I'M JUST SAYIN'

Isn’t it time to feel

Abashed about

How

self-absorbed

Self –satisfied

Self-important

Self-righteous

We have all become?

Not just the fat ass boomers

Who have declared that 60 is the

New 50

And

50 the

New 40

But the young ones too

All emo

And angst

And OMG

and

WTF

And

Hooking up

(like they invented it!)

‘cause being in a

“relationship”

Is so

Lame

And

Needy.

We all bear our burdens and

The difficulty of our

Lives

While having

Our

Toes done

Or

At the gym

Or Starbucks

Or the Lower East Side

Or

Williamsburg

Or the

Upper West Side

Or SoBro

Or anywhere else it makes us feel

Virtuous and cutting edge to live

I’m

Just Sayin’

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

If I had to isolate the original catalyst that started me on my quest to discover my inner Negro , I’d have to say it was a crazy white man named Joey Reiman.

Joey had been professionally seducing me over the course of several months, begging me to move to Atlanta and run his media group. Finally, the right combination of six figures along with additional accoutrement convinced me that living in the south would not be a problem.

After all, I had lived in Australia for 6 years, and Los Angeles for 4, but, with all due respect to New York, but, as a smart, non traditional “woman of color” making it in a place where you can ACTUALLY count how many other people look like you, you can pretty much make it ANYWHERE.

The other major consideration was that at last I would have a position worthy of my family’s approbation, Vice President!, especially since I was a failed stand up comedian and had already left husband number one back in OZ. Maybe this time the family thought; I would stick with something!

The only person I knew in Atlanta was my Aunt J. She has been my mother’s closest friend for over 60 years. They grew up next door to each other in Jamaica and their fathers did business together. People often tended to look askance when they heard me call her Auntie because she’s Chinese. But since the motto of Jamaica is “out of many, one people” it made perfect sense to me.

So, I moved to Atlanta, the Deep South, with a 70 year old Chinese woman as my only friend.

Like so many recently developed big cities, Atlanta looks like it sprang up, fully formed, from the ground one day. Everything was so NEW. I like cities that look like they evolved and were put together over time, out of necessity. I guess General Sherman put paid to that idea on his long march to the sea.

I decided, without much though to move to the swanky suburb of Buckhead. It was my first “gated community” and although I grew up in a relatively white suburb, this took things to a whole new level. I hadn’t done much reconnaissance prior to picking Brittany Acres.

I knew I wanted something new, close to work and around “stuff”. When I had initially cruised the prestigious Lenox Road strip, I gravitated towards Brittany Acres, simply because it was the only complex without the word Plantation in the name. I set the bar pretty low right from the beginning.

My place was really lovely, though. After having lived in Manhattan for the last few years, the fact that I had far more space than I could ever use was a luxury I had not been afforded since I lived in Perth. It had a huge master bedroom suite with French doors leading to a balcony that overlooked a sea of young pine trees, planted when the complex was first built. At the far end of the balcony was another door leading into a sun-drenched breakfast nook, surrounded on three sides by windows. The room off the nook became the sun-dappled studio where I set up my easel and paints. There was a guest bedroom, and bathroom, a den, a spectacular cook’s kitchen and my favorite thing in the entire unit, a beautiful marble fireplace at the far end of the living room. I had unconsciously replicated, in miniature, the house Vinnie and I had built while we lived in Australia. It was almost obscenely spacious for one person and the best thing about being in Atlanta.

My move coincided with one of the worst cold snaps the city had ever seen, so I was effectively trapped in an endless loop between home, where I rattled around like a pea, and work, where I was quickly figuring out how much I hated my job. Although my office was located in the stylish center of unbearably stylish downtown Buckhead, going to work every morning had taken on the spirit of the Bataan Death March. It was becoming increasingly clear that Joey was a madman. As part of my compensation package, I had been promised a car. Of course, upon my arrival in Atlanta, there was no car in evidence. After endless wrangling with the cheap, creepy, backstabbing, bastard of a CFO, they finally adhered to the letter, rather than the spirit of the agreement and provided me with a three year old, silver Cadillac Sedan de Ville. The car came equipped with a massive dash-mounted mobile phone that looked like it should have had a rotary dial and it smelled like the bottom of a well used ashtray. That car must have weighed at least 4000 lbs. Every time I got in that thing I felt like I should have on platform shoes, polyester pants and start bitch slappin’ motherfuckers. It has been said that rubber wheels beat rubber heels, but I’m still not so sure about that.

I honestly felt as if Joey had forgotten the hired me. On my first day, he seemed surprised, even startled by my appearance at his door. He was a small man with a wild corona of frizzy blond hair and a penchant for wearing paisley bowties and Gucci loafers, sans socks. He was incredibly manic; and in addition to owning the ad agency where I worked, he was simultaneously opening a restaurant, raising Shetland ponies in his backyard and constantly bragging about how great the sex was between he and his his local news anchor wife. All my warning bells were going off. I’m not proud to say that I ignored the signs because it was all about the money. But that’s exactly what I did.

Every morning, I woke with the familiar knot in my stomach that meant it was time to back to work.

I had not really gotten a handle on my staff as yet, but they seemed to truly embody the shibboleth “motley crew”. There were eleven of them in all, including Arleta, the woman who felt she had been passed over for my job. She was older than I, probably by about 5 or 6 years, and each and every one of those years was writ large on her face.

She was the color of dark chocolate – Teuscher, not Nestlé, and, much as I hate to say it – she had rather unfortunate hair.

At any rate, I figured if I was going to get anywhere with this group, I had to make nice with Arleta, since until my arrival she had become the default team leader. The rest of the team, while an array of various types, were non-descript to the degree that I can no longer clearly distinguish them in my own mind.

My first order of business was to find an executive assistant. I had been spoiled for the last eight years in my career and now insisted that with every new job I have an assistant to do the filing and the typing and the making of massage and nail appointments befitting a media diva of my stature.

After a parade of characterless types, who were extremely proficient at typing and filing but not at LIVING, I settled on a young woman named Lancaster. Her birth name was actually Nancy, but when she was 17, she ran away from home, changed her name and became a stripper. When I met Lancaster, she had been promoted to hostess, was taking computer classes at night, and agonizing about her fiancé’s lack of current employ. I loved her! She sealed the deal for me when she told me her breast implants felt like softballs, and she was getting rid of them as soon as she could I hired her immediately. That degree of artlessness HAD to be rewarded

Things, however, went from bad to worse and I eventually had a meltdown one night in the Chinese restaurant across the street from my condo complex. As usual, I had called ahead; they made a fantastic Grand Marnier shrimp. I was sitting at the bar, talking to myself out loud, when out of nowhere an elegant black woman, looking like she just stepped out of a St John’s catalogue approached . She asked me if I was alright and the words came skittering out of my mouth like marbles “I don’t know anyone here and it’s freezing out and I hate my job and I’m lonely and I don’t know how to meet anyone…” She stemmed the flow of words, by offering her hand and introducing herself as Ginger Sullivan. She told me that she was having a luncheon at her home that weekend, and would be delighted if I could join her. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Little did I know I had just met my first black “super” Republican. She was extremely regal and almost preternaturally calm. Thinking about it now, I realize she had that same Prozac-by-way-of Stepford quality that you see today in Condi Rice. It’s as if they had all the ‘sistah” sucked right out of them. And, yes; really bad hair. But very lovely, kind and gracious; nonetheless. At that time, I had no idea that she was the wife of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services under King George the First.

I generally tried leaving the country during Republican administrations and had come back from Australia just in time for Clinton, missing almost entirely the “Reagan/ Bush I Revolution”, no fool I!

So, while I had no idea who she really was at the time, l felt better after meeting her. Knowing that genuine human contact was promised for the weekend made it much easier to go back to the Tower of Terror the next morning.