Dara writes:
Happy new year to all my Jewish readers.
James and I went to Temple Emanu-el this morning. We love Rabbi Posner. He's kind of burly and when he wears a dapper suit and shades, he resembles Will Smith from Men in Black. (Speaking of which, Will Smith's new movie I am Legend closed the streets in front of Madison Square Park today. The movie's about a "new flu" epidemic, and the set people put up fake signs about the flu on phone booths. They looked so real I was like, "Shit, it's already time to think about a flu shot?" Until I noticed, by the fact that the mayor's name given at the sign's bottom was Collin Grant and not Michael Bloomberg, that they were fake.)
Anyway, Rabbi P is a very malleable performer. For instance, at our outdoor wedding on Block Island, he became kind of rugged, ordering a Scotch when he got off the ferry, which he had literally jumped onto to board because the I95 traffic was so slow. Then back on Fifth Avenue he's suave, and yet when he blows the shofar, the traditional ram's horn that in Judaism announces portentous occasions, he's all Ornette Coleman improvising a jazz riff.
James and I capped the holiday off with a productive stroll up Madison Avenue--stopping to talk to gallery owners and other assorted glitterati on the way--and then a prosciutto (oh-so-kosher) panini lunch at 73rd Street's Via Quadronno. Ah, the life of a starving poet...
...this is completely off the subject and I kind of feel sacreligious bringing up his name in the same post as that of a revered rabbi, but did anyone listen to the revolting former governor, current "gay American" Jim McGreevey on NPR with Leonard Lopate yesterday? McGreevey is kind of disgusting, not to say slimy and hypocritical.
First of all, I'm always suspicious of someone who repeats his interlocutor's name constantly in a conversation. Everything McG uttered began with, "Leonard, you know," as if addressing the venerable host would mask his hideousness in credibility not to say folksiness. Here's the thing: to me he seems like a kind of old-school repressed guy who never could face up to his predilections and is incredibly ashamed but now sees that his shame has a price tag and can bring him money, public speaking charges, and a book deal. I've never heard talk of gay rights and "queer identity" sound so specious. I feel like he bought a book at the Piscateway Barnes and Noble's called "Queer for Dummies" and memorized how to use postmodern identity politics to his advantage. The result is what happens if you cross a kind of cut-rate Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with a smarmy lifetime politician. It's not pretty.
The fact is adultery is never cool, and that McG got in trouble not because of his affair but because of the nepotism of appointing his lover as NJ's Homeland Security head.