The Redstar Perspective

When I lived in New York, my cousin would come into town frequently for business, and always complain that she never saw any celebrities. One time I pointed out to her Jerry Stiller entering a Duane Reade in the Village, and we watched him shop through the windows. She wasn’t really mollified though until she sat at a table adjacent to Martha Stewart at Nobu (I think; someplace fancy as her company was all about the Diner’s.)

I on the other hand, being hyper observant and a resident of New York for seven years, had no shortage of celebrity sightings. My favorite was Conan O’Brien, who was on the Delta Shuttle from Boston to New York one Easter Sunday evening back in the late 1990s. Originally sitting diagonally in front of me, I noticed that no one was taking the seat opposite the aisle from him. So I (subtly?) switched seats and interviewed him for the 45 minute flight back to New York. The part that my friend Yakka loves most about this story is how I initiated the conversation. “You’re from Brookline, right?” I began by asking him. When he answered yes, I told him how I won my junior varsity basketball team’s game against Brookline High by tying the game at the buzzer and scoring another basket in overtime. Conan O’Brien, nationally known late night talk show host meets Redstar, local high school junior varsity basketball ace. I was disappointed to find in the week of shows following our interaction, he failed to mention me on the air! He was, however, pleased at the end of our flight to accept a blow-pop from the Easter Basket I had in the overhead cabin. He made a crack about Rose Kennedy and his own Irish-Catholic family and was on his way. (At 31, I still receive Easter Baskets from my stepmother; each contains a pair of underwear, among candies and toiletries.)

I also met Ted Kennedy on the Delta shuttle, again by introducing myself to him. That was as we exited the plane, and was far less amusing than the Conan experience, or than watching Mayor Mike Bloomberg have lunch with Star Jones at City Hall restaurant in Lower Manhattan. It’s funny how it can take a minute to notice celebrities in our midst. I’ve passed David Duchovny, Gloria Steinem, and Alan Cumming on the street (not together), and their faces register in my brain when I’m well past them. One Sunday night on the Upper East Side Sigourney Weaver asked me for the time. Both of us out for walk and dressed in sweats, it took me a minute to realize who she was once I looked up from my watch. Not so for my friend Amy when she spotted Ben Affleck on the street one day, and trailed him for several blocks. Nor for me when I saw Matthew Broderick on the street when I was still just a tourist in New York, at age 12. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a recent huge hit, and that sighting was the icing on the Hard Rock Café visit cake as my mom and I spent the day in the city from my uncle’s house on Long Island. But beyond the streets of New York (and Los Angeles and maybe even London), the plane is really us commoners’ best bet for celebrity sightings. I’ve now shared flights from DC to New Orleans with both Mayor Nagin and his run-off opponent, Mitch Landrieu. The impetus for this post is that I’m sitting behind Dr. John, the legendary musician (“Pianist singer. Fren of Prof Longhair. RnB blues rock. A legend,” the M.A.S. texts me instructively.) on a delayed flight from New Orleans to Philadelphia. He and numerous folks on this plane were in town tuesday night for the tribute anniversary concert at the New Orleans Arena. He was in front of me in the security line too, with a helpful tag on his bag stating “Dr. John” and “Musicien,” but it was more the warm greeting he got from one of the airport employees that made me pay attention. Our stuff got entangled at the end of the security belt, and he is elderly and slow on his feet, walking with a cane. It was all I could do not to squeeze by him as he struggled back into his shoes and gathered his belongings. I do my best to avoid knocking down the elderly in my zeal to keep moving, particularly famous geysers traveling with an entourage of producers, roadies, etc. Attached here is a photo of the back of his head over our seats. I am vicariously excited on behalf of the M.A.S., for whom this sighting would be truly thrilling. I am genuinely jazzed about being upgraded to first class; finally after all these trips in and out of New Orleans on U.S. Air, I have made the leap in frequent flyer mile status. Silver preferred. Check me out. Man, all this new prestige – flying first class, being attacked by local activists, celebrity hobnobbing – all I need now is some scandal to cement my own fame and the producers of The Surreal Life will be knocking on my door!

I am sitting at Oak Street Cafe in New Orleans - should really be in the car en route to the airport since my flight is in an hour 45.  But if I’m on time or too early to anything, I feel like I’m wasting time.  And the Louis Armstrong International Airport ain’t known for its post-Katrina crowds (anymore).

Given there’s no direct flights (yet?) b/w Boston and NOLA, today is mostly given over to travel, reunion with M.A.S. at Logan, and getting settled in at home.  School starts Tuesday, and Block Island awaits for Labor Day weekend. 

But never fear, I took copious notes and had MANY thoughts, conversations and debates about the events of yesterday and New Orleans in general.  Cam phone photos too.

I will be back on line tomorrow to share much of this with you.

It was great to hear from some long lost friends via my “spamming” my hotmail address book with my blog address.  I am continually surprised how many of us are out here in the blogosphere (looking forward to linking up - sounds kinky!), and I am endlessly amused how many of my women friends zero in immediately on mentions of the M.A.S. mixed up in my tales of politics and disasters, etc.  He is worth paying attention to. 

My Daily Horoscope

“An important career concern could require considerable effort on your part today in order to enable you to advance whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, dear Virgo. At some point during the day, you may be plagued by doubts as to your ability to do this. However, don’t let this cause you to panic. All you need is to muster a little energy and stay focused on the task at hand. Believe it: Today you’re capable of accomplishing wonders.”

Today is the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and I am off shortly to attend some memorial events.  Due to the announcement re: MIT and Lafitte, I am “enjoying” some new notoriety about my work in New Orleans so far.  Somehow in my commuting, outsider way, I’ve become the whipping girl for MIT’s work on the ground.  My colleagues, including the one who’s been living on the ground for the last 7 months, are totally amused.

I had a long talk last night with a planner from UNO about the tension and emotion that’s been simmering in the city in the weeks leading up to the anniversary.  She watched two 60 yr olds come to blows in a meeting last night over an idea, a suggestion.  The night before the first anniversary of September 11, I burst into tears in front of my boss, over something seemingly entirely unrelated, but in hindsight seems to have been a much needed release from the sadness and overwhelming significance of the coming day. 

So in personal and professional ways, today should be a highly charged event.  I hope the energy and emotion that is so prevalent here exists around the country, and among my readers, as you see the coverage and it triggers your own thoughts about New Orleans, disasters, race, cities.  Thanks for joining us down here. 

There has been some outcry in New Orleans about my interview with MIT’s Tech Talk, as well as about MIT’s role in redeveloping Lafitte.  I am responding personally to the folks I know, but here are some statements that I hope will be useful to everyone interested.  Please remember I don’t speak for MIT.  These are MY views.  They are personal and based on 31 years worth of emotional and intellectual experience, including the last year in and out of New Orleans.

I experience a collective sense of loss and grief in the city.  YES, there is incredible grassroots activism (Tim Coates, from the Kennedy School of Government and a consultant to the Broadmoor Improvement Association, covered it remarkably well from an non-New Orleanian in an op-ed - “Katrina’s Heroes” - for the Boston Globe on August 20).  Communities, local organizations and individual residents are no doubt doing a fantastic job of reclaiming, recovering, re-imagining - honestly, just select your preferred “re” verb here - their homes, neighborhoods, schools, futures, etc.  BUT, all this individualism to me is NOT acceptable, NOT enough.  There should be stronger, guiding government leadership, from the local all the way up to the federal - and especially here! - level.  This leadership should be bridging these individual efforts towards a collective vision.  This might be naive, idealistic, un-American, uninformed, but I think it’s bullshit that there has to be a Crazy Horse approach (i.e., self-funded) to development vs. organized, coherent, available funding, guidance and support from the government on rebuilding.  And maybe I truly am an outsider; maybe this Only In My Backyard approach to redevelopment is how New Orleanians prefer it.  But that’s not what I heard when I was working with organizing groups.   And just because groups demonstrate remarkable organizing activity doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for the government to just let them have at it.  Individual CDCs and community-based organizations can’t rebuild roads, take down I-10, turn on their electricity again, or repair a broken school system unless they privatize it.  I’m not content with this solution.

I find it incredibly sad that half the city is still gone, and that this half is probably not able to return any time soon, if at all. This is some form of institutional neglect, negligence, willful harm, I’m not sure what to call it, on behalf of the government to not enable people to return, and not to cushion their landing in other cities with anything else than an overpriced, undersized flimsy home in a segregated trailer park.  Public housing and multi-unit dwellings, schools and other large parcels could have been the first to have been cleaned out and repopulated with returning families and workers.  The details could have been worked out on this.  It wasn’t done.  I find this mass displacement abhorrent, and I find the “right to return” rhetoric supports my feeling.  But if we’re going to permanently shut families out, then offer them support and opportunity in their lives elsewhere. 

I do not support the demolition of public housing, ESPECIALLY given HUD’s flimsy, false rhetoric about the need to take it down. Mixed income in my narrowly informed experience seems to either continue to segregate people in poverty (i.e., the upper income families don’t arrive or remain) or, as is the well-known case in New Orleans, River Garden, the poor are permanently displaced and it’s nothing more than a mix of middle-income families.  At the end of the day, putting up and taking down buildings does VERY little to address the root causes of poverty in the U.S., and there’s no shortage of academics and practitioners debating what to do about public housing.  All that said, if it’s coming down, and maybe the lawsuits will prove otherwise, I am glad to know who the developers are.  I know their work in other cities, I’ve listened to them at length, I understand their convictions and commitment.  I would rather this development team on Lafitte than any other, and that isn’t because I’m jonesing for a role.  I don’t like, nor do I want to practice, development.  It’s too abstract for me, a disconnected way of dealing with people’s lives.

My impressions of New Orleans post-Katrina are inevitably informed by 2 1/2 years of working in Lower Manhattan after September 11.  I saw first hand how individually-based programs that did not align with macro-level changes in the neighborhood left some people downtown worse off, especially over time.  For example, small business owners encouraged and offered incentives to remain downtown were then trapped by debt loads as their consumer population downtown disappeared due to development programs that converted commercial properties to residential buildings.  With their clients gone, they had little income to repay their debts and some of them became, as one disaster researcher put it, “permanently failing organizations.”   I’m taking a long view here re: New Orleans.  And I come back to my original point: without a common direction, pool of resources, or vision around which to rally, independent efforts on behalf of community groups and individuals could come to naught. 

The people who have attacked me directly are those with whom I have personal relationships.  I appreciate their input.  As I wrote to one of them, I hope they’ll think about our personal interactions so far and weigh those against what they are now reading and hearing (unless of course it’s from this blog).  I wrote to the reporter about the incredible “emotion work” involved in working in New Orleans (forgive the academic jargon):

“I also find it hard to work down here at at least an arm’s length removed from the ground.  Meaning, I don’t work with many survivors, very few locals, etc…it’s also hard not to have their input, their emotion, etc. to refuel me on a day to day basis (or, alternatively, sap my exhaustion from the sheer size of their needs.) It’s easy to get a sense of “why am I doing this again?”  when it’s such demanding work to begin with.  I work mainly with other external groups, and with senior organizational types from large, local groups, so there isn’t that sense of connection that I had in NY working directly with business owners.  There’s a level of feeling really removed and not having an outlet for my own emotional response to the plight of the city, as a result.  To extend this, I do feel very alone in my work down here…there’s very few people in the rest of my world that are in a position to understand what I’m going through, working on, experiencing, etc. down here.  It’s really really intense work, and I find I’m VERY consumed by it.” 

One of the reasons I’m looking forward to coming to New Orleans full-time is to try to reduce this disconnectedness from the energy and spirit on the ground.  New Orleans is an amazing city.  Whether people love it or hate it, it doesn’t seem like anyone leaves untouched by it.  It’s seductive and unique and I can’t fathom our country without it, or tolerating a sanitized version of its former self.  Perhaps over time, my critics will come to understand how much I love cities, how strong is my own urban pride, and how I’m fueled by a sense of pragmatic righteousness (yes, it confounds me too) in my work.  In the meantime, I also hope they’ll go about their business of protecting, loving, and fighting for their people and places. 

Ok, someone has to explain these search strings for me…I thought the temper tantrum was cool.  Check this out:

“homoerotic male youth turkish”

What the f***?????

Writes the soon-to-be 31-year-old as she enters her 3rd year of her doctoral program and her 19th year of schooling overall.  I wish I could find the article Amy’s husband Abs sent me a year or two ago about all the difficulty highly-educated women have in finding long-term partners, a phenomenon well-documented in the sociological subfield of gender & occupations.  Another finding: highly-educated and/or professional women who do marry are more likely to marry educational/professional peers than their male counterparts.  And that women still manage the bulk of the work at home, that men have more leisure time than women, etc. etc.  I apologize, I’m digressing, and could piss myself off in no time if I keep this up.  Just sitting here at my desk in the Phd office, getting fired up to be back at school and awash in depressing sociological studies of inequality!  Wahoo!

In the four months I’ve been assaulting you with the Redstar Perspective, I think very little content has originated here at MIT.  I’ve been consumed with New Orleans, living and working and commuting to/from there.  Now, as August wraps up and I find myself in Boston for the remainder of the month (give or take a day or two down South for Katrina’s anniversary), I am checking in with the Institute (what we call MIT, what do you think, pretentious?), and getting ready for one of my favorite seasons: back to school!  (Not least because back-to-school clothes shopping is the most fun ever!  The M.A.S. and I need to make a date to Banana Republic to spend all my gift certificates/discounts that have been piling up.) 

You’ll likely be hearing more from this academic outpost as school kicks in just after Labor Day. I am TA’ing the core Masters’ class, Gateway: Planning Action, and can’t imagine I won’t have tales of over-anxious, hyper-smart, uber-motivated, lightweight not-very-fun Masters’ students as they roll in with their two years work experience and expectations of multi-ethnic grassroots revolution amidst beautifully designed green spaces and boulevards lined with social-purpose businesses.  I’ll be studying for my General Exams this spring, and will certainly need to post to break up the monotony of reading 6,000 pages of theory and research in the next ten months.   I will need a lot of support during this trying time, and will expect many comments filled with encouragement!  Keeping company with our IT guy Mike’s iTunes library of almost 10,000 songs will not be enough, though so far it’s gotten me through long stretches at this corner desk next to a window overlooking the unending roadwork on Mass Ave.  (Gotta be a job creation strategy on Cambridge’s part…)

It’s hard to describe MIT in a holistic way to people who imagine (rightly) that it’s filled with brilliant physicists and economists and the socially awkward who think nothing of planning communities on Mars (meetings monthly in the basement of the Aero-Astro building), throwing a party to welcome time travelers from the future (last fall, featured in the NY Times), and hopefully making better use of the large nitrous tanks lining the hallways of different science departments than merely using them for their lab experiments.  There is an academic intimidation hierarchy alive and well here, in which people I met outside the Institute assume I am as smart as I assume are the econ and poli sci PhDs with whom I occasionally share classes.  (I’ve heard a few comments in some classes that make me feel like I’m stoned - I’m hearing something that sounds brilliant but simultaneously makes no sense to me.)  Not to mention the rest of the brainiacs I merely pass in the halls.

I have described MIT as being like New York City - a 24/7 place unlike anywhere else filled with characters and individuals who can luxuriate in a relative anonymity, left alone to pursue their own peculiar interests.  But this is like me saying that Boston and New Orleans are similar because they are both Catholic, parochial, and run by corrupt political machines.  The similarities only go so far.

So perhaps over time the Redstar Perspective will provide some entertaining insight into this funny little land this side of the Charles River.  The category title “Cambridge Radicals” is a tribute to my father’s comment - described on this blog previously - of what I might ultimately become when he learned I’d be attending MIT.   First Jewish intellectuals then onto Wall Street, my academic career has taken some interesting turns.  And yet there’s still so much to learn! 

Jake writes: “… was this guy Lester specially built by God for Red Sox fans…

After reading this article, I officially started my nail biting… I’m glad I missed the last game. I need the next 2 months to speed up… God don’t drag it out for me!”

Numbers Game in Their Favor (Boston Globe, 8/14/06)

Jake is a Trenches Friend - I think most often of Lower Manhattan, but it’s really a concept that extends far beyond any work we did post-9/11. He’s a mountaineer, a rugby player, and knows how to get down in there with you and get you through some excruciating experiences. You want him in your corner, esp. since he’s also way too willing to pick up the tab when the solution (as it often is) is one too many martinis!

It was with Jake and our other bud from Boston Catherine, that I endured IN New York the Sox-Yankees 2003 ALCS. While I was supposed to be studying for my GREs (and I seriously considered attaching a note in my MIT app about my poor performance on them being related to watching the Sox rather than prepping), I was instead at No Idea in Flatiron with Jake and Catherine, shifting over several days from celebratory (if still wary) heckling of the other patrons to sitting in stunned silence while the air - and sound - of victory wafted across the bar from the stunned and silent sitting Sox fans in one corner of the room to the screaming on-their-feet Yankees fans now crowding around the big screen in No Idea’s big back room. I couldn’t function the next day…I literally felt like someone died, and if it weren’t for the supportive emails circulating b/w Jake, Catherine and me (not to mention the therapeutic musings of the Sports Guy: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index), I probably would’ve called it a day and headed home and back to bed. That night we had a Lower Manhattan team dinner, and it’s got to be in my top 50 most plastered nights. And through it all, Jake was there.

I’m still waiting for Jake to honor his commitment to moving back to Boston once the Big Dig is complete (ok, he’s never coming home). Until then, I take comfort in our late summer/early fall email exchange, especially we enter a brutal 5-game weekend series.

Go Sox!

Jake emails me:

“In today’s NY times there was an article about where the mid point is between Yankee and Red Sox fans in CT….

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/sports/baseball/18fans.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin

‘The midpoint between Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium is approximately Rocky Hill, Conn., a few miles south of Hartford and east of New Britain. Some adventurers have dared to guess where allegiances are perfectly balanced, usually pointing to a place near Route 91, anywhere from north of Hartford to New Haven in the south.’”

My mom and stepdad own a condo in Glastonbury, next to Rocky Hill, where Jake’s parents live….I wouldn’t call my mom and stepdad Sox diehards. My stepdad pays attention when it gets exciting, as we all do, but generally spends any emotional sports energy on sailing and UConn b-ball. My mother would prefer to root for the Yankees, not so secretly, ever since my father spent way too many nights for her liking in the pressbox during the 1975 season (read: The 1975 World Series). While my mother was home with an infant who didn’t take kindly to sleeping (still doesn’t!), my father was living out every Sox fan’s dream of some extracurricular press job for pennies but that got him into all the games. Can you blame him? My mom can, and still does.

I see how people visit NOLA and never manage to see anything but the French Quarter and the Garden District.  In Montreal, I walked all over…downtown (Centre-Ville).  Couple hipster neighborhoods and the large, winding Parc du Mont Royal, and I was looking forward to admiring my new toned gluts after all that walking.  On the plane home, I checked out my excursions on a map, and I was the equivalent of walking around Times Square and Central Park.  Yuck. Sigh.  Lovely city though, from what little I saw.
Monday night, before the whole United 93 French-Arabic fiasco, I was roaming around Rues de St. Laurent and St. Denis, lost in the urban Quebecois wilderness, unable to make simple decisions like where to eat.**  Kept wandering in and out of bookstores and ended up talking for awhile to this young guy who worked in one of them, a sort of red-headed anarchist Jew punk rocker who writes poetry but thinks he might like sociology and really wants to write non fiction from now on.  He gave me a brief primer on the recent revolutionary history of Quebec and Montreal to explain why people here are more “prone to rioting.”  His words, in response to my tale of my high school youth group trip here where we witnessed a riot on St. Catherine St. after the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup.  He and I exchanged blog addresses, and I wrote in my journal one of his quotes, “can there be poetry after Auschwitz?”*** 
 

Cool guy, and he gave me my lunch place for Tues, and explained to me the smoked meat phenomenon going on across the street from the bookstore while we talked.  (See photos).  Apparently the best in the country, if not North America, if not the world. 

As if to confirm this guy’s point that Quebecois are thus a “little touchy”, my cab driver when dropping me off got pissed at the cab driver in front of him in hotel driveway and leaped out of the car to start with him.  The hotel valet broke them up.  It was bizarre and I couldn’t hear them, and then it was in french anyway, I believe it was that the defendant cab driver was blocking the hotel driveway. 

Then, in the elevator up to my room, one of the guys in the elevator had a handlebar mustache.

Fascinating.

La librairie: employ of the Red-headed Anarchist

Everybody wants smoked meats from Schwarz’s!

** For example, please detour down another aisle if you see me trying to decide b/w 20 oz and 22 oz glasses in Home Goods.  I will be there for at least an hour, sitting in the aisle, taking glasses in and out of boxes, etc.

 ***PLEASE READ THE COMMENTS FOR CORRECTIONS TO THIS POST.

I thought by now I was pretty seasoned at cross-cultural relationships, so I didn’t expect dating a big Swede from VA to be much of a challenge…yet, the following exchange demonstrates how he continues to confound me with his peculiar language and customs. 

L: “My dad sent me an email about my cousin J-’s 9th birthday party on Saturday.  He told me that my cousin K- has the best purple whiffle he’s ever seen on a woman.” 

M.A.S.: “What’s a whiffle?”

What’s a whiffle?!?!  A whiffle??  What kind of haircut was he running around with all summer as a 9 year old?  I don’t know, he grew up in a military area, apparently they just called them buzz cuts or crew cuts or something… Boring!  (And btw, Google Image needs pictures of Whiffles ASAP; too many whiffle balls and goofy white dude whiffle ball Champs popping up…)

Don’t even get me started on the Dutch Oven mix-up….Ever heard of a Covered Wagon?  Me neither.

I have a couple long posts rooting around in my mind, but it’s a gorgeous day and I’m back in Boston and heading out to run errands and get some sun and drink some iced coffee and give thanks that I’m not on a plane or commuting to the airport or standing in line at the airport or jamming yet another receipt for reimbursement in my purse.  So you’ll have to hang on a moment.

10 days til my birthday.

For discussion: If we go from 9 to 12 planets, what does this mean for the future of astrology?  Am I still a Virgo?  This is my faith system we’re talking about!  Me and so many New Yorkers.  A jaded, materialistic bunch with no faith in God but a pretty consistent zeal for the zodiac.  Thoughts? 

Hot planner chick is mortified. 

Back in my hotel room, emailing with the M.A.S. and waiting for pay-per-view United 93 to begin.  It starts, and I’m half paying attention but notice that the voiceover is definitely NOT english.  Call front desk in this Francophone city, complain, “this movie is in French.”  Have to turn off tv for 10 minutes for them to cancel it, then turn back on and call down again to try to figure out how to get movie in English.  They offer to send someone up to help me.

Young, olive-skinned man arrives (see my post Montreal Part I).  He orders movie, and when he hears voiceover, says “This is Arabic.”  Ah………….I say to him, “do you speak Arabic?”  Of course he does.  I’m a jack ass. He then waits with me to confirm the movie is in English, and we awkwardly watch together the early scenes of the terrorists praying in their hotel room, then driving to the airport.  Me, who can’t even distinguish foreign languages from one another, and the Canadian Arab Marriott employee, reliving 9/11 together.

Christ.

Would love to tell you about it, but haven’t seen too much of it yet.

Can certainly start with the valuable info that salt & vinegar peanuts are nowhere near as good as salt & vinegar potato chips.  But perhaps that seems obvious.

It’s funny, despite my Virgo ways, I am not the most prepared traveler.  I have a tendency to spend exorbitant amounts of time on booking my flights and other preparations for traveling (hotel, rental car, vaccinations, etc.), and next to nothing on city research, trip planning, etc.  For instance, yesterday I arrived in Montreal with an expired passport (though feigned surprise at the border), no address for my hotel, and no understanding that they speak French here.  (Never realized all the Quebecois nationalist victories either led to a French-speaking population, or, more likely, followed on the reality of a Francophone culture here.)  I have a hard time reading about places before I’ve arrived, because it lacks context.  Much better to get to the ground then turn a book for translation, back up info. 

I appear to be staying near McGill. It’s young in this area, lots of 24/7 establishments with internet access, and graffiti.  Surrounding blocks have that hipster-decline thing going on.  I’m curious to get out and explore.  B/w my hotel, Old Montreal (cobblestone streets, cafes, shops, tourists), and the conference center, there’s more vacant storefronts than expected. 

Several of my high school friends used to come here pretty frequently, and another MIT PhD at the conference, another Boston local, told me she used to do the same.  Huh.  Maybe because I lived in NY for most of my 20s, it never occurred to me to come to Montreal for the Europe-lite experience they all enjoyed. 

So, I’m off in a few for some exploration and dinner.  I’ll report back, but will leave you with this concluding thought: oOne thing I did notice immediately, and this is no reflection on the M.A.S. and his delicious Scandinavian looks, but I am struck here by a similar phenomenon I find in London.  The U.S. does not have nearly enough brown men for me to look at.  Brown, olive, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, Moorish roots.  Love it.  I know, to each her own.  Obviously I am missing out on a timely diplomatic career in the Middle East and sub-Continent.