Blogcritics Author: Kathy Jones

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Kathy Jones — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:16:25 EDT

With the publication of The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland debuted as a best-selling author of historical fiction. Two more novels followed - The Passion of Artemesia and The Forest Lover. And then a collection of short stories, Life Studies, appeared. This body of work established Vreeland as an imaginative writer of fictional works about art and artists. In her new book, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Vreeland turns her attention to one of the most famous of Renoir canvasses, using that remarkable work to create an equally remarkable novel that evokes the social atmosphere of late nineteenth century Paris and its surrounds.The story opens in the summer of 1880. Literally racing toward a painting he has planned for Île de Chatou, a leisure town along the Seine some miles outside Paris, Pierre-Auguste Renoir nonetheless seems to be in a creative slump. He longs for the return of the “thrill of breaking new ground,” like on the day he and Monet “discovered that juxtaposed patches of contrasting color could show the movement of sunlit water….” It might pay the rent but “repeating safe easy methods portrait after portrait, as he’d been doing lately, was suffocating him.” Moments later, he crashes the motorized bicycle he’s been riding. As he recovers he notices the name of the model: “La vie moderne. Modern life. He chortled. That was the subject matter of the new painting movement, as precarious as the steam cycle.” Renoir wants to paint “la vie moderne… But how? That was the more perplexing question, the underlying issue agitating him lately. Impressionist or traditional?” Impressionism, the movement he helped co-found with fellow artists Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley, appears to be riddled with internal strife - who are its legitimate standard bearers, where and how should they paint and exhibit their works, what are its proper subjects? In short, what is the future of the movement? And to add insult to injury, Renoir learns that the critic Emile Zola, an early supporter of the movement, seems to have changed his opinion: “The man of genius has not yet arisen. We can see what they intend ... but we seek in vain the masterpiece that is to lay down the formula…” Where, Zola wondered, was that work that was based on “long and thoughtful preparation”? Vreeland uses the twin catalysts of Renoir’s internal struggle and Zola’s challenge to motivate the plot — “What Zola wanted was just what he needed to do - the major work he’d imagined here [at Chatou] for years ... An encore to Moulin [Bal au Moulin de la Galette], but this had to surpass Moulin ... This would be the fight of his life.” Through a third-person omniscient narrator whose lush, richly textured descriptions paint both the interior and exterior points of view of key characters in the story behind the story of Renoir’s painting, Vreeland magically evokes the mise-en-scene of Impressionist Paris and its suburban surrounds. Vreeland’s carefully and thoroughly researched narrative creates a palpable, sometimes too-thickly, almost Rococo-textured impression of some of the major sights, sounds, colors, smells, and tastes of late nineteenth century bohemian Paris. Café life, the art world, Montmartre, the literary and social salons of bourgeois Paris, the seventy-two day siege known as the Paris Commune of 1871 and more help “set the positions and values over the whole canvas” of the novel. Yet, it is the process of painting, and the characters themselves - Renoir and his friends and models - that ultimately carry the novel. “Let them see ... the workings of his hand. If viewers saw only the things depicted and not the act of painting, they were missing half the pleasure,” Renoir muses. Vreeland agrees and brushes her text with thick daubs of passages describing the artist at work. “He squeezed out paint onto the palette, small, lovely dollops shining in the sun ... He bent the hogs’ hair of his brand new broad flat to break the sizing and try out the balance of it. Where to make the first stroke? ... He slashed a diagonal for the railing with the palest, most watery ultramarine and rose madder diluted with linseed and turpentine ... Pure joy to touch down here and there.” Vreeland is at her best when the vivacity and surety of her dazzling prose captures the artist at work. Color, timbre, and mood blend brilliantly into a compelling depiction of the act of painting and representation of a painter as much possessed by his subjects as he wishes to possess them. “The important thing,” Renoir tells one of his models, “is not what’s going on, but how it conveys what’s going on … Painting, the act of it, that’s what’s important.”Yet Vreeland takes a big risk by making process -- ”Painting, the act of it” -- the subject of her novel. To make her subjects — painting, people, the convulsed social life of Paris itself — come alive to serve the purpose of this story risks turning them into caricatures of themselves, objects to be manipulated to create a desired shimmering effect. That this mimics in verbal representation Renoir’s visual process is both the novel’s strength and its weakness. “If I had wanted to tell a story I would have used a pen,” Renoir declares. But Vreeland is telling a story. The question is: has she found the right form for the kind of story she wants to tell? At times, one feels Vreeland working, like Renoir, at cross-purposes, trying to force a more traditionally structured approach to the novel — a well-plotted story thick with descriptively rich characterizations and detailed scenes — into service to more modern, “impressionistic” ends. For instance, Vreeland represents Renoir’s arrogant obsession with being known as “a painter of women” by coloring her narrative with sexual innuendos and even quoting Renoir’s own infamous statements about women: “I can’t see myself getting into bed with a lawyer, if there are such female monsters. I like women best when they don’t know how to read, and when they wipe their babies’ bottoms themselves.” Yet, she resists crafting a more complex portrait of Renoir’s misogyny, choosing instead to distill it to the forbidden, yet sacred, essence fueling his art: “When a painter finds someone like that, and pretty too, he’s so grateful for her, so thrilled by what they do together, that it’s natural to want more, to ride his excitement farther by loving entry into the depths of her, and to bring her into ecstasy ... That’s not philandery. It’s sacrament. It’s communion.” For Vreeland, this is certainly true: art is sacred. It can emit “a blessedness,” creating a kind of healing force of light in the world. Certainly, that’s one way to read “the incandescence” of Renoir’s work. As Vreeland has described in interviews, the beauty she saw in “the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists” gave her strength when she faced serious health challenges. On one level, then, Vreeland’s Luncheon of the Boating Party is a lyrical ode to “that state of grace” she perceives in Renoir’s canvas.In the final chapter, Vreeland turns the narrative over to Alphonsine Fournais, whose first person declaration — “I saw his life and his life’s work as one great, open-armed cry of love” — is meant to leave the lasting impression. Yet Vreeland’s loaded “[her] darks as well as [her] lights.” Her portrait of art as “love made visible” and of Renoir as “the painter of happiness” seems tantalizingly unfinished, a little like Renoir’s Luncheon without the awning.

Kathleen B. Jones is a writer and former professor of women's studies at San Diego State University, where she taught for nearly a quarter century. In addition to four scholarly books on feminist politics, she published one memoir, Living Between Danger and Love , and is finishing another about the influence of Hannah Arendt's life and work on her own.

Book Review: French Seduction by Eunice Lipton -- An American's Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust

Kathy Jones — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:31:58 EDT

Ilsa: What about us? Rick: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.These lines from Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, a powerful and beautiful film about the complexities and contradictions surrounding France's role in World War II, evoke a nostalgic view of the past. In the midst of all the horror and loss, at least we´ll have Paris. Yet, between these lines other questions lurk: Who will always have Paris? And which Paris will they always have? Eunice Lipton's disturbingly delicious book French Seduction brings such questions to the surface through a story about her own equivocal love affair with France. With a meditation on seduction, betrayal, and loss, Lipton takes the reader on an aesthetic and emotional odyssey in a book that is part memoir, part travelogue, part art history, and part ethnography. Descending into the caverns of memory, Lipton explores the desires, tactile pleasures, and rich sensualities that make her love of places and people and things at once compelling and frightening.“Darling go to Paris. You'll be happy there, you'll see,” her father says, setting young Eunice's fantasy in motion. Already smitten with her father, an opinionated, arrogant man given to unpredictable rages, whose own fantasies about Paris began at fifteen when he left Riga, Latvia for America a decade before other Eastern European Jews disappeared into what Hannah Arendt once called “holes of oblivion” — the concentration camps of the Holocaust's Final Solution — Lipton takes up his suggestion. “My Dad loved conversation and nice clothes and Paris, and I loved him. So when I am nineteen, I save my money and board a student ship to France.” And so begins a journey of many decades, a ronda of an affair with France that circles and repeats and descends and circles again until, almost from exhaustion, it reaches a moment of bittersweet reconciliation.She puts Paris in her mouth with the first flaky croissant she consumes “in a room near the Boulevard St. Michel” and devours Paris with her eyes, gazing with forbidden pleasure at the stained glass windows of Notre Dame. With each bite and sly look she begins to possess something longed for, without quite knowing yet what to call it. “My father hates churches. `Anti-Semitism,’ he spits out. But Notre Dame is one of the great sights of Paris. I can't not go in... France, as something of my very own, begins in the sweet beauty of this church.”Yet France is also a place laced with memories of betrayal, at first personal — a boyfriend has an affair while Lipton is away in Provence on a research trip one year; the first time her father visits her in Paris, “the first time he's ever been to Paris,” he is disgusted by the hotel Lipton has chosen for him — and then more political. Lipton discovers, or more precisely, remembers: anti-Semitism, anti-Arab, anti-African, anti-immigrant, anti-homosexual sentiments are abundant in the past and present of France. “I am haunted by my own Otherness in France.”Nonetheless, in 1999, Lipton and her husband, the artist Ken Aptekar (some of whose iconoclastic paintings become motifs in Lipton's narrative) decide to move to Paris. “The reader will certainly laugh, or pity me, when I say that my experience, in Provence and then in Paris afterward, probably cinched my decision to move to France... Seduction and betrayal, I'm afraid is a trajectory I call home.” Why does she decide to live in France? What is she looking for? The four middle chapters of the book explore in compellingly evocative, sensual prose several answers to this question, some more deeply probed than others.On one level her desire for Paris is fundamentally sensual, animal appetite. Walking the streets, she observes being “ravished by the loveliness in the city, entranced by the tracery of balconies, the proud slope of mansard roofs, the winding streets... the balletic leap of bridges across rivers and canals.” In contrast to the color-drenched but tasteless landscape of food in America, in French markets, “indoors and out, peaches, pears, apples, roasting chickens, barbecuing pork, silver, white, red, and blue fish from all the rivers and seas of France heave themselves at you.” As do people. “My social life is lived across my body in a way I could never have imagined.”An art historian who appreciates rich visual detail, Lipton uses her acuity of sight to mine language for words that can make you hear and smell and want to touch and taste a place, be among its things and people, as well as see them. At the same time, Lipton wonders, and wants the reader to wonder, what all this pleasure is all about. For Lipton, the answer is primordial: “France is that invitation to live. Maybe even, finally, to have my mother.” To have her mother, perhaps. Without becoming her. Or her father.If there is an implicit voyeurism and watchful attentiveness that all writers engage, this narrator manages, for the most part, to implicate herself in these observations. Punctuating her own pleasure in viewing with acknowledgments that a certain `blindness´ has sometimes gotten her into trouble, or imaginatively putting herself into the scene, Lipton explores the dangers of pleasure. For the most part.In a chapter entitled “Tease,” Lipton confesses to an unconventional weakness for the eighteenth century Rococo paintings of François Boucher. “I take a long deep dive into these unruffled summer days and linger where Boucher's girls leap into one another...” Even the excesses in Boucher's portraits of Madame de Pompadour entice her. “The Marquise is anchored in a sea of turquoise taffeta studded with pink roses and bundles of wide satin ribbons. She pokes her pink shod feet out from under her petticoats. The fingers of one hand push into thick folds of fabric...”And yet, all is not well; there is a trap door in the middle of the eighteenth century. “But the effort of the display, the fierceness with which Pompadour carves a place for herself at court, feels sad to me... She is not herself... she is a display.” Instead of the “a subversive world of sexual egalitarianism” women's power in the eighteenth century seems to be what one historian called an “optical illusion.” “There it is,” Lipton observes. “I was tricked. Or I tricked myself.”And there is a trick also at the heart of this narrative, one that Lipton largely controls, but which sometimes controls her. “How can one live with both feelings, loving a culture and knowing that it doesn't love you?” she asks and again plumbs deeply for answers.In two chapters at the book's literal center, Lipton rereads the canvasses and historical tracts recording the cultural and political history of France's aesthetic and political identity. As she does, shadows protrude onto the landscape, darkening all that sunshine and dulling all glory and complicating Lipton's love affair with France: there is a horror almost too awful to imagine underneath and behind all that beauty and national honor.Beneath the surface happiness of Impressionism's “glorious, carefree paintings” lurked the “disturbing circumstances that produced them.” Lipton traces a line from them to the virulent anti-Semitism that fanned French collaboration in World War II and continues it into late twentieth century Paris, where the “dangerous classes” exiled outside the city “are now becoming dangerous and for good reason.”In Renoir's and Degas's anti-Semitism she discovers elements of treachery that recur in the interstices of the gloriously “Roaring 20s” indicating “something already in the French that could take them to bed with the Germans.” Ruined by the World War I, in which “every family lost someone,” Lipton claims that their depth of loss led the French into a dangerous nostalgia and shifted the national mood to one “xenophobic and hostile to outside influences.” And so Lipton asks again: “Does France love me? Or will she betray me again, as she did in 1940?” At this point, the story shifts almost completely to indict France as a country whose image has been tarnished. No longer the cultural capital of art, riddled by a moribund economy and incoherent politics, Lipton thinks the French are confused and frightened by the multicultural society they have become (always were?) and are unable to take responsibility for their history. “The French are sick in their soul, and that is why their culture is dying. Their lying history is strangling them to death.” Some Parisians have yet to have Paris.Still, Lipton chooses to stay. And just when the reader shouts “Why?” Lipton returns to the question of her father. “I know why I came here,” she says in the last paragraph of the book. “I wanted to forgive my father.” The answer is too glib, unsatisfying. Lipton's nuanced writing makes us want more.Beneath the surface beauty of her prose lies an unsettling, subterranean trick. Her clever weaving of history, art criticism, and memoir makes the reader question the question of betrayal that Lipton has said is at the heart of the book: what betrayal motivates her quest? Her father's betrayal of his brother by failing to give their parents the letters he wrote from Spain while fighting in the Spanish Civil War? Or his betrayal of Lipton herself? “How can one live with both feelings, loving a culture and knowing that it doesn't love you?” The same question can be asked about one's parents. In the end, it's not one with which Lipton has fully grappled.

Theater Review: Jamaica Farewell - A One-Woman Tour de Force

Kathy Jones — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:54:28 EST

“I'm sad to say, I'm on my way / Won't be back for many a day / My heart is down, my head is turning around / I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town” If you’ve ever been to Jamaica as a tourist, hearing Harry Belafonte’s famous Jamaica Farewell might make you nostalgic to return. Debra Ehrhardt’s Jamaica Farewell, which was the featured performance at the Colony Theatre in Burbank on December 9th, 2006 for the ninth annual celebration of the Los Angeles-based Jamaica Cultural Alliance, tells a different goodbye story. An uproarious, autobiographical tale of a young woman’s irrepressible desire to migrate away from Jamaica, leaving her own little girlhood behind, Ehrhardt’s inspired performance makes you laugh and cry and applaud the persistence of the human spirit. “In America, everybody can have everything, if they want it…Ever since I was seven years old, all I wanted was to come to America…” performer/playwright Debra Ehrhardt confesses in her simply staged one-woman tour de force about her madcap journey to America in the 1970s, a revolutionary period in Jamaican history. Jamaica may be the “blue emerald of the Caribbean,” fragrant with honeysuckle and ocean breezes, but all Debra wanted was to trade that shimmering, sensual gem for the American candy land of “moon pies and Baby Ruths” and “stores the size of Jamaica.” If that sounds like a child’s fantasy, it is. Yet at its core the play tracks the serious business of a child holding onto her dreams, trying to heal her wounded heart. Daddy drinks, mommy makes do, and Debra dreams about America. When she graduates from high school, she’s admitted to the University of Florida’s nursing program. After several defeated attempts to obtain a visa, including one where she poses as a nun (hilariously re-enacted complete with appropriate sound track of the embassy’s rejection stamp), Debra settles reluctantly into a job at a friend of the family’s textile company in Kingston. Meanwhile, socialist-leaning Michael Manley has come to power and the Jamaican polity trembles with change and conflict. “Every thug has a gun,” asserts Ehrhardt. When the US government bans travel to Jamaica, Debra muses that “everything is possible in America, the problem is getting there.” Enter the character of CIA operative Jack Wallingsford - “My new ticket to America.” He can walk through security without hassle. Debra thinks all she has to do is convince Jack to take her on a trip, but why and how?The answer comes in the form of a smuggling scheme: her employer needs someone to take one million dollars out of the country. He can get a visa and he’ll pay any fool willing to take the risk. Debra volunteers. She arranges to meet Jack for dinner, fabricating a “business trip” to Miami her boss is sending her on, and counting on her sex appeal to invite her to travel with him. The ploy works. Now she just has to make it to the airport and through security - with a million US dollars hidden in her bag! - and say goodbye to her family.Underneath the comedy is depth of emotion tapped most poignantly in the scenes Debra enacts about her father, a man whose drunkenness Debra wisely refuses to use to blunt our sympathy for him or the strength of her love. When she declares, just before the short blackout that precedes the final escape story, that she’s an “expert at forgiving” her Dad, we understand the true cost of leaving one’s home behind, even if to pursue a long-awaited dream. I saw the show with a mostly Jamaican audience and, at that moment, you could feel their collective memories come together in a shared sense of loss and bereavement. Such feelings ought to sober everyone with a stake in today’s debates about immigration enough to recognize that while dreams of a better life still pull many to American shores, great personal and social upheavals all too-frequently drive people away from their homes.Under Monique Lai’s skillful, yet unobtrusive direction on an almost bare stage, Ehrhardt inhabits a cast of characters with humor and grace, taking her audience on an unforgettable journey through familial struggles interlaced with vignettes from the island’s own political and cultural past. Whether imitating a minister’s fire and brimstone sermon, her father’s interminable drinking and gambling, her mother’s cheerful efforts to manage the resulting financial distress, (“It’s easier to vacuum in the corners if there’s no furniture”) or the CIA agent she dupes into helping her pull off an escape caper that brings to mind a low-tech James Bond movie, Ehrhardt’s portraits are crafted with wit and empathy, some more fully realized than others. Like Sarah Jones’s much-celebrated Bridge and Tunnel, Ehrhardt brings about a dozen people to life. Unlike Jones, she does it without changing costumes or set. (Although, on the night of the performance I saw, I wished Ms. Ehrhardt had had a better fitting costume; tugging at hers to make it fit created needless distraction). Although this staging serves the linear narrative of the odyssey, it nonetheless puts a greater burden on the story itself to carry the drama forward judiciously. We know she’s determined to get out of Jamaica. We know she’ll meet a lot of characters along the way. We want to meet them too, but we also want her to get where she’s going. For a few minutes these purposes crossed, making a couple of scenes in the latter part of the narrative a little longer and more repetitive than they needed to be, more anecdotal than essential. Another round of editing could tighten the places that sag.We have Dorothy McCleod and the JCA to thank for bringing this excellent performance to the Los Angeles area. If you missed it, you missed an outstanding night. Along with the exhibit of Jamaican artist Bernard Stanley Hoyes paintings, the tantalizing tastes of Derrick’s Jamaican Cuisine, and the music from guitarist Olajide Paris at the reception afterward, the evening was a showcase for the richness of this island’s artistic community. (My only complaint was not winning the raffle of two Air Jamaica tickets to the island!)Luckily, if you’re in Southern California, you have a few more chances to see this wonderful production: Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 16th and 17th at 8 pm at the Luna Playhouse, 3706 San Fernando Rd, Glendale, CA (Reservations: 818-500-7200 or armeniantheatreco@sbcglobal.net) or Sunday Jan 7th at the Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423 (Reservations 818-939-1026 or jamaicafarewell@yahoo.com for more information).

Jazz Riffing History: Building Cosmopolitanism One Song at a Time

Kathy Jones — Thu, 7 Dec 2006 17:10:26 EST

Jazz critic and memoirist Nate Chinen recently wrote in the New York Times about the influence of bloggers on the development of a revised history of jazz. Reacting to Branford Marsalis's opinion, cited in the Chinen's piece, that after the Vietnam war, jazz went into a period of decline bordering on disappearance, musician bloggers contributed to a remarkable, and remarkably rapid, cataloguing of nearly-forgotten musical gems, providing a swift, strong, and loud counterpoint to Marsalis' claim.Chinen recounts the process of revision as follows: jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas reported on his blog about the impact that reading Philip Jenkins's Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America had on him. The book made him think that the eruption and expansion of conservatism beginning in the middle of the 1970s might have short-changed the history of jazz and he called for a "new jazz history that would acknowledge a 'generation of multiplicity,' beginning in 1974 and stretching to the end of the cold war." (Times, Dec. 6, 2006, B10 ) In time, musician bloggers responded and different sites began to compile a veritable treasure trove of recordings, jointly documenting and demonstrating the multiplicity Douglas called for.How this all happened, and happened so rapidly, speaks to the power of the Internet to resurrect, celebrate, and share histories and counter-histories. But it also speaks to the power of jazz itself, that beautifully interdisciplinary and collaborative original American musical genre. Both as metaphor and reality, jazz embodies the power of playing together, with and through the inspiration of others, building a world of rich plurality filled with singular voices out of sound and image and sometimes word and the amplitude created through their interweaving.I visited some of the sites Chinen mentioned in his piece. At Destination: Out I discovered an article and some tracks by trumpeter Bill Dixon from his Considerations I: 1972-76 album. "Long Alone Song" managed to make me feel his playing as the musical embodiment of thinking itself. A solo piece, it had an uncanny ability to sound full even in the quietest moments. Listening to it was like listening to the space between things and as I did I realized another insight in between the lines of Chinen's essay.Throughout the decades since the 1960s, for which I remain nostalgic, all sorts of folks were challenging established ways of thinking and being, working against the grain of what was self-legitimated as "normal." Whether it was the continued civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights and queer movement, environmentalism, or the rise of new media and new arts, many people in many places were broadening our understanding of what it means to be human, living in a world filled with those who are just like us, that is, human, every one of whom are, at the same time, unique and different from everyone else.Maybe now, when it sometimes seems like we're on a ride to the future and someone's forgotten how to manage the controls, we need to remind ourselves about everything that happened in the decades since 1974 when nothing supposedly happened. Maybe now more than ever, we need to assemble a kind of counter-catalogue of all the people and events and movements that have continued to offer a contrapuntal, richly layered, alternative set of social, cultural, ethical, spiritual, and political practices. And maybe, out of the jazz score we could make of those elements and play together we could discover how to do what Kwame Anthony Appiah called on us to do in Cosmopolitanism: "to take minds and hearts formed over the long millenia of living [and playing] in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become." (xiii)This is a call to all bloggers and other writers and activists to contribute to that effort and engage in lively, public discourse about it. Let's do it open-mindedly, collaboratively, and with respect. But first, go listen to that track by Bill Dixon. Then, take a deep breath, and get to work.

Uncommon Ceremonies: My Adventures as a Wedding Officiant

Kathy Jones — Thu, 9 Nov 2006 08:19:43 EST

Sexual politics and the philosophy of marriage Heather was the kind of student I could always pick out of the hundreds who blended into one another in the sea of expressionless faces floating before me, mostly oblivious to the pearls of wisdom I was delivering about the gender gap in public opinion or the inequities between women’s and men’s earning potential. Heather sizzled with curiosity.For twenty-five years I taught women’s studies at a major public university in California. In my classes on the history of sexual politics we investigated the origins of the marriage contract, always raising some eyebrows, and more than a few doubts, about the institution of matrimony. I’m not talking about analyzing diatribes produced by some 1960s feminist. Forget about Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. I assigned Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Wollstonecraft’s eighteenth century lament that women were trained to advantage themselves through marriage, sacrificing their time and their persons to become “legally prostituted,” and Mill’s nineteenth century lambaste of marriage as a form of legal slavery could always get students riled up. Such classics raised enough consciousness that by the time we got to the twentieth century, N.O.W.’s equal rights manifesto looked pretty tame. Imagine my surprise, then, when at the end of the semester, Heather, my most outspoken, radical woman student, asked me to officiate at her wedding.An acerbic wit, an accomplished kick-boxer and lead editor on the student newspaper, she distinguished herself by organizing several groups in my Sex, Power, and Politics course that fall to support her for president of the student government. She was a quick study, most definitely headed for law school and, of this I was certain, a career in sex discrimination jurisprudence. I nicknamed her Gloria Allred II. The last thing I expected was to bless her union in holy matrimony to Tony, her computer geek boyfriend. “I’m honored to be asked,” I said. “But why me?”“Because you’ve helped me see how to make ‘old’ institutions fit into ‘new’ times. Like in my constitutional law class we learned about ‘living law.’ So I figure why not ‘living institutions.’ Tony and I want to revitalize marriage on Mill’s principles—well, with my modifications—of civil equality. That’ll make it perfectly compatible with third wave feminist action. And who better to make ours ‘legal’ than you!”“Yes, well, there’s the tiny problem of my lack of credentials. A Ph.D. in Political Science does not a legal officiant make. As much as I’d love to perform your ceremony I’m afraid that’s impossible. But I’m willing to be a smiling, enthusiastic guest.”“Gee, if anyone could find a way to subvert that paradigm I thought you could.”"Unfortunately, this is one of those times when the state…""Yeah, I know, when the state comes in and limits your choice to one or another avenue leading right back to the status quo. That sucks.”Legally OfficialTwo weeks later I was standing in the mailroom recounting this story to a colleague and getting a pretty good chuckle out of the irony. “But there is a way for you to perform the ceremony. You can become a minister in the Universal Life Church. That’s what I did when a friend asked me to officiate at her wedding.”“You’re kidding, right?”"Not at all. Totally legitimate. I’ll get you the information sheet citing case law; it tells you how to file an application.”Three days after I paid a nominal fee to the Church’s headquarters in Modesto, California, a certificate arrived authenticating my ministry. Along with the calligraphied document, “suitable for framing,” I received an order form for business cards and assorted ministerial paraphernalia. I was set. I told Heather I could now legitimately preside over her wedding.“Awesome. Turns out the minister Tony and I asked had to cancel. What should we do next?”I hadn’t a clue. I’d been so busy concentrating on how to authenticate the contract that I’d forgotten about the ritual behind it. The more I considered my ministerial duties, the more I worried my prejudices would get in the way. It wasn’t only because my own two experiences in the institution of marriage hadn’t been either egalitarian or empowering. To add to the irony, I’m in a loving, long-term relationship with Amy, my life partner, excluding me categorically from the institution I’d been ordained to bless. What the hell had motivated me to want to sanctify this heterosexist, patriarchal symbol of my second-class status? I must either be a hypocrite or a traitor. Or just crazy.“You hoo, Professor Jones, what’s next?” While doubts rattled my brain, Heather had been waiting patiently for my answer. I recalled that day she’d come to my office bubbling with enthusiasm about how marriage could become a “living institution.” I’d had one of those experiences then, less rare than you might think, when the professor learns more from the student. “What’s next is we meet with Tony to discuss your ideas for the ceremony.”Arendtian Promises I suppose other ministers pray for inspiration to whatever deity they worship, but I’m no theist. Philosophy’s my muse and, oddly enough, when I sought a way to explain what I was doing, I found the principles to guide me among the pages of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Hannah Arendt’s no wedding maven, but she offered an interesting theory about why humans have such a passionate drive to enter into what our ancestors called covenants. When I read her again I recognized her as my matrimonial muse.It appears, Arendt said, that we make promises to get a handle on fear. Since no one can guarantee who she will be tomorrow or foretell what will happen, being human turns out to be pretty frightening. Arendt thought uncertainty was a small price to pay for freedom. Making promises was one way we could look fear in the face and get on with it.A promise creates what Arendt called “a little island of certainty in an ocean of unpredictability,” miraculously enlarging us by connecting us to someone else who agrees to be bound by the same terms. Here’s the tricky part: A promise only works if we both agree to stay open to whatever the future brings. If one of us uses it to threaten the other or to try to control the course of events, the promise becomes void.Wow, I thought. That sounds like a philosophy of living marriage to me. If marriage is a promise made between equals in love, expressing their willingness to risk the future together, then marriage can be a living institution. Despite the future’s unpredictability, a couple promises to continue to love, and they do this in public so witnesses hear them and can remind them of what they have said. To make this kind of promise, to engage this soulful, gutsy, free-spirited act of mind and body, soul and heart, well, I could imagine a feminist choosing to do that.Uncommon CeremoniesThe following Thursday I met Heather and Tony at their condo overlooking the glistening blue San Diego bay. I felt pretty confident in the process I’d worked out. I called it pre-marital mentoring. First I talked with them as a couple and asked them to tell me about how they’d met, what they liked and didn’t like about each other, how they connected to each other’s family. I wanted each to become comfortable articulating what they really felt. It would be good practice, I said, for exchanging their vows in public. Next I met with them individually, in private. Finally, we reviewed the ceremony together."Now, are there any concerns either one of you has about demands being made on your wedding?”"We’ve got to get God in there somewhere,” Heather said. “My grandmother will never speak to me again if we don’t.”“No problem. Think of it as your gift to her. Honoring who she is, not who you want her to be.”A few weeks later I gave them a draft of what I’d written. They’d wanted the ceremony to express the promise each would make to help the other continue to grow within the couple. I excerpted some lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay. “No, I will go alone…Yes, of course I love you…I will come back to you, I swear I will; And you will know me still.” With music selected by Heather’s sister, the ceremony was ready."Do you know what, Kathy?” Heather asked as she reviewed the final program. “I’d like you to wear your doctoral robes. So things will look, you know…”"Sort of traditional?”"Yeah, is that O.K.?”“Of course; I’ll get to show off my CUNY colors.”I flew to the Bay area the afternoon before the wedding and met Heather and Tony and their families and friends for a rehearsal at the chapel of the University of the Pacific. A moment of panic seized me when the sacristan asked me to explain the order of events, but I drew on my theatrical experience, blocking everyone’s position, and we settled into a comfortable run-through. Heather was relaxed, making jokes, and Tony whistled, which was what he did, he told me later, whenever he wanted to cry.On her wedding day, Heather looked gorgeous. As soon as Tony saw her, his eyes misted up. Grandma beamed at the line in the ceremony where we thanked God for blessing the day and everyone had a fabulous time at the party. I even made appointments with three of Heather’s friends who wanted me to officiate at their weddings. Later that night I called Amy and promised again to love and cherish her forever.When I think about the first ceremony I ever performed, I remember feeling awkward as I pronounced the couple married. Who am I to have such authority? But over the years, I’ve grown into the role. Who am I? I am an ordained member of the community of faith in the durable elasticity of love. Our community was formed and reformed over centuries by those who’ve tried to make sense of the fact that each one of us is born, equal and free, to begin something new. If you’re lucky enough to find someone to love and decide to promise to share your capacity to astonish the ordinary course of daily life with the unique two-in-one you’ll become, you might want to stand in front of a crowd or just a few close friends and tell the world about it. If you ask me to officiate at your wedding, the state will authenticate it and give you a certificate that says no matter where you go, you can be confident. You’re legally married. The odd thing is, no one can do that for me.