25 Not So Random Things About Me
(For my interview at SubtleTea.com, click here or here. If you read it at editor Dave Herrle’s award-winning online litzine you throw him some always-welcome hits. If you open up the web-based PDF reader you can download it, along with that notorious photo of me rising out of a hot tub nude, and my favorite portrait of Stephen Gyllenhaal with his son Jake, taken by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit.)
01. My first crush was on Prince Philip in the 1959 Disney version of Sleeping Beauty. I was four.
02. From 1971-73 I attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (my birthplace and home for 18 years) where I majored in Music, my instrument Voice, a lyric soprano leaning toward the coloratura. My inspiration: the teenage singing film star of the 1930s Deanna Durbin and The Sound of Music.
03. When I was eighteen, I attended in NYC’s Union Square the huge 20th anniversary rally in remembrance of the execution of the Rosenbergs, where their sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, spoke. I met my first boyfriend there.
04. When I was nineteen, I applied for and received a scholarship (based on a paper I wrote about Maimonides) to attend summer classes at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, Israel. I wanted to go to be with another Jewish boy I liked, whose parents were sending him to Israel to learn more about his heritage. We joined the Mile High Club in the washroom of the El Al flight coming back to the US.
05. While in Tel Aviv I was stopped on the street, held by police and nearly jailed for being a suspected terrorist solely on account of my race. Although this happened a couple of years after the Japanese Red Army had opened fire with Vz-58 assault rifles on the crowd in Ben-Gurion Airport, the fear of Asians, any kind of Asians, was still so strong I must have stuck out like a sore thumb. After a few phone calls it was ascertained that I was, indeed, a student at conservative Bar-Ilan, and the authorities let me go. However I must also say that during that summer I was a big hit with the little Palestinian kids of Jerusalem and Ramallah, who thought I knew kung fu.
06. I learned just enough Hebrew at Bar-Ilan to be able to read the “Dangerous Swimming” signs on the beaches in Miami, which in the 70s were in Yiddish. I can also still sing along to “Hatikva”, “Tzena Tzena Tzena” and “Oseh Shalom Bim'Romav” (in Hebrew), and “Oyfn Pripitchik”, “Dona Dona” and “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem” (in Yiddish—this last song is used for comic effect in Woody Allen’s Bananas and in Kentucky Fried Movie, and never fails to get a laugh of recognition out of me). I can also probably still sing all of the verses to “Zog Nit Keynmol Az Du Geyst Dem Letstn Veg”, which was a song of defiance that was created by the Jewish partisans of Vilna and spread to the concentration camps as a message of resistance and hope.
07. The one kind of music that lifts my spirits is europop. One or two or three listenings of Dalida singing “Salma ya Salama”, Johnny Hallyday singing “Souvenirs Souvenirs” or even ABBA singing “Waterloo” will invariably brighten my mood.
08. The only Arabic words I know are for “beloved”, “thank you” and “you’re welcome”. This was tested only once, in Fruitvale near Oakland, when I was taking a bunch of Bosnian kids out to the store for some ice cream and Ding Dongs. For some reason the clerk, a pale rangy guy, said flat-out to me after I paid, “shukran”, to which I automatically answered “afwan”. Why he thought I’d reply in Arabic is still a mystery.
09. At eighteen I was one of the few dozen people in the world working at the unique job of identifying songs on the radio. My employer was ASCAP, and my job helped their composer-members collect royalties on their music. By an insane coincidence, in the same building seven floors above our office, the manchild I would fall in love with 32 years later and his then-boss (they would marry in 1977 and divorce in 2009) were working at the same time, for Sesame Street. We didn’t meet then, but I like to imagine that he and I shared an elevator at least once.
10. As a result of his influence, I’ve developed an interest in the religion (technically “religious belief system”) in which he was raised, Swedenborgianism, and so far have read three of the eponymous founder Emanuel Swedenborg’s many, many books: Journal of Dreams, Heaven and Hell, and Conjugial Love (that’s his spelling and coinage), which is about marriage, love and sex. Godly sex.
11. When I was a teenager I used to have to wear, for formal Filipino association functions, the traditional Filipina dress, the maria clara, which I hated because of the scratchy (netting sewn underneath to keep the shape) butterfly sleeves. But I know how to make one and could probably whip one up if ever needed. It's really a beautiful dress.
12. I get my Chinese heritage from my father, who was born illegitimate in a barrio in a northern province of the Philippines in 1905 and made it to the States in 1927. He got to Manila on foot and worked on the docks until he had his passage fare.
13. I get my Catalonian-Irish heritage from my mother, who was something of a mail order bride. After surviving as a teenager the Japanese occupation of Manila (fire bombing, rampant disease, food shortages, looting soldiers, random death squads, mass rapes, etc), she arrived in the States to marry my father. The miscenegation laws still on the books in the first half of the century prohibited him from marrying a white woman, and Filipino women were scarce because of early immigration policies. However, policies did start easing after the war, and so she came over. She was 21 years his junior.
14. An uncle of mine was General Marshall’s driver when Marshall toured Asia. Most of my male cousins (my mother’s family were a family of professionals—lawyers, teachers, soldiers) were killed or wounded at Bataan and Corrigedor. I don’t believe, however, that any of them were sent on the Death March, thank God.
15. I don’t look Filipino. Even Filipinos look at me and don’t think I’m Filipino. I actually think I might have some Mongol in me. Some thick-boned, close-to-the-ground Mongol plains horse warrior.
16. Like Jean Seberg in Breathless, in my early 20s I sold copies of an English-language newspaper on the streets of Paris, although it wasn’t the International Herald Tribune. It was The Paris Metro, which at the time was about a year old, the baby of a reporter named Tom Moore, who’d made a pile on a story (legend was, it was the Dog Day Afternoon bank hostage story) and had come to Paris to fulfill his dream of starting his own press there. The Paris Metro was a weekly and cost five francs, of which I got two for every sale.
17. My favorite book in French is the first one I ever read cover to cover, a rather good potboiler called Pour Amour d’Une Star by the screenwriter Jean-Pierre Ferriere. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman in a dead-end job whose life changes when she saves a fragile young movie actress from suicide.
18. I know off the top of my head the names of all the seven actors who played The Magnificent Seven, and prefer the John Sturges movie to the Kurosawa one.
19. The late groundbreaking gay playwright Robert Chesley was my son’s godfather. The late stage and movie actress Sigrid Wurschmidt was his godmother.
20. As Michael and I work at writing and editing in the same room, my signal to him not to disturb me is to place on my table a small copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao. No ideological purpose, simply that it’s red (it’s the Little Red Book from 60s campus life, remember?) and therefore easy to spot.
21. Since 1996 I’ve been listed in the University of Pennsylvania’s Celebration of Women Writers.
22. From time to time I look back on my work in adult films and am glad that for a little while I had the chance to be—but don’t miss the fact that I’m no longer—a luscious babe.
23. I’m a sucker for catered book launches, and (when I have it) will gladly pony up the twenty-five bucks to buy the book in order to feel guilt-free about copping at least twenty-five bucks’ worth of free food and liquor.
24. The strangest foods I have ever eaten are: peanut butter-and-bacon sandwiches (in Brooklyn); batter-fried Snickers bars (in Paris!); and Filipino blood stew (in Minneapolis). I have no plans to repeat these culinary experiences.
25. After years of being made to feel inadequate by the media—as has almost every other woman in America—over my lack of weight discipline, I have finally acknowledged my belly by naming her. Her name is Fatima and we are now good friends.
SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE.
_____