"The sleep schedule came out of a desperate need to know where our beds were going to be that night," says Morning Glory. "We needed some kind of stability. So we had some family meetings where we sat down and kind of broke down the week. We tried to figure out a place where everybody had somebody that they wanted to sleep with at least once or twice a week and that they also got time alone."
"Typically during the week I will sleep with Morning Glory on Mondays and Tuesdays," says Wolf. "Wednesdays every other week I'm out of town. I have friends in Sacramento. I game with them and come back Thursday morning. Typically Wynter and I are together Thursday and Friday. Weekends are always chaotic, often there's a festival or something. I have occasional dates with my girlfriend in San Francisco, about once a month. I try to get at least about one night to myself a week. Otherwise, I go nuts."
"Monday and Tuesday nights Liza and Oberon are together," Morning Glory explains. "But Liza and Jon are going away to the Loving More conference this weekend and then they're going to the Zeg community summer camp so it's important that Liza and Oberon get some time to spend together. And Wolf has been ill with the flu so he and I have been kind of not together. So normally I would have been alone. But last night Wynter had a date canceled with her outside boyfriend so she came to me and said, 'Hey, how about we have a date?'"
Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Wynter get together and have sex. Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Oberon have sex. Part of the reason family members tend not to inquire about what sex is like between other people is that they know what it's like. They've been there.
"Wynter doesn't ask me what I do with Morning Glory because she's been there many, many times," says Wolf. "There's nothing I know about sex with Morning Glory that she doesn't."
And although a great deal of their conversation revolves around the topic of sex-"For us, sex is like going to the grocery store," says Wolf-the Ravenhearts don't come down for breakfast and spill every detail of the previous night's encounter. "We talk amongst ourselves about our desires and about what turns us on," says Wolf. "But we don't just get up in the morning and chew the fat about what went on. Someone might say 'Hey, it sounds like you broke a chandelier last night,' but that's about it."
It should be noted that the Ravenhearts are not swingers. "The primary difference between the swingers community and the poly community is not so much their sexual practice but that their swinging is a purely discreet sexual activity," says Morning Glory. "With polyamory, it permeates every aspect of our lives."
That means that the Ravenhearts have what amounts to scores of in-laws. Their families, for the most part, accept their living arrangement. Morning Glory and Oberon both have grown children, though not by each other. Wolf has an eight-year-old daughter who lives with her (non-poly) mother in Texas. Family relations seem amazingly un-strained. When I visited the Ravenhearts in August of 2000, Wolf's daughter had just returned to her home in Texas after staying with the family for six weeks. He had given up his room for her, which didn't cause too much inconvenience since he only sleeps in it one night a week.
All of the Ravenhearts have their own bedrooms, except for Oberon, who uses the Mythic Images office as his personal space and floats from room to room as the schedule dictates. The family members stress again and again that the schedule is "fluid," that if someone is not in the mood for a date with a particular person there's no obligation to keep it. They're also allowed to stop sleeping with someone if they want to, although the implication is that they'll eventually start up again.
"I think someone would just say, 'I'm entering a nonsexual phase in our relationship for a while and we just need to be in that space for a while,'" says Morning Glory. "And everyone needs to be okay with that if they're given that message. And what's nice is that there's always someone else in the family who can take up the slack so you're not just totally left out in the cold."
Not that it happens very often.
"We're all here because we've chosen to be here," says Morning Glory. "We've made a commitment to each other."
"People talk about commitment and assume that we must not be interested in it, but the thing is we love commitment," says Oberon. "The hard thing is finding other people who want to make commitments to us."
Though the present incarnation of the Ravenhearts was just a glimmer in Morning Glory's and Oberon's eyes when they met back in 1973, they made it clear from the start that they wanted such a family. The scene was the third-annual Gnostic Aquarian Festival, a psychic phenomena conference in Minneapolis. Oberon was delivering a lecture on the Gaia thesis. Morning Glory had hitchhiked to the conference from Eugene, Oregon, where she was living on a commune with her husband and four-year-old daughter. Though she had an open marriage-"that was the only way I would have ever agreed to be with anyone," she says-her husband was less enthusiastically poly than she was. "I had a lot of other lovers and he had occasional ones that I would engineer for him so he wouldn't be left out," she says. "But he wasn't really interested in being with anybody but me."
After Oberon's lecture, he and Morning Glory felt that they were pulled toward each other by a magnetic force. She leapt from her chair and ran up to him. He immediately took her hand and they walked out of the room where they had what Morning Glory calls "a telepathic communion." They stared at each other for five or ten minutes without speaking, yet they managed to silently convey to each other the sum total of their entire lives.
"We kissed and touched and just connected, and it was clear that we were going to be together," Morning Glory says. She knew that she was in love with Oberon and that she wanted to be in his life. But she had a husband and a child. Moreover, she says, she had a commitment to non-monogamy and she felt she had to tell him that right away.
"I said to him 'I know what we have is really unique and special and I really want to be with you for the rest of my life,'" says Morning Glory. "'But there's something really important about myself that I have to tell you. If what you want is a monogamous relationship I can't give that to you. It's not in my nature. I never planned to just meet someone and get divorced and dump all the rest of my lovers.' And the look on his face! It was like 'I finally found her!'"
Within twenty-four hours, Morning Glory and Oberon decided to get married at the next Gnostic Aquarian convention in six months. "We were so gaga," Morning Glory says. "We couldn't be separated long enough to go pee."
For the next twenty-two years, Morning Glory and Oberon shared lovers and friends. From 1983 to 1994, they were in an open triad relationship with another woman who had a child, which they all raised together. In 1993, Morning Glory met Wolf at a Pagan Halloween gathering in Tennessee. He was living in Houston at the time and working at Kinko's. For two years they had a long-distance relationship. "Wolf and I would have phone sex," Morning Glory says.
"And after she'd hang up she and I would have wild sex!" Oberon says, interrupting her.
When Morning Glory visited Wolf in Houston for the first time, she walked into his house and knew he would form the perfect triad with her and Oberon. "I looked around and I started laughing internally," she says. "There were the same books on the shelves [that Oberon had], the same comic books, astronomy books, old Star Trek episodes. He had the only other Klingon knife that I'd seen in my life other than Oberon's. And Wolf came out and stayed and we found a really great unit."
In 1995, Wolf moved to California to join Oberon and Morning Glory and the three of them were married in a triad hand-fasting ceremony. This was around the time that Oberon met Liza through a mutual lover. Liza was living on the East Coast at the time, but she fell in love with Oberon and a year later she moved to California. At that point, they were a group of four, but as blissful as life was, something was still missing. Though Morning Glory and Wolf were deeply in love, they knew they weren't soul mates (Oberon is Morning Glory's soul mate), and Morning Glory was always on the lookout for a soul mate for Wolf. She also happened to be in the market for another female partner for herself. Then a young woman named Wynter, who had been raised in the area by poly parents, showed up on Morning Glory's doorstep seeking work at Mythic Images.
"She was the woman I'd been looking for my whole life," says Morning Glory. "We realized we were each other's missing female component."
Morning Glory and Wynter developed a friendship that gradually turned into romantic love. "She was just seventeen at the time so we had to do a lot of sitting on our hands and working out things with her mom and dad and stuff like that," says Morning Glory. "And she ended up coming to work for me as an employee, and it wasn't until she was fully legal that we were able to act on anything."
In the meantime, however, something even more amazing happened. Morning Glory introduced Wynter to Wolf at the pagan May Day celebration, a sexual erotic energy festival. They fell in love instantly and turned out to be soul mates. Wynter formally entered the family in 1997, on her eighteenth birthday, and became the lover of both Morning Glory and Wolf. "For me it was yet another romance come true," says Morning Glory. "I was able to have the other man who I love most in my life and the woman I love most in my life be bonded in the same way that Oberon and I were bonded."
Two days after her wedding to Wolf, which was performed by Morning Glory and Oberon, who are legally recognized clergy of the Church of All Worlds, Wynter is weary yet has the serene glow of the newly betrothed. With her red hair, pale, lightly freckled skin, and long loose dress, she has that Celtic goddess look you sometimes see in young women who work in head shops. When we meet in the family's garden, where the wedding ceremony took place, she has just returned from the house of some of her outside lovers, a male/female couple that she sees regularly. She tries to get at least two nights a week with her husband. Every other Wednesday she sleeps with Morning Glory. Wynter has, in current rotation, approximately twenty lovers.
"I never know who I'm sleeping with on Wednesday night because every other Wednesday Wolfie goes gaming," Wynter says. "I always forget what Wednesday it is, so I'm like 'Hmm, who am I sleeping with?' It's amazing that I lead this life because I'm really into my solitary space. I need my time to be alone. Usually I take it in the morning. I take two hours and I go in the hot tub and I read Harry Potter and write in my journal. All my nights are filled so every morning I take time and do what I want to do."
We are soon joined by Jon, a tall blue-eyed blond with a long ponytail. Of all the Ravenhearts, he's the "straightest" looking. His clothes suggest no particular cultural affiliation. As a computer specialist, he's also the only Ravenheart who has a job outside the home. Jon fell in love with Liza in 1998 and became an official Ravenheart just this past January. Today he's hanging out with a young woman named Jezebel, who isn't a member of the family but who is living in one of the apartments next to the house. Jon and Jezebel are currently lovers. In the past, Jezebel has been involved in threesomes with Wolf and Wynter. These days she's taking some time for herself, happy to be Jon's "secondary" (his primary being Liza) and learning to be her "own primary."
"When I moved onto this property I had to assure Jon that I wasn't moving in for him," says Jezebel, who, unlike just about everyone else in this story, actually tells me her legal name-Jennifer. "It was just because I wanted to live here."
"Right now I'm being pretty particular about who I sleep with," says Jon. "I don't have a lot of lovers."
Morning Glory, who has ambled into the garden, nods approvingly to Jon and gives him a supportive little thumbs-up. You can't help but wonder if the discernment he's just articulated is the unconscious wish of every Ravenheart.
Jon had heard of the Ravenhearts well before he ever got involved with them. He met Liza through an "erotic community," which she describes as an organized retreat wherein groups of thirty or so people get together and are "openly sexual with each other." Jon was a bit intimidated when he learned that her primary lover was Oberon Ravenheart, not for reasons having to do with sexual prowess, but because Jon feared his knowledge of paganism wasn't sufficiently developed. But the family embraced him wholeheartedly. It also helped that, like Wolf, he was a gamer.
"The first step to becoming a Ravenheart is you have to fall madly in love with someone who already is a Ravenheart and they have to fall madly in love with you," says Liza, who calls Jon "a very special person" for being able to enter such a large, established group. "Then comes the difficult part. Just being madly in love and having some kind of partnership with one of us doesn't make you a Ravenheart. You have to have a relationship with every Ravenheart. In other words, every Ravenheart has to be in harmony with your presence."
It would seem that to become a Ravenheart you'd also have to meet a need that no one else is meeting. The idea that different people fulfill different needs, sexually and otherwise, is an almost constant refrain in the household. In some cases, it's abundantly clear what one person can bring to the table that another can't. "Oberon and Jon are over thirty years apart," says Liza. "Obviously they're totally different. Oberon has a lot of wisdom and experience. Jon is very loving and playful."
"The way I make love to Morning Glory is different than the way I make love to Wynter," says Wolf. "Having to accommodate the needs of different women makes me a better lover. You don't have to be in a poly relationship to understand that people have different needs sexually or whatever. If I were to go down the line and think of how I was sexually with the different women I've dated, being the same with each of them would just not be appropriate."
Wynter, as Wolf describes her, is "catch as catch can." She likes to dress up in sexy clothes and seduce him while he's paying bills. If she's in the garden, she wants to have sex in the garden. She also likes to do it in the hot tub. "If she says 'Let's take a hot tub' it means 'Let's have sex'," Wolf says.
The issue of privacy is twofold in the Ravenheart household. On one hand, there are plenty of places to be alone. On the other, walking in on someone having sex is not exactly scandal-worthy. "If someone comes up to the hot tub they'll always say 'May I join you?'" explains Wolf. "If you want to be alone you just say so. But there's also no embarrassing social taboo about sex. That dims the voyeuristic thrill."
The same goes for nudity. Wolf points out that, during my visit, the Ravenhearts have gone out of their way to keep themselves clothed. "When it's hot, Oberon hardly ever wears clothes," he says. "We think nothing of walking around in the yard naked. That's why we have the privacy fence."
With both sex and nudity stripped of their taboos, the Ravenhearts seem to fall back on role-playing.
"Often Morning Glory and I will dress up and play pirate games," Wolf says. "We also play a lot of nurse games."
The fact that Wolf can have spontaneous, hot tub sex with Wynter and preplanned, full-costumed sex with Morning Glory plays right into their central argument for polyamory, which is, essentially, that it takes a village to fill the libido's every need. "In my monogamous marriage, which was very short-lived, the thing that nearly crushed me was that if I didn't meet every single emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, and mental need that person had, that need went unmet," says Wolf. "Here you don't have that. For example, I don't like horses. But Wynter and Morning Glory love horses. Well, they can go horseback riding together and I don't have to."
This is the kind of argument that can elude those of us who aren't poly. It seems to me that anyone with any kind of relationship experience at all knows that their beloved can't be expected to fill every emotional, physical, psychological, mental, and even sexual need. To most of us, that's what friends, colleagues, psychiatrists, and Internet news groups are for.
"Why do I have to live with someone in order to go horseback riding with them?" says Morning Glory. "Because then my wife and I can go home and have great sex!"
Could it be that great sex is what some polys do rather than going out for coffee? When Morning Glory counts the number of lovers she expects to have this year ("People who if I find myself in any kind of proximity to them there's a high probability that sex will occur"), she arrives at a number around twenty. This includes people she might run into occasionally or see when she travels out of town. She thinks about this in a manner that I might apply to how many people I'd expect to have lunch with in a given year.
"By becoming sexually involved with someone I feel like I can make a difference in their life," says Morning Glory. "For years I've found people and it's like I have some kind of calling to help them. It's like the goddess taps me on the shoulder and says 'That one over there.' I've never been a prostitute. I've never charged for my sexual favors. But I have bestowed them generously all over the planet and tried to do so from a place of energizing people and turning them on and getting them involved with being happy in their own lives."
Asking a poly whether or not they get jealous is sort of like asking a tall person how the weather is up there. The question got old a long time ago and to the Ravenhearts it seems irrelevant. According to Oberon, the answer again goes back to Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land concept, which is, as Heinlein wrote, that "love is that condition where another person's happiness is essential to your own." In other words, if you love someone, set them up with someone else. The Ravenhearts often introduce each other to new potential sex partners. It's a kind of mitzvah Liza calls "a conspiracy of heart's desire."
"Whenever we start to talk about poly lifestyles the issue of jealousy comes up," says Liza, who seems somehow less earnest than the other members of the family and has an appealing, self-deprecating laugh. "And that really limits the conversation. Because really jealousy is a response to wanting to get your needs met and clumsily going about doing it. When people have their needs met they don't give a damn about what other people are doing."
Unlike Morning Glory and Oberon, who rejected monogamy as early as elementary school, or Wynter, who was raised by poly parents, Liza grew up idolizing her parents' monogamous marriage. Like many of us, the first time she fell in love she hoped it would last forever. Like just about all of us, it didn't. And although she says she didn't enter polyamory because it seemed like a more realistic choice, she admits that romantic notions of monogamy can set nearly impossible standards for relationships.
"Monogamy in the way that we all fantasize it could be is very rare," Liza says. "Any statistic would bear this out, this is not my perception."
Like Oberon, who laments "conventional society's idea that there's only one way to live and everyone has to be shoehorned into it," Liza wishes that people could be more aware of their choices.
"What I would like to see is a world where people are able to look at their alternatives," she says. "They could view their relationships like a work of art over which they have some measure of creative control rather than be plugged into a few options that are unlikely realistically to fit their real temperament and character."
It would be difficult for anyone with an even moderately progressive sensibility to argue that point. If polyamory was solely concerned with shedding light on relationship options that the mainstream, Judeo-Christian world tends to dismiss as impractical or immoral, I would applaud the Ravenhearts for their magnanimousness and their organizational skills and leave it at that. But for many of the Ravenhearts, especially those who appear to have the most partners, I suspect there is another set of values at work. It has to do with the degree to which they hang their polyamory on their religion and the degree to which that religion is dependent upon the science fiction and fantasy subculture.
When Morning Glory talks about the polyamorous ideas conveyed in Heinlein's novel, her summary goes like this: "He spun a really fascinating possibility. What if you didn't have to stop dating? You could continue including your lovers as your best friends and their lovers as their best friends. You could build a whole social structure of a family that was bonded on this profound spiritual and sexual level."
As nice as this sounds, it seems like a much taller order than even monogamy. For those of us who spend the majority of our time and mental energy wrestling with the conventions and demands of mainstream, heterogeneous society, the notion of becoming best friends with your lovers and their lovers and everyone else who comes down the pike would require suppressing our personal tastes to an almost impossible degree. In other words, most of us aren't capable of liking that many people, let alone bonding with them on a profound spiritual and sexual level.
But here is where I am reminded of the sci-fi kids in high school and the medieval jousters in college and can finally begin to understand exactly why they irked so many of us "normal" people. We didn't like the way it was so easy for them to like each other. We were bothered by the fact that their requirements for being turned on seemed to have less to do with things like culturally sanctioned ideas of attractiveness than with their mutual involvement in the subculture. The Ravenhearts are given to statements like "we connected deeply" and "the human capacity for love is infinite." It's also pretty clear that most of them don't often sleep with anyone who doesn't share their interest in paganism or science fiction, and I can't help but wonder if, in their minds, a deep connection is as close at hand as the next meeting of the Eleusinian Mysteries. By being polyamorous, they are, in effect, giving themselves permission to sleep with other members of the science fiction club. That would seem to call into question just what "infinite capacity for love" really means.
The Ravenhearts's relentless references to things like witchcraft and "the goddess" don't mar the fact that they are fundamentally nice people. Nor does it keep them from being, by all appearances, relatively smart people. Oberon was a leader in the 1960s movement to bring together the various Earth-based religions and unite them under the term "neo-pagan." He is credited with formulating and publishing the theology of deep ecology, best known as the Gaia thesis. All of the Ravenhearts bring some kind of intellectual component to their conversation. They debate various topics. They rationalize their desires. With their deliberate, rather circuitous speech patterns, they sound a lot like philosophy majors at a college with no course requirements.
But like a lot of people immersed in subcultures, there's an intangible gaff in many of the Ravenhearts's perceptions, an imbalance that comes not, as one might assume, from spending more time reading science fiction and fantasy than, say, the newspaper, but from what appears to be a desperate need to compensate for their adolescent nerdiness. Most Ravenhearts talk a lot about feeling alienated in high school. There's much said about being misunderstood. "I wasn't very well socialized," says Morning Glory. "I used to go out into the yard with a flashlight and try to signal the flying saucers to come get me and take me home," Oberon says. "I was a geeky kid," Wolf says. "I didn't lose my virginity until a month before my eighteenth birthday."
Inherent in the belief that one is alienated and "not like the others" is the equally ardent belief that no one anywhere, except perhaps the members of the subculture with which the alienated person has chosen to affiliate himself, has ever had the same feelings. In order to feel truly alienated one must keep a safe distance from the fact that, as self-concepts go, "not like the others" is fairly standard. This distance leads to the kind of mentality that regards the loss of virginity at age eighteen as a freakish thing. It makes a person inclined, as at least two of the Ravenhearts are, to credit the high school drama club-that haven for "misfits" and "outsiders"-with their deliverance into the socialized American teenager-hood. The need to be different means we must constantly promote our unusualness. Oberon tells me he was telepathic until he was two and that he is the reincarnation of his own grandfather. Wolf sometimes bites people.
This is where the Ravenhearts lose me. It's not their polyamory I have a problem with. It's their forced iconoclasm. It's their paraphernalia. It's the fact that they don't seem to sleep with anyone who isn't just like them. The result is that too often "deeply connecting" seems more a matter of shared membership in a subculture-a subculture that is based around the premise of "not fitting in" and has an entire system of toys and tchotchkes and T-shirts to consumerize the idea of not fitting in-than it does with actually connecting.
But despite their heavy involvement in their subculture, the Ravenhearts make a big point of saying that, at root, they're no different from most people. Many polys believe Bill and Hillary Clinton to be polyamorous. "She knows he has other lovers and she ultimately doesn't care," says Wolf. "They're just not in a position to be open about it."
The Ravenhearts pride themselves on their openness. They say they give interviews because they're one of the few poly families who are in a position to be public. Presumably, that position is one of total immersion in the neo-pagan world, a place where, according to them, "diversity is celebrated" and "all forms of relationships and sexual orientations are honored." Here they are immune from the kind of hostility they might elicit if, for instance, they were polyamorous but had names like Steve and Joan and Margaret, and spent their weekends skiing rather than attending the Ancient Ways Festival.
But I would surmise that persecution is not the greatest fear. The greatest fear is of losing the stranger in the strange land. The fear is that "the lifestyle," when it's stripped of its filigrees, will look less like a lifestyle than a human condition, much like being gay or having a tendency to sunburn easily. That's because there's really nothing very strange at all about polyamory. A whole lot of people, in one way or another, participate in it without their friends and neighbors knowing or really caring. The fact that I am interviewing the Ravenhearts and not any of the thousands of other people in this country who probably practice polyamory without knowing there's a name for it says less about our culture's obsession with sex than it does about our obsession with labels. I am interviewing the Ravenhearts because they've given themselves a name, because they have a Web site and a religion and a family business and have decided to incorporate their polyamory into a larger aura of personal style. The Ravenhearts invented a word for this arrangement and have spent the better part of their lives marketing their invention. Ultimately, this story is not about people who have sex with anyone they want. This story is about what happens when you give something a name and, in so doing, deny yourself the unexpected elation that comes from falling in love with someone whose bookshelves hold none of the same books as your own.
AMERICAN SHIKSA.
I was born just another blonde. I hunted for Easter eggs. I decorated trees and ate ham. Like all women of the Protestant tradition I was raised to smile, to cooperate and "help out." I made pot holders and read books on cake decorating. I jumped rope and played hopscotch under vast azure skies. But when adolescence struck something strange happened. Instead of becoming a woman, I became a shiksa. I skipped over the typical stuff, the horses and Love's Baby Soft perfume, and went right for the throat. I just didn't have much taste for those praying quarterbacks, those hunks in blue satin choir robes, the hulking social drinkers, the swaggering lifeguards and stockbrokers, the good old boys from the verdant athletic fields of my youth. I discovered Jewish men like I discovered books: in the library, tucked away in the dark corners of suburbia, reticent and wise and spouting out words I had to look up in the dictionary. Unlike Christian men with their innate sense of entitlement, with their height and freckles and stamp collections and summer Dairy Queen jobs, all those homages to the genetics and accoutrements of Western civilization, Jewish men were rife with ambiguity, buzzing with edge. Their sports were cognitive, their affection seemingly cerebral. They were so smart that they managed to convince girls like me that they liked me for my brain, that even though I was a shiksa, even though I had been deprived of Hebrew school and intense dinner debates about the Palestinian Question, I was a smart girl. A Jewish man knows this is the way to get to a woman. A shiksa likes to think that she's intelligent, even though she's bad at math, even though she had to take remedial chemistry with the drug addicts and the pregnant girls. But the Jewish man is cunning in his sensitivity. He zooms in on our insecurities and tells us we're "insightful," that we're "real." He wins because for many of us, insight and reality have always been afterthoughts, the quintessential backseat passengers to that driver blondeness. The evolution from blonde girl to shiksa means discovering the exoticism inherent in her blandness. It is to be a foreigner in an utterly American way.
Herein began a life of loving Jews, of having a crush on the Alex Reiger character on Taxi, of preferring Bernstein to Woodward, of deciding that I was naturally neurotic, that angst flattered me, that I was smarter than my blonde counterparts, that I was funnier than my parents, that I was among the "other" chosen. Ten years after I won my first Easter egg hunt, I found myself face-to-face with a grand and brooding destiny, with dark-haired boys who read books and stayed up late, who had circles under their eyes, who looked like wise men, like owls perched on the highest rungs of the evolutionary ladder. These were the boys who, in college, combined their pot with wheat germ, who lent you their paperback of the Kama Sutra but asked you not to break the binding. Indeed, this is the allure of the Jewish man: His deviance is too self-conscious to be dangerous. He's a scoundrel but he won't kill you on his motorcycle. He's a molester but not a drunk, a pervert but not a thug.
The first symptom of this infatuation was a desire to be an actual Jew. I yearned for a richer culture, for better debating skills and hair with personality. I was jealous of my Jewish female friends, who never needed to use hot rollers and seemed to know every single person on the East Coast. But my fantasy that I would one morning wake up a Jew soon faded. Even if I converted, the roots were too deep, the culture too personal. Besides, I'm an agnostic, which is a trait only acceptable in natural-born Jews. So I decided that if I couldn't be Jewish I might as well be un-Jewish in as obstreperous and maddening a way as possible. I decided to promote myself by advertising all that I was not. And that meant surrounding myself with Jews and being a gentile. Blonde. Flaky. Adoring.
I soon decided it was my fate-my responsibility, in fact-to surround myself with Jews and eventually marry a Jewish man. I owed it to myself, and even more intensely I owed it to my ancestors, who, in my imagination, had toiled in cultural mediocrity for years, laboring in midwestern farmlands, developing tractor tans, feeding castor oil to cussing kids, shooting rifles straight into the air when there was nothing on TV, doing all those things that are so conspicuously not Jewish.
The dirty secret of goyim everywhere, even those from the highest circles of what the Ralph Lauren home collection would be if it hadn't been the brainchild of a Jew, is that deep inside we're all white trash. Even those who hide behind the cultural cachet of Catholicism or WASPdom know that the distance between Jackie Kennedy and Tonya Harding is just a few rungs on a very rickety ladder. With or without country homes in Kennebunkport or Squibnocket, we're all descendants of shotgun culture, of Coke at breakfast, Triscuits for lunch, 4-H champions, horse thieves, and drunks passed out in front of 60 Minutes. I myself am the daughter of a former Miss Congeniality. Cuckoo clocks have played a role in my childhood. Tornadoes have been of legitimate concern. I am an American. And we in America know about Jews. We know what we want.
One of the first Jewish men I knew had asked his previous girlfriend to perform fellatio on him while he was driving, but since, being Jewish, he also feared getting into an accident, he suggested that they do this while cruising at fifteen miles per hour around an empty parking lot. During my tenure, I was asked to read aloud from Portnoy's Complaint during a car trip from New York to Boston (this he could handle at sixty-five mph). I had never read the book. I had, in fact, confused it somehow with Roger's Version and as my lips passed over the pages I wondered when we were going to get to the part about Jesus Christ.
This boy was smart and adorable, a chronic allergy sufferer from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. He spoke a broken Yiddish. He carried an inhaler of Proventil with him at all times. I was not his girlfriend, merely his backdoor shiksa, a role which suited me fine as I was not interested in full-time motherhood, merely the maid service for which shiksas are so well-known (and well tipped). He told me about his other girlfriends, shiksas of all varieties-black, Asian, Mennonite-whom he invited as guests for Passover seders, after which he would take them to Coney Island and screw them on the sand. I would nod and laugh, even saying "That's interesting," a phrase used often by shiksas when they can't keep up with the conversation. Unlike the Jewish woman, the shiksa is the consummate "other woman." She knows she's not the only one and until she closes the deal by marrying him (extra points for church weddings, even Unitarian), she doesn't care. Her role is not to judge but to conspire, not to bitch but merely moan. Unlike the Jewish woman, who's been raised to have a modicum of pride and certainly wouldn't ruin her hair by doing it on a schmutzy beach, the shiksa probably has sand in her hair anyway.
Ask the Jewish man why he loves the shiksa and the same words always come to his above-average mind: "pliant," "gentle," "breezy." The shiksa is famous for her infinitely bearable lightness. She doesn't boss around handymen. She doesn't talk about her shrink. She doesn't complain about the food in restaurants-she can't tell the difference anyway, having grown up on Green Giant creamed corn. Her primary pose is an embarrassed hand-on-mouth. "Oh, I can't believe I said that," she says without saying anything. Indeed, she often says nothing, which doesn't mean that she has nothing to say, merely that she chooses not to say it. The most brilliant shiksas consider their brains in the same light that they consider their outfits; the old adage "get completely dressed, then take off one piece of jewelry" also applies to the art of conversation. So, she will conjure quite a number of thoughts and offer up only a few, one of which is commonly "Another gin and tonic, please." Like a squirrel gathering acorns she doesn't blow her wad. She lets her Jewish man do most of the talking, thereby securing her position as his number-one dream lay.
Ask us shiksas why we love the Jew and we can come up with at least three reasons but will only dole out two of them: "on time," and "less likely to have a criminal record." The thing we thought but did not say is that other than a professional athlete or a movie star, a Jewish man is the closest a woman can come to having a trophy. To date a Jewish man is to tease him away from his tribe for a while. To marry a Jewish man is to get him to turn his back on the essence of his entire existence-his bar mitzvah photos, his SAT scores, his mother. It is to get him to admit that he loves us so much that he'll trade in scholarship for marshmallow fluff, substitute the Torah for a spanking new set of World Book Encyclopedias. In exchange he can mouth off all he wants and we won't interrupt him. The dynamic between shiksas and the Jewish men who love them is that of dolphin to marine biologist. His intelligence is solid and studied. He's walking rigor. He's done the work. We, on the other hand, have remarkable reasoning powers but prefer to squeak. We splash around in the water. We enjoy balancing things on our noses. (I myself can hang a spoon off my nose.) We're the attraction, the on-air talent. He's the writer/producer/director. We're Kate Capshaw. He's Steven Spielberg-after he's dumped Amy Irving (not our fault).
Another of my Jewish boyfriends proclaimed my lack of Jewishness as proudly as he once sang "Hatikvah" in Hebrew school. His affection spewed out in torrents as if he were an open hydrant. He was kind and reliable and only ordered Cokes in bars. He told me the meanings of words. He filled me in on current events. He cooperated when I insisted that we see both Beethoven and Free Willy movies the day they opened in theaters. When we rented Schindler's List he patiently stopped the tape to explain to me what was happening. He professed his love to me on a daily basis. He loved my shiksadom, and insisted that his family could learn to love it too. Despite being expected to call them almost daily, he claimed to have "a very mature relationship" with his parents, one in which their parental love subsumed their dismay at his taste for shiksas and they accepted him, as parents accept a retarded child, for who he was.
This claim did not prevent him from, inexplicably, loving me with considerably less verve during weekends when he took me home for family visits. Within hours of our arrival he would suddenly contract a case of food, sun, or allergy medicine poisoning and be forced to go upstairs and lie down, leaving me to fend for myself. Little did he know that while he slept, knocked out on Benadryl or burned by the fierce Jersey shore sun, his parents schemed against him. For this is the scenario in which all Jewish parents, having apparently attended the same lecture at the synagogue called "Booting the Blonde: How to Get that Shiksa Out of Your Precious, Brilliant Son's Life for Good," behave identically. This is when they get out the photographs of trips to Israel and make a big deal about recent editorial changes in The Jewish Weekly. This is when they get out IRA portfolios and pore over them as if they were the original manuscript of Ulysses. They show the shiksa photographs from their son's bar mitzvah, cleverly trying to drive her away by showing her what a dork he looked like in a yarmulke. They talk about what an ugly baby he was, hoping to discourage her from producing equally hideous offspring. They unabashedly discuss bodily functions, cruelly alienating the shiksa because they all know that her family doesn't have bodily functions. At this the shiksa can merely sit there and say "That's interesting," all the while dreaming of a juicy hunk of Boar's Head.
I've dated some non-Jews, men whose chief bodily functions involved the passage of Scotch down the esophagus, men who haven't noticed that they still have a poster of Wayne Gretsky on their wall. I went on a date with a Protestant from Minnesota who told me he dropped out of library science school "because it was too stressful." I went on a date with a lapsed Catholic who got up to use the men's room and passed out on the floor. He later explained that he'd "had a few cocktails in the hours preceding our date." It turned out this was eight hours and these cocktails were the sort rarely if ever consumed by Jewish men. Blue drinks. Drinks with swizzle sticks shaped like monkeys.
"The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a multiplication problem," Portnoy intoned. "But not a dumb child, Not stupid at all!" This is not the swizzle stick monkey but the shiksa, whose desire for the Jewish man to think she's smart is equal to the Jewish woman's desire to hear him say, "Funny, you don't look Jewish." The appearance of a raw braininess is the shiksa's ultimate goal, the final frontier of "otherness" as it manifests in her so un-other world. The shiksa needs the Jewish man because without him she cannot exist. Without him she is just another blonde girl. And the shiksa is blonde even when she isn't blonde. Imposed on her world is a perpetual weary sunshine, gleaming rays reflected from Christ's own well-flossed teeth. Yellow light surrounds her; she seems bathed in Parkay margarine. She has much to overcome. She must do her homework. She must try to get through at least some of the New York Times front section before turning to the Styles section. She must subtly manipulate her Jewish man into eating an occasional Cheez Whiz treat, into buying a Christmas tree. She must avoid being stabbed by Norman Mailer. She must avoid engaging women like Susan Sontag in philosophical debate-at this, as in arguments with any Barnard graduate, the shiksa will lose. The shiksa simply must know her place at the seder table. She must help clean up afterwards. She must try to stay sober. She must send the kids to Hebrew school as long as they also twirl the baton. Moreover she must learn to pronounce charoset as well as eat it. It tastes like an hors d'oeuvre in purgatory, but she'll suffer. Yes, she'll suffer, too.
MUSIC IS MY BAG.
The image I want to get across is that of the fifteen-year-old boy with the beginning traces of a mustache who hangs out in the band room after school playing the opening bars of a Billy Joel song on the piano. This is the kid who, in the interests of adopting some semblance of personal style, wears a fedora hat and a scarf with a black-and-white design of a piano keyboard. This is the kid who, in addition to having taught himself some tunes from the Songs from the Attic sheet music he bought at the local Sam Ash, probably also plays the trombone in the marching band, and experienced a seminal moment one afternoon as he vaguely flirted with a not-yet-kissed, clarinet-playing girl, a girl who is none too popular but whose propensity for leaning on the piano as the boy plays the opening chords of "Captain Jack" give him a clue as to the social possibilities that might be afforded him via the marching band.
If the clarinet-playing girl is an average student musician, she carries her plastic Selmer in the standard-issue black plastic case. If she has demonstrated any kind of proficiency, she carries her Selmer in a tote bag that reads "Music Is My Bag." The boy in the piano-key scarf definitely has music as his bag. He may not yet have the tote bag, but the hat, the Billy Joel, the tacit euphoria brought on by a sexual awakening that, for him, centers entirely around band, is all he needs to be delivered into the unmistakable realm that is Music Is My Bagdom.
I grew up in Music Is My Bag culture. The walls of my parents' house were covered with framed art posters from musical events: The San Francisco Symphony's 1982 production of St. Matthew's Passion, The Metropolitan Opera's 1976 production of Aida, the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd. Ninety percent of the books on the shelves were about music, if not actual musical scores. Childhood ceramics projects made by my brother and me were painted with eighth notes and treble clef signs. We owned a deck of cards with portraits of the great composers on the back. A baby grand piano overtook the room that would have been the dining room if my parents hadn't forgone a table and renamed it "the music room." This room also contained an imposing hi-fi system and a $300 wooden music stand. Music played at all times: Brahms, Mendelssohn, cast recordings of Sondheim musicals, a cappella Christmas albums. When my father sat down with a book, he read musical scores, humming quietly and tapping his foot. When I was ten, my mother decided we needed to implement a before-dinner ritual akin to saying grace, so she composed a short song, asking us all to contribute a lyric, and we held hands and sang it before eating. My lyric was, "There's a smile on our face and it seems to say all the wonderful things we've all done today." My mother insisted on harmonizing at the end. She also did this when singing "Happy Birthday."
Harmonizing on songs like "Happy Birthday" is a clear indication of the Music Is My Bag personality. If one does not have an actual bag that reads "Music Is My Bag"-as did the violist in the chamber music trio my mother set up with some women from the Unitarian Church-a $300 music stand and musical-note coasters will more than suffice. To avoid confusion, let me also say that there are many different Bags in life. Some friends of my parents have a $300 dictionary stand, a collection of silver bookmarks, and once threw a dinner party wherein the guests had to dress up as members of the Bloomsbury Group. These people are Literature Is My Bag. I know people who are Movies Are My Bag (detectable by key chains shaped like projectors, outdated copies of Halliwell's Film Guide, and one too many T-shirts from things like the San Jose Film Festival), people who are Cats Are My Bag (self-explanatory), and, perhaps most annoyingly, Where I Went To College Is My Bag (Yale running shorts, plastic Yale tumblers, Yale Platinum Plus MasterCard, and, yes, even Yale screensavers-all this in someone aged forty or more, the perennial contributor to the class notes).
Having a Bag connotes the state of being overly interested in something, and yet, in a certain way, not interested enough. It has a hobbyish quality to it, a sense that the enthusiasm developed at a time when the enthusiast was lacking in some significant area of social or intellectual life. Music Is My Bag is the mother of all Bags, not just because in the early 1980s some consumer force of the public radio fund-drive variety distributed a line of tote bags that displayed that slogan, but because its adherents, or, as they tend to call themselves, "music lovers," give off an aura that distinguishes them from the rest of the population. It's an aura that has to do with a sort of benign cluelessness, a condition that, even in middle age, smacks of that phase between prepubescence and real adolescence. Music Is My Bag people have a sexlessness to them. There is a pastiness to them. They can never seem to find a good pair of jeans. You can spot them on the street, the female French horn player in concert dress hailing a cab to Lincoln Center around seven o'clock in the evening, her earrings too big, her hairstyle unchanged since 1986. The fifty-something recording engineer with the running shoes and the shoulder bag. The Indiana marching band kids in town for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, snapping photos of each other in front of the Hard Rock Cafe, having sung their parts from the band arrangement of Hello Dolly the whole way on the bus, thinking, knowing, that it won't get better than this. Like all Music Is My Bag people, they are a little too in love with the trappings. They know what their boundaries are and load up their allotted space with memorabilia, saving the certificates of participation from regional festivals, the composer-a-month calendars, the Mostly Mozart posters. Their sincerity trumps attempts at snideness. The boys' sarcasm only goes a fraction of the way there, the girls will never be great seducers. They grow up to look like high school band directors even if they're not. They give their pets names like Wolfgang and Gershwin. Their hemlines are never quite right.
I played the oboe. This is not an instrument to be taken lightly. The oboist runs a high risk of veering into Music Is My Bag culture, mostly because to get beyond the entry level is to give oneself over to an absorption with technique that can make a person vulnerable to certain vagaries of a subcategory, the oboe phylum. This inevitably leads to the genus of wind ensemble culture, which concerns itself with the socio-political infrastructure of the woodwind section, the disproportionate number of solo passages, a narcissistic pride in sounding the A that tunes the orchestra. Not many people play the oboe. It's a difficult instrument, beautiful when played well, horrifying when played poorly. I was self-conscious about playing the oboe, mostly because so many people confuse it with the bassoon, its much larger, ganglier cousin in the double-reed family. The act of playing the oboe, unlike the graceful arm positions of the flute or the violin, is not a photogenic one. The embouchure puckers the face into a grimace; my childhood and adolescence is documented by photos that make me look slightly deformed-the lipless girl. It's not an instrument for the vain. Oboe playing revolves almost entirely around saliva. Spit gets caught in the keys and the joints and must be blown out using cigarette rolling paper as a blotter (a scandalous drugstore purchase for a twelve-year-old). Spit can accumulate on the floor if you play for too long. Spit must constantly be sucked out from both sides of the reed. The fragile, temperamental reed is the player's chronic medical condition. It must be tended to constantly. It must be wet but never too wet, hard enough to emit a decent sound, but soft enough to blow air through. The oboist must never stray far from moisture; the reed is forever in her mouth, in a paper cup of water that teeters on the music stand, being doused at a drinking fountain in Parsippany High School at the North Jersey Regional Band and Orchestra Audition. After a certain age, the student oboist must learn to make her own reeds, build them from bamboo using knives and shavers. Most people don't realize this. Reed-making is an eighteenth-century exercise, something that would seem to require an apprenticeship before undertaking solo. But oboists, occupying a firm, albeit wet, patch of ground under the tattered umbrella of Music Is My Bag, never quite live in the same era as everyone else.
Though I did, at one point, hold the title of second-best high school player in the state of New Jersey, I was a mediocre oboist. My discipline was lacking, my enthusiasm virtually nil, and my comprehension of rhythm (in keeping with a lifelong math phobia) held me back considerably. But being without an aptitude for music was, in my family, tantamount to being a Kennedy who knows nothing of politics. Aptitude was something, perhaps even the only thing, I possessed. As indifferent to the oboe as I was-and I once began an orchestra rehearsal without noticing that I had neglected to screw the bell, which is the entire bottom portion, onto the rest of my instrument-I managed to be good enough to play in the New Jersey All State High School Orchestra as well as a local adult symphony. I even gained acceptance into a music conservatory. These aren't staggering accomplishments unless you consider the fact that I rarely practiced. If I had practiced with any amount of regularity, I could have been, as my parents would have liked me to be, one of those kids who was schlepped to Juilliard on Saturdays. If I had practiced slightly more than that, I could have gone to Juilliard for college. If I had practiced a lot I could have ended up in the New York Philharmonic. This is not an exaggeration, merely a moot point. I didn't practice. I haven't picked up the oboe since my junior year in college, where, incidentally, I sat first chair in the orchestra even though I did not practice once the entire time.
I never practiced and yet I always practiced. My memory is always of being unprepared, yet I was forced to sit in the chair for so many hours that I suspect something else must have been at work, a lack of consciousness about it, an inability to practice on my own. "Practice" was probably among the top five words spoken in our family, the other four probably being the names of our family members. Today, almost ten years since I've practiced, the word has lost the resonance of our usage. I now think of practice in terms of law or medicine. There is a television show called The Practice, and it seems odd to me that I never associate the word sprawled across the screen with the word that wove relentlessly throughout our family discourse. For my entire childhood and adolescence, practicing was an ongoing condition. It was both a given and a punishment. When we were bad, we practiced. When we were idle, we practiced. Before dinner and TV and friends coming over and bedtime and a thousand other things that beckoned with the possibility of taking place without all that harrowing noise, we practiced. "You have practicing and homework," my mother said every day. In that order. My father said the same thing without the homework part.
Much of the reason I could never quite get with the oboe-playing program was that I developed, at a very young age, a deep contempt for the Music Is My Bag world. Instead of religion, my family had music, and it was the church against which I rebelled. I had clergy for parents. My father: professional composer and arranger, keyboard player and trombonist, brother of a high school band director in Illinois. My mother: pianist and music educator of the high school production of Carousel genre. My own brother a reluctant Christ figure. A typically restless second child in youth (he quit piano lessons but later discovered he could play entirely by ear), my brother recently completed the final mix of a demo CD of songs he wrote and performed-mid-eighties pop, late Doobie Brothers groove. His Los Angeles house is littered with Billy Joel and Bruce Hornsby sheet music, back issues of Stereo Review, the liner notes to the digital remastering of John Williams's score for Star Wars. Music is the Bag.
I compose songs in my sleep. I can't do it awake. I'll dream of songwriters singing onstage. I'll hear them perform new songs, songs I've never heard, songs I therefore must have written. In childhood I never put one thought toward composing a song. It would have been like composing air, creating more of something of which there was already quite enough. Wind players like flutists and saxophonists need as much air as they can get. Oboists are always trying to get rid of air. They calibrate what they need to get the reed to vibrate, end up using even less, and dispense with the rest out the corners of their mouths. It's all about exhaling. On an eighth rest, they're as likely to blow air out as they are to steal a breath. There's always too much air for oboists, too much of everything, too many bars when they're not playing and too many bars where there's hardly anyone playing but them, too many percussion players dropping triangles on the floor, too many violinists playing "Eleanor Rigby" before the rehearsal starts. Orchestras have only two oboists, first chair and second chair, pilot and copilot, though the "co" in this case is, like all "co's," a misnomer. The second oboist is the perpetual backup system, the one on call, the one who jumps in and saves the other when his reed dries up in the middle of a solo, when he misses his cue, when he freezes in panic before trying to hit a high D. I've been first oboist and I've been second oboist and, let me tell you, first is better, but not by much. It's still the oboe. Unlike the gregarious violinist or the congenial cellist, the oboist is a lone wolf. To play the oboe in an orchestra is to complete an obstacle course of solos and duets with the first flutist who, if she is hardcore Music Is My Bag, will refer to herself as a "floutist." Oboe solos dot the great symphonies like land mines, the pizzicati that precede them are drumrolls, the conductor's pointing finger an arrow for the whole audience to see: Here comes the oboe, two bars until the oboe, now, now. It's got to be nailed, one flubbed arpeggio, one flat half note, one misplaced pinky in the middle of a run of sixteenth notes, and everyone will hear, everyone.