Wendy Wasserstein - Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties: Essays

Contents

For Ken Cassillo and Cindy Tolan

Acknowledgments

T hese essays were written over the course of ten years mostly for magazines and the New York Times. I would like to thank my dear friend and editor Betsy Carter, who gave me my first column in New York Woman and who brought me with her to Harper's Bazaar and New Woman. She is a consistent source of intelligent encouragement. David Kuhn took me to lunch at the Royalton and suggested that I write for The New Yorker when Tina Brown was editor of the magazine. He faxed me back after my first piece immediately. Writers dream about that.

At the New York Times I have been caringly edited by Mike Leahy, Sylviane Gold, and Andrea Stevens at the Arts & Leisure section. I am grateful to the Theatre Development Fund and the students at DeWitt Clinton High School, who gave me the privilege of taking them to the theater. Joanne Chen at Vogue sent the forty-eight-hour personal trainer to my house. I am still recovering. Mike Kinsley, at Slate magazine, keeps an eye out on not only the pieces Ive written for him but all of my work. He has never had a problem with telling me Why are you doing that?

Susan Morrison and Dorothy Wickendem at The New Yorker suggested that I write about the birth of my daughter. They were both remarkably articulate and sympathetic. David Remnick, the current editor of The New Yorker, has been encouraging and kind and knows the true meaning of a shiksa goddess.

Much more than an acknowledgment to Dr. Ian Holtzman and the neonatal intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital. Without their first-rate care and the friendship of Gerald Gutierrez, William Ivey Long, Jane Rosenthal, Phyllis Wender, Flora Fraser, Peter Schweitzer, Rhoda Brooks, Andr Bishop, Peter Wolff, Tom Lynch, William Finn, Clifford and Betsy Ross, Daniel Swee, James Lapine, Heidi Ettinger, and my brother, Bruce Wasserstein, I would have never been able to write about my beautiful daughter, Lucy Jane.

Thanks to Judith Thurman for making me a home to write in and to the New York Society Library and the Cosmopolitan Club for their reassuring libraries to escape to. Nancy Novogrod at Travel and Leisure has sent me to spas and to Prague when libraries werent a sufficient escape. Cathy Graham loves magazines more than anyone I know and in most cases she was the first to read these pieces. I am always indebted for her and her husband Stephen Grahams generosity and friendship.

My agents Lynn Nesbitt and Eric Simonoff have been beyond patient. Ten years is a long time to wait for a book. At Knopf, thanks to my editor Victoria Wilson, who witnessed my mother standing up when my name was called as a judge at the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Easter bonnet competition. Nothing escapes Victoria Wilson and thats a gift to any writer. Dame Edna, the sage comedic superstar, once wryly described Stephen Sondheim as the least complicated man I ever met! The same can be said for Sonny Mehta. His friendship and wisdom is extraordinary.

This book would not exist without the assistance, kindness, and efficiency of Angela Trento and her friend Megan Cariola. Finally, looking back over my forties, Ken Cassillo and Cindy Tolan have redefined for me loyalty and sustaining friendship.

Preface

W hen I turned forty I made a To Do list composed mostly of items left over from when I turned thirty. The list included the annuals: lose weight, exercise, read more, improve female friendships, improve male friendships, become a better citizen. (The last was left over from my second grade To Do list.) At the end of my list were the larger-than-life unavoidables: move, fall in love, and the enormous decide about baby.

Most of these essays were written in some pursuit of these quests. On assignment for The New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar, and the New York Times, I managed to focus my midlife obsessions. Looking over these essays, I seem to be the ideal candidate for a gender study on the interests of a forty-something, overeducated, (I hate to use the word) nice woman. My sense of irony, I hope, undermines the niceness.

I seem to continually write about politics, the arts, and womens equality. But I am not ashamed of my concurrent interest in real estate, diet, and my mother. In fact, my friends have told me how fortunate I am to have been born into so much material. I say it makes you many things; one is a bonanza for the mental health profession, and the other is a comic writer.

Most of these essays are comic, even satiric, in nature. But if the New York Post is going to run a headline Oy Vey Hillarys Jewish, I can only respond that Im really Episcopalian: a shiksa goddess. Of course as one travels further into midlife things become simultaneously more absurd and overwhelmingly real. I think of my sister Sandra thrilled with her weight loss due to chemotherapy. She died of breast cancer at age sixty.

At forty-eight I gave birth to my first child, a daughter, Lucy Jane. Due to complications she was born at twenty-six weeks gestation. During the three weeks I spent in the hospital before her birth, and the ten weeks I spent visiting my baby in her intensive care neonatal unit, I realized that my day-to-day way of getting through it was partially due to the eye I developed as a comic essayist. I was able to survey the situation for every ridiculous anecdote while maintaining a nonsentimental center for what is truly important. Furthermore, it was my training in the theater that taught me to show up every day and hope for the best.

This collection ranges from a comic spoof on real estate agents to the birth of my daughter because I have come to know that comedy cannot be marginalized. It embraces the widest human conditions.

Shiksa Goddess

I cannot tell a lie. I feel compelled to bite the bullet and publicly reveal that Ive just discovered my own denominational truth. I am Episcopalian.

I should have guessed a long time ago, because my parents never mentioned it. In fact, they hid it. They sent me to primary school at the Yeshiva Flatbush. It never crossed my mind that I was deliberately being isolated. On our classroom walls were portraits of Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir in place of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. Our horror stories were not of being buried by Communists, but of being suffocated by nomad ham sandwiches.

We lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Flatbush. Our shopping strip included kosher butchers and Hymies Highway Appetizers. For Sunday brunch, my mother produced bagels, belly lox, and cream cheese with scallions. Nobody told me that lox lived a double life as smoked salmon, or that herring could ever be kippered.

Even the Christmas holidays were a setup. Every year on Christmas Eve, we were on a jet to Miami Beach. There wasnt even a chance for us to watch the WPIX Channel 11 Yule log burning as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang Silent Night. We celebrated the holidays front-row center at the Versailles Room, with Myron Cohen warming up our crowd for Sammy Davis, Jr. Even our African-Americans were Jewish!

Until now, Ive had a happy life thinking of myself as a Jewish writer. I came to accept that when my work was described as being too New York it was really a euphemism for something else. I belonged to a temple, and on my opening nights, my mother invariably told friends that shed be much happier if it was my wedding. In other words, I had a solid sense of self. I knew exactly who I was.