indulgences

The old French saying is all too true: After a certain age, a woman must choose between her face and her figure.

The added flesh that diabolically accretes to one’s middle with the passing years will keep the face attractively plumped out. Cut calories to preserve the figure and the face grows pinched and wrinkled. As with so many issues in life, you can’t win, but you can choose.

I chose the figure without hesitation, having a well proportioned willowy one, with the great legs I inherited from my mother. My face, on the other hand, is ordinary except for my green eyes, which are very nice, if I say so myself.

Why such a fuss? you may ask. Do purely physical appearances, over which one has minimal control, really matter? You bet they do. They count tremendously. If you doubt it, just study romance (in fact or fiction) or, if you’ll indulge my fatal attraction to the field, dancing. A dance fan–like me, like you, perhaps–can hardly ignore a performer’s looks.

A student of mine in a dance-writing course asked one day if, in a critic’s evaluation of a performer, bodies counted. Yes, Virginia, bodies–and faces, too–count. They’re not everything, mind you. Galina Ulanova, for instance, the unforgettable mid-twentieth century star of the Bolshoi was built like a peasant, yet her soul shone through. The face doesn’t need to be beautiful–Ulanova’s matched her body–but it surely benefits from certain qualities that go into making what we call a good “stage face”: large, widely spaced eyes, a mobile and expressive mouth, a general look of openness to experience. Maria Tallchief, Martha Graham, Patricia McBride–all had glorious stage faces. And a dancer with a tight, miserly-featured face is often–not always, but often–emotionally unable or unwilling to offer the viewer those attributes that go way beyond technique.

All this applies as well to the field of pedestrians. Just as, philosophy is continually telling us, it is important to be able to put a name to something, it is essential to see how a thing or a person looks and recognize our reaction. We respond quickly and deeply to a person’s appearance and draw from it many conclusions–some of them true; a few surprisingly false, as it turns out; others that will acquire a complex subtlety should we develop an acquaintance with the person. But, admit it, that first look produces a profound, often long-lasting, response. This is so obvious, I think we can leave it at that and close the book.
© 2008 Tobi Tobias

No elegance is possible without perfume. — Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel
When I arrive at my friend Renée’s house in Paris, she is knitting a small fleecy white garment. She embraces me, holds it up, and says, “It’s for your grandchild-to-be.” I’d written her that my first grand was on its way.

“You will be a wonderful grandmother,” she declares.

Frankly, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be. I adore children, always have. Playing and adventuring with them is one of my top three delights, and they respond to me in kind.

“And your grandchildren will remember you forever,” Renée continues.

Well, now that’s something else entirely. I see no particular reason why anyone should “remember me forever,” least of all the young, who are typically absorbed in their own affairs. So I ask, “Why is that?”

“Parce-que vous êtes parfumée,” she replies with wisdom-of-the-world assurance. (Because you wear perfume.)

Despite her use of the formal “you” in her native French, an old-fashioned indication of respect that she employs even with her beloved daughter-in-law, Renée, once my professor during her New York years, has become one of my most cherished friends–profoundly cultivated, innately elegant, and, far more important, a mistress of empathy.

As for the wearing of perfume, I come by it rightly. My mother always wore a fragrance, most often Ann Haviland’s spicy “Carnation,” while her elder sister, for whom my daughter is named (so you can imagine how I adored her), favored “Wood Violet,” which echoed her sweet, self-effacing personality.

When I was about fourteen, growing up in deep, dark Brooklyn, my mother started taking me with her to the discount-perfume shop she patronized and allowing me to chose a scent for myself. I was finicky to the point of absurdity. At one session, the saleswoman, having proffered countless samples, all in vain, said, “Tell me, my dear, exactly what would you like your fragrance to smell like?”

“Soap,” I answered on the instant, then immediately corrected myself. “I want it to smell as if I actually–naturally–smelled like that.” (Our soap at home was Ivory. It did have a nice, fresh scent and, what’s more, it floated.) I can’t recall what we finally settled on that day. Fairly soon, though, rebounding from my “natural” phase, I moved into the realm of “Calèche,” “Cabochard,” “Antilope”–all three the antithesis of girlish, a mode I had come to despise.

In my later teen years, when I wore my clothes black, my long hair loose–Veronica Lake-style, my mother called it–and took a full ten minutes to layer my lashes with black French cake mascara, I wore Lanvin’s “Arpège,” it being so much more sophisticated, I still think, than “Chanel No. 5,” synonymous with Gallic chic in the mind of the general public.

I can’t believe I remember all this–I who have such indifferent recall–except for the things that constituted the pillars of my imagination: for instance, the names of all the dancers in the New York City Ballet when I first saw the company.

At college, inspired by Renée, with whom I studied medieval French literature, I wore Lancôme’s “Joyeux Été,” until the firm discontinued it. For me, that move was little short of tragic–I was far less disconcerted by the loss of a boyfriend that coincided with it. Eventually, I compromised for a while with the same house’s “Magie Noire,” but it wasn’t it, and when a thing isn’t it, it might as well not exist. For me, there’s no such thing as a Mr. Almost Right in the realm of scent.

Just before and after my marriage, I wore Worth’s “Je Reviens” (which used to be colored blue and stained your clothes, if you weren’t careful). The name means “I will return.” “Is that a promise or a threat?” my eventual husband used to joke.

And then, once I had begun writing about dancing, I discovered the old Guerlain fragrances. My favorite was “Mitsouko,” not least because it had been Diaghilev’s scent. Now favored by both men and women, it was introduced to me by my fellow dance writer Sally Banes and worn for decades by Balanchine’s right-hand-woman, Barbara Horgan. I abandoned it finally when the formula seemed to become more synthetic or something that made it not quite true to itself.

After the eclipse of Guerlain, I practiced a kind of serial monogamy, returning to old favorites for months, even years, at a time. More successfully–since the old scents or I had changed and thus lost our affinity with each other–I discovered new creations. Some later-breaking favorites: The original Vera Wang fragrance that had no name except the designer’s. “Armani for Women,” a brash (and, in my case, deceptive) statement of cosmopolitan self-assurance. Issey Miyaki’s “L’eau d’Issey” (back to the pure and subtle realm of floating soap). Calvin Klein’s “Eternity” as well as the same firm’s “Truth.”

I haven’t yet succumbed to the new fad for scents that evoke herbs, fruits, even sweets ( and exotic combinations thereof), concocted to gratify our time’s raging lust for novelty. Are they merely perverse or perhaps the next step–after the “Poison” phase–in the feminists’ repudiation of the innocent florals? After all, a Woman Warrior can hardly go around town (or to bed) smelling like a rose. Or so I assumed until, I was tempted recently by, of all things, Bulgari’s tender, shy Rose Essentielle.

I don’t know why people complain about the long waits at the airport nowadays. This limbo of ostensibly lost hours provides the perfect occasion to wile away time guiltlessly by trying out new fragrances–that is to say, new states of being.

Whenyou’re surrounded by a just-discovered evocative aura, anything could happen.

Anything.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

I am in Paris with my husband. I have convinced him that he wants to accompany me to one of the city’s legendary flea markets. It is way, way out on the edge of town, a lengthy pilgrimage on the Métro, past stops with names like La Fourche (the fork, as in a road, which it is), Montparnasse-Bienvenüe, Gaîté, Plaisance. Eventually we arrive.
I shop; he watches. After nearly two hours of this, even I–the indefatigable seeker after the old and unusual–get tired. We exit and collapse onto the low, narrow concrete ledge in which the hefty chain-link fence that separates the market from ordinary life has been embedded.
We are both exhausted and the sun is turning brutal. What’s more, we’re both hungry, a state that can lead to cranky in a matter of minutes. (Has anyone ever studied the effect of low blood sugar on intimate human relationships?) The two of us sit there gathering strength for our next move, which should be lunch–a croque monsieur and a beer, say, if we can find a café that’s not too seedy. Meanwhile, my husband has closed his eyes and retreated into the semi-comatose state of men haplessly extended beyond their tolerance.
Suddenly, some 200 yards away, I see a woman walking toward the market. She’s nibbling on something she holds in her hand. If we were in the States, I’d assume, from the look of the thing, that it was a hotdog roll. But we are not in the States. We are in the land called Delicious.
As the woman comes nearer, I realize that it’s pastry she’s holding. Even nearer: Pastry of a lightness and flakiness that are the province of French baking. Very close, just about to pass us: The sublime pastry is coated on top with a gleaming stripe of icing the color of café au lait and filled with a silky-looking cream a shade paler.
“Come on, come on,” I say to rouse my somnolent husband. I’m standing now, tugging at his hand, pulling him to his feet. “A coffee éclair! It looked fabulous! We’ll just walk in the direction she came from,” I urge, pointing to the woman now visible to us only from the back. “The bakery can’t be far away.” And it isn’t. Just about two and half blocks.
“How do you know these things?” my husband asks wearily, as if his question were rhetorical.
“I know everything about things like coffee éclairs,” I reply with considerable–if somewhat defensive–dignity. I may not know much about math or science, but I do know literature and dancing and coffee éclairs.” (I choose not to reveal to my husband that, as an Agatha Christie addict, I’ve deduced that the point of purchase must have been close enough for the pastry not to have been fully consumed when the woman passed us.) My husband just shakes his head as we enter the fragrant shop.
Since I’m in charge of French in our marriage, I do the ordering: a coffee éclair for me, a chocolate éclair for him. He dislikes coffee, but I knew chocolate would be available, it being the default mode for éclairs. He pays. He understands foreign money. When I’m alone, I just cross my own palm abundantly with silver and extend it to the seller, hoping he’s honest.
Not surprisingly, this is the most delectable éclair I have ever tasted. And it continues, in memory, to hold first place to this day, despite the passing of so many tastings and so many decades.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

The dress on my back, the cloth on my dining table–unique, beautiful, old, and absurdly cheap. “Where’dja get it?” the appreciative and envious exclaimed. Gerry’s, of course.

I came across Gerry and his goods plowing my way home through a street fair devoted, as these events are nowadays, to the peddling of tube socks, junky electronic gizmos, bras and bikinis ostensibly name-branded, off-brand sheets, discontinued makeup and food as likely to kill as to nourish you.

It was high summer and the weather was stupefyingly hot and humid; the wares, depressingly tacky. Suddenly I spied, manifesting itself like an oasis-in the-desert mirage, a long rickety table heaped with fabric that all but spelled out “vintage” in neon light. I spent the next three hours there, pawing through the mound, finding things, among a crowd of enthusiasts. From them I learned that the scruffy youngish man in charge was called Gerry and that he and his offerings appeared irregularly–this was part of the mystique–at such fairs.

Every Sunday morning in the next month, I went out hunting for the elusive Gerry’s “show” (as I found he called it), sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Eventually, I got on a semi-secret phone-alert list that made me privy to the dates and venues of upcoming shows, relayed by a disembodied young female voice. From then on, on the next designated date, fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, I would join the faithful gathered at the indicated Upper West Side locale, waiting in a state of anticipation comparable to that of a very young child on the morning of his birthday. I was rarely disappointed.

Here’s how the maverick operation worked: From the back of a roomy SUV, Gerry, the sole proprietor and impresario of the enterprise, drew a large collapsed trestle table and set it up in the street. Then, with the help of a few volunteers from the eager crowd, he removed dozens of giant trash-bagged bundles from his vehicle and piled them high on the table. They formed a veritable mountain that loomed high over the heads of the participants. Only after the last bag had been stacked did Gerry give the signal that his low-end boutique was open for business. We, his clients, then precipitously threw ourselves upon the bags, ripped them open, and began rooting through the loot.

Just before the opening gun, Gerry had thrust at each prospective shopper a large plastic bag of an institutional royal-blue hue. A horizontal oval cut out near the top of the bag created a handhold. In these circumstances, however, you grabbed your bag, slung it over your arm, and pushed it way up to the elbow so you’d have both hands free. Digging for treasure chez Gerry was definitely a two-handed job.

What, exactly, was in the mountain? Delicate christening gowns, an amazing number of them. Spunky daytime dresses that women wore before jeans were declared to be the uniform for ordinary life. Cocktail dresses, ball gowns, and tuxedo jackets (which today’s women know look fabulous over their uniform of white t-shirt and faded Levis). Tablecloths galore, sometimes with matching napkins, in every size imaginable–from bridge-table squares to banquet-length double damask. Towels of every ilk, including those divine European linen ones with the owner’s initials embroidered at a corner in red cross-stitching. Yesteryear’s baby clothes and kidwear, a study of which would make a fertile dissertation subject for a budding sociologist. Undergarments that included pantalettes from the Victorian era and peach-colored corsets your grandmother might have worn (both find rakish uses today). Hats, shoes, and gloves (occasionally the white kid “Opera length” kind that reaches from impossibly slender fingers to above the elbow). Shards of ravishing embroidery, beading, or lace–all sheared from their original location but considered by some unknown salvager–bless her or him!–too wonderful to jettison.

The basic endowments for your initial search through this merchandise were a keen eye, speed, and ferocity of purpose. The idea was to stow away in your increasingly heavy blue bag anything at all that spoke to your imagination. The elimination process would come later.

Everything was “used,” of course. And nearly all of it was old, some of it, as I’ve indicated, seriously old. Rips, frayed edges, not quite obliterated coffee or wine stains, and other signs of age often made the garment–or linen item–somehow more precious, the way wrinkles give a mature face character. Occasionally I bought examples of meticulous mending, an art that has vanished in today’s throwaway culture. The love, labor, and deftness with which a hole in an antique linen sheet had been repaired never failed to pierce my heart.

In the world of Gerry’s, age was a plus. His customers seemed to agree that clothes were better “back then,” whether they thought “then” was the Sixties and Seventies or the Thirties and Forties. (I admit to the insufferable snobbery of believing that fashion–in a classical sense that includes wearabililty and grace–ended in the Forties.) Clothes were certainly better made back in the day.

Among my favorite acquisitions were black and midnight-blue dresses from the Twenties through the Forties that became mainstays of my “look,” and then, skipping ahead to the extravagances of the Seventies, a killer-flamenco dress–several pounds of flirtatiously ruffled black lace that I never wore but took out to revel in at least twice a year. My oddest find from the stylish past? Two pairs of men’s white suede summer oxfords with those characteristic perforations–very Great Gatsby. They were almost brand new, and they actually fit.

A small percentage of Gerry’s offerings were actually theatrical costumes. Another small percentage–one I cherished–comprised extremely old items. A wisp of a white finely embroidered handkerchief, at least two centuries old, from the look of it–you could, as they say, read a love letter through it and time had lent it a faint sepia cast–had managed not to give up the ghost in the ravages we perpetrated on the dense, twisted pileup of cloth. I rescued it, washed and ironed it with scrupulous care, and took it to Renée, my dear friend in Paris. Utterly in sympathy with it, she had it framed and hung it in her bedroom, in the company of leather-bound books equally antique.

Where on earth did Gerry get his stuff? Of course we were curious, but in vain. He was cagily vague on this subject, even if questioned directly. “Oh, here and there.” Costume-museum cast-offs was one of the most shocking and unlikely sources he’d mention when pressed further, though the nature of his more compelling holdings hinted that he was telling the truth.

Gerry’s clientele was largely female and divided between two subsets: those who dressed with debonair éclat, looking to add to their holdings, and those–collagists and quilters among them–who converted their acquisitions radically, giving them a completely new identity.

Regular Gerry’s customers got to know each other and, while frenetically mining the fabric mountain for items that would suit them, always took the time to find things for their sisters. “Who’s into lace?” one might call from one side of the heap, holding high a gossamer white cloud, then pitching it across the towering stack toward the ebullient voice that replied. Or, “Mirelle,” uttered in a shriek of pleasure, “you’re gonna love this!” and the said Mirelle’s arm would shoot up–palm cupped, fingers splayed–to catch the soft missile being flung in her direction.

The only motionless figure I ever saw in this crowd was Sienna, a ravishing child about seven years old, with red-gold hair falling to her shoulder blades and curling in pre-Raphaelite tendrils around her pale face. She was exquisitely poised and unusually silent. By contrast, Estella, the middle-aged grandmother in charge of her, was an earthy, loquacious type with gypsy looks. Physically and temperamentally, they seemed entirely unrelated. I guessed that Estella was buying for a modest private resale enterprise, perhaps to put bread into the child’s mouth.

At one Gerry’s session, I insisted upon buying Sienna a winter coat that the gods had obviously designed, a half-century back, with just this eerily lovely child in mind. Executed in black poodle-fur, with a neat little collar and a double row of buttons parading primly down the front, it was cut to hug a slender torso, then flare out at skirt level as if whipped suddenly by a November gust. Perfect in its propriety, imaginative in its fabric, meticulous in its tailoring, it was fit for the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess in her days of good fortune.

To return to the Gerry’s ritual: Once you felt you had fully inspected the hoard of stock (this took at least an hour and a half), the next step in the selection process was to dump the contents of your blue bag out onto the adjacent sidewalk and inspect it, piece by piece, to see which items you really must have or die.

While you did this, another client might hover nearby, politely if sometimes pointedly waiting until you, the original claimant, were done considering a good percentage of your items. The observer wouldn’t touch a thing until the moment seemed right to inquire, “Can I look at your discards?”

A cooperative client (and most were) would then sort her haul into three distinct piles that she indicated were, as far as her own taste and needs went, Keeper, Maybe, and Forget It. The waiting observer was entitled to examine–and stash in her own blue bag–anything in the Forget It pile. By an unspoken courtesy, she would shoulder the responsibility of returning the items she didn’t want back onto the still-looming mountain on the trestle table–unless yet another hopeful connoisseur of discards stood waiting (body motionless, avid eyes scanning) behind her.

Of course these rules, which evolved logically from the needs of the situation, were written nowhere and spoken about only when a newcomer to the process, at a loss as to how the system worked, asked for initiation. The conduct of the whole affair was a convincing argument for letting women run a nation’s government.

Decisions about household linen–whether for table, bed, or bath–can be made by eye and feel alone. Sheer guesswork prevails in choosing articles of clothing you plan to present to your near and dear. But garments you may allow to enter your own wardrobe must be tried on, though an intuitive few can look at a lavish night-life costume or a sober pencil-slim skirt and know if it will fit them flatteringly. Most of Gerry’s clients needed to try on the clothes that had snagged their attention and so created dressing rooms of an invisible architecture on the sidewalk, close to the building line, as if having a bricks-and-mortar structure only inches away from your all but naked body somehow preserved your modesty.

A typical Gerry’s customer, you see, would arrive at the scene clad in the usual flea market costume–jeans or shorts that had seen far better times, a ratty t-shirt, and a banana pouch to hold the bare necessities (money–needless to say, Gerry accepted only cash; a bank card for getting more money; a Metro card; a piece of i.d.; a comb). The savviest among us learned to skip regulation underwear–bra and bikini pants, an outfit the New York police consider adequate for the beach but insufficient coverage smack in the middle of town–and substitute some sort of cat-suit arrangement cut back to biker-shorts height on the legs and singlet sleevelessness on top.

No mirrors were available, not even the usual flea market looking-glass, shakily angled against an unreliable support, so cheap it reflected you with fun-house distortion. With luck, shop windows, if a shop’s interior was dark enough, would provide a murky likeness.

Other than that, we used our own finely honed instincts about how a garment felt on our body and our sister shoppers’ opinions. “What do you think?” we’d ask, presenting ourselves dead-on to the friend we had brought to the scene or an acquaintance we had made on the spot, then revolving in slow motion to be inspected from various perspectives.

Nearly always, the negative responses combined truth with tact. The positive ones, in their enthusiasm, were less decorous. “It’s totally you. You’d be insane not to take it.” Or, “If you don’t take it, I will–and cut it up into a dozen pieces and make pillows.” The dismantling threat often convinced the doubtful model of the garment that it was her moral duty to extend its life intact. Pillows could come later, after she had worn it to death in its original form.

Once a client had winnowed her holdings to the pieces she really wanted, she stuffed them back into her blue bag, deposited any further discards that hadn’t been gobbled up back on the heap, and placed herself at the end of a line of people that led up to Gerry.

The line could be long, but the pricing system had the swift efficiency of a guillotine. One by one, you’d remove the items from your bag and Gerry would tersely quote a price. “Three bucks.” “One.” “Five.” “Ten.” On each item, the shopper was allowed only one of two responses–yes or no. Haggling was forbidden. If you answered yes, Gerry scribbled the number down in a notebook that had seen much service. If your response was no, Gerry took the item and tossed it back on the heap. Once everything in your bag had been priced, Gerry added up the numbers in his notebook, announced the result, and you forked over that many dollars. The entire process clocked in at under three minutes.

You then scooped your yeses back into your blue plastic sack–or, if you were a Big Buyer, like Estella, into one of those ubiquitous plaid zippered shopping bags you’d presciently brought along–and moved on to the nearest Starbucks for a restorative dose of caffeine.

Needless to say, once the madness of the moment had subsided, some of our purchases would turn out to have been mistakes. But, as my frequent companion on these forays–Andrea the quiltmaker, author, swimmer, and Ph.D. candidate–points out, sighing with nostalgia, the entertainment value of The Gerry Experience was reward enough for the lavish investment of time and the ridiculously modest investment of cash.

Nostalgia? Yes, after several madcap years, Gerry’s enterprise folded. Not even his most persistent regulars could trace the man. Having created his unique delight for a time, he was gone–like Mary Poppins. Dozens of us fans were left broken-hearted–and with Sunday mornings once again at our disposal. Finally we might have time to clean our closets.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

I’ve always thought of myself as an addictive personality, but life is forever proving me wrong.

Take alcohol, for instance. My father–himself only a social drinker, and not much of one at that–introduced me to an occasional dab on the tongue of very good scotch when I was a mere child, so that, as he put it in his raspy voice, I wouldn’t make a fool of myself when I got older. The Scotch tasted foreign and, in the parlance of my tender years, yucky. At the same time it seemed one of the accoutrements of the adult world, a realm I aspired to, childhood as I perceived it being a claustrophobic thicket of arbitrary rules.

On my first date–age thirteen, at the “nightclub” of a Borscht Belt hotel–my youthful swain asked me what I’d like to drink and suggested an innocuous just mildly spiked lemonade affair suitable for young virgins. Duly cognizant of the dangers of imbibing a substance I’d never tried at home, I rebuffed his cautious proposal and requested a scotch and soda. Scotch was the only alcoholic beverage I knew besides wine. Wine was my mother’s preference. My mom always claimed scotch tasted like shoe polish. What bizarre experiment could have brought her to that conclusion?

A couple of decades hence, having turned into a dance journalist, I became aware of the heavy drinking indulged in by a couple of my colleagues. (I myself learned in time that there are some performances–I call them “double-scotch events”–that might easily drive one to drink, but it’s hard to review them coherently in a state of advanced intoxication.) So fearful was I that I might become similarly undone, I observed an annual two-week total abstinence just to make sure I had “demon liquor” under control. I did, Puritan that I was.

Take smoking, then. I took it up at college, having already been raised in a cloud of secondhand smoke. Both my parents were two-packs-a-day consumers–and my father a physician, no less. My sense of the glamour of smoking came, of course, from the old movies (Now, Voyager, for instance) and the fact that my minor in French led me to hang out with the most chic professors in the school. When I could afford those hyacinth blue packets, I bought Gauloises. The rest of the time, I resorted, as my French idols did, to Camels, reputed, perhaps falsely, to carry the heaviest load of nicotine and tar available. I never inhaled.

Next, in short order, I graduated, married, and duly produced a baby. (That’s how we did things back in the day–took care of lots of the heavy stuff before we reached the age of reason.) I found that I was relaxed enough to smoke only when I sat down to nurse my infant son. One day, after he’d lost his crib hair, I noticed to my horror that still-glowing ashes from my cigarette were falling onto his dear bald head. I quit smoking then and there. No withdrawal symptoms arrived to plague me, and I rarely missed cigarettes. The glamour of smoking had lain with my cinematic and Parisian models; a sleep-deprived housewife and nursing mom simultaneously trying to earn her master’s degree in English lit has, by definition, lost her passport to that world. I spoke a lot of French to my infant, just to keep my hand in and secretly adhering to the theory that a foreign tongue can be imbibed with one’s mother’s milk. My son, as it turned out, did not confirm that theory. He was a scandalously early talker–spoke in sentences, indeed paragraphs, before he could walk–but, though he’d obey a command in French if caught unaware, his utterances were firmly confined to English.

I didn’t do drugs either. Not even recreational ones. I didn’t work up the courage to try until I had two half-grown kids, and then I felt that if I was instructing them to say no, I had to follow the rule myself. Eventually, the aforementioned son, home on holiday from his name-brand college, where he had tried out a number of controlled substances, brought me, at my request, a cache of marijuana. I put it away carefully to save for “the proper occasion” and, predictably, managed to lose it. From time to time I look desultorily through my drawers and files, in the faint hope of retrieving evidence of a misspent youth I had never managed to have. My daughter took after me. Arriving home after a college party–she attended the same institution as her brother, whose description of the very same party included a gaudy menu of pharmaceutical refreshments–she asked me mournfully, “Why doesn’t anyone ever offer me a controlled substance?” I sympathized and explained, “You’re just not the type.”

My addiction of choice–or, rather, necessity–is pitifully harmless: caffeine. How else, I often wonder, could I have survived the rigors of devoted child-raising coupled with a (I use the word advisedly) career in writing about dance? I have quit, cold turkey, several times, the main withdrawal symptom being a piercing headache that no aspirin can ameliorate. I’d stay off all sources of caffeine–even chocolate–for weeks, even months, then relapse, relief far outweighing guilt. My most memorable succumbing was through an intensely rich double espresso bought from a celebrated restaurant’s outdoor cart in Little Italy. I sipped it slowly, with the deepest pleasure, walking down Grand Street. After five minutes, everywhere I looked, colors jumped out at me, more vivid than anything that has ever hung on MoMA’s walls. Marvelous stuff, coffee. To paraphrase Sydney Smith’s paean to tea: Thank God for coffee! What would the world do without coffee? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before coffee.

Over the years I decided that there must be a gene for addiction. This was simply a fantasy on my part, but lately researchers have been looking seriously into the possibility that some people are simply born vulnerable to indulgences capable of destroying body and soul. I know for sure that there’s a gene for understanding the digital world, another for attaining whatever mathematical capabilities follow the memorization of the multiplication tables, and yet another for a sense of geography that keeps one from getting lost the moment one leaves home base. I don’t have any of them. I’m good with children, I have a keen eye for style, and some people even think I can write.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

It happened in Copenhagen. Hans Christian Andersen tells us that magic and imagination flourish on Danish soil, and the tourism industry builds on that proposal at every turn. My own frequent visits to Wonderful Copenhagen and its environs–for work and play–make me suspect there’s some truth in the idea.

One Friday, many summers ago, the Danish friend with whom I was staying told me about an upcoming weekend fair of vintage items (one of my fatal passions) and offered to drive me out there–god knows where, to hell and gone–in her zippy little white car. We took off the next morning, early, for the opening, so as not to miss a single treasure. Of course it was raining. It seems as if it’s always raining in Denmark, or has just rained, or is threatening to do so, or is expressing its melancholy indecision with a fine drizzle.

The fair was a pretty high-end deal, being annual and indoors. Typically, it featured articles for the home: china, silver, glass, mid-century modern furniture–for all of which Denmark is justly celebrated. Historically, however, dress has not been the culture’s forte. Until recent decades, dowdiness and dull convention were the norm, considered a virtue perhaps. Yet here it was, hanging high from the top of a door, askew on a wire hanger, the dress that made my heart leap up with Wordsworthian delight, the dress that seemed created for me though it was surely a product of the Thirties, the dress that ignited my usually feeble streak of greed so that all I could think was Mine! Mine! Mine!

It was made of heavy black crepe with a dull finish. The top, including the long sleeves, was encrusted with jet beading and scrolling embroidery boldly laid out in an elaborate design that conjured up leaf and blossom without portraying either literally. The proportions of this magnificent bodice suggested that the garment was intended for a mature lady in possession of a large mono-bosom. I am more delicately endowed. I imagined the original owner of the dress looking like my grandmother in full regalia: majestic and bulletproof.

The skirt was appropriately more reticent, but not without its own subtle dignity. A wide panel of pleats hung front and center. From the waist to the bottom of the pelvis, the pleats were sewn down; below, they flared free. The hemline, grown uneven with time, reached to what I guessed would be midway between the calf and ankle worn by a woman of average height.

Running down the back of the dress, as I was to discover, were twenty-six small buttons and complementary loops, all covered in the fabric of which the dress was made. This was what I’ve learned to call a “husband dress”–“Hon, would you do me up down the back?” Even if you’re very flexible, and I am, once the dress is on, you can only make the top half dozen and bottom half dozen closures, leaving a goodly number of your vertebrae naked to the gaze of society. Husbands and other sorts of housemates not always being around when you need them, I once, en route to one of those affairs requiring “festive dress,” had to ask a cab driver to do the job. But I’m getting ahead of my story, revealing that the dress became mine. Eventually. Let’s rewind.

Through the half open door from which the dress hung, I could see a tiny disheveled room occupied by a group of mostly unshaven guys of assorted ages in rumpled, none-too-clean work clothes. They were obviously taking a break over coffee, cigarettes, and shots of whatever relieves the pain of getting up at dawn to ferry wares to such a fair’s site.

A far more chic woman of a certain age, the epitome of Danish bourgeois style, emerged from a nearby booth offering mostly old porcelain and linens. Gently, she made it clear that she was the proprietress of the dress. “May I try it on?” I ventured. The look on her face suggested that no one had made such an outlandish request before. But she recovered her aplomb, along with the familiar Danish good manners, then scanned the scene and asked, “But where?”

I had shed my physical modesty years before, through quick changes in the wings of the Henry Street Playhouse, where we teenaged dance students performed. There I’d learned that the human body essentially comes in two types with typical variations on the theme, and that once you’ve viewed several of each genre, you’ve seen all there is to see.

The seller took alarm at my why-not-right-here? wave of the arm at the public space in which we stood and immediately shooed the men out of the coffee room, put me, the dress, and my friend inside, and firmly shut the door.

I shed my ramshackle flea-marketing outfit and tried the dress on. It was, of course, far too big for me, but it hung just right from the shoulders, and it felt as glorious as it looked. My friend and I emerged from our makeshift dressing room, sought out a full-length mirror (a grand-scale antique, also for sale, at a neighboring booth). Thus provided with a reflection, I turned swiftly and erratically from side to side to catch a glimpse of myself, as if caught unawares, in this foreign costume. Still I couldn’t say yes (or, for that matter, no). I adored the dress, but somehow the idea of buying it and actually wearing it seemed to be too much. As they say nowadays, I just couldn’t commit.

I managed to say a regretful, rather shame-faced no to the seller, who had the grace to remain expressionless. I apologized to my friend, who only shrugged, used to–indeed, indulgent toward–what she clearly thought of as my peculiar ways. We made a desultory tour of the balance of the market and headed home.

In the dead of night, I lay in bed, obsessing about the dress. It was not merely wonderful for its own physical self. It also harbored an uncanny evocative power. It made me think of Virginia Woolf. I was fully aware, from studying pictures of Woolf (I am a recovering fan of her work), that the dress was not really like her wardrobe at all. I simply knew that I would feel like Virginia Woolf when I wore it. God knows why. I have a man’s dressing gown (sumptuous maroon figured silk, floor-length on me) that makes me feel like Balzac. And I loathe Balzac’s novels. I just like the idea of him, writing away, at the epic Comédie humaine, to be sure, but, better yet, composing dozens of letters every day as well, longhand of course, fueled by the contents of his constantly refilled porcelain coffee pot, the creditors at the door.

Desire won out. I got up, walked down the hall, and knocked cautiously on my friend’s bedroom door. “Ja, hvad er det nu?” (Yes, what is it now?) replied a very sleepy voice. “I can’t get that dress out of my mind,” I began, standing hesitantly in the doorway. My friend sighed, as if she had known how it would be all along. Summoning up my courage, I went on, “Would you consider–I know it’s asking too much, but . . .”

So back we went the next morning, my patient, generous friend and I, in her gleaming white buggy. The excursion was again conducted in the perennial light rain that does wonders for the skin and, coupled with the all too few hours of daylight in the Scandinavian winter, plays havoc with the psyche, making depression many natives’ default mode. En route, the rain began to come down hard, indeed emphatically. Accompanying it, came my heart-hammering, belly-gnawing fear that the dress had been snapped up after I had abandoned it the day before. Which, I thought bleakly, would only have served me right. I deserved to be the victim of sartorial retribution.

The dress was still there, thank goodness. Can you believe I insisted on repeating the trying-on ritual, including shooing the men out of the coffee room? (This time ’round they seemed to have accepted the disruption as part of their generally unhappy fate or the very nature of life. The Danes are philosophical folk.) Can you believe I still took a long time to consider if the dress wasn’t too strange a costume for me, one of those mad errors that slips further and further toward the darkest recesses of one’s closet until an adolescent grandchild commandeers it for Hallowe’en. Then I began to wonder if I could really afford it, not merely as a statement of personal style but in terms of budget. I was a paradigm of indecision. Finally my friend, who may indulge fantasy life–she is, after all, a ballerina–unleashed her practical side and came to my rescue. “Buy the dress,” she said firmly, “and let’s go and have lunch.”

Once having made the decision, we did a little ritual bargaining about the price. (In Italy, I’m told, if you fail to haggle in such circumstances, the seller is disappointed.) I applied my limited Danish to the task, my friend chiming in, charming in her native tongue. The proprietress remained firm, however, and by now I’d realized that if I left a second time without possessing this garment, I’d have been criminally negligent–towards my desires and towards the magnificence of the dress.

I have since worn it for two decades on what I think of as Occasions of Elegance. It cost $60.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

Bookwormish-ness runs in our family. Over the generations it has seized the soul of my mother, me, my daughter, and my daughter’s elder daughter, to name just the female victims. For example, whenever I take the subway with my young granddaughters–which is often, and often from one end of Manhattan to the other–I read aloud to them. Nearby passengers listen, smiling. Occasionally one of them says, “I remember that book from when I was a child.”

There is nothing like a book. Nothing. People complain about standing in that endless line at the post office or curse the tedium of their daily train commute from suburb to city and back again. Such frustrating situations can be averted by always (always!) having a book with you. Why wallow in boredom when you can simply transport yourself into another world?

Arthur Mitchell, whose Standard English is meticulous, uses Black English to thrust a point home when the occasion or the audience will benefit from it. Back in the seventies, when he founded Dance Theatre of Harlem, a black classical-dance company–literally taking children off the street to make dancers out of them, as well as teaching them to speak, act, and dress with an elegance that made them royal ambassadors–he’d say, in the accent of his native Harlem, “If I ever catch you in the subway without a book in front of your face . . . .” The sentence was never finished but the implied threat was dire and effective.

I have no idea if young DTH aspirants are still subject to that rule but, when I was teaching dance writing at Barnard College, I used it with my students. I explained to them that their “subway book” had to be one they weren’t required to read but, rather, chose to read, and I offered to buy books for any whose budget couldn’t support the strain. Then, every few sessions of our weekly seminar, I’d require them to whip out their book of the moment and hold it aloft.

I also mentioned regularly that the activities most likely to contribute to one’s becoming a professional writer were, first and foremost, to write a lot and, a close second, to read a lot. To my mind, taking courses in writing counted for nothing compared to learning from the examples of successful practitioners, from the pros who constituted the canon to purveyors of popular junk. Without realizing it at the time, I must have constantly mentioned many books that I loved and that had influenced my work.

The proof: Press tickets, a perk of performance journalists, usually come in pairs, and I regularly shared mine with my students. Occasionally, a dance company performing outside the usual Manhattan precincts would send a bus to collect journalists at Lincoln Center and deliver them to the outlying district in question by curtain time. Journalists were told the appointed hour of the bus’s departure and understood that it would be strictly adhered to. One day I sat in a crowded press bus fuming because my student “date,” who was usually reliable to a fault (scatterbrained conduct was simply not in her rep), had not shown up. Just as the doors of the bus were about to close for the trip, she staggered down the aisle to the empty seat beside me, lugging two outsize, bulging shopping bags emblazoned with the name of a familiar bookstore. “I’m sorry,” she said, close to tears, “I was buying every book you mentioned all semester, and it took longer than I expected.” I expected that, in the course of the next year, she would read them all. She was, as I said, reliable.

Obviously, I consider the acquisition of books a commendable enterprise. It is equally a serious problem. As every obsessive reader knows, books multiply in the night, and you soon find they are taking over your living space to a degree that can be outright dangerous. I remember that Edward Gorey, the inimitable author/artist, having filled his many bookshelves, took to creating tall, rickety, freestanding pillars of subsequently amassed volumes without which, apparently, he could not exist. Once, when I visited my dear friend the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, she had ruthlessly plucked some 150 books from her overladen shelves and set them, spines up for easy identification, in cartons outside her apartment door. In front of them she had placed a boldly lettered sign: “TAKE AS MANY AS YOU WANT.” I’m afraid I did. She offered me some shopping bags with a gleeful smile.

None of the solutions to holding the book invasion at bay are particularly satisfactory, though they may fend off a bibliophile’s anxiety for a while. First of all, one can recognize the fact that book-owning isn’t what it used to be. The books you buy these days, alas, self-destruct at headlong speed–sometimes the spines crack even on the first reading–so amassing a personal library for posterity isn’t even possible. My grandchildren have pored over many of the picture books I originally bought for my children–volumes that are well worn from loving but incessant handling, yet still intact. The new books the grands acquire, however, will surely have collapsed long before their own children arrive on the scene.

As for me, after decades I got tired of using crammed bookshelves as wallpaper. I was never going to read Spinoza or Mickey Spillane–much as I thought I should when I acquired their works–so out they went, along with dozens of other worthy titles that had failed, over time, to seduce me. I felt little guilt about their afterlife. I live in a row house on the Upper West Side; any book put out on my stoop is adopted in ten minutes flat.

At the same time as I deaccessioned, I rediscovered the New York Public Library. Its catalogue is online. In the dead of night, your other chores finally done, you can order any volume in the entire city’s circulating collection to be sent to your local branch. You will be notified by e-mail when it arrives there. Then, all you have to do is stroll over with your library card (surely the ticket to a world of wonders!) and pick it up. If you’re a slow reader, you can renew the book online, more than once if no one else is clamoring for it. The most beautiful thing about the arrangement, though, is that the library makes these books go away–indeed, demands them back, threatening the dilatory with daily, if modest, fines. So now I can, theoretically at least, limit the books I give houseroom to the ones I need and the ones I love. Admittedly, I still have thousands.

I have also become a devotee of the adult version of being read to–audiobooks. While I’m allergic to electronic devices and congenitally incapable of understanding them, my husband, like many another man, is addicted to them. He has helped me acquire the spoken texts (there are several ways to do this without paying a cent, and even more choices if you have funds to spare), get them onto a tiny, portable gizmo that will play them (an iPod or other MP3 player) as I’m moving around, and learn the basic instructions for transferring word to ear–nothing fancy, mind you, like replaying a short section so admirable it begs to be repeated, just the essentials.

Now, when I do my regulation thirty minutes on the gym’s Treadmill to Nowhere or perform routine household tasks–both occasions, for me, of excruciating boredom–I can hear stories. In the last two months, I’ve heard Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. (That’s a lot of listening hours, but I have a streak of fitness fanaticism and I do a considerable amount of housework. I even iron, like Balanchine.) True, hearing a book is not really the same as reading the text, just as, between close friends, an e-mail lacks the texture of a letter. But, providing me with a way to elevate my heart rate without going out of my mind, audiobooks are on my short list of admirable contemporary inventions.

And then, just so you know, for books you can read without turning a page (though you do have to stay parked in front of a computer), there’s Project Gutenberg, which provides thousands of works in the public domain. Granted, people who detest reading literature from a screen will hate this. The same folks, however, may be happy to know that pillars of bookdom–the Bible, Shakespeare–are readily accessible on the Internet and yield to keyword searches, a convenience that can’t be claimed by our personally owned (perhaps inherited) bricks-and-mortar copies, though these are laden with other values, sentiment among them.

Valéry-Nicolas Larbaud called his two volumes of literary criticism Ce vice impuni, la lecture (reading, that unpunished vice). Vice only in the secret, all-pervasive delight it can bring, I’d say, along with the haunting fact that the addicted can’t be cured of it. My friend Lynne has, finally, given up smoking, but would never consider giving up books, indeed would never be able to. Nor would I. Nor would my granddaughter Lili, who since she was seven, has marched down the street holding her current book open in front of her face, ignoring her elders’ admonitions about the danger of accident, her very being enraptured by story. Reading may be marred by minor inconveniences, as stated above, along with possible solutions. Still, as I’ve mentioned, there is simply nothing like it. Nothing.

© 2007 Tobi Tobias

When I was growing up, my mother pointed out to me that, among my aunts, uncles, and myriad cousins (along with any spouses and offspring that had accreted to them), the ones that I liked best invariably had the “worst” personalities, moral characters, and behavioral track records. At least according to the standards of our petit-bourgeois world. This was true, but not entirely true. My absolute all-time favorite family member, my mom’s elder sister, Ann, was a saint–all self-effacing and genuine sweetness and tenderness. I adored her and named my daughter after her. I still cherish her memory and talk about her to my daughter’s daughters, my grands. But I digress.

Once I got considerably older, I noticed how many of my closest friends (a majority of them artistic types like me) were “peculiar,” as my mother would have put it–vulnerable, even fragile creatures, given to unconventional behavior because they recognized norms only grudgingly as they went about their business of making the world continually new. I was happy, at this point, to discover what Morison Cousins, the great designer of Tupperware, said: “People who are the most interesting are often neurotic. The ones with good sense almost lose their allure.”

© 2007 Tobi Tobias

Have you considered how rare it is to encounter an ugly baby? Post-six months, that is. But apart from C-section arrivals, the newborn, still supine in its crib or pram, entirely exposed to the gaze of the curious, usually bears for at least several weeks the marks of its struggle out of the womb, a journey it makes provided with no experience to assure it that this, too, shall pass and no concept of future joy. The infant’s physical battle scars–perhaps its psychic ones as well–disappear with time, and time, as well as interaction with other creatures of the human species, seems to make its features harmonize just as its limbs gradually acquire coordination. By the half-year mark, most fledglings are enchanting in one way or another.

But it’s the “ugly” babies that fascinate me. Those with the ears akimbo, the eyes tiny and too close together, the eyebrows perennially in frown mode, the skin sallow, blotched, or irregularly puffy, the expression grave or worried, even in situations promising pleasure.

I have enormous affection and hope for these babies. First of all, obviously, because Hans Christian Andersen was right: Ugly ducklings, occasionally, turn into swans. But even more because, if the uncomely babies never do turn handsome or beautiful, great things may befall them, since they won’t be subject to the distractions of personal beauty. Maintaining and enhancing one’s mirror image can be a full-time job, by definition a superficial one, with a tragic ending brought about by the passage of time. Inevitably, surface beauty fades.

Think of the ostensibly ill-favored, however, who, by their deeds, have become veritable gods: Andersen himself, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, to name just three of my favorites. Variously, their faces project sensitivity, empathy, hard-earned wisdom, a quietly unshakable firmness of purpose–elements of temperament that can transform the world.

© 2007 Tobi Tobias

People ask where your passion for something started. As if a passion were an unreasonable thing to have and needed to be justified by a specific root cause.

For me, the devotion to dance began when I was a child and saw a picture in Life magazine. It was a small black and white photograph of Diana Adams in arabesque, as I later learned to call it, in George Balanchine’s compact version of the sublime “white” acts of Swan Lake. As far as I was concerned, the image was a bolt from Heaven. I brought the magazine into the kitchen where my mother was producing one of the endless meals a middle-class housewife provided back in the day. “What’s this?” I asked. My mother glanced away from the stove. “That’s ballet,” she replied, matter-of-factly, and turned her attention back to her casserole. “What’s ballet?” I asked. I can’t remember her reply, but I do recall understanding, on the instant, that ballet was for me. Talk about the fairy’s kiss!

As for my devotion to the visual arts–as painting and the like are called, but, oddly, dance is not–that came even earlier, in our neighborhood branch of Woolworth’s, the five-and-ten-cent store of my youth, a vast emporium crammed with small irresistible treasures (or so it seemed to a pigtailed eight-year-old).

I grew up in a time and a community where a mother could let her young offspring out of her sight for a moment without endangering the child’s life. So while my mother, list in hand, ranged from counter to counter acquiring household and personal necessities–a frying pan, an inexpensive lipstick, a retractable measuring tape that, at a touch, would retreat into its hard shell like a startled snail–I could disappear in the direction of the Sewing Department (on the right, in back).

There, riveted to the spot, eyes wide, mouth slack with wonder, I would gaze at row upon row of inch-high wooden spools of 100% cotton sewing thread in every color imaginable, rising from waist height to far over my head. The thread had no pretensions to being silk–Woolworth’s customers were common folk–yet it was wound on the spools so tightly and evenly that each spool gleamed like a unique beacon of colored light.

The spools were arranged according to hue, one hue succeeding the next in rainbow order, with pedestrian black and white relegated to the bottom row, like a grudging afterthought. Each color family–this was the marvel–offered infinite variations on its basic theme. Women brought minuscule swatches of fabric from which they planned to create a dress and matched thread to them exactly. Not sort of, not close enough to make no never mind, but exactly.

I had no desire to sew anything, a stubborn lack of interest that has lasted a lifetime. All I cared about was the phenomenal range of color: A dozen shades of pink lined up in order of color saturation from the faintest blush to an almost psychedelic strawberry. A riot of reds, now veering toward a stinging orange, now to succumbing to cinnabar; now surreptitiously creeping up on purple. Cool greens from palest seafoam to the forest darkness that approaches black but obdurately refuses to arrive at it. Blues beginning with the merest hint of blueness and methodically progressing through cerulean and sapphire to the velvety indigo of a midnight sky. Grays more subtly differentiated than any panoply of twilight shadows I’d seen. Even the beiges, so often dullards, were worth looking at.

When my mother finished her shopping and was ready to reclaim me, she’d purse her lips and give the family whistle to summon me to her side. Half the time I was so absorbed in the bewitching reels of color, I didn’t hear her and she’d come looking for me. Soon she knew just where to find me. And one day she said, “If you like the thread so much, pick your favorite, and I will buy it for you.”

“You don’t understand,” I cried to myself. “It’s not one I like. It’s all of them together. And I don’t really want to have them. I just want to look at them.” But as a child I never learned to say important things like this aloud. I whispered, head down, eyes on the floor, “No, it’s all right.” But, as with Diana Adams in the swan’s arabesque, that glorious, hardly believable image of the spools of thread stayed with me, shaping me as I grew. I think I will die remembering it.

© 2007 Tobi Tobias