Valentine’s Day Shvitz

Posted on March 12, 2006 by Larissa Archer

The Russian Turkish Baths are a legendary New York institution, referenced by some of the last century’s great writers such as Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets. Under Russian management throughout its entire 114 year-old history, the baths are set in a brownstone with a famous red staircase in the East Village, the city’s old Russian-Ukrainian neighborhood. For twenty-five dollars, one gets a sagging pair of shorts, an ill-fitting, un-closing robe, and a thin, undrying towel, and can enjoy an uninterrupted day of steaming and unclogging. Unlike many of the popular newer spas, like the Japanese Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe or Kabuki Springs in San Francisco, or the numerous trendy dayspas in New York, the Russian Turkish baths do not present a sleek, glamorous, or relaxing environment. There are no soothing aromatheraputic scents wafting in through the grates, no sliced cucumber for one’s eyes, no new-age instrumentals playing over hidden speakers, and the slippers lying around the locker room were almost certainly not sterilized since the last person wore them (when one leaves after a session of steaming, one might experience a perplexing mix of feeling cleaner than one has ever felt in one’s life and a conviction that one has contracted a skin condition). There’s often a burly middle-aged man stomping about in his soaked shorts shilling his massages to the patrons, sometimes by actually grabbing one of their forearms and kneading it until it’s red. The patrons aren’t the young yoga-toned professionals in anklets and lotus-tats who frequent the Japanese spas; they’re mostly ancient, thick-trunked Russians and African Americans with patchy leg hair and spinal humps—I have never seen so many of either, naked, in one place! On Valentine’s evening, the Russian Turkish Baths hosted a public party, and I immediately knew this was indeed the thing to do on Valentine’s. I enlisted my good friend Angela (see “Totally Belated Halloween Post,” paragraph 3) to accompany me to this fete, which featured a boisterous gypsy band, unlimited vodka (which I found a little odd considering it was in a place that specialized in inducing lightheadedness and dehydration in its customers) and pierogi with sour cream. The crowd that night was younger and fitter than usual, and seemed more dedicated to the art of toxing than that of detoxing, replenishing their lost liquid with a constant stream of booze. People relaxed the usual New Yorker embargo on eye contact and spent the evening aggressively wooing each other, a trend that Angela and I avoided by getting into a serious debate on the Landmark Forum in the Turkish room; I guess men leave you alone once they realize just how argumentative you can be. One man proved more fearless than his colleagues, however. In the early part of the evening we noticed a young, small, reedy blond man shuffling back and forth in his flip-flops from the various steam rooms, carrying a laminated sheet of paper, which he offered for examination to one after another of mostly disinterested-looking bathers. In my dizzy state (which forced me to spend much of my time sitting on a bench in the common area nodding dully to the procession of men who approached me thinking I was waiting to get hit on), I didn’t think this man and his paper odd, although later I wondered how I could have overlooked the absurdity of someone carrying anything other than a bottle of vodka in the steaming areas. This man (I feel odd calling him a ‘man,’ as he couldn’t have been older than 22) approached Angela and me while we sat on the bench catching our breath. He introduced himself as “Avi,” the exoticism of his name contrasting noticeably with his rather whitebread appearance. A recent graduate of University of Michigan, Avi was trying to start his career as a boardgame inventor. Here he showed us the mysterious paper, steam-dampened even through the laminate, which depicted the ‘map,’ if you will, of a four-person boardgame inspired by the horrors occurring on the Gaza strip. The players represent Hamas, militant Israel, moderate Islam, and moderate Israel, with “global opinion” acting in a manner similar to monopoly’s chance card, and suicide attacks and car bombings as the modes of stealing/losing points towards the objective, Gaza control. The game itself, if dubiously informed, might have been pretty clever and appropriate for self-consciously intellectual New Yorkers, but the inventor’s sliding around the Turkish baths in his trunks presenting the game with an elaborate explanation of the rules and objectives to drunken strangers in bikinis, seemed somewhat uncouth. No matter, I started to nod off from faintness while Avi managed to engage the reluctant but unfortunately lucid Angela in a more personal discussion. In my stupor I caught snippets of their conversation indicative that I really should remain alert enough to eavesdrop more thoroughly—something about “rope burn,” and “transcendant pain.” Later Angela reprimanded me for failing to rescue her from an unwelcome invitation to a session of bondage and domination by the delicate Avi, who apparently enjoyed the strain of clamps on his nipples. I apologized for my negligence, secretly delighted that I could now use my low blood pressure as an excuse to obliviate from unwanted chatting.

Angela and I then proceeded to the Russian Room. A note on the Russian Room: this is an asset of the Baths that I have not encountered in any other spa I’ve patronized. The interior resembles what one might imagine the inside of a volcano to look like, craggy, dark, steamy, with sloped, rough walls—except along the walls are two rows of faucets out of which pour constant streams of ice-cold water into buckets. This room is so damn hot, hotter than anything in the Japanese or Finnish spas, that as soon as you step inside, you have to grab one of these buckets of chilled water and dump it on your head. This comforts you for about a minute and a half, until your hair starts to burn the back of your neck and you have to douse yourself again. Now you sit down on the wooden bench, flinch as you burn your ass on the molten cedar and curse loudly so everyone peers out at you from under their head towels, and then you pick a random towel, soaked with either some stranger’s sweat or the water collecting in the uneven plains of the floor, throw it on the bench and clumsily aim your ass on it before you faint and crack your head open against the jagged wall-boulders. Now you start to wheeze and you swear that you can actually hear the delicate cilia lining your lungs sizzle and char like so much dry brush. You wince at the worrisome sensation that the liquid membranes on the insides of your eyelids are burning your eyeballs. You dunk your head into the bucket nearest you, and take long, grateful gulps from the water, which is so cold that, at any other time, you would complain that it’s freezing your sensitive teeth and hazardous to your singing voice. You eventually resign yourself to your discomfort, as the danger of slipping, tripping, burning, or fainting on your way to the door scares you into staying put. Now your eyes adjust and you find that as long as you hog one of the buckets of water and sip at it like a giant beer mug, you can almost stand it without wanting to die. Now you notice that there are maybe fifteen other people in the room, all lounging and chatting and not seeming at all as though their every pore is screaming in protest at the heat. Gays in mud masks, burly middle-aged Russians comparing forearm bulk, babas in soaked robes, bemoaning the bitchery of their American grandaughters. In the corner atop an elevated platform, a youngish studly-type, towel wrapped about his shorn head, straddles a topless woman lying on the bench, holding her ankle fast against her ear for several spectacular seconds until he lowers her leg to the bench and proceeds to flog her breasts with a soapy oak branch. You then realize that the disturbingly flexible topless girl is Angela, and the man with the best job on earth offers this service for $35 a pop. Then Angela emerges sudsy and glowing from this ‘treatment,’ slurrily testifying to the profound bliss induced by the Russian stretch-and-whip (a review you find suspect as you know Angela to be an undiscriminating enthusiast of any activity requiring toplessness, flexibility, and flagellation). She even offers to buy the treatment for you as a Valentine’s ‘gift,’ and expresses annoyance at your refusal. The other patrons overhear your bickering and join with Angela in pressuring you on, pooh-poohing your objections and then just shouting over your increasingly-frantic protests. Then they start splashing you with cold water from the buckets, which feels surprisingly unpleasant, perhaps because of the village-lottery atmosphere which has suddenly overtaken the Russian Room. Finally, the hooded strongman saunters over to you and unwinds the towel from his head, revealing a sensitive face touched with concern.

“Hello. I am Sasha. I not hurting you.”

He pouts at your resistance, offers you his beefy cocked arm, and gazes benevolently into your eyes. You hesitate a moment, then place your weary hand in the crook of his elbow. With a beatific, dippy grin on your face like Blanche du Bois receiving the kindness of strangers, you lean on his shoulder and ascend the steps to the whipping bench.

I remember very little else from that night other than treading through thick slush and the sharp 2am chill through an uncommonly quiet East Village to the subway for the long ride home, where I crawled, clean and chastened, into bed.

Posted in New York, Russianism | 6 Comments

On Discovering Porn in My VCR

Posted on February 9, 2006 by Larissa Archer

I sent this one out as a private email almost a year ago; several readers may recognize it. I withheld it from public viewing on principle of good taste or decency or morals or some other such easily-disposable principle. My living arrangements and company have since changed, as has my interest in protecting the secrets of the “star” of this story, due to a complicated and uninteresting (except to scholars of the greedy and wicked), battle over my then-abode, involving threatened misdemeanors, illegal rent hikes, and forged eviction notices sent over blackberry’s. Ah, New York life…

Several times a year I leave New York for a few days to do a trunk show for my mother’s jewelry business. When I come back from these short trips, I inevitably find my room changed in a subtle but disturbing way. After the first of these trips, I came home and noticed a pair of my hostess’s sling-back heels resting on the floor beside my bed. I didn’t think much of it, as this used to be her bed, and I don’t object to her taking a nap in it when I’m not there rather than having to arrange her cumbersome fold-out bed in the living room. When I turned on the TV, a small, bright red light in the lower right-hand corner of the machine flickered on. I guessed that this meant there was a videotape in the machine, which there was, one entitled “Niblets.” My hostess works for a company which designs educational programs for schoolkids deriving inspiration from, of all things, mainstream Hollywood movies. She used “Shakespeare in Love” to launch an Elizabethan history seminar, and somehow wrangled “Elf” into a program for promoting awareness of the four food groups. So I imagined “Niblets” would be, perhaps, fairy tales brought to life by animated baby forest creatures, gerbil Cinderella and such. However, when I reinserted the tape and it started to play, instead of baby gerbils waltzing at a forest-critter ball, I got a giant black man sodomizing a disgruntled-looking blonde in the back of a van.
My hostess had not only been in my room and in my bed, she had watched porn in it–and then I understood that her slingbacks were not merely, innocently, resting on the floor; they were strewn there in that, “let me sexily kick off my slutty shoes and play with myself in my subletter’s bed while watching jungle-fever porn” kind of way, the heel of one caught up in the lace ruffle duster and the other lying on its side. Only then did I realize that my sheets and pillowcases had been changed. What had gone on here? It occurred to me that she might not even have enjoyed herself alone in my sanctuary. At the time she was dating a real-estate broker who, she had once mentioned, was an excessive and boozy porn fanatic; a typical night at his Bridgehampton home, even a dinner party with friends, nearly always commenced with him sliding in a DVD from his vast hard-core collection for all to watch on his 90 inch plasma screen TV, disregarding the typically ungrateful response from his guests and lover while he broke out the box-wine. She had also obtained for me a job in his brokerage firm (see “Confessions of a Telemarketer, ” paragraph 6), so this miracle of men was also my boss. When it occurred to me that the man who paid me every week with damp bills pulled out of his back pocket, might have lumbered in my bed in all his bloated hairiness and left personal remnants in my sheets, I found myself grasping for a pen or plastic take-out fork until I remembered that I couldn’t actually stab out my mind’s eye. Meanwhile on the tube, the interracial romance had come to an end and was succeeded by a couple in a bowling alley, another black man, this one with dreadlocks, pleasuring an elven redhead over the ball dispenser. This was one in several short films (hence the title?), most about fifteen minutes long, all shot in exotic locations and with multi-ethnic casts. All, in addition, seem to have been filmed with a low-grade camcorder, as the director/cameraman issued blocking orders from directly behind the camera. The performers would seem perplexed and had to turn their heads in uncomfortable-looking angles and look into the camera (and, illusively, disconcertingly, into my own eyes) to ask him to repeat his requests, unheard over the din of their own gamboling. This cinematographical quirk resulted in one amusing episode, in which a sleek Asian woman fellated a gentleman with a mullet, while the director barked complaints from behind the camera about the insufficiently-tousled state of her hair, the inadequately-feline arch of her back, her general lack of enthusiasm for her task. The harried actress silently withstood the onslaught of criticism until she pulled the instrument out of her mouth, and, still gripping it like a microphone in her manicured fist, bellowed directly at her audience, “Why dontchoo git yo’ ass ovah heah an’ blow ‘im yo’self, limp-dick muthahfuckah?” For a moment I didn’t know how to respond.
Many of the films suffered from noise and interference from “offstage,” as when, in yet another van-sequence, someone started knocking on the side of the vehicle and jiggling the door handles, which panicked the cast and crew into silence for about three seconds until the picture froze and went to static and the next film began. Ron Jeremy himself showed up in one of the features, engaged with what looked like a half-asleep teenager, her head hanging over the bed’s edge, while he uttered jokes about his bellyfat. She was barely awake enough to laugh politely.
I realized that I could not remove the videotape from my machine or even broach the subject with my hostess. Any action would admit to my knowledge of her taste in entertainment, which may be awkward for us, as well as cause her to wonder if I suspected her of engaging in inappropriate activities in my boudoir during my absence, also unspeakably awkward for both of us. Finally it would force me either to admit to my distaste for her indulging herself in my room and bed, potentially offensive and hurtful to her (who either harbors no qualms about such things, liberated Manhattannite that she is, or who simply made the mistake of not covering her tracks), or feign acceptance of the situation as normal in a swinging hostess/impressionable subletter arrangement, which might invite further unchecked debauchery in my own sacred quarters by her and unknown greasy men. I realized that I even had to rewind the tape to the exact spot where I had begun to play it, for if she came in again while I was at work and saw that the tape had advanced several hours beyond where she had left it, she would believe that I too was a closet porn enthusiast and think she needn’t exercise even a modicum of stealth in her thrill-seeking. I could only leave it in the machine and expect that the next day while I was out, the red lightbulb would go off in her head and she would rush into my room hoping beyond hope that I hadn’t watched the tape and found out her dirty secret, and, relieved that it was stopped at the scene where she had left it, remove the tape and hide it, never mentioning the faux pas. Then I decided to examine the mysterious storage box in the corner under the TV tray, which I had never been curious enough to open. Needless to say, in it were some forty tapes, all with names like “Behemoth,” “Double-Stuff Chaos,” and “Eileen Dover: Busty Cop”.
A whole week went by, with that red light glaring at me. My hostess, who usually only spends one or two nights per week at the apartment, stayed there the entire time, with nary a word about the displaced object, let alone the anticipated removal of it. Only at the end of the week when she was gathering her things to drive over to her house in Sag Harbor did she breeze into my room while I was watching TV, eject the tape, and toss it in the mystery box to include with her luggage, all right in front of me and without a word. I could only play dumb and marvel at her shamelessness.
This has happened three times since the first occasion, despite the permanent removal of the mystery box. I come home to the red light giving me the eye, I see that my bed is either more rumpled than I left it or newly-clothed and neater than I ever make it, I press play to witness some grisly sex-act, and wait in vain for my hostess’s sense of the appropriate to kick in. The VCR in the living room, where she officially sleeps, never has the red light on. Apparently, only in my own sweet bed and on my television can she indulge her libidinal fancies. As I write, the red light is hovering in my periphery like a burst capillary, and I have to figure out what to do about it before tomorrow, when my mother arrives for a visit.

Posted in New York | 7 Comments

Totally Belated Halloween Post

Posted on February 3, 2006 by Larissa Archer

Here’s an extremely belated (it’s not my fault, I swear—blame a friend of mine whose identity shall be protected while I dub her “Rice Patty Escallator”) picture-fest, this one from Halloween in San Francisco’s Castro. I don’t know why I enjoy being men for Halloween. Perhaps actually being mistaken for a guy makes me feel like a really good actress. Three years ago, I spent Halloween in the Mission as Tupac Shakur, with my friend Niki Yapo playing the ‘ho’ I smacked up. In the wee hours of the next morning, my ‘ho’ and I parted ways, she to jiggle her way back to her Mission flat, and I to attempt to flag down a taxi. Cab after cab sped past me and then careened up to the corner across the street where some hoyden dressed like J.Lo or a girl klingon stood waving. This year I intended to portray 50 Cent, but, too jet-lagged and unmotivated to obtain the requisite bullet-proof vest, I settled for the persona of some anonymous cholo (tcholo? Choleau? Cheauleau (s.)/Cheauleaux (pl.)?). My friend Patrice Escalle was Indiana Jones and Deganit Pessar (silver bustier) and Denise Something (not pictured) were both ’ho’s. I painted the Eve-ian cat paws on Deganit’s bosom, and she painted the tattoo on my forearm depicting what Jonathan Safran Foer would dub, “The Sputnik Bosom Dalliance”. I wanted it to be clear that I was a tough, so I drew those black tears dripping down my cheeks, which in prison would signify how many asses I had capped. Inspired by my old theatre friend Scott Jaicks, I also drew bombs falling from my left elbow to my hand, although they ended up looking more like overgrown, oafish sperm (perhaps an after-effect of the Sputnik Bosom Dalliance so cumbersomely enacted on my right arm), or, more realistically, a bespattering of flesh-eating bacteria doing their work on my snow-white flesh. We walked from my Hayes Valley apartment to the intersection of Castro and Market, passing thousands of mostly peaceful-looking revelers. I later found out that there had been two stabbings, one fatal, that night, but that this was a big improvement on previous years, 2001 having seen ten stabbings and scattered gunfire. There was a surprising number of Jesus’s, Spongebob Squarepants’s, Lord of the Rings warlocks and elven princesses, the usual phalanx of drag queens hobbling uphill, and a very convincing Mr.T.
Pictured here is me with a bevy of bloody Japanese schoolgirls; I don’t know if they were characters from some horror film with which I am unfamiliar (I avoid scary movies because they remind me that I’m afraid of the dark) or if they were models for some genre of snuff Lolimanga. They were so giggly and good-natured that I almost felt bad about requesting that they line up and suck my dick, but I had a role to play and I had to stay in character. Also pictured is one of the many Saviors, and the only one who actually dragged along a cross with him (the rest were portraying Jesus in earlier, less burdened days: Jesus sermonizing, Jesus getting his feet washed, Jesus arm-in-arm with the devil).

Of course I only posted a few of the pictures from that night, and only took pictures of the most outre and flamboyant people I passed, so the whole night might seems more , well, outre and flamboyant than it really was. This got me thinking about my college days, and how most of the pictures I have from them depict the more debaucherous activities and events: Araminta in a duct tape bikini held together with a safety pin, admiring her own fishnetted derriere on the dance floor; Odious and Proclus berouged and donning summer hats, lounging on my bed while I serve them raisin brandy out of a glass Venus de Milo; a garlanded, betoga’d, and enthroned John Wood being carried above the heads of a score of oiled-up young studs in bath towels (which included Odious, I believe!); Angela at S&C, in the “costume” she made out of a shoelace; me on a dining room table doing the can-can with some townie drag queen, both of us in black lace and latex, looking very demure next to Chela Norton, who is also dancing on the table, naked. What was that, The Coming Out Dance? Seducers & Corruptors Ball? Fasching?
Thus, my family has the distinctly biased and erroneous idea that St. John’s College life was just an endless parade of assless chaps and feather boas. I try to dissuade them of this misconception by reminding them that allowing photographers into our seminars on St. Augustine’s Confessions would have been exceedingly distracting, and that no one bothered to take candid shots of me reading Hegel in the library. However, the image which sticks in the mind’s eye is the one made by over-exposed color photographs, not words, and there’s little one can do to modify it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Why One Should Always Carry a Handkerchief

Posted on January 31, 2006 by Larissa Archer

I have a pair of Italian black leather gloves lined in cashmere which are not only quite cozy, but, I feel, the height of chicness and sophistication. They reach halfway to my elbow and shrug elegantly at the wrist. I’ve never been able to find women’s gloves large enough for my elongated hands yet which honor the feminine daintiness of their shape, and have historically worn gloves best suited for mountain men whose paws have beefed up with much lumber-chopping and the regular strangling of bears. These gloves, however, are long enough to suit my aristocratic fingers, on which the nails often grow to form delicate curves beyond the fingertips (which are soft from unfamiliarity with manual labor), and manage to appear trim and ladylike as well. They both fit the size and reflect the personality of my legendary El Greco-esque hands. These gloves look best when accessorized with pearls, a blonde mink stole or perhaps a silver fox capelet, dark sunglasses and black leather shoes with T-straps and french heels.

Recently I noticed that the fingertips of my favorite gloves had hardened and seemed to be lined with some thin film of concrete. For a while I was puzzled over this phenomenon. The gloves looked the same, but the inside tips, as well as the lining of the outer edge of the index fingers, had grown hard and rough. I began to fear for my nails, which might split against their new shells, and for the silky skin which would surely callous in its harsh new environment.

Then one very cold day, as I strolled past Carnegie Hall, I saw a tall dark-haired man walking towards me. When our eyes met, I recognized him as Broadway star Liev Schreiber, Tony winner and director of Everything is Illuminated. I gave him my heartbreaking shy smile (which consists of a tiny hint of a smile with eye contact followed by a quick lowering of the eyes but sustaining of the mysterious smile. This is dubbed my “heartbreaking shy smile” because it indicates that though I am gracious enough to smile upon such a mortal, I know that sustained eye contact is vulgar, plus my thoughts are far too deep and spiritual to allow some stranger unrestricted access to them. This is to be distinguished from my “ball-breaking sneer,” which includes an eyebrow arched in silent judgment and just a trace of a downward curl of the lips in what otherwise appears to be a smile. This suggests a worldliness and disappointment to which I’m too tactful to give name, but which, to the unfortunate recipient, is presumably unmistakable. Both the smile and the sneer, incidentally, can be termed “heartbreaking,” but for different reasons: the former for its poetry, the latter for its implied rejection.). Schreiber rendered his own version of the heartbreaking shy smile (which would probably be more aptly termed the “celebrity-feigning-humility-in-the-face-of-assiduously-sought-after-public-recognition smile” or the “celebrity-grinning-foolishly-at-the-unfamiliar-sight-of-a-more-beautiful-and-fascinating-non-celebrity smile”) and ambled past. Suddenly stretched inches taller with triumph, I still felt compelled to examine every expression and gesture that I had displayed in my passing acquaintance with the actor, and also to dissect his reactions to them, expecting to ascertain his instantaneous bewitchment with me. I was bewildered to discover myself lowering my hand from my nose and caught myself just as I was about to wipe it on my Scottish tweed skirt.

My god, had I been wiping my nose on my hand as I locked eyes with Liev Schreiber? In a moment of self-examination, in which the unconscious is made conscious, had I beheld a hideously childish and uncouth habit of mine, to which, for all I knew, I had been unwittingly subject all winter long and last winter in New York, the first and only winters I have ever spent in a climate cold enough to induce random post-nasal drippage? The slick evidence was right there on my fingertips.

Here is my scientific theory on the phenomenon of the hardened gloves: I wipe my nose on my gloves in a moment of obliviousness, the glazure seeps into the leather and settles in the fine knitted mesh of the cashmere lining. Here it freezes in the arctic chill of a typical December day in New York. At the end of the day when the gloves are resting on my kitchen table, the trapped moisture evaporates, leaving only the solidified mucus in the fingertips and, of course, the outer edges of the index fingers, where it is so convenient and natural to wipe one’s nose as needed. The rock-hard barriers at the tips of my glove fingers and along the edges are in fact petrified snot.

The ace up my sleeve is that I can still wear my favorite Italian leather gloves with mink and pearls and French heels and look impossibly, devastatingly elegant, and no one is the wiser as to the secret of my mysteriously crisp handshake. No one, that is, but Liev Schreiber.

Posted in theatre | 7 Comments

The Snowball

Posted on December 16, 2005 by Larissa Archer

I feel I should clear up a longstanding misconception, a subject of much controversy and furious debate. It is my duty to let the world know the definitive and unbiased facts of an event which occurred long ago.
On one of the first days of snow my freshmen year in college, I was diligently preparing for Greek class, laying my dog-eared notebook, different colored pens and highlighters, weighty lexicon, and thoroughly-poured-over homework on the classroom table in geometrically-precise order and with ring-side view of our venerable tutor, Mrs. Werbach. Suddenly, jolting me out of the revery of verbs I was conjugating in my head, someone yelled,
“ARM YOURSELF, COSSACK!!”
I turned to the door to see whose bellowing was disrupting the scholarly quiet in the room and saw one of my colleagues and friends, let’s call him,…”Eaudious,”… in the doorway, brandishing a tightly-packed snowball at me. Though he was wearing his usual cheery smile, cheeks all a-dimpled, he was clearly attempting to portray menace in his pose, so I decided to honor his challenge by simulating panic. I ran up (some witnesses might say, “charged”) at O’Deeas, and stared into his eyes with a fierceness reminiscent of my ancestors, the Viking warrior-kings. We faced-off for ten seconds, two deadly enemies locked in ocular combat. We grabbed each other simultaneously. Surprisingly strong for his size, O! Dios avoided being crushed in my bear-like grip by doing a Moroccan hip-shimmy and shaking his fists like a wee babe crying for the teat. Unable to contain his feistiness any longer, I threw him down to the ground in what the professional wrestling world calls the “Mortifying Body Slam.”
Here is where impressions of the event diverge. Now, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that Ode-Y-Us threw me in the Turkistani Hurl-Down, rather than the other way around, as he had in the past displayed prowess in such vulgar tactics. There was the incident, which I had forgotten for years until recently reminded, when he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder as I was descending the steps to the courtyard, carried me to the fishpond, and threw me in. What I remember most vividly now that I remember anything, is that I had been wearing my Natasha Badenoff boxers and red leather Mary Janes, which were then soaked and filled with green pondscum. So flukes do happen.
However, I distinctly remember that on this, the incident in question, it was I who sent Odie-Ass crashing to the floor, and, clumsily, onto my ankle, spraining it badly.
In his defense, AuDias did seek forgiveness in his shy but unmistakeably contrite way by humbly bringing cafeteria meals to my dorm room for several days after our duel, when my ankle hurt too much for me to fetch them myself. I was in even more than usual pain for the days following his reckless and ill-fated attack as that night I had gone to one of our college’s swing-and waltz parties and further injured myself with much dancing.
So, folks, there’s the truth, objective and exquisitely accurate. I hope I’ve cleared up some of that pesky skepticism concerning the events of that day. Cheers!

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

First Snow!

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Larissa Archer

It snowed yesterday!! I packed this snowball and walked around all day, tossing it back back and forth in my hands, striking fear into the hearts of passersby. Was I going to throw it at one of them with deadly aim and pitiless speed? Whom would I choose as the hapless victim of my wrath? Who knew?

Posted in New York | 8 Comments

Confessions of a Telemarketer

Posted on November 8, 2005 by Larissa Archer

That’s right, I was one of “those people” and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Well, yes I am.
When I first informed my friends that I was moving to New York, and that I had chanced upon living arrangements that would only require a meagre $600 a month in rent from me, they usually responded with incredulous stares and dropped jaws, and, once they had recovered from the shock, cracked jokes like, “600 a month?!? You could beg for spare change in the subway and make that!” I would join in laughter at my good fortune, and, when feeling bold, would take the joke a step further and act out busker routines with which I intended to wow ‘em at Times Square subway station or the Port Authority bus terminal. My favorite of these was a Metallica-inspired rendition of the negro spiritual, “Pilgrim of Sorrow.” I’d hold my air guitar upright and close to my face (which was distorted with the rage that can only be expressed through heavy metal) and hiss the lyrics of “Pilgrim of Sorrow” to the melody of “Puppet Master.” Actually, the idea of having only a month to come up with $600, every month, ignoring the other necessities like food and opera tickets, filled my heart with foreboding. The only jobs I had ever had were babysitting, daycare, and writing geneologies and pricing for my mother’s jewelry line. Babysitting would yield $20-$40 for a night, daycare paid $8/hour, and my mother’s work wasn’t organized beyond the understanding that I worked for her and then spent her money (I knew, and believe she suspected, that my spending to working ratio was rather top-heavy). I had never had to pay rent or electric bills or worry how to budget for my enormous food intake. My jobs had been more gestures symbolic of my good intentions than an authentic commitment to contributing to my own and my family’s welfare, somewhat similar to Marlene Dietrich’s stint flipping burgers as a USO cafeteria server. Because I “worked,” I had the right to “spend like a drunken sailor;” the fact that the amount of money I made had very little connection to the amount I spent was a nuance I assiduously overlooked. Usually earned money and spending money weren’t even the same bills. I would collect my modest check from the San Francisco Tennis Club daycare center, deposit it in my savings account (deposits were the only transactions I ever had with the bank), and return home, where I’d fish several fifties out of my mother’s money envelop to keep as casual spending cash. Or I’d attach three or four price tags to some necklace chains during the commercials while The X Files was on, feeling not only that besmirching quality TV time with labor proved the solidity of my work ethic, but that it also justified my regularly helping myself to elaborate and pricey spa treatments and sushi dinners as well as my ongoing quest to find ever more posh and luxurious bras. I am still waiting for them to come out with one lined in chinchilla.

In other words, I was scandalously ignorant of the value of the dollar.

When I moved to New York, I checked the Times job notices and the listings on an online organization which catered to people seeking employment in the arts. A legendary Broadway theatre would be seeking a new dramaturg (a dramaturg provides criticism and guidance to the theatre’s directors and writers) and I’d write to them explaining how I was over-qualified for this job due to my lofty “Great Books” education and the fact that I had sold drinks during intermission at my theatre company in San Francisco, and thus already had experience in the thea-tah. The same Broadway house found my qualifications lacking when, my dramaturgy application having been ignored entirely, I applied for a job selling tickets over the phone in the basement.

I applied to work at four different Starbuck’s, hoping to take advantage of their excellent medical benefits and get myself a pair of glamorous rimless eyeglasses, but was ignored every time. I could understand the first time, as during my interview, when asked what I loved about Starbuck’s and why I wanted to work there, my annoyance at being asked such an idiotic question and my natural candor joined forces and I blurted out that I had actually sworn off coffee two years ago for health reasons and didn’t usually patronize chain businesses, preferring to support the dying mom-and-pop shops instead. Realizing my blunder, I tried to redeem myself by declaring that I was ever so excited about the new green tea frappucino and was in fact relaxing my embargo on Starbuck’s since, as there’s one on practically every corner in Manhattan, I often couldn’t find a mom-and-pop coffeeshop for miles anyway. I spoke more wisely in subsequent interviews (one can near-anonymously apply to work at all the different Starbucks “districts.” Each “district” is made up of four or five Starbuck’s locations and usually covers up to one and a half city blocks). I waxed poetic on the comforting purr of the espresso machine, the cozy morning smell of a hearty Venezuelan roast, the caffeine high that makes me love the world just a little bit more, and the hip-yet-chill-yet-groovy-yet-unobtrusive array of music played there to which I was delighted to learn they had just added early recordings of Bob Dylan. What better venue for the establishment-hating folk icon? Still, no go.
Finally I answered an ad from the Village Voice for telemarketing for local theatres and symphonies. I felt this was much unlike regular telemarketing jobs because even though I would make a living calling people at home and trying to sell them stuff, what I was selling them was of such a worthy nature that the people I called would be impressed and even grateful that I was contacting them about it: for if I did not save the arts, who would? I would definitely sleep peacefully at night.
I was put on the Yale Repertory Theatre campaign, and most of the leads I was given were people who lived in Connecticut. I had never been to Connecticut and had only a very Thomas Kinkade-ian image of what it must be like. After my first few minutes of making calls I realized that most people were not going to be impressed or even grateful to be solicited by me for any reason. I always had the vague impression that I was interrupting their Christmas dinner, even though I was calling in late August. To me, Connecticut enjoyed a perpetual state of mid-Autumn–outside, that is–all red and gold leaves cascading over quaint cottage-style family homes. Inside the cottages, one could sit in one’s Norwegian wool sweater with silver buttons sipping hot cider by the fire and gazing out the window at a silent winter scene as snow flakes softly floated by and stuck to the frosted window pane. Oh, and there was always a candle placed near said window, shimmering elegantly in its glass,–and wafting in from the kitchen was always the smell of the Christmas turkey being cooked just right. The streets they lived on had names like “Old Orchard Road” and “Cherry Tree Lane.” This for me was Connecticut, and these the scenes I was interrupting with my crass big-city marketing ploys. “All male Taming of the Shrew!! What will they dream up next??” (non-sequitur commentary: I later spent several days in Greenwich on a trunk show for my mother. For reasons never explained to me, I have been banished forever from the Saks Fifth Avenue location there, as well as the Stanton House Inn, the oldest inn in Connecticut, where I stayed. The Saks incident is a complete mystery to me, but I suspect that my banishment from the Inn had to do with something that happened the first night I stayed there. I have never suffered from migraines, but that night I came down with the worst, most thunderous, searing headache I have ever experienced. I had neither pain pills nor sleeping pills with me, and, in too much agony to sleep, and crying noisily, I staggered upstairs in my bare feet and PJ’s to find the receptionist and beg for some remedy. I had not realized that since this was a Bed and Breakfast-style Inn and not a hotel, there was no night-clerk. The lobby was deserted. I rang the little bell on the desk several times, hoping to somehow invoke someone who could take pity but nobody came. Clutching my head and starting to sob, I stumbled into the lobby hoping to find a liquor cabinet or wine case that I could break into, then smash one of the bottles against a tree outside (I don’t carry a bottle opener with me. Perhaps I should.) and sedate myself with it and just incur the consequences of the theft, wreckage, and inevitable hangover in the morning. I was truly desperate. There was no liquor anywhere. Now I abandoned myself to all-out wailing, hoping that someone staying in one of the rooms adjoining the lobby would hear me and rescue me from my pain. Nobody came. So I started howling and scratching on the doors like a cat, and still nobody came. I made my way on my knees to the front entrance, intending to flag down a passing car and hitchhike to the nearest walgreens so I could steal a small packet of advil, but when I opened the heavy wooden doors, I found that it was pouring rain outside, and that I’d have to crawl across a wide and stately courtyard laid with gravel to get to the road, Maple Avenue, which was off the main city streets and mostly untrafficked. So I started calling “Hello? Hellooooooo?” into the night, hoping that some homeless vagabond prowling this tony area for burgling opportunities would hear me and offer me some drugs. But nobody came. Finally, I fell back inside the lobby and dragged myself, now soaked to the skin, along the hardwood floors, whimpering that I wanted to die. I don’t now how I finally fell asleep that night, but the next morning my pain was all gone and when I revisited the lobby for continental breakfast, I noticed that I was being met with unusually disapproving stares from other guests and the staff. The receptionist answered my taxicab request coldly indeed and I realized that the night before I had not in fact been “alone” but rather “ignored;” these Connecticut-types believed that I had undergone some rock-star episode, like I’d run out of methodone or had a particularly bad case of D.T,’s, and they hadn’t wanted to get involved. I was a persona non grata because of my headache, and thus, -banishment.) Anyway, this job paid so little that even if people had been happy to disrupt their Christmas dinners with a subscription purchase, I couldn’t stay on. To illustrate, I worked 16 hours a week, and for the two week period when I was the “star” of the office, winning all the little selling competitions and closing the most deals, I brought home a check for $230.
I also had a job in a real estate office cold-calling all the property owners in Manhattan asking if they wanted to sell their homes. Nobody ever did. My hostess had gotten me this job with her then-boyfriend who was the main broker. He paid me in cash and despite the debilitating tedium of the job, I liked having it, because my boss was never there, and my one co-worker and I often sat in the office net-surfing, telling scatological jokes, and discussing Southpark. Plus, I had access to much useful information there; for instance, I now know that if I ever meet a man with the last name of Brusco, I must marry him immediately because he and his clan own most of the Upper West Side. Imagine the alimony payments! However, after a few months my hostess had a fight with my-boss-her-boyfriend and punched him out, after which he never wanted to see either of us again.
I then sunk even lower and took on another telemarketing job, this one with a company that offered discount vacations in Florida and the Bahamas and required vacationers to attend a timeshare demonstration. There was no cushy moral cause that I could rest on to justify disturbing peoples’ dinners or workdays or time with their families. Furthermore, these people weren’t all congregated in some posh New England gated community. They were scattered all over mid-America, and had signed up to win what they believed was a free vacation while they were (definitely drunk) at various events and festivals—”Minneapolis Rib America,” “Sturgis Bike Rally,” “Great American Beer Fest.” I would recite the script to them, and if they were still game despite sobriety, I’d coax their credit card numbers from them and charge the $600 the trip cost, after which I’d inform them of the extra $150/head of port departure taxes as well as the fact that booze on the cruiseship was not covered in the price of the vacation. All this was strictly according to the script, and I usually felt like I was taking advantage of people too naïve and good-natured to stand a chance against New York commercial selling tactics. They were too polite to object when I ordered them to read me the security code on the back of their Visas, too cowed to reconsider when I insisted that they surprise their spouses with a Disneyworld vacation rather than wait to consult with them before they put the money down. I often had to instruct them to get themselves passports, men and women in their fifties who had never left the country and had no idea what was involved in so doing.
After withstanding as much shame as I could take, I left the office one day and never returned.
I just signed on with Cipriani New York, a catering company with several ballrooms in Manhattan. I was drawn to this company because I heard it caters a lot of celebrity parties and I figured I’d get better stories out of spilling things on famous people than I would spilling things on regular joes. I bought the uniform tux (and was appalled to have to spend $100 on something made entirely of polyester) and attended the hospitality training session. The session involved no actual practice; instead the instructor just inserted a training video into the VCR at the head of the table and left the room. The soundtrack to this video was the same as that of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, complete with the bizarre synthesized rendition of Purcell’s “Death of Queen Mary” march. I take this as a good sign.

Posted in crap jobs, New York | 15 Comments

Nikki and Jackson

Posted on November 7, 2005 by Larissa Archer







I just had to very belatedly share some pictures from this most moving and beautiful wedding of two brilliant and very dear friends of mine, Nikki Mazzia (my first college roommate!) and Jackson (“Scholar and Adventuror” as his stepfather aptly dubbed him) Frishman. What a glorious experience it was, and I am thrilled for both of you. And how wonderful it was to catch up with the superior beings I am proud to call my frends: Katie, Billy, Kat, Chris, Tommy, Marcie, Ann, Juliana, Jen, and the various parental units, fiances, and significant others who came attached. Na Zdorovye!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

On the Grandeur that is Rome

Posted on October 26, 2005 by Larissa Archer
Anyone who is not watching HBO’s Rome needs to start watching it, now. My favorite moment in this series and even perhaps in all tv, is in the episode 7, Pharsalus. The army of Pompey Magnus has been crushed by Caesar’s, his friends have abandoned him and gone off to surrender, and he and his family are taken captive en route to presumably safe refuge in Egypt by centurion Lucius Vorenus and legionnaire Titus Pullo, of Caesar’s 13th regiment. Vorenus is a stalwart Catonian and Republican; part of the fascinating complexity of his character lies in the escalating friction between his own belief in the sanctity of the Republic (the great state, in this era of pervasive religiosity, is not merely a secular achievement, but an enterprise protected and sanctioned by the gods themselves), and his duty as a soldier to remain loyal to and aid Julius Caesar in his campaign against Pompey, an act treacherous to the Roman Republic and thus, an act which must end in Caesar’s ascension as dictator. More intriguing even is when one considers that Vorenus, a poor freeman who lives in the worst slum of Rome, would not find his own life greatly influenced one way or the other by a transference of government from republic to tyranny. Most other Republican loyalists and opponents of Caesar have ancient family reputations to protect and patrician status and riches, safe all these generations under the Republic, to preserve from threatening change. A powerful patrician in the Roman Republic did not have to regard any one person as his superior; there were no “kings”—at most there were heavily celebrated and powerful generals who were given special rights by virtue of how many barbarians they had conquered, as in the cases of, well, Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus. One can imagine how vexing was the idea of suddenly having to kneel to a king when one had one’s whole life lived as a king in one’s own circle. Vorenus, however, has no personal power to lose and still mourns the clearly imminent demise of the Republic. Having no material “stake” in its preservation, his is a pure Republicanism, truly on principle rather than for personal gain, and possibly the only example of this we see on the show.
Back to the story. In a private moment together, Vorenus asks the general and prisoner Pompey how this sad state of affairs could have come to be; “Surely Pompey Magnus had Caesar at great disadvantage…” (though Vorenus knows to whom he is speaking, he respects the great man’s wish to conceal his identity and plays along with Pompey’s insistence that he’s a humble traveling merchant). For a moment, pride at hearing of his past strategic prowess flashes across Pompey’s face in a smile too genuine and immediate to be suppressed, ”Yes, I did, I did…it seemed impossible to lose…” The smile fades, “that’s always a bad sign….” Vorenus notices but does not remark upon Pompey’s slip. Pompey recalls, wet eyed, his early mentorship of Ceasar and draws on the ground with a stick the recent decisive battle between him and his former protégé. In silent flashes across his face we see his admiration for the victor, his frustration at his mens’ retreat, humiliation and fear at having to now beg for the safekeeping of his wife and children (for indeed, a general knows how seldom such pleas are honored), and most moving, recognition of the immensity of the consequences of his downfall, far greater than the mere defeat of a famous general and his army. “That is how Pompey Magnus was defeated,…and how the Republic died…” A horrible and sad understanding passes bewteen the two men before Vorenus, stunned, stumbles off to the camp fire and leaves Pompey trembling on the beach.
In a cast of excellent actors, Kenneth Cranham’s Pompey is so masterfully embodied that even in a scene lacking violence, nudity, or good-looking people insulting each other, I was totally riveted. Cranham looks as W.H. Auden might have looked had a giant thumb descended on his head and squooshed it just a little, displaced body matter filling out a few, but not all of the wrinkles. He deserves an extra large Emmy for his performance, and I am very sorry that Pompey Magnus was beheaded upon arrival in Egypt (oh, the hazards of travel) by one of his own former soldiers and a Roman, as this pesky historical fact (according to the BBC) prevents him from returning in future episodes. His defeat and death made me wonder:
Would you rather live a successful, happy life and die a horrible death, horrible not only for its violence but for the realization in your last moments that you are horribly betrayed and defeated, as Pompey was?
Or
Live a pretty wretched life all around, full of violence, betrayals, dishonesty, failure, and defeat, and somehow, through a miracle, resolve your life on your deathbed in a positive, even joyous revelation, and literally, die happy?
p.s. A friend remarked on the title of this post, “On the Grandeur that is Rome” that I sound pompous because no one uses words like grandeur, and nobody inverts the nominative case with ‘to be’, or whatever it’s called when you say “the (descriptive noun) that is (proper noun). However, I didn’t just make it up in a moment of unrestraint; I lifted it from a poem by Edgar Allen Poe:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
Although I guess quoting nineteenth century poets makes me even more pompous. Oh, well.
Posted in damn good, REVIEWS | 9 Comments

Boobie Update

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Larissa Archer

Dear Reader,
Yesterday I was walking on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side and came upon the Orchard Corset Shop. I wandered in and this Hasidic Jew (yarmulke, ringlets, et al.) barked at me, “34 B!!”. I thought at first he was barking at someone else. However, his wife, I guess, approached and quietly asked in her yiddish accent, what I was looking for. I mumbled something or other sheepishly, and, failing to evade her focus, added that I thought I was a 36A. She grabbed me and spun me around, wiped her hand across my back, and informed me a little too loudly, “NO! 34B!!” and asked me what color bra I wanted. I told her, my voice ascending in pitch and lowering in volume with every word, that I merely wanted to look around, to which she replied that there was nothing to see but boxes. This was true. The store is about the size of a king-size bed and crammed with raggedy-looking boxes stacked to the ceiling. Cornered, I surrendered a request for something without underwires and in a nude color, and the Yiddish lady picked out a box from the very middle of the wall display (how did she distinguish it, I wondered, from the hundreds of others, all equally decrepit?). The box was stuffed with wrinkled, beige bras, glamour and romance all forgotten. She ushered me to the dressing “room” which was basically a chair with a scarf wrapped around it, then pulled off my shirt, and ordered me to remove my bra. Not daring to protest, though I did feel a little bit shy by this point, I obeyed. She then expertly fastened this surprisingly comfortable and decent-looking brassiere on me, and, before I could yelp that this was perfect and I didn’t need any more assistance, she proceeded with her ungentle worker hands to man-handle my girls around, rearranging them so that they fit into the brassiere more correctly. This mortified what little sense of modesty I had left. Meanwhile I heard the husband hollering at some other poor lady, “NO! You not 38D, what, you crazy? You 40C! 40C!!! I tell YOU what size you are, lady!!!” after which he peeked into the scarf to make sure I was being treated acceptably and complimented me on how nicely this bra fit. With bowed head and blushing wretchedly, I offered my credit card to the husband, who must have been standing on a box behind the counter, as he seemed to be a good foot taller than I, scrutinizing my ID from on high,–or perhaps the whole experience just had a truncating effect upon my psyche. I then scurried over to Little Italy to bury my face in a plate of spaghetti.
I just decided to post this because I know you, mon lecteur, have always found my boobies fascinating and I wanted to let you know what kind of adventures they’d been having.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments