Today would have been Michael Jackson’s fifty-eighth birthday, and he’s been on my brain since I woke. Diana Ross fell in love with him on first sight and so did I, fell for those big eyes beneath big fros long before either of us hit puberty. I adored him in the Jackson 5, emulated his Thriller moonwalk every day afterschool at my best friend Ansie’s. Listened to Off the Wall a ton when I started to have good sex in my twenties—even more when I learned to love in my thirties. Continue Reading →
Archive | Age Matters
The Toils of ‘Fatima’
“Fatima” begins slowly and deliberately, and proceeds that way for its entire seventy-eight minutes, like a mother straightening her child’s room. This is appropriate, for it is about an Algerian cleaning woman struggling to raise her two teenage daughters in Lyon, France. The film is a loose adaptation of Priere a la lune (Prayer to the Moon), a short collection of poems and other writings by Fatima Elayoubi, a North African woman who emigrated to France and taught herself the language. Fatima’s onscreen stand-in is played by the nonprofessional actor Soria Zeroual, who really worked as a cleaning woman until being cast in this film.
At times, Zeroual’s lack of acting experience is all too evident – her high, trailing voice can grate; her motions and features can seem frozen – but soon enough you see what director Philippe Faucon saw in her: an unadulterated steadiness that shores her children – and this film – in the face of all adversity. With her veiled head, stricken expression, and broken French, Fatima encounters micro – and macro – aggression daily, yet remains undeterred as she spends long hours cleaning a local factory and the houses of unhappy, wealthy women. Nothing can sway her from the goal of supporting Nesrine (Zita Hanrot), her eighteen-year-old daughter in medical school, and Souad (Kenza Noah Aiche), her fifteen-year-old daughter who is as surly with her mother as she is with her schoolmates and teachers. Continue Reading →
Working Tween (#FirstSevenJobs)
I’d planned to ignore the #firstsevenjobs hashtag floating around. Then I realized I couldn’t even remember my first seven jobs because, a true Capricorn, I’d been working since before I hit double digits and had done everything from posing nude to working as a TV actor before I turned 20. Sorting out the list proved more entertaining than doing a crossword, so forgive the length and (nonhumble) brag. One thing’s for sure: I missed my calling. Given my early proclivities, you’d think I’d be a coke-addled billionaire by now.
1. Leaflet distributor. At age 9, sick of begging my parents for an allowance when it came straight out of my mother’s limited food budget, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I marched into all the local businesses in West Newton Square and asked if they wanted someone to distribute leaflets on their behalf. Two businesses bit, and, soon enough, I was slipping leaflets advertising a thrift shop and deli under all the car windshields and welcome mats in the area. Yes, I was that arsehole.
2. Babysitting entrepreneur. At age 11, I decided the leaflets weren’t cutting it—they only yielded five cents a page—so I started a mini-babysitting business in which I mined my leafletting skills to build my “company” from the ground up. In retrospect, it is appalling that so many Newton, Massachusetts parents entrusted their precious charges to a gum-snapping 11-year-old who did not like kids. When I could not handle all the work that came my way, I began to hand the jobs entailing too many boys (all those huge Boston Irish Catholic families!) over to Michael Anderson, who promptly poached most of my gigs permanently. Oh, Michael. Twenty years later, I was the best man in his Oregon wedding. Continue Reading →