Full House

It appears we moved uptown just in time, as our Upper West Side apartment survived Sandy with electricity intact. (We did, however, watch a gust of wind take out a row of trees outside our window, smashing a couple of parked cars in the process.)

This evening, we’re playing hotel for family that wasn’t so lucky: my 90-year-old grandmother is up from downton, where last night cars floated down her street, and today her apartment is still without electricity; my brother-in-law is down from Columbia University Medical Center in upper Manhattan, where he just finished a 48-hour hurricane shift in the ICU; and his wife is in from Fort Lee, NJ, where she was stuck at home in the dark on her own day off from the hospital, unable to cross the GW bridge.

Plus we have Gemelli, who’s weathered the storm completely unfazed. (Though, as Jess pointed out, he’s young enough and a recent enough transplant to simply assume we have howling winds like this every week here in NYC). It’s a lot of people all at once for a puppy, especially for a puppy who’d already started to go a bit stir-crazy in the apartment during the hurricane lockdown. (He terrorized Jess this morning with manic misbehavior while I was out opening and inspecting [the gym](http://www.crossfitnyc.com).)

I’m happy to have them all here, in part because it’s nice to spend time with family, and in part because I feel like I’m helping out with storm recovery in some small way. But also because, like [the man in the old Jewish parable who’s rabbi instructs him to bring all his chickens into the house](http://www.beliefnet.com/Love-Family/Parenting/2000/10/Teaching-Tales-The-Way-You-Like-It.aspx), I’m sure things will feel awfully quiet and spacious when we’re *only* dealing with one crazy little dog, rather than an entire house full of guests.

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Smashed

My good friend and former roommate James Ponsoldt’s new film, Smashed, is in theaters this weekend. It was much-loved at Sundance (where it won a Special Jury Prize), and has garnered great critical reviews since (according to Metacritic, ‘universal critical acclaim’).

Here’s the trailer, which looks awesome, and gives a great sense of both Jamie’s knack for spotting and directing talented actors, and his subtle but highly visual shooting style:

 

Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it in New York (with the impressive double-whammy of the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza) and LA tomorrow, then more broadly over the next few weeks; you can check the list of theaters to see when it’s coming to you.

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It’s Alive!

After months of hard work, Jess and her partner Catherine officially launched Dobbin, their new clothing line, this morning. The site is live at [www.dobbinclothing.com](http://www.dobbinclothing.com).

The idea is simple: fashionable clothing that flatters real bodies.

They’re using high-end Italian fabric and manufacturing here in NYC, yet have kept prices low by cutting out the retail middleman, selling only online.

The clothing is also full of a slew of smart touches. A pair of their pants, say, is made from stretch canvas, has a hidden adjustable elastic waistband and is proportioned with a slightly higher rise and very carefully shaped hips and thighs, to make a classically tailored pair of trouser-cut pants that look great on a wide array of body types.

Check it out, tell a friend, and buy something! As they’re offering free shipping both ways, you’ve got nothing to lose.

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Brother Strength

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

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Portrait of the Artist

Apologies for the silence of late; things have been more ‘exciting’ than ideal on the work front, with multiple films all going (and, in standard form, running into series of disasters) at the same time.

This past Friday, however, I took the morning off to drive my sister-in-law Nina to a med school interview just outside of New York City. By way of thanks, she crafted this paper cutout portrait of me and Jess:

joshandjess.jpg

I’m impressed.

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Father’s Day

My grandfather is in the hospital today, apparently not doing well. Please send Father’s Day get well wishes his way. He’s a kind and loving person, a talented painter, and an endless repository of Yiddish jokes.

When I last spoke with him a few weeks back, he shared this one:

A nice Jewish girl brings her fiance home to meet her parents. After dinner, her father invites the young man to the living room, for a glass of Schnapps.

“So, nu, what are your plans?” the father asks.

“I’m a Torah scholar,” the fiance replies.

“A Torah scholar,” the father says. “Admirable. But how will you provide a nice house for my daughter to live in, as she’s accustomed to?”

“I will study,” says the young man. “And God will provide for us.”

“And how will you buy her a beautiful engagement ring?” asks the father.

“I will concentrate on my studies,” the fiance replies, “and God will provide for us.”

“And children?” asks the father. “How will you support children?”

“Don’t worry, sir, God will provide,” replies the fiance.

So, the daughter and the fiance head home, and the mother asks the father, “nu, how was he?”

The father says, “well, he has no job and no plans, but the good news is he thinks I’m God.”

Get well, grandpa.

And, to my own father, best Father’s Day wishes and all my love.

It’s always worth being reminded that life is unpredictable, that we’d best appreciate, share time with, and love our friends and families while we can.

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Quick Update

Many thanks to all who sent in kind words of support for my grandmother. She’s off the respirator, back to conscious, and likely leaving the ICU tomorrow morning. A few weeks yet until she’s back to full steam, but at least she’s now clearly on the upswing.

Also of note, in the ‘no rest for the wicked’ category: pre-production on both Keeper of the Pinstripes and Yelling to the Sky is slated to kick off June 15th. It’s going to be a busy summer.

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Mesheberach

Almost exactly seven years ago, I blogged this about my grandmother Anita:

My 80 year old grandmother makes me look like a slacker and a lazy bum. This is a woman who, living down near Grammercy Park, will regularly walk the hundred block round trip to the Guggenheim Museum. This is a woman who, late in life, returned to NYU not only for a college degree, but for a masters as well. This is a woman who, throughout her 60’s and 70’s, worked at a day facility caring for drug addicts and the mentally disturbed. This is a woman who, now, volunteers at the senior center assisting people ten, fifteen years younger than herself, with absolutely no sense that by all rights she should be the one in the chair being spooned jello rather than the other way around.

And, most recently, this is a woman who, having decided she missed out on her Jewish heritage by not having a bat mitzvah at the customary age of twelve, took it upon herself to learn Hebrew, and, some 68 years later, is holding the traditional ceremony this evening. I’ll be in the audience, wishing her well, and hoping that I inherited some of those genes.

Late last week, she was still at it.

On Saturday afternoon, I got a call from my aunt, who was in midtown. By chance, she’d run into my grandmother.

At the time, my grandmother was midway through her afternoon walk. Nearly forty blocks from her apartment where she’d started. Less than five months after she’d been hospitalized and wheelchair-bound for a fractured pelvis.

But, since Sunday morning, my grandmother has been in the hospital again. From the time she started coughing up blood, through a series of ups and downs, it’s been a scary week. Tonight, though she’s sedated and intubated, after a day of great work by the wonderful MICU team at Beth Israel, we’re hoping she’s turning the corner.

So, wherever you are, please send happy, healthy, loving thoughts her way. I don’t use the word hero lightly, but she’s certainly one of mine. And, these days, we need to all the heroes we can get.

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Get Well

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
~Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977

Sorry, all, for this second long lapse of quiet. A couple of unexpected family illnesses have, once again, thrown off my blogging – and life – schedule.

As the Dutch say, sickness comes on horseback, but departs on foot.

Back to it, I hope.

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More Wishes

One afternoon, when my brother and I were about 5 and 8, respectively, our mother picked us up from school in the family Volvo. She then drove down the road about five hundred feet before announcing that she wasn’t our mother, but rather an alien, who had come to kidnap us.

Obviously, a debate about this ensued, with my brother and me insisting that she was, in fact, our mother, and her insisting, no, in fact, she was an alien, but that the other aliens had just done a remarkably good job in making her look precisely like our mother. The debate raged for nearly the entire ride home, with my mother holding out just long enough for my brother and I to start developing serious doubts.

To this day, I’m not entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but if she were to do it again, I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Because, while she’s logical and organized, my mother also jumps on beds and pushes people into swimming pools without warning.

Or, at least, without much warning; by now, my brother and I have both learned to recognize that certain gleam in her eyes which serves as the signal for both of us to run for our lives.

Apparently, my mother inherited this troublemaking streak from her own mother, who once, while measuring her for a skirt she was shortening, poked my mom in the posterior with a pin, “just to see what would happen.”

So, on her birthday (and, yes, astute readers, her, my, and my father’s birthdays do all fall within the span of a week), to any readers who have been following along with self-aggrandizement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, I say: go ask my mom. Much as she’d deny it, her genes clearly account for at least half of the whack-job traits I possess today.

As left on her answering machine while they were apparently headed down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for caramel apples:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Your husband’s the one who looks like a monkey,
But you smell like one so you probably shouldn’t laugh at him too much.

xoxo

j

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