TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 41

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 27, 200006

Dear People of the Season,

	Halloween is just around the corner, and 
Feyna is planning on being a punk witch --  pink 
wig, torn clothing safety pinned together, fake 
body piercings (she has none but one on each 
ear), fake tattoos.  But the costume is going to 
cost more money than she has, so she's been doing 
extra chores for extra money.  In the end, she's 
going to borrow money from me in order to 
purchase all the things she needs for the 
costume.  And then she'll go down to my sister's 
house on Halloween.  Up here at my Mom's, we get 
maybe a handful of kids, maybe two or three 
groups.  But down at my sister's, it is such a 
yearly grand event that when you sell your house 
if you live there, you have to disclose that on 
Halloween there may be as much as 1000 kids that 
come by the house.

	I like my Halloweens quiet.  I carve a 
fine pumpkin and the glow looks enchanting.  Then 
there's pumpkin soup (with ginger and juiced red 
bell pepper), pumpkin ice cream, and the last of 
it is the rotting pumpkins outside on the walk, 
needing to be scraped up with a spatula when they 
get slimy.  It happens so suddenly.  One moment 
they are perky and lit up.  The next, they are 
moldy and caved in, liquidy, putrid.  And we have 
to get rid of them.

	My brother grows big pumpkins.  I mean 
very big.  He grows the 600 pound variety, and 
every year, he enters these gargantuan monsters 
into competitions.  He comes away with some local 
prizes, too.  This year, he and Carol were away 
on vacation for a week, and in that week, 
families of deer came by and ate all the 
blossoms.  So this year, no colossal pumpkins. 
But there will still be hundreds of smaller ones 
(a few two hundred pounders) to unleash at his 
annual pumpkin carving party.  This year at my 
sister's house.  You come with your power tools 
if necessary, your knives and ingenuity and you 
pick a pumpkin or two, and then you carve them. 
You get to take home your favourite.  The rest 
stay at the house to bedazzle all the kids and 
parents on Halloween.  Hundreds of lit up 
pumpkins, some works of art, some large enough 
for little kids to sit inside and have their 
pictures taken.  He's been doing this for thirty 
years almost, I think.  And we've heard stories 
of people bumping into each other in Central 
America, getting to talking and finding out that 
each one of them had been to one of Daniel's 
pumpkin carving parties.

	Another carving.




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The Ledge at the Edge

	I had all these talents, and I didn't 
know what to do with them.  I suppose, being as 
impractical as I was, I assumed that the talents 
would just blossom into a life full of reward and 
approbation.  But that seldom happens.  If it 
did, we would all just go out there on our 
twentieth birthdays and stand on the ledge at the 
edge of the world waiting for our shining 
destinies to swoop out of the firmament and carry 
us away to fulfillment and solvency.  I think I 
was standing out there on the ledge at the edge, 
and I was shaken that nothing happened.  No art 
gallery took my wacky constructions and made a 
known artist out of me.  No publishing house 
knocked on my door begging to see my journals. 
And as much as I chased it, and as very close as 
I got, the music industry did not claim me to be 
a genius and star, but rather, something too 
different to take a risk on, and they all passed 
on this great opportunity.  So I was at thirty or 
so, having ravaged myself with bulimia, no longer 
inclined toward suicide, without a place to put 
my calling.

	My mother and I had a conference, and a 
few things were decided.  I would take voice 
lessons and composition lessons, and we would try 
to find me some manager, a career packager, a 
person who could, seeing all my gifts, tell me 
how to box it all up and make a life out of it. 
Did such a person exist?  Are those people off 
beyond the ledge on the edge advising the 
swoopers how to fetch the awaiting masses and 
deliver them to their happy destinies?

	What we found, through calling a few 
people and then calling the people they told us 
to call, and then following up on those leads, 
and then so on and so forth, was a publicist 
named Bonnie Weiss who came highly recommended as 
a creative thinker, someone who just might be 
able to make sense of all this.  We went together 
to meet her in her San Francisco 
office/apartment.  She was a warm and open woman 
with a few well placed wrinkles and a track 
record about half a mile long.  She watched and 
listened as I showed her samples of my artwork, 
stacks of short stories, tapes of my music, and 
went on about the various other things I could 
do: cook, analyze handwriting, toss around the 
repartee, tell stories, wave my arms and hands 
around and make faces, make people laugh, make me 
cry.  She took it all in and then did some 
internal deliberations.  She would call us with 
some ideas.

	When she called, she said what she could 
do was what was familiar to her, and she had once 
done publicity for a handwriting expert.  She 
proposed we have me go public as a handwriting 
analyst, drawing on my vivid personality, book me 
on radio and television programs and have me give 
workshops, do individual handwriting analyses, 
and couples compatibility studies, stage a whole 
media blitz, get me known.  But before we 
embarked on this, she wanted to test my 
abilities, and she asked me to analyze her 
handwriting.  We travelled back to San Francisco. 
I asked her to get out a few eight and a half by 
eleven sheets of unlined paper and write with her 
favourite implement, write like a letter to a 
friend, write until she felt comfortable with it, 
and the handwriting looked like it was hers.  If 
it took several pages, fine.  If she wrote 
several different ways, write those different 
ways a bit, and at the end, sign it with her full 
legal signature.  She did so.  And I sat there, 
like a performance piece, and with her 
handwriting on the table in front of me, I went 
on about who she was and what made her tick and 
untick.  She was sufficiently awed that she was 
willing to go forward with this media blitz.

	What I should have said was, "But 
handwriting analysis isn't what I love the most. 
It's just something I'm awfully good at.  What I 
need is to figure out how to get me a career 
being me."  But I didn't.  I accepted what she 
said, because I was desperate, finished chasing 
the music business and down on my luck and 
myself.  I thought, "Well, this could lead to 
something."  And of course it did.

	Before Bonnie and her media blitz, I used 
to think that the items on the seven o'clock news 
were the product of journalists searching for 
stories, discovering newsworthy people and 
events.  After Bonnie's media blitz, I came to 
know that the seven o'clock news is mainly the 
product of publicists sending promotional packets 
to journalists who sit there at their desks all 
day, waiting to find something amusing about 
something that comes flying at them with, "I beg 
you, publicize this!" printed in day-glo orange 
on the outside.  Whatever is the loudest wins the 
contest.  Bonnie sent out her promotional packets 
to radio and television stations, newspapers and 
periodicals, and offers came back for interviews 
on the air, programs to invite me to participate 
in.  I was booked solid for a few months.  Every 
radio show, every television program I did was an 
opportunity for promotion of myself as the 
handwriting expert.  And by and large, people 
were impressed with me, you know, as a package. 
It was all very exciting and engrossing, and I 
took to the public eye naturally.  I was never 
nervous, and I soaked up the cameras and the open 
phone calls from listeners, and I shined.  But it 
was all empty.  This isn't what I wanted to do 
with me.  I liked the attention, but those 
promoting me had lost sight of my calling.

	In the end, I went to bed starving for 
what I loved to do, and now I had no time to do 
it in.  I charged a mighty penny to do 
handwriting analyses.  My message machine was 
filled with enquiries.  The people who came to 
see me regarded me as a guru, and they all went 
away, having their minds blown by the lady with 
the long skirt and all the rings.  How could she 
have known that about me?  How could she tell 
from my sample of handwriting, so much that no 
one else knows when it's explained to them in 
great detail?  And because I was still aimless, I 
shriveled up my handwriting analysis business, 
and I curled up in my bed and wept.  Where had 
all this gotten me?  It all petered out, and I 
went back to my post at the ledge on the edge of 
the world, awaiting something else, something 
more personal.  I'd failed at success once again. 
What were we going to do with me?


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net