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Confessions of a Cemetery Junkie

2010-03-15T08:00:45Z

I had a close encounter with Marilyn Monroe recently. I was in L.A. and decided to pay my respects to the iconic movie star, who rests in a cemetery tucked away near Westwood Village. My brother, who lives in the neighborhood, told me Marilyn has been in the news recently - the widow of the man buried in the wall vault above Marilyn (supposedly upside down) wanted to raise some money by auctioning off the vault and moving her husband. My brother also said the empty vault to the left of Marilyn is reserved for Hugh Hefner...it seems Marilyn is forever desirable.

While checking out the small, quiet memorial garden and the resting sites of Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Natalie Wood and other Hollywood elite, I met a young man from Ohio who asked me to take his photo next to the tombs of Marilyn and Truman Capote. I told him I’ve been to other celebrity gravesites.

It all started with Isadora Duncan. I lived for many years on Nob Hill in San Francisco and once passed a building with a plaque announcing that it was the birth site of Isadora, the mother of modern dance. I was thrilled that fascinating Isadora was born not far from where I was living. Some years later, I was in Paris and made a pilgrimage to her final resting place in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. I also got a map and toured the graves of other notables buried there, like Edith Piaf (grave covered deep in flowers by current fans), Oscar Wilde (a winged white marble art deco monument covered in lipstick kisses), Sarah Bernhart, Jim Morrison (attended by young fans burning candles and playing guitars), Chopin, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (buried in the same grave), Moliere and legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard.

On other trips to Paris, at the small Passy cemetery across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, I found the grave of Debussy; went to the cemetery in Montmartre to honor Nijinsky and see the sculpture of him dancing that was on his marker; and stopped by the cemetery in Montparnasse to seek out the sites of Jean Seberg (a fellow Iowa girl) and Jean Paul Sartre.

In A Pig's Ear

2010-03-11T12:00:09Z

by Dorty Nowak

There are 72 recipes for animal body parts I have never eaten in Le Meilleur Cuisine de France. I purchased the cookbook, a staple in French kitchens, when I first moved to Paris, and over the past five years it has become a trusted guide for my culinary adventures. However, the section titled “Les Cochonailles et Les Abats” (Pork Products and Offal) remains untried territory.

It’s not that I’m a vegetarian. In fact, I’m a regular customer at my neighborhood butcher shop, La Boucherie Daguerre. The front half of a cow, with black paint chipping off its metal hide, hangs above the door and inside a small army of butchers in stained white smocks moves swiftly across the sawdust floor filling customers’ orders. Even though the cuts of meat are different, I have no trouble finding the beef, and I’m particularly fond of the marvelous roast chickens. Here too is a vast array of food I’ve never tried. Each visit, my glance would skim with practiced ease over the motley-feathered chickens, heads and feet attached, the trays of rognon (kidneys) cervelle (brains) and tripe (intestines), to settle on something safe. Indeed, I felt confident about my ability to navigate the perils of the butcher shop until the day I went to buy a roast for dinner and found myself eye to eye with a dead boar, grinning at me through his enormous tusks. He was draped over the counter above the roasts. I fled, and we had pasta for dinner.

Avoiding abats is easy enough when cooking at home, but much more difficult when dining out. The French have a fondness for them, and it is rare not to find at least one dish on a menu. As I am averse to spending a small fortune for a meal and then not being able to eat it, I purchased a pocket menu master, a handy French-English dictionary including most common menu items. Unfortunately, the menu master didn’t save me from the andouillette. Andouillette, a prized delicacy, is a sausage made from, pigs’ intestines, and it smells just like you would imagine pigs’ intestines to smell. I know because one time I ordered it by mistake, thinking it was andouille, the delicious, spicy Spanish sausage. Fortunately, the fries were good.

I Heard The Call of Girona

2010-03-08T09:00:05Z

by Elyn Aviva

I heard the Call whisper to me as I pressed my hands against its crumbling grey stones. I was standing in the medieval Jewish quarter in Girona, aka “The Call,” a Catalan word based on the Hebrew qahál, which means “a meeting or a gathering.” And gather they did, long ago, the Jewish residents of Girona, Spain, in the winding streets and narrow alleys, in the covered corridors and on the steep-stepped sidewalks. Hurrying to work, to play, to study, hurrying to synagogue to pray. They arrived in 898 and for 500 years they were integrated into the city—except for those dreadful times like 1391 when suddenly they weren’t and they became the targets of violence and repression.

I had seen their traces in the Museum of Jewish History, housed in what had been the Girona synagogue until 1492 when all the Jews were expelled, ending 500 years of coexistence. Suddenly they were gone, all gone, forced from their temple, their homes, their land, and sometimes from their faith.

I had seen what little they had left behind, displayed in the museum’s evocative exhibits. One gallery held fourteenth-century limestone gravestones, engraved in Hebrew (“Josef, a young child who was a lover of joy, the son of Rabbi Jacob. May he be present in Glory, protected by his Rock and his Redeemer" and “the honored Estelina, wife of the distinguished and upright Bonastruc Josef. May she have her mansion in the Garden of Eden”). Other galleries were filled with rare artifacts, facsimiles, and borrowed objects, with modern reconstructions and pictorial displays. Nothing else remained of the once-thriving community—except its reputation. Not even time’s amnesia could silence that, for Girona had been the center of a famous medieval school of Kabbalists, those mystical philosophers who believed the universe was made manifest in ten emanations.

The most famous Kabbalist of that time was Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (also known as Ramban or Nahmanides), born in Girona in 1194 and died in the Holy Land in 1270. In 1263 King James I of Aragón (a personal friend) summoned him to Barcelona to defend Jewish beliefs against the Dominican Pablo Christiani, a Jewish convert to Christianity. King James awarded Nahmanides a prize and declared that never before had he heard "an unjust cause so nobly defended."

Embracing Mercury Retrograde

2010-03-04T13:00:38Z

by Marlan Warren

I have decided to celebrate the end of every Mercury Retrograde. And might I suggest you do the same?

What is “Mercury retrograde”?

Astrologers say the planet Mercury rules communication and transportation. They call a planet “retrograde” when it gives the illusion that it’s moving backward through the zodiac. Mercury’s retrograde can negatively affect attempts to communicate or travel; appointments; contracts; mail; and Internet. It’s said to be the worst time to sign a contract, start a love affair or new job. It lasts three weeks. More or less.

Mercury Retrograde (MR) happens approximately every three months, three or four times a year. In 2009, we got hit four times. This year, we have only three to look forward to.

When I first left home, I moved into a Boston house with some astrologers. From time to time, they’d call out, “Mercury is retrograde! Nobody can communicate!” I saw them as Cosmic Chicken Littles. I thought they were a scream.

I started paying attention after my father died at the end of ’84 during an MR. His heart acted up during a trip in an RV with his wife, and he passed away days later in a Florida hospital. I woke up to a Voice Mail from my brother saying, “Dad’s brain waves have stopped.” Dad’s siblings noted it was “inconvenient” to have a funeral so close to Christmas, and put it off till January. I was in L.A., editing the last film project I had to do, getting ready for finals at USC. I heard later that Dad’s sister attended a December memorial service that my stepmom hosted, and took the Rabbi aside, asking him not to “say anything Jewish” because the friends attending were Gentiles.

I have only two words for them: “Mercury Retrograde.”

To travel or not to travel?

My friends who travel refuse to put much stock into my Cosmic Chicken Little warnings. “Well, I have to go,” they say. “So I’m going.” Afterward, they laugh as they give details of what went wrong. Usually nothing major. Lost luggage. Delayed flights. A basic pain in the Cosmic-Keester. But do-able.

Win Your Dream Adventure

2010-03-03T01:52:29Z

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Break a Taboo, Save the Water

2010-03-01T02:44:40Z

by Jules Older

Here's a fact: this summer, we’re gonna run short of water.

And here's a probability: water shortages will only get worse.

You don’t need a Ph.D. or a crystal ball to know that. Or to know the standard advice on what you can do about it.

Fix leaky faucets. Check.

Put a brick in your toilet tank. Check.

Buy a low-volume toilet. Check.

Stop watering the lawn. Check.

Tear up the lawn, and plant cactus. Check.

All that’s well and good, but there are other solutions that somehow don’t get talked about. Sometimes it’s because they go against long-ingrained habits, sometimes because they break long-standing taboos. Yet they offer a far cheaper solution than low-volume toilets. They're free.