The Dad That Got Away

Last week TCM, Turner Classic Movies, showed Funny Girl, a sixties throwback musical. (There will be spoilers.) The Broadway smash/film is a  fictional take on the life of Fanny Brice, the Ziegfield Follies star.

The film and Broadway musical are highly romanticized. In reality, the Brice (Borach) family owned a string of saloons in Newark, NJ, and lived in Manhattan. They did okay. They didn't buy fruit at the stands in crowded Brooklyn, weren't a part of the lower class, colorful Jewish neighborhood on Henry Street.

Also, in real life, Nicky Arnstein, Fanny's true love, courted her for her money and cheated on her. He was a far cry from the handsome, proud, and elegant man in a tux, played by Omar Sharif, who would rather divorce Fanny than depend financially upon her.

Barbra Streisand, the ultimate funny girl

Who cares? Funny Girl, is so politically incorrect by now. Zeigfield, the man Ms. Brice most admires and wants as her boss, is the ultimate theatrical female objectifier, not that anyone would dare call him on it, turn of the twentieth century. 

And the plot is predictable. We know how it will end as soon as Nick confesses to Fanny that he is a gambler by profession. Fanny will be heartbroken, we're quite sure. Gambling stories don't end well. Nick will lose his money, go to prison, and feeling unworthy of her love, powerless to take care of her, not that she needs him as a provider, insist they divorce. 

When it happens at the end, she's devastated, sings the love song of undying love.

Oh my man, I love him so, he’ll never know . . . what’s the difference if I say, I’ll go away, when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday. For whatever my man is, I am his, forever. . . more.

At Intermission, a confusing film technique, but there nevertheless, well before that show stopper song and end of the movie, I found myself asking FD:

Where was Fanny's father? 

Abandonment is a huge theme in therapy, so many problems come down to it, and he's nowhere to be seen. Later, reading the story of the real Fanny Brice, I learned that papa was a gambler with a drinking problem, and he left the family. Took off.  

That implies not only physical, but emotional abandonment. It happens, though, fathers, even mothers leave, not only to shack up with other partners. But Dads in particular pick up and leave when they can't support their families. They just give up and assume, erroneously, that their families couldn't possibly want them around, that everyone would be better off without them.

And when they leave, they suck the air out of the room, leave a vacuum.

Fathers are irreplaceable. It hurts consciously for awhile, when they go, then less so, sinks beneath our consciousness, that need for a father, someone who takes us in his arms and tells us, It is all right, don't cry, and we try to replace him, even in adolescence, with other male figures, then significant others, often people who remind us of him.

Therapists are trained to look for it, that unconscious need, the reasons people make the choices that they do. We're trained with abandonment vision, seek out losses and how they affect personality, the ways we replace or cope with loss. Looking at it this way is looking at humans needing other humans, people needing people, as Barbra sings so beautifully in the movie.



When Nick gets out of jail, when he returns to her, having served his sentence, they both know that it is over. His pride can't handle her supporting him. They will have to end their marriage. They had a child, too. 

Father’s Day there will be people needing fathers who left, who didn't come back, and people who lost their fathers too young. We lose a big part of ourselves when that happens, too, when a father dies. 

FD turns to me after the movie and says,

"I just want you to know. I'll be just fine if it ever works out that you have to support me. I won't leave you."

So reassuring, dear.

Happy Father’s Day friends.

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The Robin

FD taps me gently and whispers in my ear, "It's 5:30. Better get up."

I had set the alarm for 5:37. Swinging out of bed, I jump into some clothes, wash up a bit. Son #1 has an 8:00 flight out of Midway Airport, which is way away from where we are. If we don't leave early we'll hit morning rush hour.

I quickly grab some coffee, heat him up a bite to eat, wrap it in foil. He'll hit the road packing with food for a few dinners, depending upon his appetite tonight. On the way we talk about his research, my online class, how much we both like the Chicago community, the future of the universe. At some point he asks, "So Mom, where do you see yourself in ten years?"

Pretty sure he's wondering the same thing for himself, I still fall for the trap and talk about me. "I'm hoping I'm alive in ten years. I see people my age with brain tumors and Alzheimers. Just hoping to stay in the game, dear." But we talk about possibilities, fantasies.

In moments he's gone, and alone in the car, I flip on the radio to hear the morning news. You don't really get much when you celebrate Jewish holidays with an attitude. You sort of avoid the outside world and focus on whoever is visiting.

A mistake, the radio. The mother of three missing children found suffocated (bag over her head). Mr. Casanova, the prime suspect drives a Dodge, probably with the three little ones. China is selling the Zimbabwans weapons, but neighboring portal countries refuse to allow ships safe harbor. An NPR reporter interviews a tortured man with broken hands. In African English he tells us about an unrestrained militia butting heads with rifles, whipping civilians with bicycle chains. I begin to feel sick and change the channel.

On a seemingly innocuous rock station, talking heads yuk it up about the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team and their fans who are unwilling to wait the lines to use the facilities and wear diapers to the games. They discuss this, remark that their own bodies wouldn't allow them to do this, meaning to use Depends. I am now wondering, as I always do, where American culture is going, when the male head remarks, They really have NO shame, none. This is the absolute truth. Shame isn't even a consideration.

Well, this says it all, so I flip to the one Chicago classical music station, WFMT, which generally isn't all that great, but recently clipped me of $40.00 anyway, and remember seeing the envelope in the mail on Saturday, thinking, how fast! A
pastoral piece draws me in, calms me down, and I'm sure I don't know what it is, but am thinking, Copeland.

It's so lovely that very soon I'm seeing myself in a movie, ala Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life. He's in a convertible feeling great, top down, singing along with Barbra Streisand when a bus stops short and Albert winds up in Heaven. This is a GREAT movie if you haven't seen it, by the way.

So I drive carefully, like an old lady, which is the best way to drive, no comments about me and being old, if you don't mind.

All of a sudden the traffic slows to a crawl. I'm at Bryn Mawr and consider exiting, but we're approaching the curve to Sheridan Road and Devon and Loyola University. Only a week ago a young woman, perhaps 19 or 20, was hit by an automobile in the rain, crossing to go to school, only about a half mile from where I am sitting in traffic.

I have to go there, I say to myself. I have to see it, this intersection with new construction, this place that is so confusing in the rain. I have to pay my own personal respects to a woman and her family that I don't know, yet know.

The pastoral ends. It is The Promise of Living, the finale of an opera by Aaron Copeland, the Tender Land. Isn't that amazing, I say to myself.

Before I can blink I'm passing Indian Boundary Park and a baby robin is in the road just ahead. I slow down to be sure he knows how to fly, that I don't hit him. And as birds do, he's airborne in less than a second.

It's only 7:30 and I say to myself. Maybe one of my grandchildren is awake. Perhaps someone is ready to play.

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The Shofar

Maybe you know it as The Ram's Horn.

In the bible it's all about big announcements, calls for war, and calls for repentance. Little stuff.

Jews designate an entire month to repentance, and I suppose it's something along the lines of Lent. All I can say on that is that no matter what the similarities, when it comes to most traditions, for better or worse, we've usually started them.

The month of Elul (we're already in it a couple of weeks) is the Jewish month of consideration.

It is said that one of our holier rabbis would think about what he had done wrong the night before, before he ate breakfast.

Then before lunch, he considered what he'd done wrong between breakfast and lunch.

Then before he ate dinner, he went over what he had done between lunch and dinner. He didn't eat a morsel of food until he looked himself directly in the mirror and fixed his make-up.

He did it every day. (And they wonder why we're the most neurotic of nations, or wait, maybe that's just how we're portrayed in film. I'll have to have a chat with Woody Allen about this.)

Anyway, if you do this every day, seriously review everything you've done between meals, then you can fix things, like you can apologize to people you might have slighted. Then by the time you get to the holiest day of the year and have to really stand before the Old Mighty and beg for another year of life. . .

Oh, and by the way, don't think you're off the hook if you're not Jewish, the whole world is judged, down to the very last leaf on a tree. . .

If you really do that, think about your bloopers every day, three times a day, then by the time you get to Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment,

which is ten days after Rosh HaShana, by the way, the Jewish New Year, coming right up the night of Sept 12, it's a Wednesday night and lasts until Friday night, Don't Call Me with Your Problems, go to your Nearest Emergency Room and try to make it to shul if you're Jewish, everyone and his brother will be there, even Barbara Streisand. . .

If you do that, examine your deeds, your thoughts, your desires then by the time you get to Yom Kippur, you can probably proverbially look the Old Mighty in the eye and say, We're good.

Of course none of us are and we're virtually in tears, begging forgiveness, humbly asking Him/Her for another year because NOBODY does this, even in the month of Elul, nobody repents properly, and NOBODY looks the Old Mighty in the eye.

Some Jewish bloggers write phenomenally descriptive posts about this month of repentance because it makes for incredible blog fodder. We have this concept that in Elul, this month only, during the entire month, not just for one week like He does during a holiday (Succos is like that), the Old Mighty comes out from where-ever it is He/She lives to give us face time.

Some link it to a king who leaves his castle or a gentleman farmer who leaves the ranch, or a president leaving Camp David (that would be me who made that association) to visit people in the villages, fields, and Starbucks.

Remember that song? What if G-d Was One of Us? He is. But he's not a slob. I hate even saying that, repeating that lyric, the whole idea. A king wears a white shirt and a black tie, like my zaideh (grandfather) EVERY DAY. Or do I have the words to the song wrong?

Anyway, FD asked me today if our youngest took his shofar with him to Israel. He just left last week for another year of learning.

No idea. Call him.

So indeed the shofar's gone! Little One took it with him. And the only shofar left is on its way to California with it's rightful owner, #1 son who visited this week and wanted it back.

You have to understand. It's not easy blowing these things. They're like trumpets. If you're good at trumpet you surely can blow shofar. Most of us are bad at trumpet and can't get a single note out of a shofar.

But FD is an all around musician and in Elul he comes home in the morning from MPWTG, (Morning Prayers with the Guys) and blows the shofar to "wake us up," us being me, to examine all the lousy things we've done over the year, that being me, and tell the Old Mighty that we'll try hard to change.

I really will, I'll do both, I'll tell Him whatever I can remember I did wrong (this is really hard if you skip meals) and then I'll try to change, like every Jew does this time of year.

FYO, my mother-in-law says that if people would just watch their basic manners, we'd all be okay going into this holiday season.

It's going around, interestingly, that the month Elul is now called, Derech Eretz Month. "Derech Eretz" is Hebrew for many things, including good manners or basic human decency.

So I guess we could start there.

Tekiah. . .

Today is the 17th day of Elul.

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