Phoebe Kate

Today is National Alfred Hitchcock Day and if that isn’t cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.  We all have our personal favorites — mine are The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious.  But honestly, I’ve never seen a movie of his that I didn’t like — and I’ve seen ‘em all.

Hitchcock was as strange, fascinating, startling, complex, mysterious, enigmatic, unpredictable and dark as his films.  For instance, did you know that he:

• was, at the age of five, sent by his father to the police station with a note telling the sergeant to lock him up for being a bad boy?  (He spent ten minutes in a cell, which was long enough to give him a morbid fear of cops that lasted his entire life.)
• was so afraid of the police that he never learned to drive?
• loved the number 7 and used it frequently in his films?
• enjoyed playing weird and scary practical jokes on his various casts and crews?  (He’d find out their phobias and then gift them with a beautifully wrapped package of snakes or spiders or mice.)
• had forebodings of his own death?  (Having received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979, he told friends that he must be about to die very soon.  He passed away in 1980.)
• tossed his teacup over his shoulder instead of setting it down properly?
• occasionally wore dresses on movie sets and to parties?
• couldn’t stand to look at his wife while she was pregnant with their only child?
• had a severe egg phobia?  (”That round white thing without any holes — have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking?”)
• also suffered from a fear of small children and high places?
• gave the shortest acceptance speech in Oscar Award history?  (”Thank you.”)
• loved the movies “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Benji”?
• once said, “The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them”? 

Perhaps the most interesting thing Hitchcock said was, “I’ve become a body of films, not a man.  I am those films.”  The very best creative achievements – be they literary or musical or artistic or cinematic — are imbued with the psyche of who created them.  They are unique because they are so deeply personal.  They are the heart and soul of their creator, turned inside out for the world to see. 

And that is the essence of pure genius, which remains forever timeless.

~ phoebe kate        

No doubt about it, the world (and its population) grows weirder with every passing day.  I’m not sure what’s the cause.  Chemicals in the food?  An excess of stress?  Are cell phones rotting our grey matter?  Do we have vitamin deficiencies?  Have we watched too much TV, believed the nonsense we’ve seen and turned our minds into mush?   Is fluorescent lighting making us looney? 

Though I’d personally like to blame Wal-Mart (aka the Fourth Circle of Hell) for what’s wrong with us, the truth is that it’s our own fault.  Heads up now (literally)!  We haven’t been wearing our tin foil hats, people.  Little wonder our brains are in such of a state of advanced strangeness.

And we’ve collectively become so weird that behavior once considered to be odd or objectionable or aberrant or idiotic or laughable or lamentable is no longer even noteworthy or newsworthy. 

Culled from authorities on the subject, the following have now been declassified as weird and declared positively quotidian and oh-so ho-hum.

• Violence at peace and brotherhood conferences.
• Burglars getting stuck in chimneys.
• Applicants taking a driving test crash the instructor’s car into the DMV.
• Bank robbers using public transportation for his getaway vehicle.
• Postmen hiding/throwing away sacks of mail they didn’t deliver.
• Someone giving a gun safety demonstration shoots himself accidentally.
• Disgruntled customers ramming their cars into the storefront.
• Sexual relationships between underage students and older teachers.
• Peeping Toms using miniature video cameras in public bathrooms and store fitting rooms.
• Funeral homes putting the wrong bodies in coffins.
• Families inadvertently (or so they claim) leaving a kid behind at an interstate rest stop. 
• Hit-and-run drivers driving for miles with a dead body on their grille or windshield.
• Adults of youthful appearance lying about their age and returning to high school.
• Local elections that are tied being settled (by law) by a toss of a coin or a card flip.
• High-speed car chases.
• Husband or wife taking the spouse back after a murder attempt by said spouse.
• Golden Oldie drivers taking a wrong turn and being lost for days because no one noticed them missing.
• Hunters who (accidentally) shoot each other.  With thanks to Dick Cheney for officially making this a no-big-deal kind of thing, Texas White House-style.

It’s all old, people, these sorts of shenanigans and foibles.  The bar has been officially raised.  To make news, you gotta do something more than that. 

I shudder to think…

~ phoebe kate

I read the other day that the American Academy of Pediatrics is throwing its weight around to get the federal government to mandate warning labels on foods that pose a choking hazard to small children.  The AAP also is lobbying for hot dogs to be re-designed for safe kid consumption and for the FDA to establish a national reporting agency to monitor choking events and initiate recalls of “dangerous” foodstuffs.        

Huge changes to the food-manufacturing industry and to the government as well – and not cheap to accomplish, either. But it’s worth it, right?  None of us wants thousands of little tykes a year to suffocate on a frankfurter or a gum ball that’s stuck in their gullets.

Except there aren’t thousands — or even hundreds – in America.   According to statistics, less than 100 children a year die from food-related choking incidents.

There’s no epidemic of childhood mortality here — but there is an epidemic of stupidity and loss of common sense amongst people who ought to know better.

If the AAP is so up-in-arms about these statistics, why aren’t local pediatricians giving instructions and handing out brochures to the parents of their young patients?  Aren’t local doctors and clinics the frontline of education in this matter?  Isn’t it their responsibility as health care providers for children?

I guess not.  We’ll leave it to the Feds instead.  Of course.

Unfortunately, all the warning labels in the world won’t benefit people who are already too oblivious to notice the obvious – that little kids have little mouths and not a lot of teeth and tend to take big bites and then get tired of chewing and swallow it whole, usually while laughing or crying or trying to talk.  Sheeesh, that’s why Gerber invented their whole line of age-appropriate food products.

Well, the good news (if it can be called such) is that if the AAP gets its way, nobody will be to afford to buy hot dogs for their rug rats anyway.  The cost of R&D for companies to re-create the frankfurter into a tiny, mushy morsel will most certainly be passed on to the consumer, making it a luxury item for most folks with kids in America these days.

But let’s take this premise one step further.  If we wreak havoc on the food industry and create yet more national debt for more government agencies for the sake of less than 100 fatalites, what about us big people?

Statistically, over 3,000 adults die from choking on food every year.  That’s over 30 times more than our toddler counterparts. 

Don’t we deserve some warning labels on our steaks, chops and roasts?  What about cocktail olives and pickled pearl onions?  The bar nuts we toss up in the air and catch in our mouths to impress the pub’s other patrons?  I recently read that “leafy greens” are a choking hazard.  Why shouldn’t our garden-fresh bags of spring mix and hearts of romaine and Swiss chard caution us that good nutrition can be fatal?  And what about all those stringy things, like bok choy and celery?  And sticky things, like oatmeal and hard-boiled eggs?  Why doesn’t Quaker and Eggland’s Best tell me I’m potentially taking my life in my hands consuming their products?

And what about small, round, hard fruits?  They do in both kids and adults every year.  How should they be genetically engineered for our safety?  What shape is safe for a grape, I ask you? 

Labels or no labels on our food. re-designed hot dogs or not, reshaped grapes or not, the reality of the matter remains the same.  As Will Rogers said, “You can’t legislate common sense and intelligence into people.”  And that, my friends, is the bottom line.

~ phoebe kate

Well, actually it’s not a view from my window.  It’s from my patio.  Even better than a window for neighborhood observation…more up-close-and-personal, you know.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I moved last September to a townhouse-style complex in the Raleigh area from an old house on 2 acres at the coast.  I don’t really miss the place because maintenance and upkeep were a perpetual pain in the butt and the bank account.  Homes that have been around for decades provide a panoply of never-ending problems.  A yard as big as a city park demands constant attention.  Being on a budget means everything becomes a do-it-yourselfer.  And since everything’s constantly falling apart, there’s no time to have a life that doesn’t involve tools and tiresome hours spent in Lowe’s Home Improvement looking for the cheapest whatever.     

So I’m content to live in a more manageable setting.  A clogged drain or a malfunctioning dishwasher?  I call the maintenance office who dispatches one of the crew to fix it for free, of course.  Sheeesh, even if I need something so simple as a light bulb replaced in the stove hood or a new HVAC filter, those cheery Mr. Fix-its on their golf carts show up at my door and make my little world all good again.  This is carefree living.

And it also has turned out to be the ideal environment for an ever-observant writer.  Although my community is gated, I think the purpose of the security measures is less to keep sketchy people out and more to keep the strange ones who live here in.          

From the mildly curious to the truly bizarre, here’s a sampling of what I see from my patio-on-the-world:

• 3 curvaceous Middle Eastern ladies in berkas who’d combined their traditional headdress with skinny jeans, sequin-studded low-necked sweaters and Sex And The City stilletos.  Now if that isn’t a mixed metaphor, I don’t know what is.
• On a sub-freezing Christmas morning, a 2 or 3-year-old boy racing by in his Superhero cape, no shoes or any other clothes on and no parents or older siblings in hot pursuit of him.  He did have a maniacal grin, however, and was cackling gleefully — he’d escaped. 
• At 4 PM on a recent school day, a solitary teenage boy trudging along with a girls’ backpack strapped on him – Hello Kitty, to be exact.  Little wonder he walks alone.          
• A very proper-looking 30-ish man, who wears a Mormonesque black suit and white shirt every day, sitting in his parked car late at night, rap music blaring from his CD player as he smashed his head repeatedly against the steering wheel.
• On a frigid February morning, a male neighbor pattering by, uncharacteristically clad in a short fuzzy pink bathrobe.  He was bare-legged, bare-chested and barefooted.  I assumed he was going a couple of doors down to see a friend.  Instead, he wandered off the complex grounds and into the woods.  I haven’t seen him since.
• Late last night, a young man was swaggering down the other side of the street.  He had spikey hair and was dressed in 1950s punk style: tight blue jeans and massive black leather jacket with unfriendly-looking emblems and symbols emblazoned on it.  He had something in one hand that he was merrily swinging –nunchucks? a dead animal?   No, it was a woman’s handbag.  At first, I thought he’d snatched it and then realized if he had, he’d have concealed the evidence under the meanness of that big jacket.  I had to conclude that Mr. Tough Guy, appearances notwithstanding, is obviously in touch not only with his feminine side, but with his Inner Fashionista, too.

Needless to say, I’m renewing my lease for a year.  Move somewhere normal and miss stuff like this?  You gotta be kidding.

 ~phoebe kate      

Recently, someone who’d read my Facebook page and blog asked me, “Are you religious?” 

Well, there’s nothing much on Facebook to indicate my beliefs, such as they may or may not be.  For my profile, under the “Religion” category, I put “Eclectic.”  I write friends who are going through a hard time that I will pray for them — and I do. 

But for all anybody knows, I may worship cats and get my spiritual guidance from the wee leprechauns who live in my yard and from the Mother Ship who transmits instructions directly to my brain.

Obviously, the person in question read my posts here on Jesus and Mary sightings.  Does writing about religious stuff make you religious?  Or maybe just a writer with a taste for the weird and an eye for a good blog subject?

That being said, I admit that a lot of my fiction has a spiritual element to it.  In fact, it’s hard to think of a story I’ve written that doesn’t use religious symbolism, allegories or themes in some way.   I can’t help it — it comes naturally to me.

I was raised a Catholic.  I studied comparative religion in college — and after that, decided I needed to conduct some first-hand field research.  I spent time in churches of every Christian denomination from Adventist to Unitarian as well as in Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed synagogues and even one religious cult.  My Grand Tour of Religions took almost 20 years.

However, I haven’t been in a Catholic church in three decades.  My Mass-attending brethren say I’ve “fallen away.”  I haven’t been in any house of worship for the last 15 years.  My Evangelical and Pentecostal brethren call it being “backslidden.”  My atheist and agnostic friends say I’ve “come to my [humanistic]  senses.”

Well, I don’t quite agree that I’m an errant piece of pickle that slipped out of the One True Holy and Apostolic Cheeseburger or I’m dancing with the devil to eternal damnation or I’m recovering from a case of temporary theological insanity.  But in response to those who think I am, I just smile and nod.  We’re all entitled to our different POVs.

While, as I said, my religious exploration often lurks in the background or behind the scenes for my stories, there is one fictional piece where it boldly takes center-stage.  I invite you to read “Goo Cares.”  It’s not long, it’s sad and funny and, scarily enough, it’s based on real events. 

http://www.slowtrains.com/vol3issue2/fostervol3issue2.html

My thanks to editor Susannah Indigo of Slow Trains for publishing this story and for suggesting a change in title.  I originally called it, “Saving Gracie.”  Susannah, with her usual editorial incisiveness, cut right to the heart of the matter.

~ phoebe kate