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Smoke & Mirrors: Shell Game 2017

2/26/2017

The Sky Writer grabbed a can of spray paint and scrawled the words
Love thy neighbor
on the vault of the heavens where everybody,
then and now,
across time and space,
could read the message.

And, by golly, the words took effect.

Cain and Abel buried the hatchet.
Montagues and Capulets shook hands.
Aaron Burr overslept.
Hatfields and McCoys kissed and made up.
Coyote and Road Runner hugged.
Sean Spicer embraced The Press.

From every direction, from every dimension,
people looked up,
saw the message
and smiled on their brothers.

Genghis Khan,
Torquemada,
Ivan the Terrible,
Stalin,
Hitler,
Mao,
Poppa Doc,
Pol Pot,
Idi Amin,
Ahmadinejad,
Assad,
yadda, yadda, yadda.

Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, atheists,
rich, poor, black, white, brown, yellow,
straight, gay, trans, right, left,
etcetera, etcetera and so forth.

Everybody.
Every f***ingbody got together,
right now,
and loved their neighbor.
Loved his or her neighbor.
Whatever.
Bliss ruled.

Then the Sky Writer whispered
My turn
and quietly --
not wanting to wake his wife --
snuck out of the house,
crossed the yard
and screwed the widow next door.
copyright 2017 Ozzie Nogg

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A Pilgrimage to Mecca . . .

2/19/2017

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* I Have A Dream
Swiss-born architect Albert Frey leapt from bed one morning and shouted, “Ich habe einen traum. Ich möchte einen Yachthafen am Nordufer des Salton Meeres aufbauen.”

“Oh, good lord,” said Albert’s wife, Marion. “You’re not in Zurich anymore. We live in Palm Springs, U.S.A. Snap out of it. Speak English.”

“For your wise counsel I thank you, Liebling,” replied Albert, lovingly. For he and Marion always tried to see the best in each other.

Then, without so much as an auf Wiedersehen, Albert grabbed his blueprints and hitched a ride on Highway 111 through the Coachella Valley, the Orocopia and Chocolate Mountains, to the North Shore of the Salton Sea where he built a marina designed like a futuristic aluminum ship rising from the surf complete with catwalks, a flying bridge, masts, and a crow’s nest shaped like round porthole windows.

“Great balls of fire,” said Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra and the Marx Brothers, as they sped off in their speedboats in this Palm-Springs-by-the-Sea playground while Albert shouted, “If you will it, it is no dream,” and heard his joy echo back like laughter from Box Canyon to Mecca.

* The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off

While Marion continually tried to see the best in Albert, his escapades at the Marina made her mad as hell. Shopping with her mother along the Gardens on El Paseo, Marion muttered, “I think I’m at the end of my rope.”

“Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent,” replied Marion’s mother,
“when working to make a marriage work. Trust me. With this I have experience.”

“Yeah, well, persistence and determination aren’t doing squat,” Marion said.“My relationship with Albert no longer brings me happiness.”

“And where is your happy place?” her mother asked.

"Sitting in your kitchen, Mom, my face warmed as I lean over a steaming bowl of your matzoh ball soup.”

“In addition to wanting my matzah ball soup, do you have an urge to purge and get rid of stuff?” her mother asked.

“By stuff,” said Marian, “do you mean the Gucci bag I just bought or Albert?”

“Bingo,” said Marian’s mother. “Dump him. Be Happy. Go be the change you want to see in the world.”

* Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?
After divorcing Albert, Marion spread her wings. She began an affair with her pool boy, Miguel, tall and lean and young and handsome, with eyes dangerous as black ice.

She joined a dig for pre-Columbian Aztec, Mayan and Inca artifacts and shared a tent with Sven, the brawny archeologist. “Bring me an ocarina,” Marion murmured in her sleep. “A magic flute I can blow on.” And Sven moved slightly on the cot and obliged.

Time passed. The days were good. The men, numerous. “What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” Marion sang, deciding that in romance, diversity is strength. The warmth of sunshine on her face, Marion kept passing the open windows of cantinas on the beach, finally lured inside after dark by the music, the aroma of fish on the grill, the smell of cigar smoke.

“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this at this hour?” said the man behind the bar.

“I had an urge to eat cake by the ocean,” Marion said.

Then the man behind the bar carried Marion past the International Banana Museum
to the edge of the water and lay her down on the sand. The tide ran in, but it never ran out, and Marion understood that this was the liminal moment between her old life
and what was to come.

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Life. Is. Good.

2/12/2017

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Zelda Leybeh Nudelman, the Eternal Muse

2/5/2017

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Most facts are lies; all stories are true.
Ben Shahn, artist

For our purposes, let's say that even invented stories are still worth recounting.
They reveal as much about the artist as would the truth.
For the artist is the sum of his stories . . .

This is a photo of Zelda Leybeh Nudelman taken in Vilkomir, Lithuania, in 1918. She was maybe sixteen, seventeen years old, at the time. Hard to know, exactly, but she says she was born right after the great Yom Kippur fire, while her father was in the other room, waving a rooster over his head, shlugging kappores, and Wikipedia confirms there was indeed a huge fire in Vilkomir in the fall of 1902, so there you go. I didn’t know what Yom Kippur or shlugging kappores was until Zelda explained it had something to do with getting rid of your sins. At Ebenezer Baptist Church, where I sing in the choir, we talk a whole lot about sin, but no chickens are involved.

Anyway, Zelda decamped the old country right after the picture was taken, just before the Bolsheviks hit their stride, leaving lovers to slash their wrists or hang themselves all over Kovno Gubernia. According to Zelda, her Daddy was a poor tailor so I figure one of those admirers must have given her that little fox stole, right? Zelda never married, remained free as a faygel — Zelda told me that’s Yiddish for bird — free to fly in and out of arms, of beds, affairs. And today? Today Zelda lives here, in The Home For Really Really Really Old People, in Boca. She is, as she keeps saying, one-hundred and fifteen kenahora,
so she qualifies, in spades. I’m with Zelda 3:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., but no weekends. Every time I help her to the toilet she grabs my wrist and says how much she loves it in Boca, loves the sunshine, loves the pelicans that love the hunks of challah she tosses them when she walks the beach. Yes, with a cane, but still. She tells me there were no pelicans in Lithuania, only swans in the river that ran through her town. More than once she’s said, “The sea gulls standing on those wooden posts remind me of my suitors, standing on the bridge before hurling themselves into the icy water.”

When Zelda reminisces about the suicide-prone sea gulls, she can get downright melancholy. But she perks right up when she mentions her Vilkomir childhood playmate, Ben. “Such talented hands,” she keeps telling me. “With a stick he used to draw my picture in the dirt behind the shul.” I never knew what a shul was until Zelda taught me it was a Yiddish word for synagogue. When I bring Zelda her dinner tray,
she grabs me by the wrist and tells me, “When Ben and I were lovers in New York, he’d show up at my apartment for dinner in a red shirt. Appear unexpectedly bearded. Did you know I was his muse?"

"You’ve seen his work, Two Witnesses, Mellie Edeau and Sadie Edeau," Zelda continues. "The woman on the right, that’s me.
The other woman is maybe his wife, Tillie, who he dumped for the second one, Bernarda. But what’s the difference? Ben always said, Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us. Or was it Boris who penned those words? Oi, silly me. Yes, it was Boris, my Yuri. To be a woman is a great adventure, he whispered as I turned everything upside down, emptying the dresser drawers. To drive men mad is a heroic thing. That man was a sweet talker.” By now, I can recite these stories by heart. Problem is, I keep Googling the names Ben and Boris and Yuri and Mellie and Sadie and Tillie and Bernarda, trying to figure out who the hell Zelda is talking about, but so far, no luck.

This Friday, when I brought Zelda her evening meds, she grabbed my wrist and said,
“Did I ever mention that when I left Lithuania
I went back to Austria to be with Gustav?”

Well, this was news to me, so I said, “No, Zelda. This is news to me.”

And then Zelda said, “Gustav was on his death bed, poor man, in that long smock he always wore, always naked under that smock, naughty boy. And was Adele there to care for him? No.
Only I was there at the end.
It was I he wrapped in a kiss as he died.
And don’t you think my portrait in the hat
is lovelier than that woman in her ungepatchked gold dress? Our love story, mine and Gustav’s, would have made a better movie, too.”

So now I’ve gotta Goggle ungepatchked and Gustav and Adele.

Should keep me busy over the weekend, except, of course,
when I’m at Ebenezer singing,
Count your many blessings, angels will attend.
Help and comfort give you to your journey's end.

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Ozzie Nogg

This is where I show and tell . . .

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