Thoughts on "Orange is the New Black" Netflix series

Mr. Sax and I just devoured the first season of the hit Netflix series, “Orange is the New Black,” starring the actress Taylor Schilling playing the character Piper Chapman, an educated, upper middle class white woman in her 30’s who finds herself sentenced to 15 months in prison after being convicted of a decade old crime she committed while in her 20’s, transporting money for her drug dealing lesbian-lover girlfriend. For reasons obvious and not so obvious, everything about the show pushed all my buttons why I had to see it. I was really missing that great 2004 Showtime series, “The L Word,” which was about a bunch of beautiful LA lesbians.

“Orange is the New Black,” is based on a memoir, called “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” by Piper Kerman. The book was adapted and brought to the screen by Jenji Kohan who you might recall wrote, produced and directed the Showtime hit, “Weeds,” which was about a soccer mom pot dealer. The book details Kerman’s real life experience transitioning from a woman with a career, a Smith College education, and a nice boyfriend, to a life behind bars. The show does not deviate far from this theme, and although I have yet to read the book, I have a feeling it’s pretty faithful to what Kernan put on the page.

And real.

Very real.

And I can say this because for years, I worked at a women’s prison.

In the fall of 2009, I began teaching a class called English Composition 109 at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills. The class was for college credit and was offered under the auspices of Mercy College. Overall the class went well, and most of the ladies who took it passed and received college credit. The women were grateful for the opportunity to further their educations, most of them having only just gotten their G.E.D. while incarcerated.  But there was a lot of crying and pressure and tension involving papers and exams, and after that semester, I decided teaching English Composition wasn’t really for me. What I wanted to offer the ladies was creative writing, so I switched up the game plan. For the next four years I taught 8 week creative writing classes in the spring, the summer, and the fall.

In the show, as was true for me when I started working at Taconic, at first the women seem to fall into stereotypes. There’s always one woman everybody else calls “Crazy Eyes.” There’s edgy Latinas, feisty black chicks, tough older broads you don’t want to mess with, scary looking butch lesbians. There are junkies, and angry, religious women who won’t quit talking about the sword of Jesus. And just as is true on the outside, caged behind bars there are strong women, passive women, manipulative and subversive women, the occasional woman who used to be a man, and prey and their predators.  

Just as I discovered while teaching at Taconic, these stereotypes gradually gave way to individuals who I came to know and love. It’s been a few years since I worked inside the prison, but I still remember many of their faces, their stories, their laughter, and their tears. I saw how they formed bonds with their own tribes that were more important than any other bond. “We stick with our own kind,” one of the inmates advises Piper in the TV series, and she means it. In prison, where you sit in the mess hall is extremely circumscribed.

The major theme in the show as is true in real prison, is female relationships. Friendship in prison is all about survival because if you don’t have friends, you’re dead. Piper is advised by her so-called counselor the first day she arrives to mind her own business, keep to herself, and above all, not to get involved with lesbians. That counselor turns out to be one of the most dangerous and corrosive personalities Piper encounters. Because she is in jail with the woman who gave her up to the authorities and who was once her lover, it’s not much of a surprise when she can’t stay away from that woman, who is exceptionally charismatic. When the two fall back into their old attraction, that counselor, who is a prison officer, illegally punishes Piper by throwing her in “the shoe,” which is slang for solitary confinement.

If you’re interested at all in female relationships, or what life would be like behind bars, I recommend the series, which is on Netflix. I don’t understand how we watched it ourselves. It has something to do with Roku. Don’t ask me how that works. I still have a dumb phone.

I will close with this thought. Possibly jail is the last place in America where older women have cred. Maybe it has something to do with being post-menopausal. If you’re bleeding, you’re vulnerable. Behind bars, achieving crone-dom is a valuable asset.

My pony is ailing

Poor Buttons is having a not so good time again and it isn't even his eye

he's been picking at his food for about a week

drinking much less water

his feet seem sensitive

but he has no fever

his CBT came back showing nothing 

now we're waiting to hear about another test

something to do with his Cushings and the medication he takes for it

i asked the vet should i ride him 

and she said

"Let's not change his usual routine." 

so i took him out today for a stroll in the woods and had to get off 3/4 of the way back

after a brief canter where he pulled himself up short

he felt weird under me

he came up lame

his right hind is bothering him

i left while the barn manager was putting in a call to his vet, who was just there for the blood work

of course i'm leaving on sunday to go to Omega for a week to finish my Reiki Master training

my poor pony

he's old

it's finally all catching up with him

Tragic ending for beloved family dog; was the kennel responsible?

http://www.record-review.com/record-review/Record-Review_080213_RR.html

Always a Campfire Girl

The summer I was 12 years old, my mother packed me off to a sleep-away camp in the Poconos. It was called Timber Tops, and the camp still exists, a fourth generation family run operation in Greeley, Pennsylvania. Described as an overnight camp for girls offering an overall-activity program with an emphasis on “FUN,” the fun is posted daily on FB now with lots of wonderful pictures of girls swimming, performing, canoeing, dancing, and having campfires by starlight.

My start at Timber Tops was rocky; about 3 days into to my month-long adventure, I spent a night in the infirmary for colic. Or maybe it was food poisoning. I did not like the food or the sweltering dining hall and I hated the mandatory morning swim in a lake of freezing water. Until Timber Tops, I’d never swum in anything besides a pool or the Atlantic Ocean. I hated the uniform, which was a white tee shirt and red shorts. Can you believe there was a uniform? The second week of camp my life took a turn for the better when I landed a role in the camp play, cast as Shroeder in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which thanks to the rigorous rehearsal schedule, got me out of tennis, which I hated.

The reason my mother gave for sending me to camp was she wanted me to have a more well rounded childhood. She also had just started dating a man named Maurice, but more on him later. A friend of hers, Ruth, was sending her girls, Leslie and Barbara, to the same camp; I was friendly with both Ruth’s daughters. Another girl we knew, Wendy, was also going.

What I remember most about Camp Timber Tops was that everything happened on a schedule. There was a rotation of waterfront activities including swimming and canoeing; there was tennis, arts and crafts, theater arts, and riflery. I actually was very good at riflery. I didn’t like walking en masse to the showers and I was very grateful a toilet and a sink were inside our rough-hewn bunk house. There were 12 girls in my bunk, including Leslie and Wendy. Barbara, being a year younger, was placed in another bunk dwelling. Wendy was certain this was going to be the summer when she got her period. Her trunk was packed with Kotex.

One of the girls in my bunk was named Reisman and her family was in the pretzel business. We had pretzels at every meal. Most of the girls at camp came from lovely upper middle class Jewish homes in the Philadelphia area. Today the girls come from all over the country. On a recent video I watched on the camp’s website, one girl was from Scarsdale. Back in the 60’s, the camp was dubbed “The Mountain Camp for Girls,” and even though we lived in bunks not tents, it was pretty close to providing a wilderness camping experience. Built from scratch on the banks of Lake Selma (the wife of the couple who were the camp’s founders), and carved into the side of a mountaintop of pine trees, Timber Tops embodied the spirit of adventure.

I spent the month of August at the camp. When I returned home, my mother had married Maurice in my absence. He and I met for the first time at the train station in Philadelphia on the platform when my mother came to meet the camp train. Maurice bought me a fall (a hair piece very popular in the ‘60’s) and we all went to Bookbinder’s  Restaurant in center city for dinner. He asked me that night if I had ever considered boarding school. To this day I regret my smart-ass answer.

The takeaway from my Timber Tops experience was that camp was very good for me overall. At camp I learned water tastes so much better than the sweet soft drink they served called “bug juice.’ I learned to shoot and clean a weapon and perfected my aim. I learned about flip flops. Prior to Timber Tops, it was strictly boots or barefoot for me. From early May through late September, if I didn’t have to, I wore shoes. I didn’t even know the word ‘sandal.’ But at camp every girl wore flip flops, except for our bunk counselor whose name Leslie (but not me) still remembers, a large, soft, grouchy girl in her early 20’s who snuffled in her sleep and cursed us. I am still a reluctant flip flop wearer after being chewed out at work in my early 20’s for my footwear. I can still hear Ira Kirschenbaum, one of the bosses, saying, “The workplace is not a beach,” and let’s face it, I’m always working and when I’m not, only an idiot would wear flip flops to a stable.

The most important thing I learned at camp was independence and a sense of ‘can do.’ And being in an all-female environment at that particular time of my life was inspiring. It’s thrilling to me that the legacy of Timber Tops lives on, although I see they no longer offer riflery. But now they have horseback riding. Even better.

All About Eve

Images&Impressions magazine, June 2013

http://iandimag.epubxp.com/t/21053

Father's Day with multiple fathers

Father’s Day has always made me a little uncomfortable although I should say from the git that I like fathers, I think fathers should be honored, and I’ve got nothing against Father’s Day. And if it’s your custom to gift a new tie, or little bags of golf tees (the Pride Golf Tee Co. sells a 70 count bag for $6.99 on line), or barbecue or gardening tools to the man you call Dad, Pop, Pa, or Papa, certainly don’t let anything I’m about to say here stand in your way. It’s only that my relationship to fathers in general is highly idiosyncratic, which means that come Father’s Day I’m always left feeling confused and a little bit anxious.

The trouble began when I was 7. My dad, or my “real dad,” as I later came to call him, died 3 months before of a sudden heart attack. I remember the awkwardness of my second grade teacher when it was time for the class to make cards. That was the year the second grade curriculum dictated we make paper doily portraits and glue them to construction paper. Even after I bluntly told the teacher my father was dead and there was no one for me to give the card to, Mrs. Englehart insisted I participate. “Don’t you have a grandfather or something you can give the card to?” she said, unhelpfully, as my mother and her own father were not on speaking terms. When it came time to select what color construction paper I was supposed to glue the doily on, I insisted on black, which already was my favorite color, but just happened, unbeknownst to me (after all, I was only 7) to be the international shade of mourning. The teacher was so flustered at my choice, she sent me to the principal’s office where I sat alone in a corner, reading “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic,” so as not to upset the other children.

My mother acquired a boyfriend shortly after, and for the next few years I dutifully, even happily, gave Father’s Day gifts to the man I called Uncle Charlie. Charlie, better known in South Jersey as “Camp Cotton,” was an attorney who had an illustrious, if brief career after World War II in Nuremberg, where he was part of a judicial commission investigating war crimes. By the mid 1960’s his law practice was handling minor criminal cases and the occasional divorce; he spent much of his time as an outspoken civil rights proponent. I adored him since he was funny and irreverent and introduced me to clams on the half shell and horses at the Atlantic City Racetrack. He was a source of endless frustration to my mother who wanted to marry him; already married 3 times, he eluded her grasp. Finally she broke up with him and moved far away; for a few more years I continued to live with him and his untidy brood of children from all his previous marriages. For Father’s Day every year I gave him a fishing lure, some of which were quite beautiful, and something he always appreciated. Charlie had a grand collection of rods and reels, which he stored by leaning them up against the walls of the dining room in the rented ramshackle mansion on Atlantic Avenue where we lived. Besides TB racing, fishing was his passion. He had a boat, a cabin cruiser called the Merry Chip, which he kept in a slip at the Atlantic City Marina (now Harrahs). I spent many summer mornings on that boat, studying handicapping tip sheets for his afternoons at the track.

My mother married a man named Maurice one summer while I was at sleep away camp. She met him and dated him and married him in just under six weeks. That was the summer I was 13. Imagine our mutual surprise when we met. They didn’t stay married long enough for me to celebrate with him a Father’s Day. My mother blamed me for the failure of their union. In hindsight, she probably was correct.

A couple of years later she met a man named Martin and before they married, they dated a whole year. During the 3 years I lived with them in an apartment in Woodbury, N.J. over a dental office, the only thing Martin wanted for Father’s Day was a bottle of Four Roses, or, in a pinch, Mateus. He had terrible taste in booze. He was an alcoholic and would basically drink anything that contained alcohol and was wet; once, on a Sunday night when the liquor stores were closed, in desperation, he sucked down mouthwash. I was pretty mean to Martin although he was unfailingly nice to me. My mother at the time was in one of her suicidal, dish throwing, obscenity-laced phases. Just about anything could set her off, including Martin’s most mundane habits. He was a cigarette smoker and she loathed cigarettes; plus he didn’t much care for food, or going out, and she loved restaurants and a night of glamour. Even though I didn’t like him, I defended him to her. One of the best things he ever did was drive around with me when I got my learner's permit. The moment we got in the car, he strapped a sleep mask around his head. Eyes fully covered, he dozed for 40 minutes as I steered his Impala around town, never commenting, never criticizing. That was great.

This year for Father’s Day I will give the father of my son the gift of lunch out in Greenwich, possibly, or maybe New Canaan, at his favorite Indian restaurant. If he's in the mood, we may tarry awhile in the men's department at Ralph Lauren’s. I haven’t asked my son what he is giving his dad for Father's Day, only that it won’t be a lace paper doily on construction paper. Bless his heart; he’s way too old for that.

Discovering the Horses of Sable Island

Sable Island is a tiny body of land located approximately 190 miles off of the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.  For most of the year, to visit, and few do, a person must call ahead to find out if the airstrip is firm enough to land on, or if it is underwater. Nine or ten months out of the year, Sable Island is home to no more than 4 or 5 people who work for the Canadian Coast Guard’s weather station, although in the summer, with the Coast Guard’s permission only, the population swells with scientists and the occasional tourist – or photographer.

The climate on Sable Island is inhospitable. Not many species thrive save for the harbor and grey seals, and the Savannah sparrow and Arctic tern. And then there are the wild horses, protected now by the Canadian government.

Some call the Sable Island horses ponies because they are small, but in fact they are horses, hardy small equines who thrive in a tough environment.

There are about 400 of them. They eat, breed, play, and die naturally, completely free of human interference. This was not always the case; the horses are believed to originally have arrived on the island thanks to shipwrecks centuries before, and until 1960, many were rounded up to be shipped off the island to work in the coal mines of Cape Breton until the Canadian government put that to a stop.

The Sable Island horses are quite attractive. Naturally stocky and muscular, their coats are mostly dark. As a completely protected and unmanaged population, few people have ever seen them, at least until 1994 when the fashion photographer Roberto Dutesco went to the island and photographed them, and exhibited his work in a gallery in New York. In 2005 the Nova Scotian photographer Paul Illsley took pictures of them, inspiring both a Canadian stamp and coin.

Drew Doggett, a New York City based photographer also trained in fashion photography, made a name for himself in the documentary and fine art world with his images of some of the planet’s most unique and isolated indigenous cultures. He has traveled to the most isolated parts of the Himalayas as well as Ethiopia. In June 2012 he spent two weeks on Sable Island, spending every day documenting the horses he found there. On Sunday, June 23^rd from 6:00 p.m. until 8:30 p.m., an exhibit of his photographs of the Sable Island horses will be on exhibit in Bedford at Historical Hall. The event is free and open to the public. The show is hosted by Anne Alexander and her husband Carl, Bedford residents and enthusiasts of Mr. Doggett’s work.

Mr. Doggett grew up riding casually a few times a year, and has a love of horses.

“I’ve always been fascinated and drawn to them,” he said in a recent telephone interview from Colorado where he was at work on another project. “On Sable Island I wanted to focus on their form and musculature and movement and examine their relationship with their landscape,” he said. “Sable Island is undergoing several changes as well as a national park. The process for me to get there was difficult. I had to apply and be approved and charter a plane to get there and deal with the weather in the region. The beauty and the treasure the islands have to offer are worth the trip.”

Mr. Doggett said he spent every day of his time there documenting the horses and picking a direction to walk. “The horses are completely unhindered and unmanaged,” he said. “You could walk for hours on end and not see one, and then suddenly see 90 horses.”

Sable Island, he said, is often called the ‘graveyard of the Atlantic’ due to its history of shipwreck. “Using the island’s rolling, shifting dunes and abundant fog as a canvas, I sought to uncover Sable’s singular treasures and to encounter these powerful animals on their own terms.” His exhibition, entitled, “Discovering the Wild Horses of Sable Island,” tells a story of power and beauty and wild equines. “The strength of these horses is evident in their form and in their movements,” Mr. Doggett said in his artist’s statement about the work. “Depicted in these photographs is the physicality of the horses as they relate to one another within their social hierarchy, but also the progress of time. The unhindered range these horses have over the landscape mirrors the dynamism of the island itself, which is constantly being carved out and reshaped by the wind. The resulting body of work, both intimate and expansive, captures the sometimes difficult realities of the island and offers a portrait of the relationship between these horses and the environment that supports them. Although the landscape is harsh — fresh water is scarce, and bone-chilling sea winds thwart the growth of any vegetation taller than dune grass — the wild horses of Sable Island have adapted to thrive in their unusual habitat. The only land mammals on Sable, they know no fear and have no predators. Entirely unmanaged and unimpeded by humans, the wild horses of Sable Island embody a unique freedom and independence.”

The exhibit presents 48 black & white or sepia toned images, archival pigment prints, signed by the artist. Prints 18x27 and larger are limited to an edition of 500 with 25 artists proofs subject to a tiered pricing structure with prices starting at $1,000. Sizes are customizable. Frame-ready open-edition prints are also available in 8x12 and 12x18 sizes.

The Alexanders have known Mr. Doggett for several years. One of Ms. Alexander’s close friends from college is married to Mr. Doggett’s older brother. “Drew invited my husband, Carl, and me to attend one of his photography openings in Soho last Fall,” Ms. Alexander said. “Although the evening highlighted his recent trip to Ethiopia, Drew also had several photographs previewing the horses of Sable Island. Needless to say- it was amazing! We have kept in touch and thought that Bedford would be a wonderful place to feature his Sable Island collection. As we are limited with art galleries in the area, Carl and I decided to "host" an evening at Historical Hall for Drew.  We are not "horse people" but have several friends that are and thought that we could help make that connection for him. We are collectors of his work, our favorite being one of his Sable Island Horses, and we look forward to acquiring more!” she said.

Mr. Doggett has visited Bedford on numerous occasions. “My wife and I have lunched at The Bedford Post. We’re very drawn to the beauty of the area. We love the wide open spaces and the charm,” he said. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting the community at the exhibit.”

Since 2009, Mr. Doggett has incorporated a philanthropic element into his artistic pursuits with Art Cares. Thanks to this non-profit project, proceeds from the book and fine art prints of Slow Road to China have already funded all operations at a health center in rural Nepal for a year.

In 2012, the Omo collection was accepted into the Smithsonian African Art Museum’s photographic archives. Mr. Doggett’s fine art photography is on display in buildings and private collections around the world, but for one special day in Bedford, it can be seen at Historic Hall.

“Discovering the Horses of Sable Island: An exhibition at Historic Hall” takes place on Sunday, June 23^rd from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.