Turkey Lurkey

Gauche is a term that pops into my life more and more frequently...

GAUCHE: French, literally means "left," also: "1: lacking social experience or grace; also: not tactful: crude <gauche to mention the subject> 2: crudely made or done <gauche turn of phrase>"; also has connotations of the Left Bank in Paris and its more artistic and youthful identity than that of the Right, like the left side of the brain.

I have decided to begin a weekly entry on All Things Gauche that I encounter...

Gauche Food Etiquette:

1. When staying somewhere as a house guest: presenting your host with a box of chocolates, opening them immediately upon arrival, perusing the box for the one caramel kind you like, and licking or picking at the rest along the way.

2. When dining at an elegant restaurant (or any restaurant, for that matter): after finishing your meal, dipping your fingers in your water and rinsing your hands like a raccoon.

3. When going out to a festive dinner with friends: talking about your latest low-carb diet or workout regimen.

4. When going to a cafeteria or dining hall: bringing Tupperware.

5. When having an expensive meal with your generous extended relative: getting so drunk that you take your pants off and pee on the floor.

6. Writing about peeing on the floor on your blog.

7. When staying at a local country inn: eating all the turn-down-service chocolates, and then telling the foreign maid you never received any in order to get more.

8. When having breakfast with your new girlfriend: telling her all about the things you're going to do that afternoon with your wife and kids.

9. When feeling full after eating appetizers: taking a "break" to unbuckle your pants, remove your shoes, and lay down on the floor.

10. When dining at a fine Italian venue: talking about how much you love the Olive Garden.

11. Generally: alluding to the Olive Garden.

12. When confronted with a platter of pastry "samples" at a cafe or bakery: eating all the samples while waiting on line, taking a look around, and then leaving.

13. When sitting down to your mother's lovely Thanksgiving dinner: sending naughty text messages under the table.

14. When attending a wedding reception or gala: moving from your assigned table until you find the table with the most attractive people.

(The above photo is of Josiah McElheny's "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth-Century Modernism" currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sculptures & Squatters

As I stepped out of the elegant Art Deco lobby for the last time, I expected the doormen to be smug and satisfied that the five-month-non-tenant-impostor was making her exit. But to my surprise, the doormen exclaimed, "We'll miss you! You were always such a sweet girl. We put in a good word for you." The doormen were my friends and not my enemies in the case of my mysterious Park Avenue maid’s quarters eviction…

The real culprit was a disgruntled middle-aged male tenant whom I had encountered in the laundry room. He is the Wanker of the Week who spread malicious gossip about me to the superintendent and co-op board. He even knocked on my apartment door in a panic, asking me if the "stuff cluttering the hall" was mine. I reassured him that the items did not belong to me. He hobbled off in his needlepoint loafers. The "stuff cluttering the hall" included: a large Oriental rug, two Chinese horse sculptures, and a few expensive lacquer end tables and porcelain lamps. I felt like saying to him, "I am a student writing chick lit and squatting in a maid's quarters. Do you really think those valuable Asian heirlooms are mine?"

When my sister slept over, he interrogated her in the hallway, dashed off in his needlepoint shoes, probably clutching his antique briefcase and the key to his precious bicycle lock, and complained to the management about "the security of the building." To this Park Avenue lawyer with too much time on his hands, my sister, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old girl in a pea coat and glasses, is "a security threat." The recession is turning the world topsy-turvy.

Prestige & Ice Cream

Through my pseudo-eviction and last-minute packing, the luxe environs of the Gramercy Park Hotel eased my preemptive separation anxiety. My final night in Manhattan was spent with two close friends: a slightly reformed winner of the Wanker of the Week award, and the vivacious redhead known for breaking champagne glasses. Hollywood director-producer extraordinaire, Ed Zwick, was our guest of honor. His new film, Defiance, is a sweeping Holocaust-inspired epic. Considering his pimp status with Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio, his Harvard B.A., his Rhodes Scholarship, and his expert knowledge of everything from Heidi Montag, to Imperial Samurai warriors, to West African hip-hop, he is a prime candidate for pretension and cockiness. However, he is one of the most down-to-earth men I have ever met.

He grilled me on the woes of being a twenty-one-year-old girl in Manhattan (preyed upon by weekly wankers and daily douchebags). He even listened to my idea for a series of novels geared toward the lucrative target audience of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls (who has more time to devour page-turners, see the same movie five times in theaters, and buy accompanying action figures?).

Ed Zwick was a breath of clean alpine air in a city of taxi exhaust and souvlaki-vendor smoke. Earlier this week I attended a media-infested auction house event where I encountered smug young bankers whose Ivy League degrees oozed out of their personalities as much as their knowledge of New York Magazine's restaurants-of-the-week. In comparison, Ed Zwick was the real good thing. My final night in Manhattan was like a bowl of homemade ice cream after six months of Tasti D-Lite.

Volvos & Evictions

I woke up on Saturday morning to discover an unfortunate note slipped underneath the door of my Park Avenue maid's quarters. The doormen and other tenants complained about me to the the elderly man who owns the glorified storage space in which I am living. His personal assistant cross-examined me, asking, "Do you have someone living in there with you?" If she had experienced the claustrophobic nature of my room on a daily basis, I don't think she would accuse me of hoarding some "extra person" in my apartment.

I recently broke the only key to my door while turning it in the lock, and I was forced to make a copy of the lobby's spare key. I think that the doormen, who are inordinately aggressive and snarky toward me, are spurning the malicious gossip, claiming that I had an extra key made for the mysterious "extra person" now allegedly taking root in my maid's quarters.

Everything is sexual, and I assume that their aggression stems from repressed jealousy and resentment at the fact that I had a male visitor on Friday night. I was supposed to go to a Waspy "40 Days 'til Christmas" ham and cocktail fête in New Canaan, Connecticut, but I stayed in the city and had dinner with my gay boyfriend instead. He walked me back to my Park Avenue address and came upstairs to watch the edited footage of the Halloween film my sister and I made, Princess Cricket. Upon seeing my male visitor in the lobby, the doormen gave me shifty looks and the next morning I woke up to the eviction note...

I escaped to New Canaan that afternoon, where I hoped to hop a ride back to Boston with my sister (to the safety of my mother's un-suspicious Beacon Hill doormen). But my sister had an unfortunate incident with a speed bump at the New Canaan Country Club, and the car was towed to the nearest Volvo dealership. With no alternative, my sister and I spent the night on Park Avenue in the infamous maid's quarters.

Now, someone (sexually frustrated doorman? nosey neighbor with some dark determination to do away with me?) is more convinced than before that I have a stowaway living in my room. Today I was officially threatened and told to vacate the apartment by Friday. The Wanker of the Week remains a mystery to be solved.... Who is bad-mouthing me all over the building? Upper East Side frigids at it again?

The above photo is from my visit to the Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum, but I too feel like a monkey hanging by a wire.

Big Men in My Life

I recently met up with a very important man for drinks. I suppose I stalked him. It turns out I have relative success with pseudo-stalking male celebrities and masquerading as a girl less desperate and deranged than I truly am. In the past year I have finagled my way into a personal email correspondence with Woody Allen and a personal Escalade ride through downtown Manhattan with Leonardo DiCaprio. Two days ago it was the love of my life, the ultimate man, the real deal (other than, sigh, Jack Nicholson, for whom I will forever have a special place in my heart). In psychological ways, this week's man is bigger, much bigger, so big in fact that he is referred to as such on a certain sex-and-shoe-related show.

We met over drinks at the Plaza Athénée Bar, one of the Upper East Side's rare (though decidedly square and semi-elderly) gems. The day itself had been surreal in terms of celebrity run-ins: I had stood a mere three feet away from Bill Clinton on my way home from an early-evening stroll through Central Park. He was friendly, with a head of bountiful white hair and a winning smile. Later, I walked right by Debra Messing and Katie Couric on their way to an event.

The stars were aligned, as I entered the dark-hued imperialist Morocco ambiance of the hotel bar to meet the man whose screen image lulled me to sleep almost every night of prep school (and, sad to say, most of college). Before he arrived, I encountered yet another middle-aged heart-throb who was sitting in the lounge: Pierce Brosnan. It was utterly uncanny.

So there I was, perched at the bar with two flesh-and-blood James Bonds, and only after leaving a single pseudo-prank cell phone message. So I guess it goes to say: a little stalking can go a long way on a Manhattan Monday of male mania.

W + Anchor

Things are strangely familiar these days. I went on a jaunt to New Haven to meet the celebrated transvestite-potter-artist-extraordinaire, Grayson Perry. He was in his little girl persona, Claire, who wore a poufy silk dress (pictured above) with red tulle underlay and a black bib embellished with rhinestone-encrusted phallic rocket ships. Perry's main source of inspiration is his childhood “cuddly toy,” Alan Measles, a teddy bear who takes on dictatorial status as “ruler of the establishment” in Perry’s art.

I sat in the front row and admired the artist’s dazzling glitter eye shadow and red patent leather shoes. I loved Perry’s insights into aesthetic, emotional, and global topics, especially his/her view that “testosterone is the most dangerous chemical on the planet.” I am also fond of his obsession with adding gold to most anything he creates: he says, “even the most sophisticated of collectors find their heads turned by a bit of gold.” Perry's firm belief in Barbaric Splendour (e.g. blinged-out pimp style, gauche use of patterns, etc.) contrasts any “minimalist or puritanical sense of restraint.” I like to think of it as Miami Beach vs. Beacon Hill.

Perry also showed his ingenious design of the letter “W” suspended above an anchor symbol--how clever: W + Anchor = Wanker (a pejorative term in British slang that literally means “one who masturbates”). I am in the midst of having a much-regretted tattoo removed from my hip bone (in a lengthy and somewhat painful five-month process), but I already envision my next tattooed mistake to be Perry’s W-anchor symbol. Maybe with “wanker” perpetually inked on my hip, I will cease to seek out these sub-par male characters in my everyday life.

When I approached Perry after the lecture, I noticed a fake black-glitter heart-shaped tattoo beneath the corner of “Claire’s” eye…the girlish embellishment speaks loads to art and life in general: glittery, heart-shaped, and black all over.

Gold Sequin Hot Pants

On Halloween I was lured to Brooklyn’s Dumbo to help out with a Tisch student film. The cinematographer happened to be Hollywood It boy and newly enrolled NYU film student, James Franco. He was wearing a very intense long green coat that had an odd fur hood—think football coach meets Russian militia meets Prada Sport. I was supposed to play the role of “Jogger,” but I failed to receive the memo and was wearing my Bond-girl tailored white coat and jeans. I was “Girl on Cell Phone” instead. I think it will sound better on my illegitimate acting resume anyways. Since I couldn’t play “Jogger,” James Franco ended up chasing after a random Brooklyn fireman and recruiting him for the part.

In the evening I absconded to my family’s neighborhood in Boston for the famous Beacon Hill Halloween: with the cobblestone streets, gas-lit lamp posts, and Louisburg Square townhouses embellished with ghoulish decorations and multi-colored gourd bouquets, it’s the closest event I can imagine to a Martha Stewart wet dream.

My sister and I shot the footage for a silent film entitled The Mysterious Hatted Woman Escapes into the Night, a tale of Princess Cricket, who “lives in an enchanted urban village untouched by the hypermedia of modern society.” She sleeps soundly in her bed (bathtub) to prepare for the festivities of the monthly Bacchus, when a sinister intruder, Boris, creeps into her chambers and shuns her with the curse of perpetual blindness. The only remedy for her condition: a kiss from a man of the people. We enlisted our favorite cashier at the posh Beacon Hill 7-Eleven to play the man administering the curative kiss. Moral of the story? When one retreats into fantasy there are fewer Wankers of the Week.