TRAINING NOIR

The theme at my last supervisor training session was role-playing. Well, I guess that was the process more than the theme. The theme was empathy (or something like that).

I find role-playing annoying. It makes me feel awkward and self-conscious and phony. And 99 percent of the time it seems pointless because I feel like I already possess the empathy that the role-playing situation is supposed to generate.

For example, in one exercise, we were supposed to pretend we were a supervisor who had to tell an employee that he had body odor and bad breath. My first instinct in that situation would be to grin and bear it, to weigh the benefit of telling against the cost of not telling. I mean, I actually have a co-worker who regularly stands about six inches from me and emits a tsunami of garlic stench while he explains his work. It's a genuine effort to keep the sides of my nostrils from curling back, to not turn my head and wave my arms in open disgust. I'm telling you, bad breath can't get any worse than his, and yet it has never crossed my mind to actually say something to him. Surely my discomfort at having to smell him for a few minutes could not possibly trump the pain and humiliation he would feel by being told that he stinks. Such a confrontation would surely, and needlessly, taint our relationship forever.

But in the role-playing game you have to say something, so of course you say something like, "Gee, I know this is embarrassing, and I don't want you to be embarrassed, but it's come to my attention that you might have a bit of a hygiene issue, and maybe it's something you can't help or maybe you're just not aware of it, but I want to help you and, you know, I'd really want someone to tell me if I were in your shoes, even though it's hard to hear and ..."

You get the picture.

So this sort of thing went on all day, to the point where you want to just shout: "Dude, I got two words for you: Brush your Goddamn teeth! And take a fucking shower while you're at it. Capiche?"

In the middle of the afternoon, we got a respite from our acting jobs. The Chief Encouraging Officer's cook/secretary stomped up from the basement, rudely interrupted the CEO and demanded to know why some paperwork wasn't ready. She was visibly angry and shaking — this woman who had seemed so mild mannered and self-possessed in our brief chats in the kitchen as she doled out chicken casserole and meatloaf. You could tell some ongoing problem between them had come to a head, that the underling had had enough. The CEO looked nervous and disturbed. She told the cook she'd attend to the matter as soon as she was done with class. The cook got an "Oh yeah, I've heard that bullshit a thousand times" look on her face and stormed out of the room, leaving a wake of sourness and disbelief.

Ah-ha! I thought. The veneer of touchy-feely crapola has been rudely peeled back to reveal the true sturm und drang of our CEO's cuddly self-help empire. The empress has no clothes!

But then the empress, instead of crumbling into a heap of shame and despair, asked us to get out a piece of paper and "document" what had just happened. I greedily snatched up my pen and scrawled "INSUBORDINATION!" before it dawned on me that it was a set-up! The cook wasn't really mad. The CEO wasn't really embarrassed. They were role-playing! Excited by my perceptiveness, I eagerly informed my co-worker, who was busily documenting. "Psst! It was an act!" And, to my surprise, he said, "No duh. It was obvious as soon as the cook opened her mouth." "It was?" I asked. My co-worker rolled his eyes and went back to his exercise.

Dammit! Tricked again! It reminded me of the time I dutifully recorded in my Greek archeology class notes that the mother of Cleobis and Biton could tell them apart only by the differing swirls of their pubic hair. I regurgitated that scintillating info on a test, only to be told later by my boyfriend that the instructor was simply making a joke.

But this is not a joke. Listen to this! While we were discussing the ugly incident between the cook and the CEO, someone mentioned that the cook seemed so angry that he thought she might pull out a gun. The CEO said, "A gun?" Followed by, "Do you know Lorna? You guys know Lorna's history, don't you?" she said, referring to the cook, who was now back in her cozy kitchen.

We shook our heads.

Then the CEO revealed that Lorna — the woman who had been making our coffee and lunch and cookies every day, Lorna in the pastel mom clothes and apron — was not the rural housewife-type we had all assumed she was, but was in fact a famous murderess who had just been paroled.

SHUT UP!

I turned to my co-worker and whispered, "Is this a set-up, too?"

And, darkly, he said, "No, I don't think so."

"That really is Lorna __________? The woman who had the affair with the minister and callously murdered their spouses? The one the movie was based on?"

Indeed.

Then our CEO realized that she had inadvertently opened up a can of worms, so she had to say some more. She was so used to everyone in their small town knowing that it didn't occur to her that we out-of-towners would be ignorant. She told us how she met Lorna while working in the prison, that she was the model prisoner, that no one was more deserving of a second chance, so she gave her a job for work release, and when she finally succeeded, after decades in prison and five tries with the parole board, in winning her freedom, she got a full-time job as our CEO's cook.

I spent the rest of the afternoon ignoring the training session and pondering our cook — the convicted-murderer-turned-caterer, as my friend has described her — who spoke so charmingly and served food so graciously. Wow. I had to constantly keep my jaw from dropping in amazement. You just never know whom you are dealing with, do you? You interact with people every day and you just never know. Even some people you think you know really well, they have something you just don't know, something you would never guess: a crime, a bizarre sex thing, an act of heroism, an amazing talent.

And people whom you write off as phonies or shallow little beings, can blindside you with sincerity and depth. Our CEO, for instance, seems to embrace a certain New-Agey evangelical faux-Christian worldview that has as much to do with accumulating personal wealth as with anything remotely related to Christianity. Then you find out that she did something that many would regard as the very essence of the Christian spirit: She looked beyond someone's bad deed and gave them a hand up. She went to bat for another human being — at some risk to herself, living in a small, judgmental town — and had the courage to be a model of forgiveness and redemption.

This is the most valuable lesson she's taught us so far, the most valuable role she has played — one that didn't appear on any of her Christian-flavored, feel-good handouts — and I don't think she even realizes it.

OWNING MY PAST, PART ONE

My mom is moving into a new house. To minimize the junk she has to pack, she filled three plastic storage bins with "memorabilia" she thought my sister and brother and I would want to take off her hands — you know, stuff we could add to the accumulation in our own basements.

We're getting to the age where it makes more sense for us — not her — to be the keepers of our keepsakes. Weird.

She gave me my bin about a week ago, and it sat in the trunk of my car until tonight. I didn't have a burning curiosity to see this stuff, frankly — I think I'd rather see my brother's and sister's bins — but I knew there some vinyl records in there and that, with temperatures in the 80s, my car was not the best place for them to be.

So I hauled the bin into my living room this evening. Here are some highlights:

The creature above is my beloved Bippy monster. It has a tag that says "I'm your Bippy." I don't know what a Bippy is or who gave it to me. It was just always on my bed since I was teeny-tiny. Its back is pink with white polka dots. I sort of wonder now whether it was its complete lack of gender that appealed to me. I had scads of frilly dolls, too, but my mom gave those away through the years, realizing perhaps that they didn't mean as much to me as my multicolored monster.

This is apparently the card that identified me in the hospital before I had a name. It's pink because I'm a girl. Notice that it has my religion on it: "Cath." God knows that's some vital information to have on a hospital ID. Does anyone know why they did that?



Here I am in preschool, with some sawed-off kid teeth. This is right around the time my parents were divorcing. My preschool teachers taught me how to say the American Pledge of Allegiance in French. Cool, huh? And very useful, obviously.



Here's a book my mom read to me all the time. It has a lot of those old-school, surreal stories, like people living in shoes and sticking their thumbs in Christmas pies and whatnot. When I pulled it out of the bin, I immediately thought of Ani Difranco's frank assessment of her ex-lover: You make about as much sense as a nursery rhyme.



Here's my kindergarten photo and class picture. My mom was a hairdresser, which I think is obvious from this picture, don't you? Please note that these glasses are the height of fashion today. In the group shot, I'm next to the teacher, the divine Mrs. Litle.





And here is first grade (back row, second from right):



And second grade (back row, second from left):



And third grade (back row, third from left):



You get the picture.

After third grade, my hairdos and glasses were not as bitchin'. Neither was my personality.

At some point, I became a Brownie and decoupaged this picture of myself onto a crappy piece of wood.



I was a hardcore Brownie. Notice in this picture from the newspaper that I (third from right) am one of the few girls in uniform (complete with regulation brown knee socks, which all too many slackers deemed optional). I felt like an awesome police lady every time I put it on. I really needed a holster and sidearm to complement the sweet orange necktie. The journalist in me appreciates the clever headline "Brownies meet."



One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was a Kodak Instamatic camera. The first thing I did was photograph the tree it was under. (Before that, I had a little cardboard box that I had decorated to look like a camera; I had drawn a bunch of images on squares of notebook paper — like of my mom, for example — then I'd point the box at her, say "click," and pull one of the drawings from the top of the "camera" and give it to her. I'm sure this bizarre — and highly Byzantine — game of pretend inspired her to get me an actual camera.)



Later, displaying the same compositional flair, I turned the camera on my family, which boasted — count 'em — three Caucasian afros.

THE BACKSIDE OF 20

Because April 15 fell on a Sunday this year, celebration of Ben's birthday has been moved to Tuesday.

I couldn't find an appropriate e-card, so I got out my crayons and made my own.

Hair: orange-red
Eyes: blue-green
Lips: scarlet
Skin: apricot
Dimples: black
Personality (as represented by shirt): green

Ben is 28 now. I predict he will have the worst midlife crisis of anyone you ever knew — and that it will begin sometime this year, possibly within the week — so let's enjoy him while we can.

PUT ME IN, COACH

Tuesday I attended the first of five days of "supervisor training" — a requirement for my job, even though I am a supervisor only in the most superficial sense. Unlike many "supervisors" at my workplace, I do the exact same work as the six people I supervise, with the addition of a few administrative tasks and some extra accountability. The title "supervisor" sounds plain silly.

But whatever. I'm certainly not averse to learning something new, so if the company wants to pay for such training, I'll go with an open mind — a bitter, sarcastic, mocking mind, to be sure, but open.

Although you will scarcely credit what follows, it is completely true, and, please bear in mind, this was only Day One.

Now I had heard a little about this training before I went — from other "supervisors" who were obliged to go. Not a lot of details — people were curiously mum, which makes me suspect that the last day is a brain-washing session — but broad hints about the nature of the program: squishy, New Agey, self-helpish, embarrassing.

I was not expecting the additional adjectives of rural, cutesy-Christian and trite — a deadly mix when combined with the former.

Fault my taste, if you will, but if you're going to have an Anne Geddes photo greeting people at the door — a baby sitting in a bowl of roses — you might as well hang up a sign that says "Check your IQ." Ditto with the onslaught of country figures — dolls, cutouts, signs, figurines — adorning every wall and surface, erupting from every nook and cranny, spouting bits of redneck wisdom. A little of this I don't mind. But the problem with this aesthetic is that there is never just a little. It's an aesthetic of excess. Its practitioners are not satisfied with a well-placed objet here and there; the point is to overwhelm you with an orgy of fake flowers and stuffed animals, pastel colors and faux-lace and cute sayings, to keep you moving through the room emitting a complimentary barrage of oohs and ahhs. It's all about vanity, really: Look at all of my feel-good stuff! — a vanity made explicit after I started noticing that our trainer's name was everywhere — on coffee mugs, on decoupage signs, on wall-hangings, on stylized drawings.

And it's about commercialized "femininity," the kind that makes my skin crawl, the kind that aesthetically reduces grown women to prepubescent girls. Honestly, I've always wondered how a man could bring himself to have sex with one of these wives whose beds are covered with stuffed animals wearing overalls, who exclusively inhabit a princess world of pink hues and Precious Moments. Wouldn't that be absolutely creepy?

The only decor in the building — a cool, brick churchlike meeting place from the 1920s — that attracted me were a few bookshelves on one wall. But when I examined the titles I found that they were row upon row of self-help books of the Chicken-Soup variety. There was even one called "Life Coaching for Dummies." Gads.

This collection of "literature" came into high focus when our trainer mentioned rather casually halfway through her presentation that she valued her mental health because it wasn't "always so good." A co-worker and I exchanged a glance, and I could tell he was as familiar with the type as I was: someone who had a rough patch in life, like we all do; only, instead of using a self-help book to get through it, she made her life into a religion of self-help. The means became the end. It's like sporting a bandage after the wound has healed. It's unseemly.

Maybe she has a true passion for helping others, but the fact that she refers constantly to the money-making aspect of her "coaching business" — she calls herself Chief Encouraging Officer — tends to taint whatever altruistic motives she may have. She also praised her "marketing mentor" several times for helping her achieve "business and spiritual success." And she referred unabashedly several times to her convertible sports car as something she really valued in life. It's OK, she told us, to prize material things because they are a symbol of our hard work and who we are.

I pondered that statement as I sat at a table laden with rainbow-framed mirrors and Beanie babies and a fly-swatter contraption that you are supposed to politely snap in someone's direction in lieu of telling them to shut up.

So that's the scene. And this is the substance: I have a Blue temperament. This means I am like Princess Diana. A co-worker had a Gold temperament, which means that he is like Colin Powell. Others had Green — Bill Gates. And others orange — Tony Danza. (Yes. Tony Danza). After our trainer had color-coded everyone in the room by administering a "personality assessment," she lectured about how the different colors work together — which ones complemented each other, which ones were opposites. She noted, for example, that problems could really arise if you got an "immature Blue" and an "immature Green" working on a task together. The point of this, I guess, is that as a supervisor you should be aware of what color your employees are and be sensitive to their weaknesses and strengths.

This color talk went on for hours. You can probably imagine me sitting there seething and rolling my eyes. But I didn't. I just went with the flow. I fell under the pretense that it was all valid and worthwhile; otherwise I would have exploded. I mentioned to my co-worker that if she kept going on about the colors it was going to seem REAL. And he observed that that is exactly how fundamentalist cults work: repetition of idiocy in an uncritical environment until the idiocy acquires substance.

She did at some point mention that this wasn't "strictly scientific," but you could tell she considered that a negligible flaw.

I have a good relationship with the people I "supervise," and I highly doubt that it will be improved by my labeling them Blue or Orange. In fact, I highly doubt that anything will be accomplished by my spending five days of my life under this woman's tutelage — except for her to advance another rung in the pyramid scheme of her self-help empire.

And, honestly, perhaps it's because I'm reading the book "Absurdistan," but I enjoy farce just enough to be OK with that.

MORE DINNERWARE CARNAGE

Remember the black bowl mystery from early March? I'm sure you've lost tons of sleep trying to solve it. Well, the culprit has struck again, only this time not so neatly. I came home today from a supervisor-training session (stay tuned for blistering critique) and found this wreckage in my dining room. Once again, Mabel and Rupert are the only known suspects, but neither will crack under interrogation. I can't tell if they're really out to get me or if they're just breaking my bowls.

31 FLAVORS AND THEN SOME

Rush, I thought you'd be interested to know that the flags are flying at half-staff until you — the Sunflower State's cutest-ever lesbian — return to Kansas!

Pride Week is a drag without you, friend.

I hope you have a rockin' birthday. You're 31 today. I think I was that old when we met. Or just 30? I remember you made fun of my age. The cool thing is I haven't matured a minute since. So now we are even.

SOMETHING TO SEE

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something. — Henry David Thoreau

I visited the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka recently. It's the former black-only elementary school that Linda Brown had to attend in the 1950s instead of the white school that was much nearer to her home. The restored school is now a national museum devoted to the struggle to end segregation.

While rummaging around the gift shop I opened a deck of "playing cards" showing the milestones of the civil rights movement, and I came upon something I had never seen before, which was this woman's face:



Do you know who she is? Does her name, Viola Liuzzo, ring a bell?

It didn't for me. I flipped over the card and read that she was a 39-year-old mother of five and a student of nursing who was married to a tough-guy Teamster. When she heard about the civil rights movement in the South, she dropped everything and drove by herself to Alabama in March 1965. She used her car to help protesters on the Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery — until a car full of Klansmen, including an FBI agent, pulled up beside her, fired two bullets into her head and left her to die on the side of the road.

After her murder, the FBI ran a smear campaign against her, accusing her of going to the South to do drugs, be a communist and sleep with black men. The jury acquitted the men of her murder, and the Klan threw a big party for them.

It's one of the most shameful things the U.S. government has ever done — to one of the best people this country has ever produced.

I didn't learn about her in my high school civics class or history or anywhere else. Do you think anyone is learning about her today?

After I got home from the museum I looked her up on the Internet and found that an award-winning documentary, "Home of the Brave," had been made about her and what became of her children after her murder. I ordered it from Netflix. In the film, one of her daughters makes a very moving journey back to Alabama, and the others are seen coping all these decades later with the loss of their mother.

I remember in high school learning about the American Transcendentalists and the anecdote where Henry David Thoreau was in jail for not paying taxes to support what he considered an unjust and inhumane war. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit his cell and said, "What are you doing in there?" To which Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"

When Viola Liuzzo's death became national news, not just the federal government, but large segments of the public, wondered "What was she doing down there?" A white woman. A mother. A wife. This documentary makes the reply that she never had the chance to: "What were you doing up there?"

'WHAT'S A KIKE?'

Today in class we were talking about sensitivity issues in editing: racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, etc. It's really interesting to see the things that jump out at this generation that wouldn't have jumped out at mine — things that they automatically assume are wrong that most people wouldn't have batted an eye at when I was a kid. For example, remember the story about the courtroom killings in Georgia where the defendant broke free from the deputy who was escorting him, stole the deputy's gun and proceeded to shoot several people? Most of the students seemed to agree that it was wrong to make a big deal out of the deputy's gender, to say in a headline, for instance, "Defendant overpowers woman deputy, goes on rampage." They felt her gender was irrelevant — just as irrelevant as her race or sexual orientation. A "man deputy" could have been just as easily overpowered, and some have been in fact, and no one would point out in a headline that it was a "man deputy." Plus, most students felt that her name identified her gender and that nothing else needed to be said; readers can draw their own conclusions.

In my day — not that long ago, but still — we probably wouldn't even have had that conversation about whether it was right, much less a consensus that it was wrong. I am heartened by this — mightily — especially because I often observe things in the classroom that make me despair, such as students calling things "gay" as a pejorative or displaying a shocking ignorance of history and geography — not having any idea who Susan B. Anthony was or Malcolm X, for example. Some students guessed on a quiz that Malcolm X was a rapper. Several identified the Nile as a river in South America.

And that's nothing new, I suppose. Teachers from the beginning of time have been lamenting the poverty of their students' minds. (I'm sure I shocked more than one professor with my own dearth of knowledge/sensitivity). It's not stupidity, I think. It's mostly a failure to read, to be proactive in their learning, to find out about issues, ideas, people outside their daily routine. They've had a lifetime of absorbing this and that from their public school teachers and this and that from TV and, for some reason, have not yet felt compelled to take their education — their minds — into their own hands.

Some of this ignorance I don't know what to think of. When my colleague was discussing the cartoon above, which came out during the flap over the depiction of Mohammad in European newspaper cartoons, I heard something shocking. One student turned to her classmates and said, "What's a kike?" None of the handful of people around her knew. They all stared blankly. One said, "I have no idea." I was absolutely floored, just as I was a few years back when a group of student journalists, after printing a picture of an African American playing cards with an overline that said "calling a spade a spade," professed to not have any idea that "spade" was a racial epithet for African Americans. They really didn't know, and maybe that's a good thing. Or maybe not. Does not knowing the word "kike" mean you are blissfully free of racist awareness, or does it mean you don't read, that you are out of touch with history, with culture?