My good friend Andrew has written and directed a show called Perfect Harmony, which is back at the Fringe NYC Encore Series. Here’s why they revived it: BackStage called it:“Sharp as a blade.. clever… magnificently hilarious! Lovely to ridiculous to riotous. Perfect Harmony as close to perfect as any Fringe show can be.” TheaterMania just said “Well-nigh perfection!”

It’s at the The 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, from the 21st to the 24th. I wish I could see it. Go in my place, if you can.
Perfect Harmony website.

Photo by Tim, 2001

Photo by Tim, 2001

My caption from 2004: “These are accidental portraits of the buildings that were the city compass (and camera hogs, too). We looked for them whenever we surfaced from the subway or climbed onto a roof deck. We triangulated from them on bridges and in strange conference rooms, and steered by them in tug boats and canoes. The towers were Downtown. More useful than True North, in the self-appointed center of the world.”

Tyerra Green, BAYCAT filmmaker, taken by michaele, Yahoo! Teacher of Merit, July 2006.

The first thing you see when you walk into BAYCAT‘s loft—once Villy lets you out of a hug—are the photos. There’s a wall of signed Polaroids of everyone who has ever visited: students, instructors, preachers, clients, donors, Bill Strickland, Jeff Skoll, and our fine-looking mayor, Gavin Newsom. Names and smiles; bigwigs and smallwigs.

BAYCAT trains young people from Bayview-Hunters Point in art, design, digital media, filmmaking, and human decency. These neighborhoods have by far the highest concentration of children in San Francisco, but the rest of the city doesn’t notice that that’s where we warehouse the future. “Historically-underserved comunities” seems to be the vogue term, but however you put it, these kids have had a raw deal so far. They are poor. Their schools are chaotic and badly equipped. The houses were built next to a power plant, on landfill where decades of toxic waste have built up, and so the children get sick more often than they should—but there’s just one pediatrician in the area. Until a Farmers’ Market opened last year, fresh food was a bus ride away, though liquor stores are plentiful. The gangs are armed.

Photo by Tim, 2005

Those are the problems, but there are 33,000 solutions. Bayview-Hunters Point also has artists, musicians, leaders, dreamers, preachers, businesspeople, and teachers who have it going on, and there’s no shortage of kids who want more. That’s where BAYCAT comes in. BAYCAT shows kids that they have a voice, and gives them the skills to give voice to their community. These are also, the theory goes, the skills that San Francisco and Silicon Valley employers want: design, video production, editing, and motion graphics.

Villy is the founder and CEO. She went from the New York projects to become an equity derivatives trader, then a corporate lawyer at a fancy firm. What she wanted to do was take these skills to make kids’ lives better, so she trained as a fifth-grade teacher. She was the kind of educator who teaches the Constitution by letting her kids draw up a class constitution: pushing them to move beyond because-I-said-so rules to identify the lasting principles behind them; encouraging them to test rewards and penalties and consequences; stretching ten-year-old minds around the notion of collective responsibility.

But she couldn’t reach all of them. Ten years old is too late. Five may be too late. No matter how much work you put in, how much you dig into your paltry salary for extra supplies, food, and field trips, no matter how many nights you lie awake with racing thoughts, you can’t save every kid. No Child Left Behind is the name of the federal act that has set public education up for guaranteed failure by mandating that every single child must pass standardized reading and math tests by 2012. Its goals are admirable, but no system improves by measurement alone—especially in California, where public education is still crippled by the staggering selfishness of Proposition 13. Where the principles of No Child Left Behind really live is in the hearts of dedicated teachers, who live in a war zone between hope and discouragement.

Villy left the public schools to start BAYCAT. She found an early supporter in Bill Strickland, the Pittsburgh social entrepreneur. I met Strickland (and Villy) when my company hosted a conference that brought together innovators from Japan and the US, and he held us rapt, as he does every audience, with his slides and his story. His power comes from his insistence on the elemental. The worst thing about poverty is what it does to your spirit, he says, and the cure for this spiritual cancer is to expose people to the best of the natural world. Beauty. Light. Water. Music. Art. Good food. Flowers. In the No Child Left Behind era, where principals are forced to force their teachers to drop everything but math and “language arts” drills, this sounds like granola-dreaming. But over the course of thirty-odd years, he has succeeded.

Strickland was a 16-year-old from the Pittsburgh projects, on path to nowhere good, when an art teacher introduced him to ceramics and took him to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. When he found his calling as a grown man, he persuaded a student of Lloyd Wright’s to build a cathedral-like training center in the middle of the projects in Pittsburgh. That’s where he trained students in the ceramics he had come to love. He loved jazz, so he built a concert hall as part of the center—and Dizzy Gillespie came to play. They started a jazz record label that has won four Grammy awards. He wanted the kids to see beauty, so he built a greenhouse to grow Japanese orchids—and now they supply the Whole Foods grocery chain with flowers and hydroponic tomatoes, grown in the projects in Steeltown. He worked with local Pittsburgh businesses, Heinz and Bayer among them, to set up facilities to train a new generation of workers in food service and lab technician skills, so they could find jobs—and eat good food every day. Sunshine, he insists, is for everybody on the planet, not just for rich people. Good food is for everybody on the planet. His Manchester Craftsman’s Guild trains students in art, not academics, but his students’ graduation rates are so high that the city of Pittsburgh recently asked him to take over a failing high school. His first action will be bring in fresh flowers. People understand those kinds of messages. We are creatures of expectations, he says, and once you put people in the light, they shine.

Villy is an artist and musician too, and the BAYCAT loft reflects their shared belief in the power of beauty and high expectations. It’s spacious, light-filled, and stylish, and designed for people to work together. Buildings have emotions, I think, and BAYCAT’s place is warm and playful. It’s in the Dogpatch neighborhood, between Bayview-Hunters Point and downtown San Francisco.

Across the street, my friend Celine has opened a wine bar, one of several new small businesses drawn to Dogpatch by the mirage of the Third Street Light Rail, which will connect Bayview-Hunters Point to the city that has ignored it. That’s where Villy and I drink Rioja and Viognier from time to time. Dogpatch reminds me of Brooklyn’s DUMBO eight years ago, with its waterfront light, beautiful old warehouses slowly converting to design studios and apartments, and mostly peaceful agreements between the artists and the crack dealers. “I talked to the crackheads and the drunks from the beginning,” said Celine, who is as matter-of-fact as you might expect of a woman who can both pass two kidney stones and open a wine bar in the last two months of her pregnancy. “I told them, I have no problem with you being here, but you just can’t piss in the doorway any more. I can’t do business if you piss in my doorway.” They are obliging. Now they piss in the bus shelter at the end of the block, and greet her warmly as she opens up.

Last July, a team from Yahoo!—my favorite clients—hired the BAYCAT students to make a documentary about a project we were working on, a weeklong summer camp to celebrate 60 local teachers and introduce them to blogging, Flickr, and other web goodies. Every day, Villy drove Tyerra and Jason from Hunters Point to Sunnyvale in her green VW Bug. They interviewed dozens of teachers and Yahoo! staff, including Terry Semel, the CEO. They filmed it, shaped the story, and edited it in two weeks, with the help of BAYCAT instructors. Tyerra’s 14. Jason is 16. That’s Tyerra speaking on the BAYCAT homepage. Yahoo! liked the results so much that they sponsored a BAYCAT “Oscars” to show off the students’ work at the end of the summer. There was plenty to celebrate: graphic design for local businesses, a new design identity for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, documentaries made for Yahoo!, for the Mayor’s Office, and for NetDay; a film about the Alice Griffith Housing Projects; an interview series on obesity they filmed at local McDonalds. They’re learning to bear witness: by shaping stories, you can shape a future.

Villy has huge plans for BAYCAT. Every time she tells me about them over Italian wine, my brain starts fizzing with her spirit—that’s the Villy effect. She believes that change starts with personal connections, with asking open-ended questions and being willing to listen to the answers. This autumn, she’s going to let me learn how to teach writing at BAYCAT. It’s a tiny commitment—once a week, a couple of students a time—but I want to be there to watch her dreams bloom.

Richard Sennett has a newish book out called The Culture of the New Capitalism. I heard him interviewed about it on a BBC podcast, and there’s only one copy left at Amazon’s UK store, but he’s less admired here in his own country, as far as I can tell. Sennett is concerned about the people who don’t fit the needs of this economy. They’re not the stars the talent spotters want, or they are too old, or too needed by dependents to hold a Blackberry tether with grace. Or maybe they’re the kind of people who find that shifting loyalties make them anxious and sad.

I had just enough of a taste of the old work culture of pantyhose, punchclocks, and marble lobbies to be grateful to be born into this new work style exported from the Bay Area. By Sennett’s standards, I was designed for this economy. I have more curiosity than ties. I’m childless. I’ve moved like a stone skipping across a pond: 120 miles, 500 miles, 3,000 miles, 6,000 miles from my hometown, touching down only lightly in each place. In Hernstein and Murray’s creepy Bell Curve analysis of intelligence structures, I’m a “symbol analyst.” A “master of change.” That makes me a good catch.

“When we hired you, we weren’t interested in your experience. We were only interested in how fast you could learn,” I was once told. At 24, that’s flattering. It’s also a relief—thank God, it doesn’t matter that I know feck-all. I’m a little bundle of potential. But at 34, it’s disconcerting to have a dozen years of your life dismissed. I could have stayed in bed rather than bothering to get trained on Wall Street? I didn’t need to sweat through those startups to learn why entrepreneurs have more in common with artists than with MBAs, and what it really takes to turn an idea into a change? I needn’t have bothered with volunteering, with learning to write, with riding the public buses around Bolivia?

For all that this amoral economy suits me well, I’m making a promise to my future self that if I hear at 54 that my experience is uninteresting to capitalism—and I expect to—I’ll stand up, excuse myself with a big smile, and go back to the woods for good. We’re human beings. Our stories matter. Grown-ups have more to contribute than babies. And where we have been and who we take care of matters more to me than symbols, models, and theories.

“And one last instruction, my brothers and sisters, before we travel together the roiling white path of this river of crazy,” said Toobmaster. He was standing on a picnic table, with a blue ‘T’ painted on his bare chest and a small inner tube tied around his forehead. “Keep your butt up…” he intoned.
“…and keep your beer high,” said Toobhedd, who was half a length shorter. Below them, 65 souls awaited immersion in the American River. Our lifejackets were snug against bellies full of Toobhedd’s campfire pancakes. We were ready to follow them into the rapids.
“A-men, Brother Toobmaster.”
“I bee-lieve.”
“Say it with me: beer high.”
“Buddup! Buddup!”

Some just slapped their rumps and raised their cheap suds reverently as the leaders climbed down. If only all paths were as simple as theirs.

We had huge truck inner tubes, some of which had swollen into tortured croissants under pressure from the compressor. We had duct tape, body paint, spangles, and rope. All morning, each campsite had improvised, improving on black rubber and air. We experimented with handle designs, rejecting Shea’s suitcase-style prototype for Gareth’s loop, through which you could hook a foot or an elbow or even an extra beer. We pitched our successes to other tubers—talking up a design that conserved materials (because it turned out that only Toobmaster had remembered to bring duct tape), or one that worked even when the tube flipped. We debated the platonic form for an ass-basket, to cradle the main concern of our journey downriver. And what would it take to build a floating spit, for barbecued chicken? Gareth tied on our mascot, Ducky. Next-door, they made sparkly blue superhero capes and bikinis, and tarted up their tubes with paint.

“We need someone for the front of the beer train.” Someone stepped forward and took hold. They had lashed five coolers to five inner tubes, and now the strongest voyageurs carried them sideways down to the bank. The rest of us followed, ducked under our tubes like dung beetles. We laid them in the sun—a few burst spectacularly—and climbed up on the rocks to watch the dozen who had decided to start the trip with a run through the Troublemaker rapid before joining our caravan.

Bright yellow rafts, bright blue and red kayaks, inflatable beer coolers with built-in cupholders: the river was full of bath toys made in China. The South Fork of the American River is the most popular rafting run in California, and all morning, professional rafting operations had paddled clients through. Troublemaker is the highlight, a Class III+ frappuccino that makes the punters squeal. Just below, the outfitters have built a wooden platform on the rocks, where a photographer waits to catch the rubber-ducky bounce of each vessel. The guides perch at the back of the rafts, shouting “Left! Go! Go!”

The rafting companies traffic in thrills for the deskbound, so it can’t be good for business that tipsy tubers can bob through Troublemaker ahead of them, trailing intrepid beer coolers. Troublemaker mostly keeps you on the straight and narrow, and even if you offer yourself up in an unsteerable rubber doughnut, you’ll likely do okay. The guides are good-humored about these traffic jams, though, catching tubes on their paddles like SpaghettiOs when the occupants get flipped. “Butt up,” we shouted from the bank, but it’s bad advice for the face-down.

“It’s not as interesting as kayaking,” complained Tim. “You can’t see anything from the tube.” Or, in his case, out of it. He missed the exit and kicked to shore fifty yards beyond, where a furious man waited on a deckchair.

“This is private property,” he yelled, and it was, though it would have taken them seconds to leave. Instead he kept them for fifteen minutes, loosing the anger of a day and a lifetime. “Thirty years I’ve lived here. Thirty years. And you fucks have ruined the river. I can’t enjoy my house any more. Yesterday two people nearly drowned in that rapid, and let me tell you, I’d just as soon they did. Keep more of you Bay Area assholes away. Fucking flatlanders.” Where Tim comes from, there were mountains two billion years before these upstart California rock-pimples, but it seemed better to nod.
“Peace, man, peace,” said the other tuber who had washed up. That would calm anybody down, of course.

We all reunited below the rapid and made ready to set off. There’s no graceful way to get into an inner tube. You back up to it, legs splayed, and lower your backside like a pregnant woman hitting the sofa on a Friday night. Kathleen took my hand. I draped a leg across Natasha’s tube and tucked a foot in her armpit. With my free hand, I held Shea’s Teva sandal, and he grabbed the handle of Gareth’s tube. We drifted.

“That stuff will kill your ambition” Robert DeNiro tells a stoned Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown, in one of my all-time favorite movie exchanges. Fonda looks up from the couch and exhales.
“Not if your ambition is to lie on the sofa and watch television,” she points out. Tubing is like that. It’s at once very American—the long roadtrips, the gear, the preparation, the activity—and then fundamentally not. Unlike rafting, with its frenetic paddling and cheerful teamwork, tubing takes a bit of getting used to in such an active culture. We get to just…lie here? And drink beer in the middle of the day? And eventually we’ll get where we’re going?

Natasha had left three toddlers in San Francisco, and now she flopped her head back. “When you have kids, you don’t get to be yourself. You have to be this person who keeps telling people to do things they don’t want to do. This is so unbelievably nice.”

“Rocks! Separate!” someone would call from from time to time, but the sociable ones ignored it, preferring, like true loves, to hold on through the rocky patches. What harm if a few of us always ran aground? Why not hang out with friends, trying to wobble ourselves free while cool water rushed past? Eventually, we would stand up and stagger through, holding our tubes by duct-tape leashes, while the rafters gawked. Easy for them; they had paddles.

Sometimes our lack of ambition kept us in an eddy for minutes before we noticed we weren’t moving. But we yo-yoed around the faster rapids, spinning backwards, then forwards, six of us joined by feet and hands. “Butt up! Butt up!” we howled, as we were smacked against the rocks. When Shea’s ankle slipped out of my reach I broke into “My Heart Will Go On,” only the latest in a dripping medley that had included “Reunited (And It Feels So Good),” “Islands in the Stream,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and of course “California Uber Alles.“ When I am queen, there will be karaoke-tubing for everyone.

We fantasized about opening a bar where you could sit in circles holding your friends’ feet, swiveling in and out of chats as the mood took you.

We persuaded Shea that he could stand on two inner tubes, rodeo-style, and he managed to get a knee on each one before they popped him up like toast. “Like a harp, Shea. Those tubes are just playing you like a fuckin’ harp,” we told him, making fun of his Chicago-Irish street toughs.

We imagined our grandchildren’s complaints about Gen-Xers. Mommy, I don’t wanna go to Grandpa’s house. Old people smell like Tevas and chai lattes. Daddy, why does Grandma give us Red Bull?

The takeout point was a little beach under a highway bridge. Last year Kathleen had missed it, and the others had to send a posse to rescue her and the beer cooler before they went to Sacramento. Mindful of this, we aimed in early, with splashy kicks and weak swipes at the water below. Before long all the tubers were gathered on the bank, passing out the last of the bad beer while the hardy ones jumped off the bridge in another tradition.

The bridge was 40 feet high, maybe more. A rope hung from one of the girders, and each raft that passed below it had a customer balanced on the bow, waiting to grab it. They climbed a few feet if they had the arm strength, then dangled, then dropped into the water, where the others waited, paddling backwards. We watched our jumpers. Only one spot was deep enough for a safe landing, and they paced up and down trying to pick it, while the crowd directed them.

“You can’t think about it,” Toobhedd explained to me, safely below. I had no intention of thinking about it. “Just doesn’t help to look down and start thinking. Pick the jump spot and step off, feet together, arms by your sides. Hit the water like a pencil and you’ll be just fine.” Above, some jumpers yawped and pedalled like Wile E. Coyote. One guy, new to the tubing weekend, did a hummingbird’s backflip, and word quickly went around that he was a stunt diver up from L.A. An old-timer stayed down “long enough for people to look forward to seeing me,” then popped up, waving, with his sunglasses and bandana back on. We winced as Gareth smacked the water, arms out. He waded out with sore, pink hands.

A girl with ringlets climbed up the bridge path, twirled her yellow bikini top with a whoop, then let it drop to the bank like a gingko leaf. Her breasts were pretty, but she immediately thought better of showing them, because she clutched them and ohmygodded for a bit. Her friends coaxed her over to the jump spot, stepping sideways, still holding her breasts as though they might fall off. We could hear the two guys encouraging her, and the bankside tubers cheered her too. Eventually, she took their hands and climbed onto the railing. A few cars on the bridge slowed. Someone raised a countdown. “Ten…nine…eight…” She lifted a foot, testing what a leap might feel like, but squealed and shook her head instead.

One woman groused. “This Girls Gone Wild crap. I hate the way it changes the tone of everything. Ooh, look at me. And, yeah, you know what? They will. It’s bullshit.”

“There are children up there. Not cool,” said someone else.

The girl peered down, in her little yellow boy-shorts. Most of the tubers were chatting now, debating when exactly the pot cookies had really kicked in, and the strengths of the Black Eyed Peas. “Wait, whaddya mean you don’t know London Bridge? Don’t you ever listen to the radio?” If her free spirit didn’t extend to freefall, they were no longer interested. One of her two companions dropped her hand, and jumped. Midway through the third loyal countdown, a fire truck stopped and the driver got out. She hopped down, and made for the river path. We could see the fire chief still wagging a finger.

A couple of high school boys had somehow climbed across the bridge struts to slouch on the support pillar. “Hey, is the water hella cold? Like, hypothermia cold?” one called eventually. It’s okay, one of our jumpers shouted back. He shrugged and pitched himself into the water, forty feet below. His dripping skate shorts hung even lower.

“I’m a mother of three,” Natasha warned the guy who was set on getting her to jump with him. “You’d better be right that I’ll come out in one piece.” She did. Twice. “It wasn’t even scary,” she said, shaking off the water.

It was the 19th year of the Toobing trip, which started with a few college friends and has kept going long after they’ve started driving new cars and buying homes in Tahoe. Every year they welcome friends of friends, like me. Toobhedd and Toobmaster book the campsites, buy the tubes, rent the vests, arrange shuttles, count heads, paint chests, and check off spreadsheets. They are the cheerful mayors of the campground. Toobhedd cooks bacon, eggs, pancakes, and toast for every single hungover camper. That’s the Bay Area way, from Craigslist to Burning Man, and I’m still getting used to it. Pitch a tent, pitch in, take your shirt off, share your intoxicants, share your munchies, light fires. Forget the zillion-dollar fogbound house you’re paying off, and sit around a campfire with your friends instead.

I like it.

This barn-raising mindset is more generous than my own. “Give it away now! It’s a natural thing,” their invitation had said. “So bring your special something to share with everyone. Past years have included body paint, baked treats, lipgloss necklaces, paint pens for toobs, flaming sambuccas, etc. Ignite a new tradition for 2006!” All weekend, people offered up vodka jellies, cookies, fruit, firewood, costumes, beers, and buttons. Tim had brought a generator, a compressor, and fuel to share, and the backwoods know-how to use them all, but I sat behind my acrylic camping wine glass, hoping that these strangers would stop embarrassing me with kindness. I had brought pounds of Marcona almonds and pistachios, but had no clear sense of how to distribute them beyond my own little gang of familiars. Though I can write fat checks to charity, and pamper friends and family once in a while, I have pinched, hoarding instincts around hors d’oeuvres and strangers.

As if to teach me, a man with German glasses visited every twenty minutes to offer platefuls of melon cubes and peaches. His superhero cape sparkled, but his eyes were sad. I took his melon first gratefully, then guiltily, aware of the peaches that filled our coolers and—oh shoot—the melon that sat, uncut, on our picnic table right in front of him. But Melon Man seemed to want to give, and looked for nothing.

I guess we’re supposed to be scared these days. Scared of the quake, the terrorists, the warming ocean that will rise and turn San Francisco’s hills into islands. Scared that house prices will fall—or that they’ll keep going up. Scared of another tech bust, in this whitewater working culture. Scared of the panhandlers who own the Tenderloin and would sell it for a rock; of the immigrants taking either all the jobs or all the social services, or both. Some days I feel it too, but mostly I’m still fascinated by this country, by all these cultures I haven’t learned. There is still much more to love than fear on this American river.

Why, Dario wanted to know, did Mommy want to take his drawing?
    “Because I like to have it on my desk at work,” she said.
But why?
    “Well, because when I look at it, I think about you, and I imagine you at pre-school, and it makes me think about all the fun you’re having. It’s like having a little piece of you with me when I miss you,” she said.
This was satisfying.

The next morning he waited until it was bright enough to see his Thomas the Tank Engine poster across the room. That was when he was allowed to go in to her bed. Her hair was all over her face.
    “Mommy. Mommy,” he said. He couldn’t shake her with the present in his hand, so he elbowed her instead. Gently.
She was blinky and smelled of bed. Her voice was beddy too.
    “What is it, Dario?” she said.
    “I have something for you. To take to work. Here!” He dropped it carefully into her hand. She squinted. He worried that it wasn’t morning yet after all, even though he’d waited for Thomas the Tank Engine to come out of the dark.
    “It’s a piece of me,” he said. He felt proud.
    “What…is it?” she said. She sounded sleepy.
    “It’s my scab. From my leg.” he explained.
She peered at her hand.
    “To take to your desk at work,”_he explained again, scratching the Bubblicious-pink welt left below his careful harvest. “For when you miss me!”
She crawled up onto an elbow, put the scab on her pillow and glanced from it to his leg. He’d known she would be thrilled. “I’ll get a Kleenex so you can carry it in your purse.”
Daddy rolled over. Big and hairy, groaning. The pillow moved. “For God’s sake, Jonathan, mind the scab,” said Mommy.

[Hi, readers:

This one is super-long for a blog entry. That’s because it’s a short story draft—you know, those things you skip past in the New Yorker or stopped reading after your Leaving Cert—so don’t feel you have to plough through it. YouTube is always right next door on the internet.

But if you’re interested, the story is inspired by an RTE radio documentary of the same name from 1987, and I’ve imagined it taking place in my grandparents’ hometown in Roscommon. I didn’t know them very well, so those bits are entirely made up. The awesome letter to the Catholic Herald is real, though, and so are the slogans. And one description of country life is swiped from a commenter here.

Oh, and I haven’t written a full-length story since my own Leaving Cert, so this took for-goddamn-ever. Making stuff up takes me even longer than reporting it. I’m posting a draft so’s I can see it with some distance and then patch it up.

As the phone company would say, “We know you have choices for your blog-reading needs, and we appreciate your business.” Thanks for stopping by.

-D.]

…you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
—David WagonerThe bicycles go by in twos and threes
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
—Patrick Kavanagh

After Mass, Charlie Hanley offered Margaret Kelly a bar to the Saturday dance in Elphin. The fellas had bicycles, and the girls did not, and it was better that way. It meant a High Nelly was a ticket to ask.

The light girls were popular. They’d back up to the bicycle bar like little high jumpers, pretending to be more delicate than they were, and with a laugh and a wobble you’d be away. Margaret was middle-sized—two wobbles, maybe three—but when he reached for the handlebars on either side of her good frock, with her hair tickling his chin, he was glad of every mile of the seven from her home place to Elphin. She was cushiony enough not to complain about the iron slap from each rut in the road. Instead she gripped the bar and pointed her knees primly ahead, like a Strokestown House mistress riding sidesaddle.

They passed Billy Carmody and his donkey, bringing home the churn from evening milking. They saluted Jonjo Sharkey and his old bitch Gypsy, who even though her eyes were milky still snapped at Margaret’s dangling feet. These days the sheep obeyed Gypsy only out of habit, or pity. Jonjo would have to get the shotgun to her soon.

All day Charlie had turned turf. The sods already smelled warm and nearly meaty, as they would when stacked beside the range in winter. At the dinner hour they unwrapped their mother’s bread and drank strong tea from milk bottles. There was just him and the brother to cut their plot of bog. Margaret had a rake of brothers, but they were still young lads, and when she walked out to bring their dinners to the bog she often stayed on to work harder than they did. Though Charlie had known her since she was in High Babies and he was in Second Class at the schoolhouse, it was only in the last few years had he liked to watch her work from across the bog. She looked stronger than she was; rheumatic fever in Sixth Class had given her a bad heart.

In the evening Charlie and the brother walked back, stopping as they always did for a smoke on two flat mossy rocks in the bottom field. They shared a Sweet Afton and listened to the land. Half of life was winding down and half waking up; a change of shift, you might say. It was sweet now to stretch out on a warm rock and do nothing but draw in smoke. He thought about Margaret Kelly’s hair. As the night went on they might be dancing a rumba. Close-to-close dancing like that, it was bolder than the proximity of a bicycle ride, because there was no reason or excuse but the pure pleasure of it. The thought made him feel so alive it was barely bearable. O yes, we have no bananas…

Noel was too young for the dance, and his mind was on Under-16s hurling. Why, he wanted to know, did Father Treacy have Lennon playing centre field again tomorrow? Anyone with eyes in their head could see Lennon should be centre-forward and Noel should be midfield. Lennon was more skilful and a better scorer, and Noel was fitter, bigger, and more controlling of centre field. How else were they to beat Tulsk? Charlie agreed it was a senseless thing. Noel would puzzle it further, but Charlie was inclined to get to the dance. He stubbed the butt and rose towards home, hungry for his tea. The milk bottle rolled in his jacket pocket. Noel followed, slapping a sliotair from hand to hand, still complaining.
(more…)

Bill flipped up my visor.

“Is it not human nature to fear that which might harm us?” he said gently. “Motorbiking can harm us. Your fear is natural.”

Mute eyes say plenty, especially to teachers who stopped counting at 10,000 students. Though they could barely see our faces, and we hadn’t yet straddled the bikes, Bill and Bob had already sorted the class. They knew whose testosterone pride had to be brought low, who couldn’t follow instructions, who needed no more than mechanical guidance, and who needed encouragement, above all, to quiet the mental gabblings of failure.

I’m braver than most, but only because I’m scared of so much. My comfort zone goes from my nose to the nearest printed page, and going any further affords daily scope for courage. Like the Italian villagers who discovered new worlds (and new hotties) on their post-war Vespas, I was hoping that Class C California Motorcycle Drivers Permit would expand my range.

Bill and Bob had parked their Goldwing tourers front-wheel to front-wheel; twin monuments against the wind that shunted rolls of fog into the drained reservoir. The reservoir is a vast parking lot for City College now, and at 6.45 on a Saturday morning it stood empty except for the orange cones and rows of bikes of Bay Area Motorcycle Training. Next to the Goldwings, the students’ 250 cc Kawasakis and Hondas were rolling hairdryers (though still scarily potent compared to my bicycle). None of the borrowed bikes had mirrors—they’d break when we dropped them.

First we walked the bikes across the park, lumbering in neutral with the engines off. Then we found the friction zone and moonwalked in first gear. Finally, we planted our feet on the pegs and woozily crossed the range, like a row of bowling balls let go too soon. This was fun until I tried to stop the thing. The throttle roared; I dropped the brake and lurched at Bob, then grabbed the brake and roared and lurched again. He gave a matador’s hop.

“Stop riding the brake! Stop braking! Clutch. Clutch! CLUTCH!”

I clutched. It felt so fucking unfair. Whose idea was it to stick the throttle under the brake, ready to roar at you like a junkyard dog?

“You can’t. Ride. The brake,” said Bob. “The clutch is what?”

“Your friend,” I said sullenly. Every morning I freewheel down Bernal Hill squeezing my true buddy—the back brake. I hate not knowing what to do.

“The clutch is your friend. Don’t grab it. Don’t drop it. Squeeeeze it. And get your fingers off that brake. Head up! Head up! Look where you want to GO.” We crossed and recrossed, with laborious three-point turns, until we had established that all twelve of us could putter at lawnmower speed without damaging the parking lot. Then we lined up in two columns. Bill lectured us while Bob demonstrated our next challenge.

“Old people riding. Makes your eyes mist up, dudnit?” said Bill as we watched Bob weave through the cones. “Or could be the fog.”

Our class was relatively elderly. In the other group there were a handful of cholo kids who had boasted in the classroom sessions about not being afraid to get hurt. They did great ghetto rolls on the way to the PortaPotties, even as the day wore on and we were all near-hypothermic in the dank fog. If you’re under 21 you can’t get a California Motorcycle Licence without completing a safety course, but the wily old men must have manouevered them into the other instructors’ course.

“Five months? Aw, you’re just a puppy,” Bill said to the cute newlywed as we waited for all the students to finish the lesson. “I’ve been married 38 years. And here’s what I learned: women go to Wife School when they’re five years old. This is true. No matter where you are, 30,000 feet up in a plane, filling up your tank, sitting in a bar, whenever you get two guys together and the subject of marriage comes up—and I don’t know why it should come up with strangers, but it does—guy will tell you the same thing. “‘Yew never listen,’ she says, or ‘Yew only pay attention to the newspaper.’” That’s because they all went to Wife School and got the script, and the guys are just shambling along without a clue. A guy, see, he’s got a line in the sand. You don’t cross it, you’re fine.”

He drew an imaginary line with the gripper stick he uses to pick up the tiny cones that mark our courses. “But women, see, they got a line that goes like this.”

He broke into a little trot and drew a line that wriggled like an inchworm, the kind of path we were supposed to be able to weave by now. “You cross that line, and you’re dead. And if by some tiny chance you’re actually right for once—and this is very rare—she learned in Wife School what to do. She’ll go back twenty years if she has to, drag it all back up, mess with your head until she’s in the right again.”

“Twenty years?” sniffed Bob, “Try thirty. Try forty.”

“I just start with ‘Sorry’ now,” said Scott, who was 35. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry.” He told me earlier that he’s wanted to ride a motorbike all his life, but first his parents wouldn’t let him, and then his girlfriend wouldn’t. Now they’re married, and she’s relented, figuring he was old enough not to kill himself.

“That’s good. You’re learning. First step is, you’re always wrong. Wanna know what I do when the lectures start coming down?”

“I’m trying to teach a class here, old man,” said Bob.

“I’m passing on a lesson too,” said Bill.

“You’re cutting into my lunch break…”

“I get down on my knees.” He got down on his knees, leaning on his stick. “And then I grab her around the knees—this I won’t demonstrate with you, Scott—and I press my cheek against her thigh, and I say, ‘Please please please, don’t beat me no mo’.’ Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she tells me to get out of her sight. Either way, it’s a win.”

He hopped on a borrowed bike and demonstrated the course for our lesson on Swerving. Then he stood ready to coach our individual runs, until we rode back to our parking range for further instruction. Engine-off-key-OFF. Dismount CORRECTLY.

“Know why I do this dog-and-pony show?” he said. “It’s not because I need the attention, or I want everyone to love me up here. I could give a shit about that. It’s because you’re going to perform better if you can relax and get out of your heads, start focusing on the skills. So I goof around to try to get you to look up, pay attention to me and your surroundings instead of to that voice in your head that says that you’re going to mess up. Bob and I rarely, rarely have a student fail.”

Bill comes from a line of Marines, though he’s retired now. Below the cod-acting he has the coiled Zen calm of Special Forces soldiers I’ve known. They’re a breed that seems more thoughtful and engaged with the world than the consumers they’re trained to defend. Bill looks a bit like Dennis Hopper. Not the young Easy Rider, but the stoned and placid grandpa in Fishing With John: ready to make fun of himself, and readier still to smack down anyone else who tries it.

When I came back from a break, he had placed my ignition key on the seat. “Understand, I do this not to humiliate you,” he said, “but to draw your attention to the practice of shutting down. Bikes like that, battery’s flat in no time flat. Get a jump from a car and you’ll destroy it. So, be mindful.”

My mind was full. I missed my bicycle. Its muscle-engine needs no choke.

By the second day we had all got more confident. Bill and Bob took turns coaching us through the exit for each activity.
“Watch me. I said, watch me. You don’t get this right, you’re not going to pass the test, and you’re going to have to come back to spend another weekend with the old people.” Bill hobbled behind an imaginary walker.

U-turns.

“DerVAla,” Bob said, mangling my name, “you’re going to have to speed up or the cars will run you over. Hell, cats will run you over. Going faster is easier. More fun.”

Accelerating into a curve.

“DerVAla. Stop riding the brake.”

Riding over an obstacle.

“DerVAla, how do you feel about yourself now?” I’d made it through a box of u-turns and bounced over a two-by-four plank, backside raised a cautious inch. I said that I felt better, with a huge grin he couldn’t see.

“Good girl,” he nodded. “You’re doing fine.” A hit of praise made me drop the clutch in excitement and cut out. He waited while I scrabbled to figure out what gear I was in. “Okay, just hit the starter and start again.”

“I don’t even call it riding,” said Bill.“I call it practice—unless I’m just going down the freeway to get somewhere. That’s commuting, which I don’t care for. It’s practice because you’re always trying to perfect your skills. And you never do. You’re never perfect, at least if you have a mind like mine.”

When I made it through the last training range, Bill flipped up my visor again and peered in. “Learning to be a good rider will change your life,” he said. “In ways that have nothing to do with motorcycles.”

For the test, we entered a box of cones and described a figure eight. Then we puttered up to a line of cones that forced us to swerve around an imaginary bus. We accelerated into a curve. Finally, we each came to an emergency stop, where Bob sat in a deckchair grading us like an skating judge. “Three. Zero. Six,” he called when I clutch-gear-down-front-brake-rear-braked to a halt.

“You went outside the box with your U-turns. You went too slowly into the turn. And your stopping distance was three feet too long. But you passed,” said Bill, when we had all finished and were lined up in front of his clipboard. “You are now qualified to ride in a parking lot. Good girl.”

I babbled thanks, telling him I didn’t even know how to drive a car.

“Listen to me,” he said seriously. “I hear your thanks, and I’m glad you feel that way, but you need to understand something. I didn’t pass that course. You did. You can do anything you want. If you want to become a good rider, you can. Has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with your own expectations.”

Over the last few years, several people have trained me in new skills: to listen actively on a crisis hotline; to sit in silence on a ten-day retreat; to scuba dive and sky dive; to fast for seven days. It’s uncomfortable to be a beginner. It’s an exercise in trust; in faith that these people know where we’ll end up even if we don’t ourselves. Usually, they’re kind and brisk, used to calming fretful beginners so that they can get their jobs done and go home. How quickly we reduce ourselves to types when distracted by an unfamiliar task.

This morning I dreamed that my motorbike class was trying to get to the Motorcycling for Dummies Training Center, somewhere in downtown Brooklyn, or maybe Dogtown. I was separated from the pack, and found myself spinning out of control in front of a biker bar, scared and embarrassed on my little hairdryer bike. I took a breath, and coached myself through the dream. FINE-C. Fuel-Ignition-Neutral-Engine-Choke/Clutch. I drove—up the hill, miraculous competence—to find my classmates painting canvases about how motorbiking made them feel.

“You can’t teach a human,” said Bill in our last lesson. “It’s been proved. You can tell them, you can show them, you can warn them, but in the end all you’re doing is putting the information in front of them so they can figure it out for themselves. That’s the only way humans learn.”

“In a world without consequences,” my mother’s friend Marian had said over their weekly coffee in the Shopping Centre, “wouldn’t it be great to go to bed with Bill Clinton?” When she reported this, she added, with a 15-year-old’s giggle, “And do you know, I have to say, I agreed with her.”

Dad said, “Well, I don’t know what to make of that at all.”

“We were all swooning to hear him in person. And he knew all about Limerick. He mentioned Dell, and the new concert hall out at the university. He even knew about the rugby!”

Ten days before, I’d got an email request from a friend. “Give me a few facts about Limerick,” she wrote. I told her about the pogrom of 1904; Richard Harris; the spit-flecked Redemptorist Fathers; and the arrival of Latvian, Chinese, and Polish immigrants, who brought durian crisps and rye bread, and queued up for internet access in the public library. I mentioned how unfair the Stab City nickname seemed to the citizens, and the resentment at poor-mouthing Frank McCourt. Sure, the McCourts were starving because the father was a roaring alcoholic—and that was hardly Limerick’s fault.

These ramblings weren’t what she’d had in mind. She was pals with President Clinton’s head foreign-policy speechwriter, and he needed notes for his boss’s trip to Ireland. In those slinking days after the Starr Report, Clinton could still count on a Kennedy welcome in Ireland, which had never fallen out of love with him (and misses him still). He was a great man on the North, it was felt. Irish people took pride in believing, unlike the English with their scourging tabloids, that a politician’s sex life was none of the electorate’s business. They wouldn’t hear a word said against him.

I supplied replacement facts: new bridges, new industries, a new stop on the national arts’ circuit, and an abiding love of rugby that crossed class. These were better suited to help a president reflect a city’s growing sense of itself, and no one does that better than misty Bill. Limerick was impressed at his grasp of town life.
“Ah, Bill’s just my puppet,” I told my mum.

I thought of Clinton’s visit after yesterday’s Munster victory.

“Local update: Munster beat Biarritz 20-17 in the Heineken Cup in Cardiff today. 15,000 people watched on an outdoor screen in O’Connell St in Limerick. 70,000 people at the stadium in Cardiff. Stringer got man of the match. George Hook was unbearable on the telly there. Of course, they beat Leinster in the semi’s so my celebrations are somewhat more temperate.”

That came in a Saturday letter from an old college friend, a Leinster Dub transplanted to Cork. On first reading I thought he was poking fun—as If I’d be interested in rugby, unless I was trying to sweet-talk some fella. Dad regularly reports the match results to my sisters and me, the jokey lament of a man in a family of women indifferent to blood-rising county rivalries. But this week, it was Mum who delivered an excited match report on Sunday night. I hadn’t realized it was a European Final, and a triumph for my home town.

Munster is the bottom-left of Ireland’s four provinces, and it covers Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Kerry, and Clare. Maybe Waterford too; my geography was always poor. It has a lasting rugby rivalry with Leinster, where the Dubs are. I don’t hear of the other provinces getting in on it, but perhaps that’s because rugby is such a city game.

In most of Ireland it’s a posh sport that grows from the private schools. The kids in The Commitments would have played soccer. In Dublin, rugby is for South County Dublin boys whose strong necks are bred to support barristers’ horsehair wigs as well as scrums. Long before the rest of the country could afford to fake Viking genes, their girls were swinging sheets of blonde hair over pints of Heineken.

In Limerick, tough, scrappy Limerick, the whole city is mad for the game. On the field, solicitors tackle janitors and bouncers take down mortgage brokers (or they used to, before the game went professional). In the concrete stands of Thomond Park, the doctors from St. Camillus’ freeze their backsides off next to cabbage growers. We don’t have people from all walks of life in Limerick—there are no rag-pickers, no Google billionaires, no pet psychics—but if we did, they’d probably follow rugby. On Saturday nights, girls dress up for the Sin Bin, a club owned by a former Munster star and named for the place to which he was regularly sent off.

Mum reports that Cork is jealous, because everyone is saying that they’ve never seen anything like the way the Limerick fans came out for the team. At her school, the kids all wore Munster red on Friday, except for a couple of the little Pakistani kids—which is a pity, she says, because red is lovely with their dark hair. All the teachers wore red head to toe. Dad bought a Munster jersey; Uncle Tommy and Derek went over to Cardiff to see the match, and the fans there, oh, the whole stadium was pure red.

I can hear the shine in her eyes when she talks about O’Connell Street, where the whole town gathered to watch the match on screens strung above the traffic lights. When the homecoming bus drove into Limerick in the rain, it was magic. “You turn on the news and it’s all Munster, Munster, Munster, and they’re talking about the Limerick fans and how committed they were. And the team says that’s why they won, they couldn’t let the people down.” (The Limerick people, she insists.)

“Claire couldn’t believe I was watching the semi-finals, and I told her, if you had blood running in your veins, how could you not be interested when they might win for the first time in 120 years? So then she watched the finals and got all into it. Caroline went out for the celebrations and she ended up walking home. I hope she wasn’t wearing stilettos…”

She spills the jokes that are going around, how the Leinster fans were too busy shopping in Brown Thomas to show up for the match, and the Leinster team were afraid to spoil their manicures.

I remember this, or something like it, when Ireland got to the quarter-finals of the Football World Cup in 1990. Something changed. Until then we had flown high only solo, and mostly far from home. Here was an Irish team (cobbled from the stocky British offspring of Irish grandparents and coached by a Yorkshireman) holding England to a victory draw, and gallantly saving penalty shots from Romanian strikers. The country rose up in a great yawp of triumph, and urged the players beyond their modest abilities.

And we watched ourselves as fans, and liked what we saw: thronging Palermo, respectful, high-spirited, cuddly, and cheerfully sozzled. The worse the English fans behaved, the more lovable the Irish fans were careful to become, on their first grand tour. They waved scarves at the cameras and told of bank loans borrowed over the phone so they to stay on and follow the team on through—nobody had booked past the first round. At home the factories closed and we filled the bars—with their brand-new, big-screen TVs bought for Italia ’90— and wept with joy to see ourselves weep with collective joy in front of the world. Ireland was still close to bottom of the EU heap then, but the shine of the World Cup showed a new reflection. Everybody thought we were great, we repeated. It felt good.

For my home town, Shtab City, known for hoodies and piebalds and wormy Stanley Knife scars, this Munster win, a mucky oval ball delivered over a white line, might signal the same shift in confidence. Fifteen years from now we might look back and see just how ready Limerick was to stand proud and passionate, after decades of being done down. “It’s great,” says my mother, firmly, “to see positive images of Limerick in the media for once, when they’re never nice about us.”

Do you know, it is.

“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents, Stanford UP 1995

“And for those of you who don’t know what Barnard is,” says LaTonya into the microphone, hands on hips, “let me tell you: it’s Ivy League, aright?” Everyone laughs. She’s earned that swagger, along with the scholarship that promises to put her all the way through graduate school before she’s even started her freshman year. Now there are hundreds of grown women in the hotel ballroom, eating salmon to celebrate her and her GirlSource sisters.

GirlSource hires 150 poor girls a year, aged 14 to 18, mostly from the Mission, Bayview, Hunters’ Point. They’re trained—and paid—to run a chatty health information website, by girls, for girls. They design, research, write, and code the whole thing, picking up skills they can sell. “We’re not from the kind of communities where we all got the internet at home,” one explains. As part of the program, they also get tutoring, help with college applications and scholarship research, and a safe place to hang out with other girls.

“Can you imagine that I used to be so shy I didn’t want to open my mouth to strangers?” Marisa says gleefully to 600 strangers. “ I’m Filipina-American. We’re raised to obey authority, but not to have high self-esteem. That turned me into a hater. I didn’t know how to appreciate my own qualities, so I hated on other girls to make myself feel better. Girls do that. They hate on people until that person’s confidence is totally destroyed, and that makes them powerful. But when I’d hate on people and bring them down, I’d still feel empty inside. GirlSource taught me to flip the script. When I met the other girls in the program, I was de-fen-sive, wondering what they were thinking about me. Now I look at these beautiful girls, and all they can do, and I feel sooooo proud to be a GirlSource girl.”

In America, just 4% of Hispanic 12th-graders can read at their grade level. For African-American students, it’s even worse. But in spite of poverty, pregnancies, family problems, and sometimes even homelessness, 96% of GirlSource girls graduate from high school. 80% get to college—and most are the first in their families to do so. The organization directors believe that the best way to change a community is to pick a small number of individuals and stick with them. In their turn, the girls tend to stick with the program.

18-year-old Cristina tells how she’s worked to help support her family since she was thirteen. How she took BART for an hour and a half each way to get to school, and worked after school, and made time for GirlSource, and still kept up a 4.2 grade-point-average.
“There was this one class where I got a B. But it was AP so it counts as an A, right?” She had always dreamed of going to New York City. The hardest moment, she said, was one night when her father was sick and she brought him something to eat in his bedroom and he cried that he was so lonely, that things were so hard in the United States. How could she think about leaving home when her father would miss her so much? And then she remembered what she had learned at GirlSource, about standing up for herself, honoring her own needs, using her new confidence to set boundaries. It made it easier for her to make the choice that was right for her. That’s why, she said—with a delivery Steve Jobs might envy—she was going to Columbia in the fall.

There were whistles.

I clapped too. How can you not clap a girl from Richmond who gets herself to Columbia University?

“It’s crazy, right?” she says, eyes shining. “I mean, they’re gonna pay for my tuition, my housing, my books—I’m even gonna get my own psychologist.”

I walk around the Mission a lot, sharing the streets with Norteño gang kids, Salvadoran toddlers, junkies, vendors selling brain and cheek tacos, tattooed hipster gringos, Sixties acid casualties, street preachers, broken hookers, and slumped day laborers hoping to get hired on Cesar Chavez Street.

In the Mission, fruit and vegetables are cheap, and the buses are studded with nuts. Mariachis strut from restaurant to restaurant in white cowboy hats. Full-throated ranchero songs float out from the bars, but when you peep in, there might be only a few old guys on the barstools. On Sunday mornings, dressed-up families walk to church, the stocky kids exact half-scale copies of their parents. Once in a while I follow a little Mexican or Peruvian family a block or two, enjoying kids who are so sure of themselves that they don’t need to come up with snot-nosed demands just to prove they still exist. I like that these families seem to like each others’ company.

(My friend Alex is principal of a bilingual charter school in Silicon Valley. Though it’s in one of the richest towns in the country, 97% of his students live below the poverty line. Their parents clean houses and mow lawns for the engineers and Biz Dev Directors. “Americans think poor people don’t care about their kids’ education,” he says, “but no one wants their kid to read as much as a parent who can’t.”)

Last Thursday night, in a week when hundreds of thousands of my fellow immigrants had marched for respect in cities across the country, a shy young guy invited me to stop for tamales outside a storefront church at the bottom of my hill.
“De puerco o de queso?” said the old woman with the mantilla, almost hidden behind her styrofoam cooler.
“Meat or cheese?” he said, trying to help me out. He was from the Yucatán. I asked if he missed it. “Claro que sí” he said.“Pero hay que ir adelante.”

Hay que ir adelante. You’ve got to move forward. I suppose that’s what drove our forebears out of the primordial ooze, onwards and upwards towards seven-fifty an hour. It’s what pushes Cristina from Richmond to New York City, armed with a precocious biography of self-esteem and boundaries. But still, I’m uneasy for her. Her story is too neat, too Oprahfied. I don’t know how it will serve her when she’s surrounded by slick, expensively-trained classmates at Columbia. What will it be like when she’s three thousand miles from the family who so wanted her to have a better life—and who needed her?

Cristina’s not leaving a village in the Yucatán. She’s already just a BART ride away from one of the best-loved cities in America, and from Stanford and Berkeley. Choosing Columbia means that she’s grasped the California mantra of personal choice, and so her decision brings you-go-girl cheers: distance equals independence equals strength. But I want more for her, and from her. I want her to show Americans how to include love and family in success.

Maybe she still can. Her own Oprahisms are as sincere as they are canned. She’s of a generation that knows how to try on and package identities, and this one is wrapped up for the convenience of the busy women in the hotel ballroom. We’re looking to feel good about throwing a few hundred bucks to young women fifteen years or twenty years behind us, and it works. I believe in GirlSource enough to set up the direct deposit donation, to read through their essays and wonder if I could tutor, or hire some of these girls as interns. (They’d find out what the snacks are like in an innovation consultancy, and we’d learn more than we’d teach.)

But even as I write the checks, and cheer Cristina and her friends, I think, oh baby, you’re going to need that Columbia shrink…