Fatty Food…                                                                      …Fossil Fuel

The planet, like our bodies, is a closed loop. Instead of leaving a foul-smelling trail, our bodies just bloat up.  With planetary or personal systems, we count on redundant purification to keep us from keeling over. So far, so good.

Sure, we might get diabetes or high blood pressure or just become morbidly obese, but there are pills, diet plans and even $urgeries for that.  We might have a planetary disaster or two, but that’s no reason to change our lifestyle, is it?  Plenty of fish in the ocean…uh, just not in the Gulf of Mexico for a generation or two.

Americans push enough fat, sugar, alcohol and chemicals down our collective gullet that it’s a wonder we function at all. We often shun exercise and relegate deep thinking to places called ‘tanks’.  We look at the world’s larger problems and ask why someone doesn’t “do something”.

Excuse me; pass those chips, will you? I don’t want to get up.

Bodies are amazing things, and often, we manage to plod along with minor aches and pains, despite a barrage of self abuse.  My fear? Catastrophic system failure on a personal and planetary level.

Yesterday I went to the Independence Day Parade in downtown Great Falls, Montana. The good news: patriotism appears to be in good supply. The bad news: I doubt we could waddle away from our enemies, let alone dig a foxhole for cover. For a moment I flashed forward six months: Santa’s Ho-Ho-Ho belly was strapped on everyone of every age and stature.

Great Falls had parades when I was a kid: people were not this big.

Remember Bonanza on TV? There was Hoss, played by Dan Blocker. Hoss was a big fella, and back in 1964 I’d blink twice looking at him beside fellow actors Michael Landon and Parnell Roberts. Flipping through the channels recently, I caught a re-run, and I wondered why everyone else looked puny. Hoss ain’t a big fella anymore. He’s an American.

All those generations fighting and dying for our freedom, and once we perceive that the threat is over, we sit down and we don’t want to get up. Slowly, quietly, the threat becomes insidious. It becomes ourselves.

Speaking of getting up, can you pull another Bud out of the cooler for me? Thanks.

Turns out that running from our enemies was good for us. It kept us on our toes, literally. If I didn’t get on the honor roll, if I didn’t get the President’s Physical Fitness Award, the Commie Menace might win.

Realizing that we are our own oily enemy–fatty food and fossil fuel–doesn’t motivate us: all this news coverage just causes stress eating, which leads to indigestion, which makes us ask for the prescription medication we saw on TV.  Line the medicine cabinet with enough of this stuff and it will cure you of your ultimate problem: Life.

I’m worried about more than our bodies. Are there any double-blind field studies being done on how obesity affects brain function? Catching people’s eyes in downtown Great Falls yesterday, I wondered if this layer of fatty glaze interferes with deductive reasoning skills, making facts and ideas too slippery to grasp and retain.

Obviously our oil addiction has interfered with our intellect: real, painful solutions would be in place if we were thinking straight.

Maybe I won’t have that deep fried Snickers Bar after all, but mmmm, it looks mighty good.

I’m a Great Falls native, a product of local public schools, and a lifelong resident. I ain’t no anemic eastern liberal…still, I found myself looking at the Chinese-made flags waving from distended lawn chairs and wondered how long our redundant filtration systems can persevere before our webbing gives way and our collective asses wind up in the gutter.

If we boil ourselves in our own oil…could I have fries with that?

VS.

Pistol Packin' Jewish Cowgirl, ca. 1964

I missed the Ivy League experience.

I missed the sorority houses, I missed the keggers.  Unlike Walter Kirn, I pretty much took the low road through higher education.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t have a road map, marked with red arrows, even. My siblings are all doctors & lawyers…when the song gets to ‘and such’, I raise my hand from the back of the room.  I wound up eight blocks from my childhood home, selling jewelry in Big Sky Country.

Last year when I read Lost in the Meritocracy, I thought about my own formative years in public school. I remember warm milk and soggy graham crackers in kindergarten. I remember Dick. To be fair, I also remember Jane and Spot.

The pivotal memory I have of grade school is hearing that I killed God.

It was the fall of 1966, and I refused to sing Christmas Carols. I was in fourth grade.

Wanda Button pulled me away from a spirited game of Chinese Jump Rope at recess. Wanda and I were not friends. She had bad news.

 “You killed God.”

I was nine years old and I denied it. “Did not.”

“My mom said the Jews killed God.”

I knew a little about Judaism, but I didn’t remember this part.  Flat dry matzo, I knew. Dressing up at Purim, I knew. Passover Seders, I knew.

I was only nine, but hearing that I killed God explained a lot.

It explained why I was the only Jew in class. Who else would fess up? It explained why the Germans, who were probably Christians, had been so mad at us. It also explained why my dad was home dying of cancer. He was a German, and he married a Jew. We were being punished.

I barely realized what it meant to be a Jew, and I was already riddled with guilt.

Even then, though, I wondered, if we killed God, God is dead. Why are these Christians still going to churches? If we killed God, I mean like, what’s the point?

Out there on the Emerson School playground, I started to cry.

I went home and confronted my mother, who had problems of her own, with five kids and my very sick father. Alone after dinner, her red hands dripping over the sink, I asked her if what Wanda said was true.

Mom was tired. She may have been having her own crisis of faith. “It was a long time ago. Some people think Jewish leaders killed Jesus,” she said. “But it’s not your fault. It’s not my fault, and it might not even be true.”

It was a weak defense.

Three months later my father died. I took a week off school, and everyone in my class signed a sympathy card. Even Wanda.

Because there is an Air Base in Great Falls, there were always a couple of military kids in my class.  There was a Bully, a Fat Kid, one Black Girl, a slew of Indians, and I got to be…the Jew.

Walter Kirn was the Smart Kid. This may have driven him slightly nuts, but it gave Walter plenty of tragicomic fodder.  All that stuff that teachers tried to pour into poor Walter—he literally got the last word. For the rest of his life, all Walter has to do is push his hand down his psyche and make smart shit from shit that smarts.

When I reach down my psychic gullet, all I get is a gag reflex.

Given the role of Montana Jew, I guess I made it my job to be strange. After Wanda’s diatribe, I perfected a look that told my classmates not to come any closer or I might crucify them.

When I picked up Walter’s book, I thought that Lost in the Meritocracy would be heavy and literate and full of footnotes to prove we are depriving ourselves of creative thinkers by shoving square brains through progressively smaller round holes. Instead, Kirn, by recounting his own dysfunctional youth, picks up all the shavings and ignites a fine cautionary tale.

The book isn’t cautionary enough to discourage aspiring miserable literati, however. If I’d read it when I was in high school, I might have actually been enticed into being the Smart One just to suffer through the bookish fodder of degradation, adoration and isolation, which may have resulted in enough ‘fuck you smarts’ to earn a fellowship of my own.

Sometimes, though, instead of getting lost in the meritocracy, it’s safer not to open the door.

  

                                     THE TWO ANDYS

After watching Andy Rooney fumble through a two minute coda tonight on 60 Minutes, I couldn’t resist re-posting this suggestion to CBS News:

 
That ticking black stopwatch is more significant for Bill Geist and Nancy Giles, two commentators often seen on CBS Sunday Morning. They are probably backstage tapping their fingers, biding their time to become the heir apparent for Andy Rooney.  I wouldn’t put it beyond them to send Rooney thoughtful gift baskets with fat-laden treats and cigars.

I hope they are disappointed: Andy Rooney’s successor might not be waiting in a CBS studio. He might be in the bathroom mirror in Pittsburgh or yelling at the kids in Spokane.

CBS has tried citizen commentators before. It’s time to give the last few of those 60 Minutes to the senior citizens who bookend their Sundays with Charles Osgood and Mr. Rooney.

Wedged between short segments in war and politics, for a couple of years The CBS Evening News  Free Speech Segment attempted to become the venue for ordinary Americans to speak out. The concept was abandoned without fanfare in 2006.

Free Speech wasn’t a bad idea: it was just the wrong venue.With overwhelming hard news, the twenty-odd minute Nightly News is not the forum for cogent feedback.

Free Speech deserves a new life, a transplant where it’s more likely to thrive. Tick, tick, tick.

Did you hear Andy Rooney complain this evening (4/25/10) about the lack of primary care physicians?  Hardly a news flash. It brought back sad memories of Harry Caray during his last drooling seasons with the Cubs. The producers probably have more respect for Rooney’s body of work than for  his recent commentaries. Rooney might be a great guy, but he has the stage presence of a not-so-delightful cross between A.A. Milne’s “Eeyore” and a weary Studs Terkel.

Go ahead and retire with dignity, Mr. Rooney. Get a winch for that desk and update your memoirs from a posh perch on the Upper East Side.

Once the office is cleaned out, let’s replace Andy Rooney with Andy Warhol. This is the digital age: condense Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ down to three or four. Open up You Tube, hire a new producer, go through submissions. Pick one to air, and maybe four “runners-up” to link to CBS News’ website.

Reviving Free Speech within the context of television’s premier newsmagazine accomplishes many goals:

*It gives viewers a level playing field to have a say in a respected venue.

*It may broaden the base—is Uncle Charley from Butte, Montana finally going to get the chance to tell off the Feds? The segment will widen viewership for web and broadcast. The demographic right now is fairly easy to deduce, given the geriatric content of advertising placement and all those white heads in the studio.

*It would saves money. Talent is everywhere. Post basic requirements and links on the CBS News website, where hits and submissions are bound to explode.

*It offers commentators more freedom than the old 90-second Free Speech segment, and gives a voice to stories that are best told in  ‘first person’.

Of course, I volunteer to be your first citizen commentator.

It may be hard to be as much at ease as Andy is behind his famous burlwood desk, but even Andy might admit it’s not hard to be better looking.

What law of physics explains the motion of the adjacent subway car always appears more jarring than the car I am on? Please respond with non-copyright mathematical formula.

v

“Blowtorch and a putty knife,” answered the doorman on the tony Upper East Side, when I politely asked why there are no gum spots stuck to his sidewalk.

v

Manhattan mannhole Covers:

CON ED: Consolidated Edison.

NYWS: New York Water & Sewer.

DWS: Da Wada an’ Sewa?

DPW: Da Pow-wa an’ Wada, what else???

v

Small plaque @ 3rd Street Station NYC:”Hospital for Joint Disorders”. Ideal patient: mobility-impaired conjoined twin with a weed problem.

v

Overheard at CLAY gym on 14^th Street:

Trainer: What kind of exercise are you doing now?

New Member: I used to have sex with my girlfriend before we broke up. What exercise is most like sex?

Trainer: That depends. Why did your girlfriend break up with you?’

v

Ratio of cows to people in Montana? 2:1

Ratio of rats to people in Manhattan?

A matter of controversy, ranging from 6:1 to 10:1+. In Montana, our herds of animals are an industry. New Yorkers poison theirs. Maybe they ought to start wranglin’ rats in the Subway stations. I want to see someone dressed like Roy Rogers down there, straddlin’ the tracks, crackin’ the lasso to the strains of “Get Along Little Ratty.”

v

There is no such thing as a good looking men’s dress shoe.  Leather submarines, small European watercraft, shoes with very shiny pointed toes (don’t ask what they use for polish).

v

The curious substitution of the word for a wooden-handled sharp instrument used to fell trees  with a three letter word meaning

 “to inquire”. 

v

  Keep looking for Lex Luthor’s lair. If anyone sees Ned Beatty, please trail him and call my cell. 

                                                          v

The rule of inverse proportions: footwear vs. diamonds. The smaller the shoe, the more adorable; the bigger the rock, the more desirable. A size ten loafer and a half carat ain’t gonna cut it in Manhattan.

v

The platform on the 1 Train has been under construction at 59^th Street for at least three years. I am tempted, when seeing the dilapidated state of the project after my trip to the opera, to alter the sign: “Platform Under DEstruction”

v

What’s with these Jewish guys who look vaguely Hasidic? Instead of looking like extras from Fiddler, these zaftig guys look like they’re partners in a plus-size zoot suit factory. And unlike The Chosen, who avert their black-rimmed spectacles, so many of these fellows are overtly horny (and slightly desperate to be looking at me). Who are they? The Second Choice?

v

Been to Mumbai in the monsoon? Been in a NYC subway station after a rainstorm? Mumbai gutter, just outside the Oberoi is the outdoor version of the 23^rd Street Station. No shit. I mean, shit.

v

I understand that humans are social creatures, but anything that causes our species to swarm aimlessly devalues humanity (Times Square).  Like mayonnaise, humans may be appealing when spread thinly, but we are unappetizing in large globs.

                                                     v

A woman dropped her purse on the subway tracks and made the mistake of attempting to retrieve it. When passers-by yelled at her to lay flat in the Mumbai sewage (see above note) she decided to squeeze into the 1 ½” space between the subway and the platform.  An eyewitness said when the first car hit her, it sounded like a popping paper bag.

After that incident I tried to find a seat in the middle of the train.              

                                            v

Human brains are like Silly Putty. When our minds are pulled in many directions, we lack depth. We sag. It’s easy to see thtrough us. When we lump ourselves into little balls, it’s easy to roll around in a self-absorbed stupor, gathering the hairy lint of relationships or creative pursuits.

The finest minds, when flattened, imprint and integrate. Silly Putty on newsprint, roll up and roll on. The tragic ones get dropped, slide down the sewer, and sometimes, when the gasses are just right, they explode. 

The first time my mother saw Great Falls, Montana she cried.

She had an image in her head: babbling brooks, mountain vistas, general stores, crisp air, cowboys. For the last few hours on the train, she worried that she had been duped by my dad. He had let her prattle on about pictures of Glacier Park in the World Book, claiming it was at “our back door”.

My father took Mom from the platform by the shoulders and aimed her toward the Highwoods, claiming they were just a few minutes away, then he turned to her and asked her to squint hard. “Them there are the Rockies.” My dad didn’t mention you had to drive through Browning to get to “our backyard”.

Through her tears, my mother pretended to see the spine of the continent. She did her best to smile.

I suppose my mother thought she would pass a few seasons in the Great American Desert…like the wandering Jews, she did not expect spend the rest of her life there; My dad, her Moses. 

I wonder how many of our Jewish neighbors expected to pass through, and for whatever reason, decided to stay.

Despite my mother’s first flat, dry impression, Great Falls became the Promised Land for our family and other Jews willing to put up with harsh winters and just a few harsh comments. Mid twentieth century Montana was the perfect place to be a Jew.

Local Jews were an intrepid crew: Irving Fineman, who sold furniture, then insurance; Zollie Kelman, who bought ‘useless land’ on Tenth Avenue South; the Samuelsons, the local jewelers, and the women—oy, the women: Sylvia and Pearl, the Twin Quin of Great Falls Jewish Matriarchy, Sylvia could fuel her big old jeep from the fumes that passed between her and her sister Pearl: from my view as a kid in the back seat, they had the kind of love that appeared to be fueled by friction.

Everyone welcomed my mother, and her mother with open arms. My father just shrugged: perhaps he felt this was the price to keep Jews happy in Big Sky Country.

To me, all the local Jewish families seemed pretty nice. Not exactly normal, but nice.  After my father died, the Kelmans gave us their old three-foot-deep hard-walled swimming pool. All we had to do was to drive to their house in the Country Club and pick it up in our 1958 station wagon. It was pretty strange to climb through a concrete drainpipe and drag our new pool from their bomb shelter. I was ten years old and I wondered if Zollie & Evelyn decided to cancel pool dates after the Commies dropped the big one, figuring the ashes might clog the filter.

With so few Jews, we didn’t have a synagogue. The nearby Air Force base, however, had a smattering of Jewish recruits. To serve their needs, occasionally rabbis were flown in, and the five or six local Jewish families would endure the ignominy of Air Force security procedures to join them. I remember a velvet covered torah in a big closet on wheels that they rolled in and put off to the side of the big blonde wood cross—never in front of it—and Union prayer books slid beside New Testaments in slots behind each pew.

I don’t remember the services, but I remember the room off to the right, where food was served and kids, after a cookie or two, awkwardly waited for the whole thing to end.

Once a year, the Jewish community would hold a rummage sale. We always had great rummage sales: it was the High Holy Day of my Jewish calendar: I’d come home with enough Reinstein girl dresses and Weissman toys to be the envy of my lower southside neighborhood for weeks. It seemed Jews always outgrew or tossed a better quality of junk, which made me proud to be Jewish.

I haven’t been back to the Chapel in decades. I walk past synagogues, I don’t go inside. And here I am, the wandering Jew, back in New York. I feel a strange comfort climbing the ancient wood escalators in Macy’s, not unlike the feeling New Yorkers must get when they visit the mountains of Glacier National Park, which, by the way, is “right in my back yard”.

I’m still in NYC, hammering away at the laptop. Our assignment this week was to write a short segment as a tribute to one of our favorite authors. I chose the holy grail of short stories, “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote.

“Buddy?”

Her fingers, bleached swollen branches, bent around the front curled edge of the chipped porcelain sink.

I had been doing nothing. Practiced at the skill, my nine-year-old eyes were dipped in a shiny finish just about as thick as this first frost outside our verandah window. It was late enough in the morning that everything within eyeshot was flimsy and two shades darker than it had been the day before.

“Buddy.” Always patient with my purposeless reverie, she nudged me, nonetheless. She wiped her hands on the flour sack and scraped the kitchen chair so loud Queenie got up and curled in the other direction.

Coming in close, right beside me, in her best kitchen conspiracy voice, she leaned in so I could smell the medicine on her breath. “Bet you two bits Gracie Sloane’s patch is nigh on ready.”

That first frost always sucked the air out of summer, leaving me flat. But she was right. Those pumpkin squash, shy behind huge leaf fans, would be exposed like private parts by now. “Go down and get us one, Buddy. Not too big, mind you. Not too small.” She winked at me. “You’ll know which one’s right.”

She pulled a shiny quarter from the patch pocket of her housecoat and laid it on the table, heads up. In my favorite voice, the one saved for confectionary collusion, she arched her brows in high triangles and smiled so wide I could see two of her three missing teeth, a wizened imitation of our endeavor.

“It’s Jack-O-Lantern time, Buddy.”

I imagine primates rolling over spent limbs toward steel food dishes, the result of a controlled study that roughly translates in English to ‘Chimps on Ice’.

When I was a kid, a single spin above the rink was considered the ultimate in figure skating. I was glued to a our first color TV to see Great Falls, Montana’s own John Misha Petkevich skate at the 1968 Olympic Games: the crowd swelled into polite applause at a single Lutz back in those days.

In the 1960’s, Olympic skaters were young adults in their twenties. Now that science has confirmed that our bones begin their brittle decline at puberty, talented skaters live far from their families and fall asleep clutching stuffed animals on their way to five a.m. practice. Time’s a wastin’…you got one, maybe two Olympics, right?

We are seeking the limits of humane endurance, boldly about to go where no groin pull has gone before. First it was a single, then a double, a triple, and now, the elusive quad. At each increased rotation, rapt fans wonder if the skater’s body will spin apart on camera, appendages detaching, Quentin Tarantino style, across the rink.

It’ll take more than the Zamboni machine to clean up that one—but can you imagine the ratings?

Is there a limit? The Last Lutz, a banner headline may someday read, atop a photo of a perplexed seventeen-year-old kid cradling what used to be his left leg, designer skate still attached. There will be an “I Told You So” sidebar written by 94-year-old Dick Button, and interviews of boy Soprano hopefuls who’ll glance at their coaches before nervously assuring reporters that this tragedy will not deter them from their dreams.

The last resort may be selective breeding. It’s probably a shameful drinking game among sports agents, a whispered fantasy league. Look at sports controversies today and tell me it’ll never happen…well, maybe not with figure skating.

Gender scandals are on the rise, though on ice they have involved orientation more often than chromosomes. Still, could some version of reality be far behind a Will Farrell movie? How can we give our skaters the edge?

Beyond the sextuple Lutz, ankles may shatter, trainers may shrug, and sports medicine experts may be forced to frantically search for controversial protocols: is it worth sacrificing the youths of the few, so every four years the many can spend a few hours of pride and nationalistic frenzy, witnessing the ignominy of an icy ass on NBC that does not belong to Jay Leno?

“If you have to go to the restroom, you may not be re-seated.” The stern middle aged lady walked down the aisle whispering pointedly to theatergoers five minutes before curtain went up at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater’s opening night preview of “A Behanding in Spokane”. I’ve only been to six, maybe seven Broadway shows in my life, but I’d never had someone threaten the obvious to my bladder before. Was it an omen? A threat? Christopher Walken’s sense of humor?

Walken is always smilingly sinister: the guy’s had me jumpy for years. I’m not talking just Pulp Fiction, either; I’m referring to his role as the Commie-phobic dad in Blast from the Past. As the lead character Carmichael in ”Behanding”, Walken rests on the caricature of old roles, washed up and still dripping.

Sam Rockwell co-stars as Mervyn the night receptionist at a dumpy hotel. Rockwell doesn’t stray too far from familiar ground either. He’s the insecure misfit, the sort of neglected kid who lashes out because he has so little to live for.

My guess is that playwright Martin McDonagh had drinks with Walken, and wrote a play to Walken’s fallback persona, tossing in some Ron Popeil playwriting for good measure…“But wait…there’s more.”

These interjections of racism and profanity were meant to add layers, but instead made the audience uncomfortable. Back where I sat, it was the kind of laughter that conceals vague embarrassment. The symbolism, on the other hand,was sophomoric, and the ending was a disappointing cliche.
It was smart not to have an intermission. Along with the bladder threat, they might have lead to a steady stream from the Schoenfeld.

Between the first and second acts, Rockwell’s character Mervyn gives his captive audience a connection by referring to perverse fantasies about the Columbine High school killers. Nigger and cunt jokes aside, not many showed laughter or gasping at this gaffe.

A high point in the plot for me was when a young girl of color in the middle of my row in the theater rebelled with an unforgivable need to use the bathroom. We dutifully did the Broadway, one-row version of “the wave” to let the poor thing express with her bladder what McDonagh was doing with his script, but at least she didn’t do it down one leg and make everyone watch.

Walken was his smarmy self without apology…or energy. Rockwell was annoyingly apt as Mervyn. The two supporting actors, Anthony Mackie (Toby) –who did a great job in The Hurt Locker--and Zoe Kazan (Marilyn) were more entertaining than the headliners, but their roles didn’t catch me…they had me wanting to bite, but the words were too overwritten to swallow.

There are two saving graces of this 16-week run: first the set, which, in contrast to many minimalist Broadway productions, was a perfect dingy hotel room, framed with an even dingier ripped house curtain.

The second saving grace is hope. When I see a good playwright “mail one in” it gives me hope that something I write may someday get a nod from an editor or a producer. You would think that with a name like Erich Jungwirth the associate producer of “A Behanding in Spokane” would have understood the offensive symbology of the script and reconsidered his backing, or perhaps the other producer Richard Jordan, might have realized he’d have to cross the River Jordan to finance another production after being personally be-walleted…on Broadway.

Quick, where’s Broadway?

Because the same name can be used in other boroughs, it helps to know which Broadway you’re talking about. If you are planning to give your regards in Manhattan, don’t take the J or Z line to Broadway Junction (Queens); please take the C line, get off at 42nd Street. If you care to see the other Broadway, remain on the subway for about 18 stops, except if you are headed to East Broadway, in which case please take the V line.

Luckily Rockaway Avenue is on the way to Far Rockaway if you are on the A line, but you aren’t so lucky if you are headed for Rockaway Parkway, which is the last stop on a totally different subway line. At least all these destinations are in the same borough.

By the way, there are TWO 23rd Street Stations. They are both served by the E line. It takes half an hour to get from one to the other if you get on the wrong E train by mistake. Trust me, I know.

As a cruel twist, although you do not see them on maps, Manhattan has handles: big steel handles, one at South Ferry, and the other way up at 207th Street. While you are in the subway, New York flips a 180 just to piss you off. The funniest part of this joke is that everyone maintains a straight face.

Even if you don’t visit them, you should recognize the other four boroughs of New York City, out of respect for all the people who serve you in hotels, restaurants, stores and salons at the very least. Besides, if you walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, when you get there, no shit, you are in Brooklyn.

In case you haven’t gotten the point, getting around in New York City is confusing. You need an easy way to remember the five boroughs of New York City—Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. I do it by thinking of the Naked City–fully undressed.

The Manhattan part (flaccid) is the main organ of the City, the borough that becomes engorged during the day and expensive to sleep with all night. Once I got a taste of Manhattan I admit, the smile on my face was so big I didn’t care if I saw another Queens in my whole life.

What gives Manhattan its bucks? Have you ever seen a rodeo? Do you know WHY Broncs buck? You’d buck too if someone did that to your testicles. So right there, logically attached to the base of Manhattan: the bucking Bronx.

The big splat of an island off the other end, the tip of Manhattan, well, that’s Staten Island. Much of this part of New York City got shot out so far it almost stuck to the wall across the room—New Jersey. Enough said.

Up close, sitting right beside Manhattan but not touching it, you got Queens. Queens like to attract Manhattan, but we are often happier sitting next to it than actually touching, thanks.

Brooklyn, the big land mass just under Queens and across from Staten Island, is Manhattan’s ambitious alter ego. If you can’t afford a 4.2 million dollar condo in Manhattan, you may be able to look at your high-powered kid brother from a place in Brooklyn, like they do in the short embedded slideshow on Brooklyn’s website(!)…The way I remember Brooklyn is not strictly anatomical, but it’s relevant. Brooklyn is the Peeping Tom, the verdant voyeur of New York boroughs, with its Botanical Gardens and Brooklyn Bridge. Besides, Brooklyn separates Queens from Staten Island, which, given the previous descriptions of both, may not be a bad idea.

Once you take the fancy clothes off the Naked City, see, it’s not so complicated after all. Big cities all look the same with their pants down.

Test your skill by labeling the boroughs on this map.

In Great Falls, Montana it doesn’t matter if you’re on public assistance or if you own a private jet: everyone shops at the local supermarkets. Geography is the great equalizer: it’s either Smith's...or starve—even Letterman, when he visits his Montana cabin, can fly in only so much Dean & Deluca (which, come to think of it, might explain his brief visits AND the bear in the kitchen).

Though folks in Great Falls all stand in the same grocery line, it’s not as though we don’t have a pecking order, especially if your last name is ‘Weaselhead’ or ‘Runs at Night’. Sales clerks everywhere are guilty of ethnic profiling, though no one in Manhattan or Montana turns away a cash sale. This explains the indulgent, somewhat condescending smile I got today in a Persian market.

Another class symbol is less important in my hometown: the car. There are no old automobiles in Manhattan: I suspect they force them to pull over and remain in Jersey where they belong. In Great Falls, my husband drives a 1992 Dodge Spirit with a peeling hood and a Hooters sticker. It’s a Montana badge of courage to keep an old horse in power.

In New York, I count limos on the two-minute walk to Starbucks; in Great Falls, I hoof it two miles to get to our solitary Starbucks, and count cars with a right front quarter panel held on by duct tape and Bondo (less than three and my companion pays for my mocha).

Back home there are many measures of a man: where he lives, what he drives, the veracity of his ex-wives, how many times he’s seen gambling his paycheck at The Prospector. You don’t want to judge too quickly: you’re bound to run into him again, and when it happens, you might have a flat tire or need a beer. Heck, in Montana it takes ten seconds just to see if whatever you're looking at is fit to shoot for dinner. Sadly, every hunting season, mistakes are made.

In Manhattan, partner, you got two seconds to size someone up.

In the City, we are all extras in the movies of other people’s lives. Without a supporting role—or at least an actor’s union card to prove your worth in my story—you got two seconds, one chance.

Instead of rutted rural roads, here the subway pitches and yaws, ta thump, in unison with sharp glances.
The black guy with papaya fists holds the rail and stares back hard, one-two. the tiny lady in the torn red hat tucks her shopping bag tighter between her legs, one-two, as if she’s worried I might reach across and snatch whatever smells inside. The greasy kid bopping to his iPod turns his head without turning his body, horror-film style. One-two.

Back in Montana, all these folks would all merit a good stare. On the subway, instead of offending anyone, I savor my two seconds, like a crime victim who might be forced to i.d. the perp at a later date.

I adore the anonymity of The City. If I want to tease my hair, put on a PETA t-shirt and roller blade backwards in Central Park whistling Verdi, no one would care. If I did any two of those things at home, someone would call my mother…and I’m over fifty.

Because New Yorkers’ personal space is so small, details loom large. Bags, watches, hairstyles and such—any one of these might confuse another member of your tribe. Back home it’s hard to determine gender, let alone social status in our snow gear…and though we might not know a Rolex from a Timex, we know the O’Days had a big spread east of town, and the lady who sold the shoe store had a brother at the State Pen.

Some New York tribes are instantly recognizable: camel coat, wingtips, shifty glances: financial district. Three inch Manolos and printed tights, Diet Coke, student at the FIT. Long curled sideburns, black hat, glasses: not a Lost Tribe, anyway.

The grey grandeur of it all! There is something oddly reassuring about big buildings, new faces and the rolling smells of the City. Skyscrapers bestow upon me the kind of calm that I imagine a New Yorker might get from Glacier Park.

Manhattan, you are my muse.

I’ve seen those Discovery Channel mini-series where suspicious tribes accept anemic strangers to their clans in the interest of science. Is there anyone in Manhattan who’ll trade an old Dodge for a Metro pass, pour me into the native costume (black Prada), and feed me little black fish eggs while I pretend to make a face for the camera? I have a saddle back home…from what I could tell in a two second glance, it looks like it’ll sit that City ass of yours just fine.