Interview with Traci Slatton, author of IMMORTAL
Watch Traci on YOUTUBE!
The Prom
Last night my step-daughter and oldest daughter went to their prom.
There were the usual concerns in the breathless anticipatory hours: dress, shoes, hair, make-up. The day before, my daughter decided her original dress revealed too much, and texted me to ask if she could exchange it. Text is the medium of communication of choice these days, I’ve found, and become adept at it myself, for that reason.
“Course,” I texted back. “B comfortable n happy!”
So she found another one, at a different store: the perfect pink concoction. And last night a bunch of parents were invited to a pre-prom soiree hosted graciously by the parents of a young woman in a delicious gold-print gown.
Present was a group of about 12 kids, young adults, who stood with splendid, nervous grace while an assemblage of parents snapped thousands of pictures. With my usual thought to backups and redundant systems, I brought two cameras, in case a battery died. (One did!) We parents were in a poignant, jovial mood and joked with the kids about the Hollywood red carpet.
It wasn’t just my daughter’s sudden and shocking maturity that caused a lump in my throat. These are great kids, some of whom I’ve known since they were 4 years old. I remember one young man as a skinny little boy in leggings. Another young woman climbed the monkey bars in the park while her mother read the newspaper and I chased my oldest daughter, who was 6. Now they are all going to college in two months. They stood before us in their finery, which made them look even older than 17 and 18. Where did the time go?
And how does it redefine parents when their children leave?
The Fantasies we live with, culturally
“Sex and the City” opens today. I am not a fan.
It’s not just because I’m a married lady and mom, so what do I know about sex?
Or maybe it is. I openly admit to being unhip and old-fashioned. But I have a valid point. Which is: this show is like “Glamour” and “Elle” and “Vogue” magazines and the celebuculture in general: a glitzed up, ersatz, polyester version of life held up to people as a desirable way to live. It has the shmoozy succubus appeal of a beer commercial, where everyone is happy and skinny and has a gazillion friends and an adoring mate. It’s a superficial fantasy, and a pernicious one, like any other narcotic.
Adults who have some life under their belts, who’ve been around the block and back and have a few bruises to show for it, who’ve suffered from loss and heartache and unfulfilling jobs and broken relationships and the illness of friends and family members–those of us who are achingly present in our lives–we know that “Sex in the City” isn’t real. It’s a junky piece of pink cotton candy to snack on, hopefully without stomach cramps. But there are plenty of young people who don’t understand this yet.
I tell my daughters: “Don’t be fooled by the glam and the pretty clothes! Real women don’t act like that. The “Sex” women’s values are a hip, sitcom charade of what really matters in life.” All that indiscriminate sleeping around. It doesn’t make it less superficial, degrading, and dehumanizing just because the main character ruminates with pseudo-profundity on the meaning of relationships. I really want my daughters to understand this about sex: it’s not the quantity, it’s QUALITY that matters! And hearts and bodies are indivisibly, irrevocably connected, so whatever the body does makes an impact on the heart! Know the consequences when you sleep with even one person!
And a shoe fetish? Please. I’m trying to figure out how to pay school tuition for my youngest daughter, in a city where the public school teachers have been hamstrung by mandated testing into teaching for tests, rather than teaching a curriculum. In the history of American education, here are the three worst, most idiotic notions to be inflicted upon students by otherwise well-intentioned people: the demise of phonics, new math, and “No child left behind.”
For the record: kids need phonics to learn to read. And they need to be drilled in math tables. No matter how boring it is, no matter how much kids suffer from it, kids need to memorize the multiplication tables and be tested on them until “8X7=56” is a part of the DNA of their cells. Because, guess what: life isn’t fun and exciting every single minute. We need to help our children develop some tolerance for that.
And docking teachers for their students’ low performance on tests is NOT going to improve the quality of education. Teachers are underpaid and overworked to begin with. This strategy will simply induce fear, reduce creativity, and produce a classroom geared toward correct answers on a standardized test, rather than a classroom filled with concepts, ideas, and love of learning.
Back to the viruses and fungi we live with and the athlete’s foot (or should I say yeast infection) that is “Sex and the City.” People will go see it. And how many of them will be young women who believe that wearing $5000 dresses and starving themselves into a size O is the key to happiness and fulfillment?
Up Till Now: William Shatner’s biography
Let me get it out of the way right away: I am a long time trekkie and I have loved Captain James T. Kirk from the first minute I saw him on STAR TREK, in 1969 when I was 6 years old.
That was a formative year for me. It was also the year I read my first “big book” and knew I wanted to write novels.
So I couldn’t resist buying Shatner’s autobiography when I saw it at Barnes & Noble, though I will, alas, resist his websites, which he plugs on every other page of this book.
Other than the used-car-salesman-like pressure to visit his websites and purchase assorted Shatnerbilia, UP TILL NOW is warm and charming. It’s the all-too-human story of a life intensely and purposefully lived. The voice is well done, careening between blustery self-congratulation, wry self-awareness, and honest revelation. William Shatner is a man who has loved and lost and suffered, and he talks about it with perspicacity and sadness. He’s also a man who has succeeded, and he recounts his achievements–and his near misses–with equal measures of braggadocio and irony. Well, maybe the braggadocio comes out ahead. He is an actor, after all; that species is not known for lacking narcissism. But this book has more substance than the usual vanity fare. The unifying theme is the intelligence with which he revisits his life Up Till Now.
I don’t hold the “Buy My Stuff” schtick against him because I am an artist married to an artist, and I never miss an opportunity to 1, tell someone how wonderful my novel is so they can run out and buy it, and 2, tell someone how wonderful my husband’s sculptures are, so they can run out and buy them, too. After all, I’m not just in the business of writing novels, I am in the business of selling them. My oldest daughter nearly dies of mortification every time, but here is one of my typical forays:
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Video Store Guy: Here’s your movies, enjoy them.
Me: Thanks. Hey, do you read?
Video Store Guy: Read? Uh…
Me: I mean, do you enjoy novels. I’m an author whose first novel came out a few months ago. Here’s a card for it: IMMORTAL. It’s a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence. The film rights just sold a few weeks ago.
Video Store Guy: Film rights? Really?
Me: Yes! It’s going to be a great movie. Check out the novel!
Outside the store.
My daughter: MOM! Could you BE any more embarassing??? Argh!!!!!
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So I don’t judge Shatner for his candor about wanting to make money.
And he namedrops in satisfying enough ways, and he has been a working actor for a very long time, so he includes a little bit of the social history of acting and the evolution of the medium of television and some perspective on the phenomenon of STAR TREK. I would have liked to see even more of that; whatever the largeness of his ego and the smallness of his hairline, William Shatner is a smart man, with shrewd observations.
I enjoyed his autobiography. It was entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone with interest.
And, FYI, Dear Reader: My husband Sabin Howard’s small sculptures, like the exquisite MAN or EROS, can be purchased for $5000 plus shipping. His heroic scale HERMES (a testament to Man’s power and intelligence) and APHRODITE (a paean to beauty, harmony and balance, the single best female figure in several hundred years) each cost $165,000. For those of you who might want to own a limited edition, museum quality bronze sculpture by an artist that the NY Times has compared to Rodin and Donatello. His works are grace beyond compare: check out www.sabinhoward.com and see for yourself.
BBSH In Touch
In 1996 I graduated from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. People often wonder about that, because I have a ritzier intellectual pedigree than I deserve–Yale BA and Columbia MFA–considering what an American mutt I am. Considering that my mother was a high school drop-out and my grandmother was an itinerant crop picker who didn’t make it past third grade. And I went after traditional learning with an unholy passion.
But my mother cherished education. She got up every morning before 5:00 to read, and still does. She went back to obtain an equivalency degree. She did Lifelong Learning work and amassed a number of college credits. My grandmother read the newspapers every day and kept abreast of everything; she was one of the shrewdest people I ever met. She was also a font of folk wisdom, which she had pre-sifted in her mind to separate the chaff from the wheat. She would make some claim… about cod liver oil, or how healthy beans were, or UFO’s, or how it meant something when geese flew a certain way… and my mother and I would roll our eyes at her. A year later, Granny Bee would turn out to be right. Five years after her death, my mother and I are still discovering the truth in some of her outlandish claims.
This is all by way of saying, the BBSH is the Ivy League of healing schools. Admittedly, there aren’t a vast number of healing schools out there. Hands-on or spiritual healing is still a niche field. That is slowly changing; there are Brennan schools now in Japan and Europe, as well as the US.
What makes the BBSH so great is that it is well-organized (with military precision, if a Navy brat says so). There is a close attention to both detail and purpose, and there is an unswerving and radiant intention for integrity. It’s a mystery school with a left brain twist for the modern age, a crucible, a psycho-spiritual boot camp. Not that it’s a perfect institution. I have some serious criticisms of the school, perhaps for another post. But then, neither Yale nor Columbia were perfect, either. But all three were great.
All three institutions gave me something, some core part of myself that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t passed through their doors. I am grateful.
And to any BBSH healers who might read this: Salve, welcome.