My Sister Vs. The Breast Cancer Surgeons

My sister vs. The Breast Cancer Surgeons
Weekly Press • Wed, Nov 27, 2013
By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

Today I’m thinking of my youngest sister Carolyn and the struggle she’s had with breast cancer. It hasn’t been easy for her. For one thing, she had to undergo a (single) mastectomy two years ago that left her with a new body to adapt to. As a man, I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a part of your body removed, especially a part that, for women at least, can be such a focal point in their lives.

I also have another sister with cancer. Sister Susan had a form of lung cancer. A smoker for many years, her cancer was discovered seven years ago. While she didn’t have surgery, she went through a heavy cycle of chemo and radiation, forcing her to change her lifestyle to a radical degree. Always a beautiful woman (in restaurants and elsewhere, she turns heads), she decided she wasn’t going to go the "chemo bald is beautiful" route, so she went out and bought several eye-catching wigs. After all, when it comes to cancer, it’s all about choice.

I mention choice because after Carolyn’s mastectomy, she was offered chemo and radiation by a bevy of cancer specialists. While chemo and radiation worked for Susan, Carolyn smelled a rat. It just wasn’t her style. She wanted to go the natural route. And so she and her boyfriend did some research and found a safe drug (from Canada) that pretty much did what chemo did minus the harmful effects. The drug also had the approval of her oncologist. It was a controversial move, and a brave one. Carolyn was afraid of "chemo brain" as well as possible weight loss. Bald may be beautiful in old Mr. Clean commercials, but it wasn’t for her.

Two sisters with cancer is a scary thing, but because Carolyn’s cancer was visible in a way that Susan’s was not, she naturally thought of a breast implant. After some lengthy discussions with her doctor about this, she went under the plastic surgery knife for breast reconstruction surgery, or a tissue expander. Of course, the surgeon promised her a wonderfully successful implant, a problem-free end result that would very soon have her humming a happy song and shopping at Victoria’s Secret.

"I want my old body back," Carolyn told me many times. "I’m not about to be stuffing socks in my bra like a two bit drag queen."

Happily for her, she has a patient boyfriend who told her, "I love you just the way you are. You really don’t need to do this." But who can blame her? The surgeon promised Utopia and a bikini-ready body once the tissue expander "settled in." The future looked bright. Her cancer seemed to have been nipped in the bud and her remaining breast was cancer free.

After the cosmetic procedure, Carolyn appeared in her new tissue expander, not Mae West or Jayne Mansfield exactly but looking as if she never had a mastectomy at all. Periodic checkups kept her peace of mind intact until the day when she discovered that the expander-- the perfect cosmetic implant-- was causing an infection.

It was back to the surgeon, who told her, "We can fix this thing, have no fear!" And so, with a dose of antibiotics and a little bit of this and that, Utopia was once again promised her: bikini-wearing on the beach, and a future of cleavage revealing V neck sweaters.

The old Broadway musical, Promises, Promises, brings to mind a lot of broken promises along the way. The infection was getting worse, the antibiotics weren’t working, and her surgeon was now saying that the expander had to be removed. This involved another surgery (the fourth!) and a two-week recovery period involving tubes, leakages, etc., all in all a very messy post-surgical experience.

"Can you believe this?!" Carolyn told me. "On the bright side, the surgeon says that a new tissue expander will work. He doesn’t know where the infection came from. Maybe it was a staff infection. He’s not sure."

Meanwhile, in Florida, my sister Susan, who was still dealing with her own cancer, announced that during her latest checkup, she was told that her remission looked permanent. She was now working two jobs and enjoying life with her husband, having steak and Chardonnay every Saturday night and enjoying their indoor pool under a canopy of palm trees.

Carolyn prepared for the second tissue expander operation with high hopes, believing that the surgeon would watch this infection business, and that things would go as planned. After all, the good doctor assured her with a kind optimism straight out of a Disney film that this time "things would settle in," and that "she was a very good candidate for this type of thing." So, when the dreaded day arrived for yet another hospital visit involving anesthesia and the "shock" of waking up in the recovery room, she held her head high and told everyone that, "This thing is not going to defeat me."

After the second implant, Carolyn called Susan and announced, "It’s in. It feels okay. The surgeon says it looks good. I think we’re home free."

In life, I don’t think there’s anything worse than believing that something is going to get better when the opposite is true. That’s especially when battling an illness that waxes and wanes. There’s nothing quite so secure as certainty or closure (the Oprah moment), rather than bi-polar variables that leave you feeling exhausted.

During a moment of happiness with her boyfriend—a night on her apartment balcony in Roxborough with shrimp grilling nearby, a Stock’s pound cake in the refrigerator, and her dog and cat running circles around one other in the living room—Carolyn noticed another burgeoning infection. Yes, it was happening again. I can’t imagine how her emotions must have plummeted just then, all the high hopes she had for a full recovery plunging down into the darkest part of feeling.

She announced the arrival of a new infection at a dinner she was hosting for friends and family. There were no tears, at least publicly. Being family, we saw the troublesome eruption and told her that she needed answers. Why was this happening? Tomorrow, she said, she’d phone the surgeon and go through the rigmarole once again. She couldn’t stand the idea of another trip to the hospital, of falling asleep under anesthesia and then coming to in the recovery room.

Finally, however, the surgeon did admit that some women are just not able to receive tissue expanders because they’re "chronically" subject to infections. Still, he left the option open for a third go-round. The man was unstoppable. "Maybe next time," he told Carolyn. "Take six months to heal, and we can try it again if you want." But Carolyn, feeling like a high school biology frog that’s been over dissected by too many awkward sophomores, didn’t fall for the surgeon’s head ring of health insurance cash registers.

After multiple conferences with family and friends and a prolonged meditation on her balcony overlooking Fairmount Park, she decided against a third slice and dice.

"How long will these guys just cut, cut and cut? I know the answer to that," she added, "As long as you let them. Well, I’m not letting them anymore!"

And so, with a song in her heart, she did what any savvy contemporary woman would do: she shopped for "boobs" on the Internet, and found a faux breast from China. "It looks and feels like the real thing," she says. "It has become…my daily prosthetic!"

My Old Friend Todd: The Handicapped Life

The Local Lens
Published • Wed, Nov 27, 2013
By Thom Nickels

Recently I sat down with my handicapped friend, Todd, to hear what he had to say about his life. Todd and I get together every Thanksgiving, so I was eager to get an update.

I have reshaped Todd’s words to put them in story form. Here is Todd’s story:

I know what people think when they see me for the first time—he’s severely handicapped. He doesn’t have arms. He’s not a tall man, and once more, he’s confined to a wheelchair. What kind of life is that?

I’m sure their thoughts do not stop there. Other thoughts may be, "How does he do it? How does he eat, bathe, scratch himself, answer the phone, blow his nose, go to the bathroom?" If I was an able bodied man and saw my wheelchair-bound self in the street, I’d probably ask the same questions.

I have to tell you that I am not put off by people thinking these things.

Most people want to know why I don’t have arms. When I tell them I’m from Middletown, Pennsylvania, the area around Three Mile Island, many immediately think of the big nuclear accident there, and they surmise that this might have caused my disability. But no, that’s not true. I was born before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

Some people will ask me if my mother took Thalidomide, a drug that was given to women by doctors in the early 1960s. But my mother never took Thalidomide, at least that’s what she always told me, unless she’s telling a major fib. I know my mother is being truthful. As far as I can tell, I am the way I am because of genetic factors although as far as I know nobody else in my family was born this way. Perhaps if I traced my family history back 200 years, I might find somebody who was, but I won’t be doing that much research any time soon.

So, yes, I have a number of disabilities. Looking at the bright side,

I can honestly say that at least I was not born able bodied and had to deal with an accident that made me disabled. Then I would have had the memory of a tragic loss, the loss of my arms, but since I was never able-bodied, I don’t know what it is like to have arms, or even to be tall, or to scratch myself with hands or dial a phone without using my feet.

I can be thankful for that!

My feet, you see, are my arms. They are my hands. I use them to type, to eat, to point, to open mail, to pet my cat Leo, to work the remote control for my TV.

One more thing, people think that because I am disabled, I don’t work but rather collect disability checks while watching TV all day, but that’s not the case at all. I am a full time Data Entry Clerk at Verizon in Center City Philadelphia, and I’ve had that job for over 21 years. I’m proud that I was able to find and keep a job like this, although just because I’m handicapped doesn’t mean that I have to be satisfied with the boring duties of a Data Entry Clerk. While I love getting up early and getting ready to leave the house, I don’t always love the fact that my job is among the world’s most boring jobs.

Just because I am handicapped doesn’t mean that I have to settle for a job that doesn’t completely satisfy me. Of course, in this economy, many people work jobs they are not in love with. I guess that’s why they call it work. If you can’t get what you want, you get what you need. My data entry clerk job did satisfy me for a number of years, and though that has changed in my department at work I am on record as being the 3rd most productive employee. There are some months when I register in at number one. There are 18 people in my department. There used to be 32 but because of downsizing many of my co-workers took early retirement packages, and so now there are a lot of empty desk around me.

There was a time when nobody could get me to say that I am a lot like my mother. To me for many years those were fighting words. But when you allow yourself to grow in life sometimes the truth becomes more than obvious: The fact is. I am a lot like my mother.

I am thankful that I can finally accept the truth!

When my parents went to enroll me in elementary school, for instance, school administrators said that would not work because the school was not wheel chair accessible. Those were the years when institutions could say things like that because most buildings were not wheelchair accessible. "He’ll have to be bussed over to Hummelstown," they said, and my mother took a fit.

She took a big fit, a monstrous fit. She yelled and screamed until they couldn’t take it anymore, and guess what? They made the elementary school wheelchair accessible. My mother did this because she was not afraid to speak up.

You might want to know when I first became aware of the challenges I had to face in life. It didn’t start at home, really, but when I would go out to shopping malls with family and friends. People would stare at me. I don’t mean quick, polite stares but the long drawn out kind that can stick like glue. The stares didn’t bother me so much, but they bothered the people who happened to be with me. A big change I have noticed over the years is that generally people don’t stare at me that much anymore. I really attribute this to the increased awareness and visibility of disabled people in society.

For that I am thankful!

I feel very good about this change, although I must confess that I used to be bothered by the questions and prolonged stares of little children. Now children are naturally curious beings, and they want to know why something is the way it is, and so over time I began to relax around them and comfortably answer their questions about my disability. But then I found that it was the parents who would draw the children back and tell them, "Don’t ask him that. Don’t be rude. Come here," which in the end I think is the worse thing a parent can do.

A lot of times I will tell a parent, "Let the kid ask, it is really okay. They should know. How else are they going to know? Let them hear it from me."

Throughout much of my life I’ve had to pretend to be happy, to put on a happy face for people. This is true until I get to know someone, at which point I will let my guard down and show them that I have different moods just like everyone else. Many people meeting me for the first time will say, "My God, he is always in a good mood. Given the position he’s in, he’s always in a good mood." Of course, anyone who knows me knows I am not always in a good mood.

The biggest thing about my disability is that I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. As a teenager I really felt sorry for myself, but that feeling had more to do with how women treated me. Since I have been without arms since birth, I didn’t see this treatment as happening because I was necessarily disabled, although some of it may have been connected to that. At the time I felt it was because of my acne. You see, since I was born this way, I don’t know any other way, so had my parents kept me in a locked room away from able bodied people, I would never know that I was…disabled. A lot of my insecurity in high school had to with acne….I had the kind of acne nobody should ever get…the kind of acne that is almost impossible to get rid of with over the counter crèmes and ointments. I don’t think I started to look good until my twenties…that’s when the acne cleared up. Of course, being a teenager even for able bodied people can be a very difficult time. Hormones are racing, the body is changing, and emotions are mixed and confused. It’s not an easy time for anybody. So for me accepting the fact that girls didn’t find me attractive—not even one girl—was very hard to accept.

That all changed for the better in my twenties, as I said, and it would change even more as time went on when I’d eventually get a girlfriend. My teenage years taught me a lot about peoples’ reactions to me. One thing I learned is that when both men and women are over attentive or fussing over me excessively, this is a red flag. Too much fuss in my mind translates to "I feel so sorry for you." Conversely, when people are visibly nervous around me I take this as a good sign because I know that I will eventually win them over by being cheerful and happy. And after I win them over they often become my best friends.

And when they become my friends, I no longer have to pretend to always be cheerful, I can be myself. You might say I have a talent for acting. Well, I do, but I also really like people. I really value my independence, as I’ve stated. I cannot say this often enough.

When I finished high school, I knew I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, the kind of job I would get. My goal was to go to a big city, live in my own apartment, make friends, and have a regular job. I wanted to go to a trade school, and eventually I applied and was accepted at a school in Philadelphia. Now, while my parents wanted me to be independent, being that independent scared them. Philadelphia, in their minds, and in the minds of most rural people, is a hornet’s nest. They were worried about crime and about my safety. But to tell you the truth, I did not want to live in a rural environment. The city to me has always been exciting, because in the city you can go out and get coffee at 3 in the morning if that’s what you want to do.

There are also many more people to meet in the city than there are in isolated rural areas.

When I enrolled as a student, I found a place to live in University City. Later I moved to an apartment in Roxborough, which was fine for a while although I have to tell you that I did too much drinking in Roxborough. I had to learn the hard way, I suppose, and so there were many odd DUI style wheelchair accidents. These were mostly sloppy minor accidents that made me look and feel foolish. I later decided that I had to become sober. (I have been sober for over a decade now).

For that I am thankful!

A lot of my life has been spent on the road…not as a traveler to exotic places—although I did do that two years ago when I took a cruise to the Caribbean with one of my attendants—but as a wheelchair driver. Driving through the streets of the city is not always easy. In fact, I have had many, many, near misses with cars, so many in fact that I had to figure out how to get to and from my place of work from my Center City apartment. So I devised a way to get to 12th and Race via the subway concourse and as a result I more than cut in half the number of car-wheelchair near misses.

I’ll never forget my first wheelchair-car near miss. It was in University City, and I was headed out to the school cafeteria to get some food to bring back to the apartment, when a woman in a car clipped my wheelchair. She got out of the car and began to cry. She couldn’t apologize enough, she was really upset, but my mind was only on the food, and so I told her, "It’s okay Miss, it is okay." I eventually clamed her down and was able to get my food.

Another time in Center City a male driver almost hit me. He was so apologetic he handed me a twenty-dollar bill. Now, I really don’t like it when people just hand me money, but in this case I took it. But there have been times when people have just come up to me and handed me money, as if in their minds a disabled person in a wheelchair equals a homeless person in desperate straits. I’m proud to say that I have never accepted money under these circumstances.

Even though I am disabled and going through some pretty scary health problems right now---I have polycystic kidney disease and will need a liver transplant before too long---my parents would not be happy if I threw in the towel and gave up, quit my job and asked them to move home. I would never do that. I consider an action like that falling victim to loser status: a man in his forties living at home with his parents. It’s certainly not something my mother would respect, and since I am like my mother, I wouldn’t respect myself either. My big personal goal is to meet the right woman and get married and have a family. That’s what I really want, and I know I couldn’t do that if I became a dependent invalid.

Talking about marriage brings me back to women again. I met my first girlfriend when I was 23. I was in a bar with friends, and they happened to notice a beautiful girl looking at me. It was phenomenal to see that a woman was looking at me because she was attracted to me, rather than because she thought I was a freak. So we became boyfriend and girlfriend for a while but then like a lot of love stories when you’re young, the whole thing took a nosedive when she started giving her business card to men while we were out on dates.

Today my life is good in terms of peace and comfort. I love going to work everyday even if I am not in love with my job. I’ve accepted the fact that living in Center City is lonely. In CC people tend to say hello how are you, and that’s it; friendships are not easily formed as they seem to be formed in neighborhood settings. But feeling lonely has to do with the fact that I no longer drink and go to bars. Meeting people in bars is a big chunk of what happens in the city. So I’ve learned to trade a tumultuous exciting life with huge ups and downs for a more solid and quiet life with a secure center.

Yes, for all of these things I am extremely grateful!

Expulsion from the Union League

The Local Lens

Published• Wed, Apr 10, 2013

By Thom Nickels



Philadelphia is basically a "dress-down" kind of town, where it’s not unusual to see theater and concert-going patrons in casual clothes bordering on rustic. By "rustic" I mean torn or split jeans, corduroys with holes or stains, or shirts that resemble lumber yard work frocks.



I sometimes think the "dress-down" style here has something to do with the city’s Quaker heritage. The original Quakers liked plainness over ornate or showy materials. New Yorkers have often observed Philadelphia’s penchant for dress-down attire, especially when it comes to theater audiences. A long time ago I remember reading a New Yorker article about Philadelphia men wearing bib overalls to the theater. Bib overalls, of course, are what farmers in the country wear. You don’t expect to see men in bib overalls when attending opening night in one of the city’s major theaters.



When it comes to dress, Philadelphia is also a city of extremes. Consider the class of men who like to wear bow ties. These fellows can be any age; they can be prep school grads, conservative Republicans, men from old money, rich suburban families or even men who aspire to attain something of what wearing a bow tie seems to suggest: sophistication beyond the pale. In some cases, a bow tie can looked affected, although wearing the right bow tie with a nice seersucker suit is a sure way to suggest money and class.



Suspenders are another specialty dress item. They can look like the Farmer in the Dell or just downright cool, depending on what they are holding up. I wore suspenders as a boy with white shirts and a small checkered bow tie. To get my attention sometimes or to make a point, my mother would snap my suspenders. Perhaps that’s why I opted to stop wearing them, although it may also have been because suspenders were sometimes known to come undone in violent recoil that had me holding up my trousers for dear life. To this day whenever I see somebody in suspenders I experience a slight urge to go over and give them a snap. As for bowties, we wore them in parochial school as an alternative to the sometimes boring necktie.



I grew up when boys and men wore ties to school, church and work, when shirts were tucked into trousers in the classic Brooks Brother’s mode rather than left to hang over trousers like untailored drapery. Today it is fashionable among many twenty-something men to wear shirts - dress, casual or grunge - hanging over their trousers, a fashion trend started years ago by overweight designers who wanted to hide the huge expanse of their waistlines. A tucked-in shirt, after all, accentuates body image.



Many, though not all, younger men go to extreme lengths to avoid wearing sports jackets and suits. I have seen these guys underdress at social and press events where almost everyone present is wearing a jacket and tie. What amazes me is how these guys don’t seem to care that they stand out like boiler room janitors or party crashers. Don’t get me wrong: I love old, sloppy clothes. Weather-beaten clothes are fun to wear around the house and to do work in. I tend to wear one work shirt, for instance—something I bought at the local thrift store—that is starting to sport holes, but because I like the shirt I have come to regard it as my work uniform. But would I go to a museum exhibition opening in it? I don’t think so.



When I was in my twenties I began to think of wearing suits and ties as the province of old men. You know the look: oversized sheen jackets, fat clown ties, neatly pressed baggy trousers and shiny black shoes that not reflect way, way up into Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden universe. My beloved old great aunt, who once corresponded with Clare Booth Luce and knew Connie Mack, expected me to dress in a tie whenever I visited her in Cathedral Village, a retirement/nursing home in Roxborough. Sometimes I complied, although I would only put the tie on when I entered the Village, and never wore it on the bus going there or returning home. There were other times when, out of stubbornness, I would decide, "NO tie for great aunt!" so I’d visit her with an open collar.



At no time, however, did I visit her with my shirt hanging out of my pants like those hipster exhibition janitors. My great aunt, who was born in 1895, had no time for an open collar, while an open collar to me was a beautiful thing (like reading the poetry of Walt Whitman), especially in the summer. The prospect of having lunch with me and my open collar in the Cathedral Village dining room once drove her to tears. In her panic to make me look presentable, she suggested that I wear one of her broaches in place of a tie.



Of course, it not being Halloween, I did a double take. "I’m sorry I didn’t bring the tie," I said. "I will next time, if it means that much to you, but I’m going nowhere near that broach." We decided on a compromise: I would button the top button and leave it at that. Later, however, I saw that I was being unfair to her and so I made the decision that if a tie made her happy, why not wear one, especially if she’s paying for lunch?



Through the years I’ve come to realize that when it comes to dressing for events, it’s always better to be overdressed than under. In some cases it’s actually possible to do both, as hybrid dress configurations like the sports jacket/sweater/ jean combination manage to bypass any suggestion of janitorial influences. Suits and jackets today have lost the Square Bob look of yesteryear, thanks to certain European influences like shorter, tighter jackets, slimmer trousers and slim ties.



Of course, there are things I’d never wear, even if I found myself (during a terrible war with North Korea, say) crawling on all fours in the streets in a search for water and food rations. These items include: (1) sweat pants and sweat suits, which should never be worn outside a gym or the backyard. (2) Flip-flops: No self-respecting man should wear flip-flops in the city (the beach is okay). There’s no sadder sight in contemporary life than watching a grown man in flip-flops trying to descend the steps at Girard and Front after getting off the El.



Please don’t think of me as a fashion expert. I flunked a big test recently when I went to cover a Royal Oak Foundation Lecture, The Day Parliament Burned Down, in the Grant Room of the Union League. As I entered the building, I was stopped by a UL overseer who asked, "Do you have jeans on?" I might have been carrying a ziplock of weed from Colorado, judging from her full frontal lunge in the direction of my shoes. "No, ma’m," I said, respectfully. "In fact, my natural tendency is to overdress. I am wearing dress Levi’s from the Port Richmond Plaza thrift store to match this very hard-to-find Calvin Klein corduroy jacket."



"You are wearing jeans," she said, patently ignoring the Lauren sweater, Italian shoes and dress belt from Helsinki. A fashion debate then ensued at which point the overseer mused, "So far this evening we’ve had to turn away 16 people."



"Sixteen?!" I exclaimed, happening to glance over at a man on a lobby bench in the act of removing his jacket, when like a flash of lightning the overseer pointed at the culprit and said for all to hear, "Please do not remove your jacket, sir!" Two men behind me, also wanting to know how and why Parliament burned down, wore skinny peg ties (Pee Wee Herman), tight jackets and a hybrid version of hipster petite casual slacks. They were also waiting for the overseer’s green light. To my astonishment they were allowed to pass through without the overseer ever checking their trousers.



Life is unfair sometimes.



It was not a good day, and I did not like being number seventeen, but out on the sidewalk, in the sunlight of truth, I could plainly see that the Levi’s on my body were in fact denim (or black jeans) and not cotton.

November ICON MAGAZINE City Beat Column 2013

November City Beat columnb> 2013
ICON MAGAZINE




We hope that the Mural Arts Project’s October 5th The Meal, an extravaganza staged to celebrate the organization’s 30th anniversary, becomes an annual event. Imagine eating art off the walls “and putting it into a public space in the form of a table setting?” That’s how French artist Lucy Orta referred to The Meal. “In a sense, the murals on the wall will be found on a table runner and the plates of The Meal,” Orta said. This was Philadelphia’s first free collective dining experience but the 34th for Paris-based artists Jorge and Lucy Orta, who created The Meal as an art event. Many of the 904 guests were selected by a lottery system. The vegetarian fare was created by Chef Marc Vetri. Guests got to take home a rather spectacular Orta art plate. We ate with Amy Johnson, a Media, Pennsylvania, City Council candidate, and muralist Ben Volta and his young son Milo (Milo crawled under the table at one point and pinched our knees). Jane Golden gave a speech that had the airborne pounce of an Olympic discus throw. Onlookers beyond the perimeter of the Thomas Paine Plaza at the Municipal Services Building were surprisingly sedate when spotting so many people chewing on Black Krim, Dabinett, Celtuce, Spitzenberg and lots of cubed carrots. “What I want to know is,” Amy Johnson asked, “is who cut all of these carrots into such tiny cubes?” Since vegetables, like Chinese food, leaves the stomach fast, we headed out to a fast food restaurant afterwards for something meatier to chew on.

At Drexel University’s second TedX symposium last month we led the pack with a 9 AM presentation on how technology effects human interaction. Later, we answered questions from students about the value of cursive writing, and were taken aback when one seemingly smart woman asked, “Isn’t advocating for cursive retrograde thinking?” What? We let it be known that cursive writing is a kind of poetry, a basic skill like learning the alphabet. In addition, we told her that intelligent people who can only print block letters make most observers think of the developmentally disabled. It’s much like the argument we got into last year with a woman who announced that she was starting a movement to abolish the use of the semicolon. We love the semicolon, just like we love cursive writing-- and just like we love astronauts like Paul Richards, another TedX speaker who was part of the eighth Shuttle Mission to the International Space Station. Richards told us at lunch that astronauts who travel in space are given so much to do that they often forget to look outside at the ball of earth, or at the stars within arm’s reach.

We don’t usually attend film screenings. Philly’s film world, like the Philly poetry circuit, can be an odd feudal kingdom. We ventured to the Kimmel Center anyway to see the 2012 Susan Seidelman film, Musical Chairs, about two New Yorkers and their love for ballroom dancing (even after one becomes physically disabled), as part of a benefit for the Mayor’s Commission on People with Disabilities. The red carpet affair included “I am a camera” HighE Dillon who took posed and random shots of Mayor Nutter, Governor Ed Rendell, and Joan Bressler of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office. Seidelman was also present but tracking her down at the post film reception was not easy. We wanted to ask her about her film, Desperately Seeking Susan, with the then rising star Madonna, but like Governor Rendell and the Mayor, she either skipped the reception or was being held hostage by admirers. The film had many in the Kimmel wiping their eyes. “What a tear jerker,”Dillon told us afterwards, still wiping an eye.


When you go out to lunch at a restaurant like Nineteen atop the Bellevue on Broad Street, you expect to dine in pleasant surrounding, pay your check and leave, not witness a man in his sixties get up from a neighboring table when his wife goes to the ladies room, walk over to a window and jump out onto Broad Street. That’s what a friend of ours saw weeks ago as he dined there with a friend. “I haven’t been able to sleep for 3 days,” he told us, fairly distraught. “The man just walked over to the window and jumped out, after which one of the waitresses fainted.” After the tragedy, management closed the restaurant and escorted diners out. “But there was nothing on the news,” our friend added. “A man jumps out onto Broad Street at lunch time and it goes unreported!” We researched the incident but getting the facts wasn’t easy. Nineteen had no comment while Bellevue management confirmed that someone had indeed died out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, adding, “You’ll have to call the police for the rest of the story.” The police were “sort of” forthcoming. They took our information with a promise to call back but it took a reminder call from us two days later to get them to tell us that we had to call the City Medical Examiner’s Office. When we did that we were told to call another number and then wait for a return call. We finally received the confirmation we were looking for 5 days after the original request: a 66 year old man from Ventor, New Jersey, had indeed committed suicide from Nineteen on that fateful September afternoon.

Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Tony Auth was on hand at the Philadelphia History Museum for a retrospective of some of his best work from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Auth was everything to political progressives during the Ronald Reagan era. An engaging, almost elfin looking man in a perfectly contoured John Steinbeck beard, Auth greeted well wishers and chatted with PHM Executive Director Charles Croce about his career and the glory days of The Inquirer. We learned, among other things, that when he lacked inspiration, he’d head to the movies for ideas and that during his tenure at the paper he only had one cartoon rejected by Inquirer bosses. While The Inquirer gave Auth complete artistic freedom, it also reminded him that it held editorial veto power. During the Q and A with Croce Auth made several inferences that the once great Philadelphia Inquirer has indeed fallen from grace. At the reception he elaborated further when he told us that a young Tony Auth looking for a newspaper venue in 2013 wouldn’t stand a chance at his alma mater.

What’s going on with PAFA, one of our favorite institutions, and its fascination with cartoon characters? We tried to get into the mouse like blow up doll, the ‘Companion’ statue by artist Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) last spring when PAFA plunked it down in 30th Street Station directly across from the Angel of the Resurrection sculpture. We know that times are tough and that people need laughter, but are blow up dolls the answer? KAWS has found a good “Red Grooms” style gimmick although the whole thing makes us think of a children’s circus. The new KAWS @ PAFA exhibit suggests to us that cartoons masquerading as art are propagating like bed bugs: from the single 30th Street blow up doll there are now three more KAWS blow up dolls, one a 9 ¾ foot tall sculpture entitled ‘Born to Bend’ as well as cartoon character portraits hung salon style in the venerable halls of PAFA. The KAWS phenomena makes us think of the time Thomas Eakins accepted an award from PAFA in red bicycle pants and then promptly had the award (a medal) melted down. Was Eakins seeing the birth of a cartoon art in the museum’s future? Since there’s no telling what might happen next in the world of art, how about an inflatable KAWS PAFA building--- the art museum as a pop-up, moveable rubber raft?

We talked shop with The Philadelphia Tribune’s Bobbi Booker during the Museum of Art’s press reception for Ledger: Modern Art and the Metropolis. The massive exhibition (October 2013-January 5, 2014) is in the Dorrance Galleries. Leger, who studied architecture, was, like Warhol and Jean Cocteau, an artist who engaged painting with the popular arts. The exhibit includes “The City,” one of the greatest works in PMS’s collection, at least according to Timothy Rub, PMA CEO. Check out the PMA gift shop for Leger goodies as well: there’s resin jewelry, ceramic kitchen and dinnerware, and more.

Marty Moss-Coane was born on Valentine’s Day, 1949. The host and executive producer of Radio Times With Marty Moss-Coane in Philadelphia, started as a volunteer at Philadelphia’s WHYY-FM studios in 1983. From her role as associate producer of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air, she became the host of Radio Times when Gross went national in 1987. Moss-Coane says that in the beginning of her career she was “terrified of making a mistake, of sounding like a fool, of not being as good as Terry Gross.” In another interview, she talked of her radio guests. “We’ve had lousy guests—the lousy guests are ponderous talkers. We’ve had hostile guests; we’ve had guests who were drunk or high. We had one guy who was as high as a kite. The truth is, that’s the rare guest. Most of them are pretty good and we’re pretty choosy who we have on.” Well, maybe not choosy enough if some of these high recognition “names” are snorting in the back aisles.

FOOD IS the NEW GOLD

The Local Lens
Published • Wed, Nov 13, 2013
By Thom Nickels

The recent cut in SNAP benefits or food stamps has made more than a few people uneasy. Obviously, this is the beginning of the end for food stamps. The cuts will lead to more cuts until finally food stamps will be a thing of the past. As reported by The New York Times, this year’s cut is "the largest wholesale cut in the program since Congress passed the first Food Stamps Act in 1964 and touches about one in every seven Americans."

Right wing Republicans (and even some Democrats who should know better) think that these cuts are good for people. "The government shouldn’t be helping people anyway," they proclaim. "One shouldn’t depend on the government for assistance."

Well, that was the general feeling in the year 1890, or the Gilded Age, when the poor literally starved in the streets or were mistreated by employers.

The SNAP cut is problematic because of what it portends for the future. Since the age of Ronald Reagan nearly every social program begun by FDR, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson has been marked for shrinkage or elimination. Assistance programs of all types are being slashed, from unemployment benefits, LIHEAP, and welfare. There are even those who still want to privatize Social Security and the Post Office.

But food, in case you haven’t noticed, is the new gold. That should be obvious to anyone who walks through the doors of the supermarket. Sometimes as I walk about the aisles there, I have to look twice at the very obvious spike of prices on many items. In fact, it’s gotten so bad at the supermarket that spending twenty dollars there will only net you a miniature (as in microscopic) bag of supplies.

Everyone is feeling the punch. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen disgruntled customers checking and rechecking the prices on receipts outside the supermarket before loading their groceries into cars. Their faces have a pale, shocked quality. They’re hoping that the huge total is the result of a mistake. But it is not a mistake. The total is as real as the cut in food stamps.

As a result of the upsurge in food costs, many people have discovered the "more for your money" pleasure of the Port Richmond Village mall’s two Dollar stores, that used to be places to buy non-food items like paper products but which are now fast becoming supermarkets because of the addition of more food aisles than ever before.

O the blessed times in which we live!

People who have never shopped at dollar stores are now packing the aisles there because, outside of blowing an entire paycheck on food, there’s simply no alternative.

"One can always eat less," as somebody once told me. Well, that’s true, but when ‘less’ spells hunger, then we have a problem.

There are food banks, of course. The PhilAbundance depository at 601 W. Lehigh Avenue is only one of many such free food banks in the city. On certain days of the week you can see the long lines of people waiting to obtain a very small amount of free food, from canned goods, meats, milk and cheese. Just one year ago the lines outside the Lehigh Avenue outlet were moderate in length, but today they stretch on for at least a block and a half. It’s obvious that the lines will grow substantially in the future. A good many of people in line are elderly who very often bring portable stools or fold up chairs to sit out the interminable wait, since the line moves at a snail’s pace. Good-natured volunteer workers stock the Lehigh Avenue outlet’s shelves and guide participants through the small room packed with food selections that vary from week to week. Some weeks, it seems, the selections are exceedingly generous, but other weeks there’s no variety at all. But you can always count on canned beans, corn, plantains (not bananas), crème of chicken soup and frozen pork sausage. Hey, it’s food!

While the PhilAbundance scene is enough to make the uppity Whole Foods crowd hold their noses, if things get much worse the invisible food immunity granted to Whole Foods Foodies will come to an end.

Unfortunately, the variety of free food offered at PhilAbundance has suffered serious declines. A year or two ago participants could take twice as much food as they are being offered today, a downsizing that suggests the program might be in trouble because of the huge numbers of new applicants.

It’s enough to make a prophet of doom ask: are we headed for some kind of food shortage or famine? As reported by Stephen C. Smith of George Washington University, "About 925 million are currently hungry, not far from the all-time record. A family living in poverty in a low-income country may spend almost three-quarters of their income on food."

Are we, as a nation, going to suffer food shortages in the future so that we go around looking like those leading Hollywood actors who lose weight just to excel in a movie role? Careerism, not hunger, nearly destroyed the bodies and health of these actors (who should know better) when they lost 50 pounds or over to win a Golden Globe or an Academy Award. The photos of these emaciated men, available on the Web, remind us of authentic victims of hunger, or even some future scenario of what many of us would look like when, and if, there’s not enough to eat, or if food becomes so expensive that it is attainable only by a few. The results of not eating can be ghastly. Nothing can explain the absurdist antics of those careerist actors who risk death, disease and the deterioration of their looks just to sustain a role in a movie.

Actor Tom Hanks may have been having fun when he lost 55 pounds to play a FedEx employee stranded on an island in the movie Castaway’ but in the end he gave himself infections, a rapidly aged face and body, and diabetes.

Actor Christian Bale is probably the most extreme example of a careerist weight loss fanatic. When he lost weight to appear in The Machinist, not only was he barely recognizable in his new skeletal state but also many say that he came very close to death. Of course, this latest Hollywood trend among male actors is its own story, but it does serve to point out the horrific effects of going hungry and starvation.

I’m not saying that the people in the PhilaAbundance line look like Christian Bale or Tom Hanks after a self-imposed starvation diet, but the sickly images of these guys do illustrate the supreme importance of food and nutrition, and the disastrous effects of forced fasting or not being able to eat because of controlled (high) food prices, corrupt Agribusiness, or famine.

It may or may not be science fiction to imagine that during any world emergency, the availability of food would almost certainly be affected in a negative way, and that eating as one ate "before" would be the exclusive province of the rich.

Food, at that point, would have an even higher value than gold.

Miraculous Icons

I took to the road again but this time headed to visit one of my favorite places, Saint Tikhon's monastery. Saint Tikhon's is an Orthodox monastery about 40 minutes outside of Scranton. The three hour trip on Martz Trailways went without a hitch. One of the monks, Brother Stephen, was at the bus terminal waiting for me when I arrived. We chatted amiably in the car on the way to the monastery gates, and then I was left on my own at the guest house where I unpacked and read until the two-hour Vespers service at 4:30. Dinner followed at 6:30 and then there'd be free time to read, explore the grounds (and the woods) until bed.

Life in a monastery is generally serious business. There is no such thing as "monastery entertainment," no movie nights or daily happy hours. I didn't take a cell phone or a laptop but opted to go natural. It was good to get away from the city and to talk to the monks. In the car on the way from the bus, for instance, Brother Stephen told me about a group of retired Catholic nuns who love to visit St. Tikhon's. These sisters are ultra modern types who don't wear a religious habit, so it's my guess that they are drawn to the extreme traditionalism at the monastery, where the monks wear cassocks twenty-four seven. In any event, Brother Stephen had a lot of nice things to say about these nuns.

Like my first visit to the monastery a year and a half ago, I was the only one staying at the guest house. My large room had two twin beds, a desk, closet, and a bathroom across the hall. Near the bathroom was a communal kitchen of sorts that was also attached to a hermitage where a very learned priest-monk, Father Athanasay lived. Father Athanasay, Brother Stephen informed me, was a former Jesuit Catholic priest who switched to Orthodoxy around the time of the Second Vatican Council. Father Athanasay has a particular devotion to Saint Anna, the mother of Mary. As a result of that devotion he was able to donate a miraculous icon of Saint Anna to St. Tikhon's, although this icon didn't start out as miraculous at all.

Years ago Father Athanasay was approached by an elderly woman who gave him money to spend as he pleased. Father Athanasay decided he would go to an iconographer and have an icon made of Saint Anna, his patron saint. Shortly after the icon was made, it began to stream myrrh (perfumed oil). This fact attracted considerable attention, which inevitably led to numerous reports of miracles and healings after people prayed before the icon. The icon of Saint Anna is located in a small, separate chapel near the monastic dormitory. The chapel is large enough for fifteen monks and is sometimes used when the main church is over crowded due to a St. Tikhon's seminary event. Brother Stephen was kind enough to show me the icon, taking it out of its glass container so that I could get a close up view of it as well as see the gifts of jewelry, necklaces and rings draped around the perimeter of the icon. These gifts were left by people who had benefited from miracles as a result of prayers to Saint Anna.

If you're not Catholic or Orthodox, all this might sound like Halloween hocus pocus. Some people, in fact, have suggested that the miraculous effects of the icon (or any icon) are illusionary, and that the streaming part is a hoax engineered by priests or monks just to get people to donate money or come to church. "There has to be a rational explanation," one friend of mine insisted. I am at a loss to explain these things to skeptics except to shrug and say that the mysteries in the universe sometimes outweigh rationality and logic. Sometimes there isn't a rational explanation. When Brother Stephen showed me the icon of Saint Anna, I didn't smell perfume or see it stream myrrh, but I did cross myself and give it a kiss.

Two days later I would visit Saint George's Orthodox Greek Catholic church in Taylor, Pennsylvania, when the Abbott of Saint Tikhon's invited me to accompany one of the monks and his visiting parents to a service around the exposition of two weeping icons that have been attracting considerable attention.

For at least two years these icons of the Virgin Mary (Theotokos) have exuded a fragrant oil or perfume like substance that literally flows down the surface of the icon, so much so that it can be collected in a bottle or swabbed up with cotton balls. Sometimes the streaming is so intense it fogs the outer glass containers into which the icons are placed. The service, called a Moleben, is about 40 minutes of prayers and hymns during which the priest places the icons on a Tetrapod (or stand) and then anoints the congregants with the myrrh. In the past, the Moleben has attracted thousands of people, some of whom have reported healings of serious back pain and stroke related problems. Brother Stephen said that there were so many people at the service one year that the local police had to direct traffic in and out of the church parking lot.

The people who attend these services are Orthodox, Roman and Byzantine Catholic Christians. In the Catholic world, there are statues and pictures of the Virgin Mary that also weep. But this is not about seeing the face of Jesus or Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich or the swirl of a Dairy Crème ice cream cone. The media favors these frivolous stories because they tend to poke fun at crazy religious people up to their necks in superstition. There's nothing laughable about an icon that weeps.

That's why when the Abbott, Father Sergius, asked me if I'd like to accompany the monk and his parents to see these icons, I replied with curious enthusiasm. On the evening of the service, I met up with Father Silouan, the young bearded monk who converted to Orthodoxy several years ago after finding himself in a rut while attending art school. Father Silouan, who is currently an iconographer at St. Tikhon's, changed his mind about a career as a secular artist when the instructors at the art school he was attending announced that they would begin to teach students how to sell and make money from their art. The future monk, cooled by this emphasis on money, announced that he was not interested in doing art for cash. As a result, he left art school and then, through a serendipitous chain of events, happened to find himself inside an Orthodox church when one of his friends told him that he "should take a look at this place."

Father Silouan took to Orthodoxy like a fish to water and not long after entered the monastery at St. Tikhon's. But for his parents it was a slightly longer road. While traveling with Father Silouan's family, his mother told me that she was at first a little put off by her son's conversion. For many Protestant evangelicals, like Father Silouan's mom, Orthodoxy can seem like voodoo with its icons, candles, incense and blatantly un-modern vestments. Nevertheless, both she and her husband followed their son's path. For Fr. Silouan's father, who was born Catholic, the transition was easier. He told me that following his son was like going back to the Church of his childhood before Vatican II.

Fr. Silouan's mother recalled the initial reactions of her evangelical friends when she told them she was now Orthodox: "It's superstition, almost witchcraft!" some of them replied. Of course, her friends were thinking about the icons, and how they saw them as idol worship, even if they didn't realize that prayers are said to the saint the icon represents, not to the icon per se (as an idol). Icons, simply put, are not worshipped. Catholics get similar criticisms when some insist that they pray to statues, not to the saint a statue represents. Father Silouan's mother found that explaining these things to her questioning friends to be a hopelessly frustrating experience. "This is the original Christianity," she told me she told them. "Before there was scripture -- before there was a bible -- there was liturgy."

The church was crowded when we arrived. There were Greeks, non-Greeks, non-Christians, workmen who looked as though they'd just left a construction site, elderly couples, people with obvious medical conditions, families, children and curiosity seekers. The two icons, in glass containers, were placed front and center before the iconostasis. The priest, in blue vestments, chanted a prayer that elicited robust responses from the hundreds present. The energy in that small church had an upward drift, even a touch of the charismatic, but just a touch, because the Orthodox never get crazy with these things. You won't find hand waving, head rolling, or snake charming.

By the time we made our way to the icons to get anointed from the streaming myrrh, the entire church had the smell of roses. We watched as the priest would switch from one icon to another, sometimes holding one aloft but at an angled position so that the myrrh would run in a steady stream into the cupped hands of congregants. The streams of myrrh were constant. When it was my turn, my forehead was swabbed with the fragrant oil. Some people were in tears.

For a good 10 minutes or so in the car on the way back to the monastery, nobody said a word. We were all still in the perfumed environment of the church.

The tempo changed when Fr. Silouan announced that, compliments of the Abbot, we would be stopping at a Chinese restaurant for a bite to eat because we had missed dinner at the monastery.

We continued to talk about what we had experienced through dinner, feeling very good that we had witnessed a true... miracle.

Halloween and the Henri David Machine

It's Halloween, and I'm sitting in Henri David's living room in Philadelphia on a small Victorian sofa. On the mantelpiece in front of me are two bronze dragons perched on globe-like foundations. Dragons are never pictured as happy creatures, and these monsters are no exceptions. On the floor a bust of Nefertiti catches my eye, while directly above the mantle is an oil painting of Henri in a Salvador Dalí-like setting.

The house has the air of ruined aristocracy. In fact, you expect Madame Blavatsky and her crystal ball to walk in at any moment and take a seat.

Forty-five years ago Henri David, or Mr. Halloween, was a bearded, long-haired hippie who liked to hang out with female impersonators. The impersonators took him under their wing and brought him to New York City, where they showed him auditorium-sized drag balls. There were no large-scale drag balls like this in Philadelphia. (Of course, Henri would later change that.) Worse, when Halloween came around, there were only private Philadelphia house parties and bars to frequent, but no glamorous Halloween balls.

In 1968, Henri, all dressed up for Halloween and with no place to go except to those isolated, private house parties and bars, decided that it was time to do something big on his own.

He knew right away that he had to start his own Halloween ball tradition, so he went to the Philadelphia Hotel at Broad and Race Streets and initiated the first big city ball. Preparation for the first event was tough. He printed flyers and pasted them himself to poles all over the city, in stark contrast to then-popular counterculture posters calling for an end to the war in Vietnam.

He had no money but still managed to pull it off.

The next year the Halloween ball went to The Drake on Spruce Street, and to Town Hall at Broad and Race after that.

"When it all started," Henri tells me, "the Rittenhouse Square society ladies decided, 'Ah, this is wonderful! This is like a masked ball, like the old days!'" The society ladies (who frequented teas at the Barclay Hotel) liked Henri, and he was soon getting invites to their fancy cocktail parties, where he says he met the likes of Fernanda Wanamaker and Hope Montgomery Scott (who lost the vision in one of her eyes when she tried uncorking a champagne bottle). Hobnobbing with the social register set didn't stop him from posting flyers about the Miss Gay Philadelphia contest, a drag ball that he organized and that no doubt helped him refine his Halloween skills.

"For the Halloween ball, I would always get the most glorious building I could afford with chandeliers and velvet curtains," he says.

Hotel managers, benevolently suspicious, saddled him with questions: "Why do you need a runway? Why don't you want this set up like a wedding?"

"'Think of it as fashion show,'" Henri says he told them. ""I want everyone to be seen. This is a show. There's got to be room for dancing, so I don't want big tables all over the floor.'

"Philly used to be a drag town in those days," he reminds me. "People would come from New York because we had such beauties here. That changed in the 1980s, when gay men started wearing 501s and desert boots and flannel shirts. They all went to that extreme to the point where you wanted to say, 'Ease up a little bit.' In those days it was politically incorrect to do drag."

The new, macho, "construction worker" drag, Henri says, "changed everything."

"I got fewer and fewer impersonators at the party, but the costumes got better and better. It forced guys to say, 'I can come as an emperor now without putting on a dress.'"

Today, of course, the impersonators are back in force, but people come to the ball dressed any way they want. You can find Roman soldiers, zombie cowboys, bishops in towering miters, '50s girls, biker-chic, mermaids, nuns in neon habits, vampire seductresses, hobo werewolves, or people dressed as pizzas or boxes of Franzia and macaroni and cheese.

"The 1970s were the 'take-a-fag-to-lunch' decade," Henri says, smiling, recalling how one time Philly celebrities like Harry Jay Katz and Sam Rappaport would invite him to accompany them all over town.

"Katz would make sure I went to every event that he did. Their attitude was, 'Oh, Henri's a little naughty. He'll do it with style. He won't bare his full bottom. He'll bring well-dressed freaks and elegant freaks who would not grab your husband!'"

When the ball was held at the Warwick Hotel in 1973, the same year that Philadelphia Magazine did a feature on the event, the area around the hotel exploded with taxis, limos, streaming paparazzi, horse-drawn carriages and even hearses that delivered famous guests at the door. Henri recalls how Frank Rizzo, who was mayor then, "very graciously" sent mounted police officers to direct traffic.

"I met with Mayor Rizzo once or twice face-to-face. He was from the old school of Italian mentality where you don't raid gay bars, you don't bother gay events, because you know where they are. If you raid them, gays scatter, and you're going to have to find them again."

"Today at the ball there's a whole generational change," Henri says. "Whether people passed away, moved, or have gotten too conservative, my army is no longer around. The people I grew up and came up with just don't go out. Or they'll come to the party at 9 and leave at 10."

But it's the art students, he says, who are his new fans.

"So many of them think I'm the bomb," he says. "They've figured it out, even if most of them might not be aware of the history of the ball and how it used to be mainly a drag affair." But this cross-pollination of sexual orientations is something that Henri relishes. "I've always wanted that," he says, despite the number of young female fans today who don't recognize him and approach him on the night of the ball and remark, "Oh, that's a fabulous costume. I hope you win something."

Perhaps it takes some maturity to put a "face" on history, but Henri is always there to teach the "newly" hip. He's even "there" for his jewelry customers who come up to him in his shop and say, "Oh, did you know that there's another Henri David who puts on the Halloween ball?"

Then there are the people in the city who get Henri confused with John DeBella, the radio celebrity who throws his own, albeit smaller, Halloween party in Northern Liberties.

"We'll cross paths, and he'll tell me, 'I don't look like you!' and I'll say, 'I don't look like you either!'"

Of course, the ball always attracts major celebrities who are performing at the casinos or at local theaters. They'll come up to Henri, masked, lean over and whisper, "Guess who I am."

Could it be Brad Pitt? Johnny Depp? Richard Gere? Nicole Kidman?

As for the art of costuming, Henri suggests that if you want to come to the ball, don't fret, just go to your closet and take out something you never wear, something old or exotic, and then build on that. "Get yourself out of your normal mode. Our door people are very lenient as to what constitutes a costume."

His worst fear, he says, confiding to me as we leave the rustic Victorian setting, is staying too long at the fair. He does not want to become one of those tired old hacks who keep putting out a product when they should walk away and give it a rest. "If I reach that point, tell me," he says. "Just tell me."