Kid 1 and Kid 2 and Vermont

This may be my Christmas card this year. Edgy, huh?

St. Kathleen of the D-List

My face has mostly recovered from the strain of laughing and non-stop smiling I endured the night before last when I saw Kathy Griffin at the Palace Theater in Albany, NY. Now friends, despite the rave review she properly got from the Albany Times Union, I alone am returned to tell you why we really all love Kathy, beyond the too obvious reason that she is funny.

She is doing the Lord's work - an apostle with an audience - sold out, adoring. As Jesus came to say unto us that, truly, those who sat at the lunchtable of the popular kids have had had their reward Kathy is returned to remind us of that truth. Nevermind that she, a professed long ago and deeply lapsed Catholic called priests "Kidf___ers" a few times, well, maybe a dozen times or so in the hour and a half, or that the funniest bit in the whole show was her rendition of her devout 85-year-old mother's disregard of the commandment not to take the Lord's name in vain (when asked by Kathy to go on a lesbian cruise for a Bravo TV special) her moral authority is intact.

A-list celebrities are ridiculous and the ordinary sloggers, and the despised and outcast (gays of both sexes ascendant and a big part of her fan club) are, uplifted in Kathy's company. She's come to tell us nobodies in a conspiratorial tone, how ridiculous those fabulous people are. She's one of us - or convincingly pretends to be - whose been in their world spying and is here to tell us, and, you guys, you won't believe it!

Come to think of it, Moses hung out with Pharoah and his ilk for a long time and was a Jewish guy. Maybe, instead of thundering down the mountain and smashing stone tablets, dishing up Pharoah and his hangers on would have helped keep the Israelites in line. Maybe Aaron, history's first Jewish lawyer and a smooth talker, could have had that job...Of course, he wasn't adopted into Pharoah's family the way that Moses was. To make it work you need a first-hand account from someone who has really seen how it all works.

OK, that Old Testament analogy probably isn't really that apt. That dour northerner in me just won't shut up. (Do we always have to loop back to Jesus - even in a review of a nearly x-rated comedienne? hmmm). I have to admit as well that we love to laugh at Paris Hilton and her crabs and don't really want her to stop doing what she is doing. It's fun and its funny and part of what makes America great; you can see that when Kathy is talking about it. Go see her if you can.

Before I Forget

I know there are people out there who are paid lots of money to come up with names for things. I am not one of those people. No one has ever offered me one red cent for an idea for a name. Yet, without hope for remuneration, I can't help having some good ideas. I am putting them down here hoping for compliments on my genius and to protect these gems, the way inventors put things down in the patent office. It's on the record. Potential uses, you ask? Company names, rock bands, products. Just about any old thing. Here goes:

The Vanilla Cycle

East Coast Girls (if I ever start a consulting firm, I think this will be its name. As we know, East Coast Girls are hip. Perhaps ECG, LLC will be in the business of genius branding... hmmm. Hey, I like that too, "Genius Branding, LLC")

Repreself

That's all for now. Bidders can contact me here ;-)

Do the Math, Or Life in the Law for a Writer Manque

This is Woolfoot’s entry into the 2006 Ross Essay Contest sponsored by the American Bar Association. Lawyers were invited to submit an essay describing how life in the law has changed them. I had counted on winning, but wound up an also-ran (they did “publish” this in their weekly e-newsletter but no coin for yours truly). I liked it though, so I'm sharing

If I had been good at math, and or science, I could have been a doctor. But I was not. The only thing I remember about 10th-grade geometry is the time a classmate came to the front of the room to get a hall pass and barfed all over the one teacher in school who had a PhD. That is vivid. I can’t remember one theorem. About one week into 11th-grade chemistry, the teacher started talking about “atomic weights.” I fled. Chemistry wasn’t required for high school graduation.
Within the first few weeks of law school I learned that the capacity for logical thinking, math/science-style thinking, would be required for graduation. And so, in my late 20s, I was forced to forge new pathways through my swiftly hardening brain. One of our first assignments was to write a memo analyzing a torts fact pattern that involved the balance of probabilities. This did not quite make blood come out of my ears.
Writing that memo was a do-or-die moment, and I did it. I managed a respectable law school career and have now been practicing law for 10 years. I have worked in a small firm doing general legal work, then for a few years as a prosecutor, and now as a family law attorney at the biggest law firm in our state. For better or worse, I now can think like a lawyer. In fact, I can’t stop thinking like a lawyer. This is the great change that The Law Hath Wrought in me. I am still not very handy with numbers, but now, my mind is forever, completely unbidden, processing equations of the following sort:
• 1 North American Woman + 1 Man from former Soviet Republic x (1 Child + 1 Child) + Money Problems = Legal Fees requiring Grandma to take a 2nd Mortgage.
• 5 Boys between ages 17 and 20 + 1 Campfire + 1 fifteen-year-old Girl passing by who knows 1 of the Boys + 2 cases of Bud Ice + 1 Marijuana Cigarette + 1 Cargo Van ≈ minimum of 7 Misdemeanors and 2 Felonies.
• 1 Stock Boy + 1 Long-Handled Dust Mop + 1 Friend of Stock Boy behind Service Desk with Time on his Hands + 1 Woman with Multiple Sclerosis and Associated Vision and Gait Problems = 6 to 18 Months Employment for Insurance Defense Counsel.
And while, as noted, geometry was never my strong suit, I now understand that where two neighbors with a long set-back from the highway share an interest in a rectangular area of driveway where their properties meet the road, the cost and number of legal problems that will arise is directly proportionate to the size of the rectangle times the disparity in income between them.
Needless to say, this is not how normal people, process the everyday situations that confront us. Recently, I was discussing a terrible plane crash with my sister, a nice “civilian” who teaches middle-school social studies. She said it had never occurred to her that lawsuits might follow after a passenger plane went down. I had to tell her that was generally the first thing that occurred to me.
It is in moments like these that I wish I had been smart enough or good enough to be a doctor or an artist or whatever. Still, if there’s one other thing I have learned in the last ten years it is that our world, with all its constant conflicts, actually needs and desperately relies upon people who can work things out the way we lawyers do.

Santa's Village

Hello to all of you, my dear public. Back again after too long away. I wanted to record the events of the day, my last day of vacation, spent with Kid 1 and Kid 2 at Santa's Village in wee Jefferson, NH.

Kid 1 is 8 and Kid 2 is 5 and Santa's Village is a throwback to the 50s, a family-owned proto theme park with, you guessed it, a Christmas theme. It's perfect for small kids and not too hard on the grown ups. The place has more Christmas Kitsch than you can shake a stick at and they are not adverse to separating you from a dollar but it is also obvious that they are not there to rip you off. For your $21 admission you get a clean, safe, friendly little park, staffed by nice kids and retirees. Everything is immaculate. The soft ice cream cones we bought cost about $1.50 and were too big for kids to eat.

Kid 2 is not adventurous but today he went on the Rudolph Rollercoaster and the Yule Log Ride, the too "scariest" rides and loved them. I was telling some friends about it last night and noting the happy contrast to Walt Disney World: a nightmare of eight-dollar lollipops behind a sea of strollers and the new semi-disabled on their Rascals.

Give me deeper understanding

Softly and Tenderly

Last weekend Woolfoot was back in Montreal: the place where I spent almost all of my 20s, the place where I got my formal (and a lot if informal) education, the city of my heart. Unlike college days, however, on this trip, I also had two kids, and for part of the time, the husband in tow.

I was there for a meeting of the Vermont Bar Association. We were based out of the luxe Omni Hotel on Sherbrooke Street, in the heart of downtown. The formal bits of the meeting wrapped up on Saturday afternoon and then everyone got to do what they really came to do: have fun with their friends and family in Montreal. It also meant that the kids and I were still in town on Sunday morning. This rare event brought with it for me an undeniable sense that I was under a cosmic obligation to at least try to get the kids to the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, which is just stone’s throw (well, 4 blocks) from the Omni.

As the hart pants for streams . . .

The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul is a Presbyterian Church and was built by a prosperous set of Scotch/English/Canadian high society back just before the second World War got going. It was an amalgamation of the Church of St. Andrew and the Church of St. Paul. This group (the founders of the “A&P,” as it is sometimes known) and their ilk have gone and we will not see their like again. In their current incarnation (today’s rich people), charitable efforts are not directed at church buildings and stained glass. The A&P, is a gothic revival stone church with an impressive stone tower that anchors the corner of Rue Redpath and Sherbrooke Street in what is still, in some senses, Montreal’s “best” neighborhood.

The sanctuary is large and long and the ceiling is vaulted. The pews, the altar, the pulpit, the model church over the pulpit, all are made well and out of the best things. It is a cathedral of and monument to a particular brand of colonial Britannic Protestantism. In the giant stained glass window over the altar Jesus rises triumphant and white with his arms outstretched and the awed onlookers include a be-kilted soldier holding a Union Jack. The weekly bulletins explain that the faded flags that hang in rows on slightly bowed poles above the heads of the congregation are the colors of the Black Watch, and that the church is the regimental church of the Black Watch.

I have never been particularly active in any church organizations but I grew up going with some regularity to the Methodist Church in my home town of Schenectady, New York. We may have made it to church about once a month. We were the family that was late every spring when they changed the clocks.
I bonded with those services and my fellow middle-Americans. In the ‘70s at our Methodist Church, everyone was nice and the emphasis was on reflection rather than fervency. The service went basically like this: Call to worship, hymn (choir entering), reading, children’s sermon, prayer (exit children), hymn, collection, sermon, hymn (choir exiting), blessing, cofffee, doughnuts. Once a month, on the first Sunday, we did communion, usually in our seats but sometimes at the rail. The hymns were the same ones my great grandmother sang.
Since then, this has seemed to me the right way for a church to be. As an undergraduate in Montreal in the mid-80s I was in search of a church in the poor man’s Paris that a Methodist girl from Schenectady could attend without making a fool of herself. McGill University, which is largely the product of that same group of people that endowed the city with St. Andrew and St. Paul, is in the same neighborhood as the Church. I decided to chance it. It was Presbyterian, but I figured that was close enough. Furthermore, I recalled that my maternal grandfather, Floyd Stark, had been raised as a Presbyterian by his mother, Ella Macumber, (though he had gone Methodist under Grandma’s influence) so I figured could claim some reasonable heritage connection.

We shall be changed . . .

It is one of the hazards of Protestantism that those born into any of its branches are likely at some point to go in search of church that speaks to them instead of simply submitting to the authority of their natal church. I respect the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but 500 years of Protestant ancestry has disabled me from an honest embrace of them. I can’t help weighing up the belief systems on offer. At the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, I found my church.

The service followed the same outline as the Methodist one to which I had become accustomed. The hymns were the same, although the Presbyterians went in for something called metrical psalms. I loved the way they did things, though I couldn’t help a little bit of inner chuckling at the Presbers (church leaders) who periodically appeared, marching solemnly through the church and sat in the row of high backed carved gothic chairs at the back of the altar. They were not all older white men, there were plenty of women and people obviously not of Scottish heritage. They were all, however, so extremely dignified… The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul still looks back to Old Scotland. I think the Queen Mother dedicated the Organ or something back in the 80s (I wasn’t at that service). I did hear a reading at the A&P one day by a very florid visiting gentleman named, believe it or not, Lord Elphinstone.

This is not to say that the church is snobby. There were quite a few students in the congregation with backpacks and casual clothes and I always felt quite at home there. I enjoyed these little cultural flourishes. They were so obviously not put-ons, but a genuine expression of the heritage of this Church. And the congregation was full of people of many stripes (the superintendent of the apartment building where I lived during law school, Mr. Ong, was a member of the A&P choir back in those days). People were exactly the right amount of friendly: they always smiled and nodded and said hello. The minister invited people to church events from the pulpit. No one tackled you to get your home phone number. Perfect. There were no guitars. No stopping the service midway to run around the church shaking hands and hugging.

The church has always had, and retains, a commitment to great church music. There is a professional music director and a choir that sings Christmas carols for the CBC each year. The massive organ can boom through the church to vibrate the stone pillars. Just as important, and what was such a treat, nay, blessing, for me on my recent revisit, is a minister with genuine literary talent. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when I went regularly to church at the A&P the leader was the Rev. James Armour. This last weekend when I was back in Montreal, the Rev. Armour, now retired, was filling in for whomever the new guy is. When I saw the Rev. Armour’s name on the sign in front of the church, I knew I couldn’t miss the service.

Q: Where have all the Rev. Armours gone? I studied English lit. as an under graduate and was marked forever by John Donne and John Milton and a handful of other religious geniuses who were also literary geniuses. The sermon is an art form, or can be. The Rev. Armour was clearly an offshoot of the root that is found way back in that tradition. I wouldn’t embarrass him by classing him with Donne and Milton but he could think, write, and deliver a sermon of beauty and logic week after week. More than just afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted (the role expected of ministers, as he joked once) he mined the Bible for insight and gave sermons that demanded reflection. He did the same when I lucked back into church last week. I was so grateful to have a chance to hear him again this last weekend, I was almost overcome - which is not really the done thing there. Thank God – really, for all of it, and to all those Saints who from their labors rest who made the A&P what it is.
http://www.standrewstpaul.com/