau’s father was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His mother headed to Perigueux, in the south of France, with the two brothers, but when the situation became too dangerous, Alain and Marcel fled to Paris. Despite the desperate times, Marceau continued entertaining fantasies of a future in the theater. “I wanted to be a speaking actor,” he insists, though most of his theatrical inspirations were silent screen stars: Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Again his career was put on hold when he entered DeGaulle’s Free French Army. Because he spoke such good English, he was appointed as a liaison officer with Patton’s army. When he returned to Paris, the city was liberated, and Marceau was free to pursue his dreams. In 1946, he enrolled in Paris’ famous Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre.
It was at the Dullin School that Marceau found his mentor, renowned teacher Etienne Decroux, from whom Marceau would learn that there was, in fact, an art called mime. Decroux had invented an exacting physical grammar, “moving statuary,” that called for a virtuoso performer capable of perfect isolation and precise movement. Theater students weren’t lining up at the door. “In those days,” says Marceau, “mime was a tiny part of drama school study, like saber fencing. Most actors found it too tiring. But it captivated me.”
“You’re a born mime,” declared Decroux, and it was so. But Marceau soon parted ways with his mentor, who was at heart less an entertainer than an academic. Taking Decroux’s uncompromising grammar as a launching point, Marceau developed his own style, a language that proved to be more accessible to the masses — mime for the mainstream. His invention of “mimodramas” signaled the true beginning of modern mime and the end of his relationship with Decroux. Believing that Marceau had cheapened the “science” of mime, Decroux never forgave his star pupil.
This mainstream mime, however, enchanted audiences, especially starting in 1947, when Marceau created his alter ego, “the dreamy little poet” Bip. Dressed in striped sailors shirt and white flair pants, Bip was a classic underdog, a sweet loser who tried hard, and inevitably failed. First playing at Paris’ diminutive Theatre de Poche, Bip, aka Marceau, swiftly gained enough fame to take his show on tour, performing throughout Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Over the next 10-plus years, he wrote dozens of mimodramas. In 1955, he decided he was ready to take his show overseas. If Marceau could make it in New York, he could make it anywhere.
But he was virtually unknown in the United States. His tour opened on Broadway, at New York’s small Phoenix Theater, where he was scheduled to play for two weeks. Critics raved — “Marceau is the essence of theater” — and the houses filled. His Broadway run lasted an astounding three months, and he went on to tour the country to standing-room-only crowds. By the beginning of the ’60s, Marcel Marceau had become a household name.
Which is precisely what troubles him. When Marceau is gone, we won’t say, “There goes one of the world’s greatest mimes,” but “There goes ‘the’ world’s great mime.” Marceau is mime, which is the artist’s strength and the art’s weakness. When the man who made the invisible visible has departed, will mime disappear with him?
“I’ve heard some people say I’m a ‘classic,’” says Marceau. “But time goes so quickly and people forget quickly. What is really important is to remain a classic after your life. One way is to bring mime to more and more young people.”
Marceau hopes to keep mime alive through his Paris school, L’Ecole International de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau. He wants people to remember not just Marceau, but the art form he created. “Mimes are masters of silence,” he says, “soon forgotten if they don’t appear onstage regularly.”
To ensure his legacy, Marceau, after gentle prodding from colleagues, agreed to form the Marcel Marceau Foundation for the Advancement of Mime in New York. Foundation board members are an eclectic mix of stars that include Michael Jackson, Placido Domingo, Barbara Hendricks and Dustin Hoffman — all devoted fans.
The foundation’s primary goal is to collect and record Marceau’s work. At present, he is making an educational video to teach mime to theater and dance students. And despite the naysayers and joke tellers who’ve already penned mime’s obituary, Marceau believes mime has a bright future. “I believe in the 21st century mime will enter the field of theater as a modern art form,” says Marceau. “Remember, it’s taken dance 500 years to develop. We are only 50 years old.”
One night recently, I phoned him at his country home, a farmhouse just outside Paris. The next day, Marceau would be leaving for a summer-long American tour. It is midnight, his time. I thank him for taking my call at such a late hour.
“But I keep theater hours, you know,” he tells me in flawless English.
“You must get tired, though,” I say.
“Tired?” Marceau says. “No, I would have been tired if I hadn’t played. This has kept me young. My body has kept the same weight and agility it had 30 years ago.”
Indeed, Marceau’s still as flexible as a Slinky, but time has taken a toll on his hearing, so I find myself in the unkind position of bellowing questions at the world’s only great mime. But once he understands me — just as he had when we first met — he talks fluidly. He tells stories about performing as a young boy, for Patton’s troops, about finally meeting Chaplin in an airport and David Copperfield on an airplane. “Mr. Copperfield said to me, ‘You make the invisible visible, and I make the visible invisible.’ So I ask him if he could make the plane disappear. Can you imagine? What would the world think if suddenly David Copperfield and Marcel Marceau disappear in the sky?”
I type quickly to keep up while he speaks. Suddenly, he stops and says, “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, Mr. Marceau,” I say, “I’m still here.”
“Ah,” he quips. “I thought perhaps you were doing mime.”
Saturday, Jun 5, 1999 4:00 PM UTC
The author of the 1970 bestseller "Sexual Politics" may have been the women's movement's most unlikely heroine, or maybe not.
By Leslie Crawford
How forgotten is Kate Millett? When I stop by my local bookstore to pick up a copy of “Sexual Politics,” it doesn’t occur to me that I won’t find her seminal work, the one that all but launched the second wave of the women’s movement. It’s worth noting that this is not a chain, where a militant feminist author of the 1970s might not be missed. I go to an independent bookstore in a San Francisco neighborhood peopled by highly educated liberals. I’m directed to the women’s studies section and find a single shelf’s worth of oddly random titles that include Nancy Friday’s “Our Loves, Our Lives,” Germaine Greer’s “The Whole Woman” and, given the paltry selection, a hefty offering of books on menopause. I return to the front desk and ask a woman, in her mid-30s like me, if Millett might be located somewhere else, possibly in the nonfiction section?
“Let’s see … Kate Millett,” she taps at the computer and stares at the screen, searching the store’s database and, it appears from her puzzled expression, her own. “Wasn’t she a feminist?”
“Yes,” I say, and as if delivering an eighth-grade book report, I add, “Millett was very famous 30 years ago; a revolutionary.”
“Oh, right,” she looks up from the computer. “A revolutionary for 10 minutes.” The book, she tells me, is out of print. I’m less confident as I head to a used-book store nearby, but in the remainder bin I uncover two of Millett’s lesser-known works: “Flying,” the autobiography she wrote when she was 38, and “The Loony Bin Trip,” Millett’s memoir about her mental breakdown and forced institutionalization. After calling five additional stores, including what I’d expected to be a slam dunk — a Berkeley feminist bookstore — and then checking Amazon.com (“This title is out of print …” it responds as I key in each of her nine titles; only “Politics of Cruelty” is still available), I get a copy at the main library.
How is it that the great Kate Millett has nearly vanished from the collective consciousness? Certainly, she’s overlooked by the media that once scrutinized her every move, and is barely a footnote in the minds of the very women who have profited from her labors. For whatever reason, my generation seems to be more familiar with Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem, Millett’s onetime peers. These feminist hall-of-famers — who respectively authored “The Feminine Mystique” and founded the National Organization for Women; wrote “The Female Eunuch”; and co-founded Ms. magazine — remain in the Zeitgeist. Biographies of Friedan and Greer were published this past year, as were books penned by both women; and Steinem remains the biggest women’s lib celeb of them all.
Thanks to my favorite college professor, I was forced to read “Sexual Politics.” In truth, the 543-page polemic, Millett’s Columbia University Ph.D. doctoral thesis, reads like one. Save the raunchy literary passages from Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Jean Genet, which Millett uses to illustrate men’s use of sex to degrade and undermine women, “Sexual Politics” is a dry read. Millett assails romantic love (“a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit”), calls for an end to monogamous marriage and the family (“patriarchy’s chief institution”) and proposes a sexual revolution that would “bring the institution of patriarchy to an end.” Millett’s classic woke me up, changed my perception of women and myself, as it did for tens of thousands of American women when it first appeared nearly 30 years ago.
In 1970, Millett’s dissertation — which she didn’t expect to be published much less read by the mainstream — became a bestseller. What Millett advocated hardly sounds subversive in 1999, perhaps because much of it is now accepted as basic feminist theology — most notably, her questioning a patriarchy that relegates more than half its population to second-class citizenship. But at the time, it was striking. Ever since the winning of women’s suffrage early in the century, the movement had gone stagnant. With the ’60s came the feminists’ second wave, and at a grass-roots level anyhow, the nation began hearing rumblings from women voicing their discontent.
There was plenty of it, to be sure. In 1970, women were making 59 cents for every dollar earned by men, and represented just 7 percent of all doctors and 3 percent of lawyers in the country. The Equal Rights Amendment, languishing since 1923, was reintroduced into Congress, but wasn’t passed for another two years (and still hasn’t been ratified by all the states). Roe vs. Wade was still several years away. Maybe most telling: Good Housekeeping’s “Ten Most Admired Women” were identified only by their husbands’ names.
And voil`, at the peak of the wave, in rode Kate Millett, a rather unlikely heroine — but then again, maybe not. When “Sexual Politics” was published, Millett was 34, an unknown sculptor and activist living the life of an impoverished bohemian in New York’s Bowery district. Born Katherine Murray Millett in St. Paul, Minn., Millett led a far different life than her strict Catholic parents had envisioned. Married to Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, to whom she dedicated “Sexual Politics,” she maintained open relationships with a series of women. Upon the publication of her dissertation, Millett achieved instant fame and, compared with her formerly dire straits, a modest fortune of $30,000. The majority of this she spent to buy property in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., establishing the Women’s Art Colony Farm for writers and visual artists.
Whether she liked it or not — and for Millett, this seems to be forever an ambivalent question — she became an overnight celebrity, lauded as the movement’s perfect figurehead. She was brilliant, articulate, attractive, passionate in her activism, generous with her time and surprisingly gracious in interviews. The media swallowed her whole and spit out a simplified spokeswoman for the masses. Millett was hardly prepared. “I’m slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility,” she wrote in “Flying.” “Will this object in my hands, offspring already so remote, become a monster?” Time magazine hailed her as “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” But Millett didn’t want to be a leader; it’s against the spirit of the movement, she said, and mimics the patriarchy’s repressive hierarchy. “Microphones shoved into my mouth … ‘What is the future of the woman’s movement?’” she wrote. “How in the hell do I know — I don’t run it … The whole thing is sordid, embarrassing, a fraud.” Every campus in the country seemed to want her to speak, which she did, often grudgingly. “I would like to slap their smug little faces,” Millett wrote, “and tell them I’m vomiting with terror … why have you made me a curiosity?”
As intensely as she was lionized, Millett was demonized. In his 1971 essay “The Prisoner of Sex,” Norman Mailer, whom in “Sexual Politics” Millett painted as the arch-villain chauvinist, fought back. Spitting mad, he wrote: “Well, it could be said for Kate that she was nothing if not a pug-nosed wit, and that was good, since in literary matters she had not much else.” And he called her “the Battling Annie of some new prudery,” a “literary Molotov” — then blasted her purported use of inaccurate research, deceptive quotation and simplistic, flawed logic. How dare she ride roughshod over such artistic geniuses as Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, and — although he never comes out and says it — Norman Mailer?
Millett’s public persona started to tarnish. The women’s movement turned on her when she was outed as a lesbian. “The disclosure,” said an article in Time, “is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause.” Indeed it did. The gay movement lashed out at her for not coming out sooner. “Never queer enough for the fanatic,” she confessed in “Flying.” “Confused with straight people.”
“Will future historians say that I blew it?” she asked, always conflicted over the part she was expected to play. Unlike Friedan and Steinem, “all far better politicians,” observed Millett, and comfortable in their starring roles as Feminists for the People, Millett wasn’t easily defined — and seemed continually misunderstood. There’s Friedan, the stately matriarch; Steinem, the brassy babe; and Millett, the manic-depressive, married, bisexual, women’s reformer, gay liberationist, reclusive sculptor, in-your-face activist, retiring Midwesterner, brassy New Yorker. There were too many mixed messages; she was far too conflicted and complicated a figure.
Her private life was in turmoil. Sure she was an iconoclast, but a part of Millett never stopped wanting to be the good little Catholic girl. She was tormented by the pain her lesbian front-page news brought her deeply religious mother. “Guilt,” wrote Millett, “her retaliation beyond any offense.” In the self-described “isolation” that fame had brought, she was increasingly tortured by her manic-depression — which may well explain Millett’s many selves, at war with one another as much as they were with the outside world.
“There is no denying the misery and stress of life,” she wrote in “The Loony-Bin Trip.” “The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice.” This is her dark self, the one diagnosed as “constitutionally psychotic,” who, against her will, is given electroshock treatments. This is not the self-possessed mother of the feminist movement, this is the other woman who, Millett admits, is constantly wavering — “I doubt everything,” she says.
The feeding frenzy became too much for her. “How does one get out of the movement?” she asked. “Where is the exit? … I can’t be Kate Millett any more … A joke at cocktail parties … Just let me watch it from the sidelines. Like other women can. Enjoy the luxury of looking on while someone else does it for us.” Be careful of what you wish for. Over the next three decades, she slipped into obscurity. Millett stopped being Kate Millett, America’s favorite feminist.
The reality is that Kate Millett has continued doing what she had always done: writing, art and activism. In 1973, she published “The Prostitution Papers,” a defense of prostitutes’ rights; the following year, she came out with “Flying”; and in 1977, “Sita,” about an ill-fated love affair with another woman. In 1979, Millett went to Iran to work for women’s rights, was soon expelled, and wrote about the experience in “Going to Iran.” “The Politics of Cruelty,” published in 1994 — which brought her more attention than any book since “Sexual Politics” — exposed the ongoing use of state-sanctioned torture in dozens of countries. Some of her books get attention; many fall off the charts. Universities and small galleries occasionally exhibit her work, and colleges ask her to lecture, although less and less often. And she’s managed to hold onto her farm, today a well-established artists’ colony.
A year ago, Millett surfaced in the most disconcerting manner, when an
article she wrote for the London Guardian was excerpted and circulated on the Internet. In the article, titled “The Feminist Time Forgot,” Millett comes across as desperate and destitute, fearful of future “bag-lady horrors.” Despite her credentials, she can’t get a decent teaching job, not even at an extension night school. No one returns her calls. She can’t even get hired as a temp. “I don’t type well enough,” Millett writes ruefully. She’s offered $1,000 to republish “Sexual Politics,” an embarrassing sum she refuses. (Ironically, notes Millett, Doubleday is putting out an anthology of the 10 most important books it’s published in the past century — an excerpt from “Sexual Politics” is included.) Most astonishing is the news that she earns a living selling Christmas trees from her farm. “I begin to wonder what is wrong with me,” she writes. “Am I ‘too far out’ or too old? Is it age? I’m 63. Or am I ‘old hat’ in the view of the ‘new feminist scholarship’?”
Camille Paglia, author of “Sexual Personae,” a title that mimics Millett’s own, all but screams yes. Writing in her Salon column of Millett’s “atrocious book,” Paglia blames Millett for starting “the repressive, Stalinist style in feminist criticism … Her condescending, destructive, bitterly anti-male method of approaching art was adopted as dogma by the women’s studies programs as they sprang up everywhere in the 1970s and became insular fiefdoms intolerant of dissent.”
Is this to be Millett’s epitaph — a bitter, misguided feminist? She may no longer be on our bookshelves, but Millet is still very much present. A little more than a month ago, she made the news over the Bowery building where she’s lived for 40 years; she’s fighting to save it from the wrecking ball. The New York Times ran an op-ed piece — “The Bowery Held Hostage” — lambasting Millett, “an icon in feminism’s radical circles,” for single-handedly impeding the progress of the glitzy urban development.
I reach Millett at New York’s NoHo Gallery, where she’s showing a series of drawings. The exhibit, “Elegy for a Murdered Lady,” is devoted to her Aunt Margaret, who died in a nursing home, even though Millett fought family members unsuccessfully to get her out. When I call, Millett is redirecting a delivery man who’s convinced that she ordered a stack of tortillas. The story of her life: Millett is misunderstood. “Sir,” she says in an amicable, deep and slightly scratchy voice — it sounds like a smoker’s voice — “I think you might try upstairs.”
The tortilla matter cleared up, no, she tells me, she hasn’t read what Paglia has said about her. “It’s not my style to make that kind of remark about people,” she says in genteel St. Paulese. “Maybe she thinks I’m too radical?” Millett asks in seemingly genuine bewilderment. And the New York Times piece, “That was a misunderstanding. I found out the op-ed piece had been commissioned.” Contrary to what the Times said, she is not battling Councilwoman Kathryn E. Freed over the property. “We get along quite well.” The Bowery building is an important cause of hers, says Millett; the historic building was once New York’s worst brothel, so bad for the women that they regularly committed suicide. “Imagine when you’ve written about prostitutes and you end up living in a building where prostitutes took their lives.”
Millett explains she also didn’t know her article was on the Internet and appears chagrined that the piece came across as self-pitying. “It turned out to be embarrassing, really,” she says. “They took what was newsworthy. What I wrote was longer and funnier.” In fact, she tells me, the essay was meant as a diatribe against the oppressive university adjunct system that pays professors paupers wages, not a tract on how Kate Millett has fallen on hard times. Once again, Millett’s meaning has been lost in the medium. If only, if only people could understand.
Saturday, Feb 10, 1996 8:00 PM UTC
By Leslie Crawford
Try, just try, grossing out Sylvia Branzei. Big balls of ear wax? Forget it. Athlete’s foot? Won’t do it. Oozing sores? Diarrhea? Try again. Burps and belches, halitosis, projectile vomit? No dice. Because this junior-high school science teacher, based in Mendocino, California, loves to talk about anything and everything the human body excretes and secretes, no matter how smelly, runny, slimy, or crusty. Branzei, the world’s first — and possibly last — grossologist, is the author of “Grossology,” (Addison-Wesley, 1995), a book for excretory experts, intestinal inquisitors, or just kids who want to make their parents gag.
Her years of delving through the most sordid corners and cavities of our bodies have not dampened Branzei’s spirits. In a telephone interview, the scatalogical scholar was vivacious and forthcoming, even when asked the most probing questions.
This is, to say the least, an unusual field of expertise. Why did you decide to write a book about repulsive bodily functions?
I was cutting my toenails one day and said to myself, “Wow, what’s this stuff under my toenails? It’s really icky and gross.” I realized that since I had majored in microbiology, I could actually figure out what it was. Later, over spaghetti dinner with my family, we came up with the idea for this book.
Did you ever make yourself sick while writing it?
Yes, when I learned about the Eskimo tribe where the moms suck the snot out of their babies’ noses and spit on the ground. I had to leave my computer to stop gagging, and then come back and write about it.
Does anything else nauseate you?
I have a huge hang-up about spit. You know, big loogies.
But are you less grossed out now than you were before you wrote “Grossology?”
Yes. Around our house now, we feel okay about burping and farting in front of each other. It’s like, “This is what we do. Why hide it?” But I wouldn’t burp or fart in a nice restaurant or anything.
What do your students think of having a grossologist as a teacher?
They think it’s great. If I go into a class and say, “Today we’re going to learn about the excretory system,” the students yawn. But if I say, “We’re going to learn about pee and poop,” they say, “Yeah! That’s great!” Ultimately, I end up teaching the science behind all these gross things. That’s exactly what I do with the book: I use the real words, not the scientific terms. Too often, science hides behind big words.
And although the things you write about are pretty disgusting, learning the reasons why we have eye crust or scabs, for example, helps us to appreciate them.
Basically, your body is trying really hard to take care of you all the time. You realize that everything has a purpose and a place; every bodily function has a function.
Plus, let’s be honest. It can be fun to examine some bodily functions, like picking off scabs.
You shouldn’t pick your scabs, because your body is trying to heal itself. But it’s good to examine your snot. If it’s green or yellow, you have an infection. If it’s clear, you don’t. Snot’s a good thing. It keeps junk from reaching your lungs.
Your book has a statistic that says 70 out of every 100 people are nose pickers, and that three out of 70 eat what they find. Don’t you think the number of people picking and eating is larger than that?
That’s just the statistic that lists people who admit to doing it! It’s probably much more.
Why do you think so many people pick their noses in the car?
What else are you going to do in the car? It’s a way to pass the time.
Your chapter on projectile barf was fascinating.
Actually, the real name is “projectile vomit.” But saying “projectile barf” is so much more fun. It’s mostly young children who do it, because their throats haven’t opened up enough and they can’t control what comes out.
Also, I didn’t realize some people actually make money by farting?
Not any longer. The last fartomaniac was in Japan in the 1980s. But they could imitate animal sounds, sing songs, and even blow out candles.
You talked about dust mites. I never knew they existed. That gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I know. It’s creepy. There are millions of them on your body that eat your dead skin. There’s another wild mite that looks like a crocodile and lives on your eyelashes, where it eats up scum.
Are you planning to write a sequel?
Yes, I’m thinking of doing one on Animal Grossology.
Such as?
Such as why dogs roll in their own dookie.
That sounds fascinating.
I’m excited about it.
