Nothing in Common Goes South, Day #3

Who knows why we went to see the Natural Bridge. I must have seen a picture of it somewhere and been enchanted. It seemed like a natural wonder, but an uncomplicated natural wonder. I thought we would drive over, see the wonder of nature, be suitably awed by the wonderfulness of nature, and then head off on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
It didn’t quite happen that way.
You can’t just look at the Natural Bridge because it is privately owned and the owner has devised it so that you cannot even see the Natural Bridge without entering through the gift shop and passing through the gauntlet of gift shop, basement filled with arcade type games (and tragically dubbed “Jefferson’s Playground”). Then, because the Natural Bridge is privately owned and not a National Park as yours truly thinks it should be, you have to pay a rather steep (think exorbitant) fee to see the Natural Bridge. The cheapest ticket you can get is $20.99; the cashier will tell you that this gouging fee includes the Fake Indian Village and the Wax Museum and the “Drama of Creation”. But I do not want to see the Fake Indian Village, the Wax Museum or the “Drama of Creation”; in fact, you would have to pay me to see them. Our fee is not reduced and so, since we have come so far (etc. etc., all sorts of ridiculous rationalizations) we pay and head off.
Past the gift shop, you head downstairs and pass by the previously mentioned tragically named “Jefferson’s Playground”. Yes, Jefferson did once own the Natural Bridge, having bought it from George III for about $9.00. Then you exit the building and descend a paved walkway (You can also take a shuttle bus) to the small structure at the ‘entrance’ to the Natural Bridge. We approached, and the ticket taker emerged.
Ticker taker: How are y’all doing today?
Me: Fine.
CSB: Fine, except that we were a bit shocked to learn that this natural beauty is privately owned and costs money to see.
TT: It costs money to operate.
(What I should have said, my esprit de l'escalier: Operate what? It’s all rocks.)
CSB: We heard up above that it’s for sale.
TT: So it is.
CRL: I think the owner should give it to the National Park system so it could be appreciated by all.
TT: [Harrumph.] The owner offered it to the government but all they wanted to give him was credit for 17 years of back taxes.
(What I should have said: You mean he hasn’t paid his taxes for 17 years? Like the rest of us? And we’re supposed to feel sorry for him?)
TT (continuing): And you can’t give it to the government because the first they would do would be to get rid of the light show, and it’s a religious light show, and you know about government and religion, they just don’t mix.
CRL: Nor should they. That’s the Separation of Church and state. Freedom of religion.
(What I should have said: Something about Jeffersonian ideals.)
TT: Oh, and every religion in the world can get away with everything they want, but not the Christians. Christians can’t get away with anything.
CSB: Ahem. I think we need to go see this Bridge.
At this point- that is, before I get really incensed about the tyranny of the radical Christian right, as well as the “drama of Creation which is all about the seven days according to Genesis, as interpreted by the very literal-minded – CSB tugs at me and we head off to see the actual bridge. Which is lovely. But I am still fuming.
The Natural Bridge, painted by Frederic Church in 1852.

Welcome to Glasgow, Virginia!

Nothing in Common Goes South, Day #2

I expected Palladian elegance and the separation of church and state; what we found in Charlottesville was an extraordinary preponderance of orange. A whole lot of orange. I do not refer to pumpkins or foliage, but orange finery, orange flags, orange banners, and orange clothes of every persuasion.
This was because Charlottesville, home to UVA and Jefferson’s elegant home & garden, was in the grip of college football frenzy; and it turns out that I have spent my entire life ignorant of the American tradition known as college football, and its attendant noises, rituals, apparel and processions. We arrived in Charlottesville on the eve of a major football game with Clemson U. I was shocked to learn that the UVA team was sure to lose; yet that fact did not seem to dampen anyone’s spirits. Revelry was general over Charlottesville.
I don’t think that both teams purposefully both had orange as their school color, but this synchronicity certainly permeated the town. Maybe if you follow college football you will tell me that it often happens that two teams with the same color will play other, making it hard to distinguish them on the field, at least for the uninitiated. I just found it odd, and rather challenging, and spent too much time in Charlottesville trying to perceive subtle differences of hue and tone in the orange accouterments being sported all over town.

But no, it was not all orange and football. We did indeed tour Monticello, the Palladian home of Jefferson and a major tourist attraction. The Visitor Center – with café, gift store and theater – is larger than the actual house.
Our guide at Monticello was a lovely woman of a certain age who kept looking pointedly, almost quizzically, at CSB. Now if I had been the one to point out that she kept looking at him, as if she knew him, or had known him, then perhaps you might say I was imagining this. But CSB was equally certain that our guide, Peggy M, was eyeing him, and he became increasingly uncomfortable with her attentions as we made our way through the mansion. Did I increase his discomfort by gaily nudging him and asking if they had perhaps dated in some former life? Or by mentioning that she seemed quite nice and perhaps he should engage her in conversation and try to figure out what was what? Should I have alluded to the fact that he was a head taller than anyone else in the room, and hence made a handsome focal point? Poor CSB.
I should have been paying less attention to the guide’s ogling and more attention to what she said about Jefferson’s homemade copying machine and the Rumford fireplace. Yet something about the Rumford fireplace stuck with me, and once we departed Monticello I went straight to Google and learned a little about the checkered career of Count Rumford, née Benjamin Thompson in Woburn, Massachusetts. So little that on getting home I sought a biography of this odd duck – via the excellent auspices of Inter-Library Loan.
Benjamin Thompson was born in 1753 in Woburn, Massachusetts, where his childhood home still stands and is owned by the Rumford Historical Society. They have on display a copy of the portrait of Rumford done by Gainsborough, though the location of the original appears to be unknown.
I feel confident that you don’t want to know all the lurid details of Rumford’s life, but here are a few salient ones:
His taste for scientific experiment was early evidenced when he and his boyhood BFF Loammi Baldwin flew kites during electrical storms, and performed surgery on pigs.
He had a lifelong fascination with fireworks.
At the age of 20, Benjamin wisely married a somewhat older and much richer woman in New Hampshire, by whom he had a daughter. Then he chose the wrong side in the Revolutionary War, acted as a spy for the British, and ultimately had to flee across the ocean, leaving behind his wife and daughter.
In England he found favor with the king, pursued his scientific interests and had numerous affairs.
Later Benjamin went to Bavaria and the court of Elector Carl Theodore, to whom he became indispensable. So indispensable that he was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. (I was shocked to learn that the HRE still existed at this late date.) For his Count-ish title, Thompson chose Rumford, the New Hampshire hometown of his abandoned wife. While in Bavaria Count Rumford had numerous affairs, founded an exemplary Institute for the poor, and designed the English Gardens. (Through which I once strolled with beloved #1 son, and was shocked - operative sensation here - to espy an entirely naked family picnic, in the middle of the very lovely Englischer Garten, in the middle of Munich. We also saw surfers. Surfing on the smallest wave possible.)
Back in England, Rumford engaged in the experiments that would result in his excellent design for the Rumford fireplace. But otherwise, England grew too hot for him and he returned to the continent.
At age 50, he remarried (this entailed getting his previously abandoned daughter in the USA to send him a copy of his first wife’s death certificate) Marie-Anne Lavoisier, the 43-year-old widow of Antoine Lavoisier, the great French chemist who was separated from his head by the Revolution. But yet again, marriage did not suit, and they divorced within two years. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, died of ‘nervous fever’ in 1814 at Auteuil. The funeral was ‘a lonely affair.’

One of the very first things I did upon getting back home was to assail certain dear friends with my newfound knowledge re the Rumford fireplace: so efficient, such a godsend for the chilly folk. Their response? Well, duh. Of course they knew all about the Rumford fireplace. The Rumford fireplace was/is, for the cognoscenti, right up there with the Franklin stove as the industry standard. The fireplaces in our house are – yes, - Rumford fireplaces.

Nothing in Common goes South, Day #1

How long has it been since we first mooted this brilliant idea of a southern road trip? All I know is that since that initial glimmer of a trip that would include literary shrines, Nascar races, country music and Civil War battlefields, the trip was delayed, postponed, and postponed again; and always for a reason: it was planting season, or bee season, or too hot or too cold, or one of the dogs was ill, or a relative was dying. Since that initial glimmer I managed to forget much of the reading I did in preparation for the trip. (The annals of Yoknapatawpha County; Look Home Sweet Homeward; A Good Man is Harder than Ever to Find; Delta Gay Wedding; and Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell off Alabama.) CSB was in better shape, since he made the wise decision to engage in no preparatory reading.
First we had to clear the dates with the chicken sitters and the dog sitters, because we are blessed with most excellent chicken sitters and dog sitters. And then we had to be fairly sure that no one was likely to be born or get very ill while we were away. And of course the garden had to be more or less finished for the season.
Then it was Halloween - and we never get trick-or-treaters here at Let it Bee Farm because it is rather lonely and there is a long driveway and in every way it is ideally suited to scare small children in the dark - and we set off. The first adventure was getting lost in New Jersey. How can you get lost heading straight south on a highway in New Jersey? It’s not as if I have not driven into or through New Jersey before. But while CSB was reading the Times, I managed to get on I-95 instead of the NJ Turnpike, or something like that. I was afraid that we might miss the Walt Whitman rest area. I didn’t actually plan to stop at the Walt Whitman rest area but I just like to consider the delightful randomness of a thruway service plaza named for a radical, freethinking, tree hugging poet. Otherwise, the rest areas/service plazas in New Jersey are a great opportunity to use Google while driving. You want to know the real story of Molly Pitcher? Google her and you will learn that she may not be an actual person, but a composite. But if she was a real person, her name was probably Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, whose husband fought with the Continental Army at Valley Forge, and Mary traveled along with them and brought water (pitchers of water) to the soldiers. You will also learn that Fort Bragg holds an annual “Molly Pitcher Day” when they demonstrate weapon systems for the whole family.
In quick succession, we traversed New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. That morning and afternoon of traversing whole states was tantalizing and deceptive, and reinforced my skewed notion of the size of the rest of the states of the United States. If where I live is the center of the universe, the apex of civilization, and the Omphalos of the world, (and is it not?) then surely everything else is smaller and ancillary. How very wrong. Our first day would be the last day when we would get across any state in less than a day.
The excitement of day one involved neither a literary shrine nor a battlefield or even country music. They were bears. Bears high in a tree. Very high in a tall oak tree. On the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park we encountered a mother bear and a cub collecting and munching on acorns. (Sadly, the photographic evidence is more like evidence of my sub-par camera skills.)) It was a rather skinny oak tree, and they were about fifty feet high and incredibly agile. I feel confident that had I ever gotten that high up in a tree I would not have scampered from limb to limb and managed to gather acorns at the same time. I feel even more confident that if my cub were on the limb just below me I would have been apoplectic with worry lest he fall. The wind was blowing, and the oak tree was swaying in the wind, and the bears on the limbs were swaying, and still they collected acorns.
Of course I was entranced. How many times have I not seen a moose in Maine? Close to a thousand times. Yet here I had just barely entered the Shenandoah and I saw bears. Not suburban bears scavenging in garbage. But happy National Park protected bears bulking up for the winter.

A few selected (redacted) Weekend Highlights

First off, we had a visit from Jerry H., Librarian of the Northern Nutgrowers Association and passionate advocate for nut trees. He came by with our new industrial strength nutcracker – capable of cracking the black walnuts that fall on the back porch and on the driveway, and dent the roof of any car parked beneath. It turns out that, after all these years of thinking otherwise, the black walnuts are actually edible. In order to derive an edible walnut, all you have to do is:
1. Gather the fallen black walnuts. They will be soft and mushy. They will stain your fingers and anything else they touch.
2. Step on them with shoes you don’t mind discoloring and roll them around on the driveway to remove the outer green skin and pulp, leaving the nutshell. Do not do this if you suffer from vertigo, dizziness or labyrinthitis.
3. Soak the partially cleaned nutshells in a bucket of water and scrape them clean with a wire brush. OR, if you happen to have a washing machine you have no other use for, you can put the nuts in that. Do not under any circumstances wash the walnuts in the same washing machine you will use for your clothes, as the nuts will dent the drum and stain everything else.
4. Lay out the cleaned nutshells on a screen and allow them to dry for 2 to 3 weeks in a cool dry place.
They should now be edible.
5. Bring out your industrial strength nutcracker to open them, but be careful of flying bits of nutshell that can be very sharp and could pierce your eyeball.
6. Enjoy the nuts.

I particularly liked Jerry’s jacket.

Next, I went to see CINDERELLA on Broadway with Numero Uno Granddaughter, Leda G.G.H.B. I expected every little girl in the audience to be dolled up in colorful and slightly tacky versions of Cinderella attire, and was somewhat disappointed at the preponderance of blue jeans. Though not on Numero Uno granddaughter, whose version of Cinderella Attire included: a long gown apparently from the 1970’s, a tasteful sweater with a deer (faun?) on it, a glitter headband and missing front teeth. We loved Cinderella. I appreciated that the stepsister with wanderlust and political leanings wore glasses.
Updated fairy tale was followed by a Sushi picnic on Metro North. Numero Uno granddaughter loves sushi. Not photographically documented was the miso soup spillage, which made rather a large mess but did not dampen our good spirits.

Then on Sunday, we walked out back to appreciate the 13-FOOT AFRICAN PYTHON SKIN. (I wanted CSB to lie down next to the python skin, for scale, but his dignity forbade such a ridiculous performance. My dignity would not have minded, but this was not suggested.) This was not our python skin, I regret to say, but our friend Merrill’s python skin. This python skin required the application of glycerin to soften it, and she thought our backyard would be an excellent place to accomplish this. We agreed, naturally. I did not learn if live pythons, that is pythons attached to their 13 feet of snakeskin, like to be rubbed all over with glycerin. But this snakeskin certainly gleamed after the application.

I could include in the highlights last night’s dinner chez Camilla and Aldo. But in the interests of brevity I will simply say: Antipasti by Aldo; Gnocchi a la Romana by Camilla, Rabbit stew (there must be a better word than stew) and caramelized onions by Aldo, Plum tart made with Zinfandel grapes by Camilla. Honey tasting by the bees of Montenegro, Rwanda, Southern Colorado, Bolivia, Block Island, Ontario and Hastings on Hudson.
Also of great interest was the ensuing discussion of the difference between and meaning of CHEF and COOK.

From Parthenogenesis to the Cinema

Last week I went to the Cloisters for their Annual Garden Day. I could have stayed home and worked in our garden here, which needs weeding, pruning - massive amounts of pruning, harvesting and also hoeing and raking, but there was a lecture on Beekeeping in the Middle Ages that beckoned. I could have stayed home to nurse my visiting sister who was laid low with a very nasty case of poison ivy. I could have ushered her into her oatmeal bath. I could also have stayed home to make some baked item to serve my stepson’s new in-laws who were dropping by in order to rhapsodize about the recently transpired wedding. (But I don’t bake.)
Of course I went the Cloisters to learn about medieval beekeeping. In many significant ways, beekeeping in the Middle Ages was not so different from current beekeeping, except there were no varroa mites, no pesticides and especially no neonicotinoids and the hives were such that in order to harvest honey, the hive and often the bees themselves had to be destroyed. But still, the bees made honey and wax, and humans availed themselves of their bounty.
No, the real difference between then and now is what we believe, or know, about honeybees and honeybee societies.
In History of the Animals, Aristotle enumerates some of the extant theories, circa 350 BCE, regarding the parthenogenic origin of bees: the babes spring from the honeysuckle flower; the young are brought forth from olive trees; bees emit their progeny through their mouths. Aristotle eschews mentioning bougonia, the commonly held belief that bees occurred spontaneously from the rotting carcass of a cow or oxen. But Virgil, in his Georgics, elegantly describes this birthing process of bees: a young bullock is smothered and beaten to death, then its body is strewn with rosemary and thyme, and once the Westerly winds start to blow, a swarm of bees emerges. So it was that the ancients believed that bees propagated asexually: parthenogenesis.
For Medieval Christians the great story of parthenogenesis was the Virgin Birth, whereby Mary – without benefit of sexual congress – gives birth to Jesus Christ. (I won’t go near the Immaculate Conception in this short space.) Hence medieval Christians associated the Virgin Birth with the parthenogenesis of bees, and further extrapolated an analogous relationship between monastic communities, full of virgins & ruled by a virgin/chaste abbot or mother superior, with beehives.
This somewhat essential misreading of the gender and procreative process of the bees contributed to the symbolism that surrounded the use of beeswax candles in Christian churches. Many people kept bees in the Middle Ages, but the monasteries were in the forefront of beekeeping because of the importance of beeswax to the rites of the Christian church. Not only did beeswax burn brightly and smell sweetly, unlike the smoky & smelly tallow that was used by the peasantry, but also beeswax had the cachet of being produced by virgins.
In Christian iconography, the beeswax candle represented Jesus Christ: the pure wax being his flesh and the wick his human soul. We can read from the Exultet, a portion of the liturgy recited during the Easter season, this magnificent Ode to the Candle:
If indeed the bees, while they conceive by mouth, so they give birth by mouth; it is with a chaste body, not from foul desire, that they copulate.
Finally, preserving their virginity, they generate offspring; they are glad with progeny; they are called mothers; they remain untouched; they generate sons, and they do not know husbands.
They use the flower as a husband; with the flower they furnish offspring; with the flower they build their houses; with the flower they gather riches; with the flower they fashion wax.
O admirable ardor of the bees!
And more:
O splendid examples of virginity […..]
Let us proclaim the favor of this candle.
Whose odor is sweet, and whose flame cheerful; its fat does not exude a foul odor, but a most joyful sweetness, which is not tainted by foreign colorings, but is illuminated by the Holy Spirit.
Which when it is lit feeds on the fabric of its own body, this weeps tears bound together in rivulets of drops.
And which disperses as a yellow vein the half-consumed portions as a divine blood, as the flame absorbs the received fluid.

Since earliest times the Queen Bee has consistently been addressed as a King. As a powerful female, she was not alone in being regarded as necessarily male. She rules the hive? Well, then of course she is a guy. Because guys rule! Poor Joan of Arc dressed as a male in order to lead the French soldiers out of their slump and into victory over the English, and it was her cross-dressing that most incensed the clerics who interrogated her and condemned her to the flames. History and legend are replete with tales of young girls who dressed as boys in order to travel safely or enter restricted areas. Likewise history is full of powerful women – and sometimes simply energetic women - who have been condemned for their unwomanly behavior, for being mannish, tomboyish, butch, and unladylike (a favorite word of my mother’s, back when).
No such name-calling occurs in the beehive. The worker bees, all female, know the queen and they know their very survival as a hive depends upon her. Their survival depends upon the virgin queen embarking on her mating flight, high up into the drone space, where she will mate with as many drones as possible; the worker bees know their survival depends on the queen bee then returning to the hive, filled with enough sperm to lay 2000 eggs a day for the next two or three years.
It was not until Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680), a Swiss entomologist, looked at the queen bee under the newly discovered microscope, and identified her ovaries, that we came to know – and believe – a single queen was the mother of all the bees in he hive.
Even then, it would be a while before it was understood that drones inseminate the virgin queen. And further understood that inseminating virgin queens is the one and only purpose of the drones, who otherwise do not gather nectar, nor sting, nor create honeycomb. All they do is fly up to the “drone space” and hover all day long waiting for a virgin queen to show up.
Into the 20th century, the prejudices of human mores colored our understanding of the insemination of the queen. It was accepted that yes, it was not a virgin queen who lays 2000 eggs a day, but we clung – moralistically? - to a belief in her essential monogamy. Only in the 1940’s did scientists verify that queens on their nuptial flights mate with multiple drones. To really appreciate this startling fact, we can read E.B. White’s brilliant Song of the Queen Bee, from the New Yorker of 1945, which he wrote in response to this bulletin from the US Dept. of Agriculture: “The breeding of the bee has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.” You really should read in its entirety E.B. White’s poem, which ends thus:
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I'm devil-may-care and I'm fancy-free,
Love-in-air is the thing for me,
Oh, it's simply rare
In the beautiful air,
And I wish to state
That I'll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.

(I have found so-called science books for children, published in the 1950’s and 1960’s, stating categorically that the queen bee mates with one and only one drone. I tried to contact the publishers and express my outrage at this promulgation of false science, but was rebuffed.)

So with such thoughts of bee procreation in my head, we went a few days later to see a wonderful new movie, More than Honey, by the Swiss filmmaker Markus Imhoof. (We saw it at Jacob Burns in Pleasantville, and I hope it will get widely shown. I highly recommend it.)

Imhoof was moved to create this documentary by the environmental crisis affecting the honeybees. He charts the paths of several different beekeepers, from a picaresque Swiss who keeps the native European black bees much as did his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, to his (Imhoof’s) daughter-in-law researching honeybee genetics in Australia (the only place on earth with no varroa mites), to an American migratory beekeeper, trucking thousands of hives to the almond groves of California and to the apple orchards of the Pacific northwest and back to the Dakotas to make honey. Perhaps one aspect of the brilliance of this movie is that even this migratory beekeeper - whom we first meet as he is listening to the buzzing din of bees pollinating the almonds, saying, “That is the sound of money” – is not vilified, but allowed to tell his story in a humane and nuanced way. Later he will say, referring to the loss of his hives to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD): “I’m getting real comfortable with death of an epic scale”.
Along the way, Imhoof captured on film something I never thought I would see: a drone mating with a virgin queen, midair. The process takes a few seconds, and only when it was over, and the camera captures the drone pulling out of the queen and then plummeting to the ground as he dies, bereft of his inner organs, did I cotton to what I had just witnessed: way up in the beautiful air, where it’s simply rare, I saw a drone and a queen starting the process that would result in tens of thousands of more bees.
Of course I had no idea how feat was accomplished, but I have learned. Imhoof and his crew learned where the ‘drone space’ was. They built a 10-meter high platform for their camera and cameraperson. The drones, however, congregate even high than that. So in order to lure to drones down to their altitude, the filmmakers emitted pheromones. Then they filmed, and filmed, for ten days, and for that they have 30 seconds of amazing footage.
“O admirable ardor of the bees!” Indeed.

Flossing at BAM

So last night Reine (favorite daughter) and I went to BAM to pick up the tickets for Ethel’s DOCUMERICA and then we realized the show started at 7:30 instead of 7 which meant we had time to get something to eat. Reine led us to La Caye which I thought was Jamaican the entire time we were there (not entirely idiotically, because Reine did allude to the prevalence of Jamaica/West Indian cuisine in Fort Greene, so I just inferred…), but I should have realized it was Haitian because the menu was in French. Since we only had about 30 minutes we ordered a salad (it had beets, but I was wearing a black dress so it seemed safe to eat beets, which it would not have been had I been wearing anything white) and Shiktay(cod fish mixed with onions, peppers, garlic and parsley - served with French bread) to share. The Shiktay was tasty, but early on I realized that shreds of codfish were becoming lodged in my teeth and that my teeth had a vice-like hold on shreds of this Shiktay. In fact, I have never known a vice to hold on so tightly or to so persistently resist dislodgment, as did my teeth last night. Still, we finished most of the food, tossed back our glasses of Pinot Noir, and then headed back to BAM where I went straight to the ladies’ room in order to floss. I proudly pulled from my purse a credit card sized FLOSSCARD® Compliments of Irwin Miller, Donald Salomon & Joseph Esposito, DMDs & DDSs, my dentists. Although Miller has been retired for at least three years now and plays golf in Arizona full time. I figure that the two remaining partners kept his name on the FLOSSCARD® to be nice, or because it is cheaper than making any changes to the printing on the card, or it could just be that this FLOSSCARD® has been in my purse for several years, and hence predates Dr. Miller’s (“Miller the Driller”) retirement. Whatever the reason for Miller’s name on the FLOSSCARD®, Reine was impressed that I had this with me. She wasn’t about to waste time checking to see the names of the generous dentists, the dentists of her youth. I pulled out a length of floss for Reine, and then one for myself. She flossed and departed. I flossed and flossed, and kept flossing. I succeeded in dislodging the shred of codfish from between my upper left molars, but then – was I feeling cocky? – I proceeded to keep flossing in places where there was no lodged codfish. I tried flossing between the upper right molars, molars that are impossibly tight. So tight that the very floss got stuck between them, and then shredded. No amount of subsequent flossing could dislodge that shredded piece of floss, and in fact all attempts to dislodge floss with floss were abject failures. Because the floss on the FLOSSCARD®, while a freebie, was unwaxed, or deficiently waxed. And if I didn’t know it before, I know now that the tightness of my teeth requires HIGHLY WAXED FLOSS.
While I was fruitlessly trying to floss out the shredded floss, Lorraine F* came into the ladies' room and we greeted each other, and she even proceeded to introduce me to a friend who she said I may or may not have met at an earlier occasion at her house, and I tried to be gracious but my tongue was probing my upper right molars and the shredded floss that still dangled from between them. So I just said that I really needed to finish flossing, which was not entirely true because I am guessing (hindsight?) it was already clear, even to me, that no amount of flossing with the unwaxed floss was going to solve the situation and was probably going to make it worse. I don’t need to describe the unpleasant feelings of having stuff, anything, floss or food, jammed between two already tightly jammed together teeth. You all know that feeling, unless you are blessed with teeth sufficiently spaced apart, and then nothing I can say can possibly evoke the feeling. It is sui generis.
And also, it seemed just a bit uncanny that in less than a week I had two awkward encounters in ladies' rooms, though this one at BAM was certainly the lesser, in awkwardness. The first awkward – the most awkward – ladies’ room encounter was in a country club on Long Island, with CSB’s ex-wife, at the wedding of CSB’s son. Post-divorce civility has not been achieved with this particular ex-wife – nothing approaching it – and so there I was at my stepson’s wedding, and yet have never actually laid eyes on his mother. Had I met her in the ladies’ room at Grand Central Station prior to that wedding, I would not have known who she was. I would have been clueless when she hurled invective my way. Because she would recognize me, since she has made a point of it, and anyway I am fairly easy to find. (Even on FB:)
But I did see her at the wedding, since we sat catty-corner within ten feet of each during the ceremony, and now at least I knew what she looked like. At the wedding, at this first opportunity in years, the ex-wife clearly was disinclined to be civil to any of her former in-laws, never mind me. So later on, during the dinner & dancing portion of the evening, there I was washing my hands in the ladies’ room, and just as I turned around, CSB’s ex-wife walked in, saw me, spat out “ O F#%@ ing Christ” and marched out. That was it. In over ten years, that now qualifies as our only face-to-face encounter. For a second I considered dashing after her and saying, “This is such a happy occasion, let’s try to be friendly….” Or something similarly smarmy.
But I wasn’t wearing a bulletproof dress, and I knew the last thing she wanted was to converse with me that night; what occurred in the ladies room, stayed in the ladies’ room.
I spent the first hour of Ethel’s DOCUMERICA trying to ignore the shredded unwaxed floss that was stuck between my molars and filaments of which dangled in my mouth, and failing to ignore any of it. Meanwhile, the technological portion of the evening failed. The middle screen of the three screens for displaying the DOCUMERICA photographs went black. At first I thought this might be on purpose, but after being black for a really long time, it was clear. Midway though the program, the performers stopped, and over the loudspeaker we heard that they would try to fix the technological problem. Five minutes later we heard on the loudspeaker that the technological problems had proved intractable, and so they would continue sans visuals. Reine and I departed for her home, where she assured me I would find very WAXY FLOSS. And I did. So that problem was solved.
Some problems** are more easily solved than others. All it takes is very WAXY FLOSS.

* A friend and also host to some of our NYC bees and very gracious and most likely someone who would never floss in a public rest room.
** BAM has since fixed the technological glitch, so you can now see DOCUMERICA in all its glory.