fauxklore

I took a quick trip to New York last week. Late January / early February is a good time to go there, because hotel prices are fairly low. I was able to get a room in midtown for just over $100 a night. The primary purpose of the trip was seeing the Encores production of Once Upon a Mattress, but a little time browsing Time Out turned up three other shows I wanted to see, as well as a museum exhibit. And a quick look through the New York Adventure Club newsletter found a good way to fill in some of the rest of my time.

Anyway, I took the train up early on Tuesday morning. After dropping off my bag at my hotel, I headed down to the Lower East Side.

Judy Chicago Herstory: This exhibit, at The New Museum, was a must-see for me. Or course, I’ve been familiar with The Dinner Party for years, including seeing it both in book form and, in person, at The Brooklyn Museum. I also saw her exhibition Resolutions: A Stitch in Time at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles back in 2001.

I stopped quickly at Yonah Shimmel’s on the way there and had a disappointing kasha knish. They were never as good as my memories of Jerry’s on the boardwalk at Far Rockaway, a few blocks away from where Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ely lived, but they have definitely gotten worse the past couple of times I’ve been there and I think I may just have to give up on them. Oh, well.

Anyway, I was there for the Judy Chicago Herstory exhibit, which proved to be a fairly comprehensive retrospective. It made sense to follow it chronologically, so I started with her early work. The information placards were very informative, discussing things like how she took an auto body class to learn how to paint on pieces from cars. There were various video clips from her days doing performance art, the most amusing of which involved two performers dressed in body suits with large soft sculpture genitals attached arguing about roles in housework, e.g. “I have a cock. Therefore, I don’t wash the dishes. You have a cunt, so you have to wash the dishes.” But there was some less shocking artwork.



One of my favorite exhibits had to do with the Birth Project, which was an early 1980’s collaboration with over 150 needleworkers from around the U.S. Here’s an exquisite tapestry from it called The Creation and an enlarged photo of one part of it.





The picture below is from Resolution: A Stitch in Time, which I’d mentioned having seen at the Skirball. In that project, each of the works offered a contemporary interpretation of a traditional adage or proverb.



If Women Ruled the World was another fascinating piece.



There was plenty of other stuff to see, including an exhibition of works by various women who influenced Judy Chicago. This was called The City of Ladies and the accompanying brochure had biographies of over 80 women, such as Hima af Klint, Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard von Bingen, Suzanne Duchamp, Georgia O’Keefe, etc.

One of my other favorites was the International Honor Quilt, a series of several small triangular quilts representing women throughput the world who had been unjustly forgotten. There are apparently over 500 quilts in the total collection and the museum exhibited only a small number of them. Here’s an amusing example. Note the blue triangle in the top row, between Mother Teresa and Agatha Christie.



If anyone is going to be in New York, the exhibit runs through March 3rd and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in feminism and art.

Merrily We Roll Along: I took the subway back to Midtown and rested for a little while before getting a slice of $1 pizza before going to see Merrily We Roll Along. For anyone who doesn’t know, this was a 1981 Sondheim flop, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It tells the story of three friends, whose youthful promise takes them in different directions. But it’s told in reverse chronology, so it starts in 1976 after they’ve had their falling out. The real focus is on Frank (Franklin Shepard, who has become a successful Hollywood producer, abandoning both his partner, Charley (with whom he collaborated on musicals) and their friend, Mary, whose career tanked after an early bestseller. As it works its way backwards, we see how Frank’s pursuit of monetary success led to his falling out with Charley, who embarrasses him in a television interview. And Mary’s unrequited interest in him leads her to decline into alcoholism.

The performances were impressive. A lot of people were there to see Daniel Radcliffe as Charley. His singing voice is okay, though not spectacular, but he does have a real gift for physical comedy. And he did very well with “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” which summarizes their separation.

Lindsey Mendez was an appropriately acerbic Mary. But the highlight of the cast was Jonathan Groff who made Frank less unlikeable than many other performers have. I also want to call out Katie Rose Clarke who nailed it as Beth (Frank’s first wife) who gets the best song of the show in “Not a Day Goes By” and Reg Rogers, whose comic timing as Joe was superb.

I have two serious problems with the show. For one thing, the backwards timeline makes it depressing. No matter how much early promise things show, we know that everything will go wrong. That also applies to the cabaret number, “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” about the Kennedy clan. It’s a very funny piece, but (again) we know how things go wrong for them.

My bigger issue is with the women in the show. Gussie (Frank’s second wife) displays every horrible stereotype about actresses. And Mary’s character is never fully developed. Sorry, but Frank just isn’t worth her throwing her life away for.

As a Sondheim completist, it’s worth seeing, especially for the excellent cast. But it will never be a show I love the way I love, say, “Company” or “Assassins” or “Pacific Overtures.” By the way, there is a running bit about songs not being hummable, which was, of course, a frequent criticism of Sondheim’s work. Anything you can sing you can hum, damn it. Just don’t go in expecting a Jerry Herman-esque ear worm.

This is getting long, so I’ll continue it in a separate post.

Back in October, fansee asked me (in response to my retirement) how I came to be a satellite systems engineer and, more specifically, about my experiences as a woman in that field. I have plenty of other catching up to do, but I’m in the mood to write about this.


As far back as I can remember, I was interested in science. As a child in the 1960’s, I had a particular interest in space. The first book I remember, from about age 5, was You Will Go to the Moon. Later on, I recall writing to NASA and getting pictures of spacecraft and planets. The first news story I remember was John Glenn orbiting the earth, And the moon landing was one of the major events of my childhood.


But, when I asked if girls could become astronauts, my mother said, “no, but maybe when you’re old enough...” For a while, after reading a biography of Maria Mitchell (part of a series my elementary school library had on childhoods of famous Americans), I thought of becoming an astronomer. Or, at least, going to Vasaar College, like she had. But then I read about Marie Curie in the back of a Classics Comics (possibly one about the story of the atom) and decided I wanted to be a chemist. I did go through other potential careers throughout elementary school and junior high, ranging from being an actress to becoming the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500. But I pretty much stuck to chemistry as the plan. For a while, I specifically wanted to be an analytical chemist for the police department, like Barry Allen (the alter ego of The Flash), which would also solve the problem of how I would get super powers without having been born on Krypton or being an Amazon princess. By high school, I was primarily interested in biochemistry and, specifically, neurochemistry.


That pretty much continued to be the plan. I did well in chemistry class (and other science classes). I also went to two National Science Foundation programs. The Columbia University Science Honors Program was held on Saturdays and I spent 3 years taking the train into the city (and the subway uptown) for it. I took a wide range of classes, not just biochemistry related. I remember one about statistics for psychology, one on elementary particle physics, and a biochemistry class where we extracted DNA - something far more exciting in 1975 than it would be now. There were also afternoon lectures a few times each semester, with the most memorable of those having to do with topology. There were also social benefits, including meeting my first real boyfriend. When there weren’t afternoon lectures, he and I hung out in the city and perpetrated public displays of affection in Central Park. But that’s a whole other story. (Before I met him, I sometimes went to the headquarters of the socialist Zionist group that ran a summer camp I’d gone to for a couple of summers and spent the afternoon handing out leaflets on the street.)


The other NSF program was the Program in Biochemistry (PIB), the summer after my junior year of high school. It was held at the Loomis-Chaffee School in Connecticut and was a mixture of lectures and research projects in small groups. I had actually spent the previous summer taking a summer school class (at my high school) on biochemistry research, which I remember as being almost entirely focused on individual projects, with a few field trips thrown in. I did a project in which I injected the nerves of clams (which are big red threads) with neurotransmitters. I don’t remember what I was trying to prove. As for the field trips. we did one or two to various institutions within a couple of hours of our school. I know we went at least once to Waldemar, which was a medical research facility that had its own summer program for high school students. And I know we went to the Coney Island Aquarium, but I don’t remember if that was an official event.


Anyway, PIB was a fun and intense summer. We took pride in sleep deprivation and people signed up for one hour naps on the sofa in the lounge, for example. We learned how to “sacrifice” mice and grind up their livers in a blender and an unlucky member of my team got a taste when mouth pipetting some of the resulting liquid. We did have papers to write and the various instructors (who were upperclassmen at prestigious universities; the head of my team was a junior at Harvard, if I recall correctly) graded them according to their own systems. There was one instructor who favored the use of classical compositions as grades. To this day, I have no idea whether “Glinka’s Summer Night in Madrid” was or was not a good grade. We also had various extracurricular trips. I know I went to concerts at Tanglewood a few times. There were tours of various colleges. And there was a trip to New York to see Equus on Broadway.


So, when I was applying to colleges, I was still planning to be a chemistry major. But my brother was busily setting a Michigan State record for changing majors and someone I knew from high school was rethinking his plan to major in math at Yale. I chose MIT over Yale largely because I figured that, if I did change my mind about my major, I would still want to do something scientific.


Freshman year included 5.41, which was an Intro to Organic Chemistry class. I was reasonably well prepared and went on the next semester to the next class, 5.42. (I was also taking a lab class.) I discovered that, while I could think of lots of reactions that could happen, I often had no idea which one would happen. More significantly, I was not enjoying either of those two classes. At the same time, I read about some work that people in the mechanical engineering department were doing on prosthetics that used the body’s nervous system. That sounded fascinating and I looked further at ME as a major. (Or, in MIT lingo, Course 2.) The biggest advantage is that it would give me a broad engineering background, meaning I didn’t really have to make up my mind. There was a program (2A) that let you design your own major within the ME department and I used that to design what was, essentially, a biomedical engineering major.


One of the first classes I took was 2.02, Introduction to System Dynamics. This was focused on modeling and it just clicked with my desire to view the world as simple. There were a few times that I rushed back to my dorm room after class to work on a problem set right away to see if it all made as much sense as I thought it did. (I assure you that was not normal behavior for me.) Anyway, people said that if I liked that class, I should take 2.14, which was Introduction to Control Systems. I did and it continued to click with me. So I kept taking classes in system dynamics and controls and enjoying them. And I pursued that into grad school (at UC Berkeley).


While I was in grad school, I got a fellowship from NASA, which came about mostly because one of my professors knew somebody and helped me write the application. When I was nearing completing my doctorate and was job hunting, I did look at things in various industries, but most of the interesting controls issues were in the aerospace industry. I went to work at The Aerospace Corporation (aka The Circle-A Ranch) largely because it offered the opportunity to work across a wide range of systems. And that worked out we’ll for me, obviously, since I stayed there (in various jobs) for 35 years.



This has been fairly long and I haven’t gotten to writing about the specific issue of being a woman in the field. The short version is that I certainly had to deal with individual assholes, but I was always able to find support. As an undergrad at MIT, I chose to live in an all-women’s dorm, partly to have other women to vent to. Most of that was in the form of mircroaggressions, e.g. the instructor who headed a research project I worked on who kept a ruler with Playboy pictures on his desk or another professor who would make comments like “those co-eds are always turning in things late.” The most egregious example was a professor who had started every lecture for years by addressing the class as “:Gentlemen.” I was the only girl in the class and he’d then start with “Gentlemen,…and Miss Nadel.” On the plus side, he definitely knew who I was and I did well in his class. (I am fairly sure he was entirely unconscious of why this was annoying.) I should also mention that my undergrad advisor was a woman.


In grad school, I remember a reception where our department head proudly announced that he had doubled the number of women on the department faculty. They’d hired one person. (They did hire a couple more while I was still there.) But there were a couple of other women working on Ph.D.s and, even though we were in different subfields, we often had coffee together.


Job hunting was another story. A few places made a point of having me talk with a token woman in their group. More than one interviewer expressed surprise at seeing a female job candidate. One organization even sent me a thank you letter addressed to “Mr. Nadel” after my interview.


Circle-A was pretty good from that standpoint. Yes, I often found myself counting the number of women in the room at meetings (which included government and contractor employees, too), but I can think of only a handful of inappropriate comments. I do know of one woman whose (female) boss told her she should wear makeup. And I’ve heard of a few incidents of sexual harassment. On the plus side, we did have an African-American woman as our CEO for several years.


Overall, I had a career that suited me well.

This is intended to get me completely caught up here, a state that may last, oh, 15 minutes or so.

Frequent flyer meets business travel: I had a quick business trip to Denver a few weeks ago. I managed to arrange my flight out to be on a plane that Captain Denny Flanagan was piloting. It’s always good to be reminded that there are people working for the airlines who care about customer service. (And it was nice to chat with him before the flight.) I also used the trip as an opportunity to have dinner with friends who live out there, which is always nice. The work part was pretty intense, however.

Michael Chertoff: The former Director of Homeland Security gave a talk at an MIT-related reception I was at recently. I didn’t find anything he said particularly surprising, but I did think he completely dodged a question someone asked about the balance between security and privacy.

Domestic politics: Romney’s selection of Paul "Privatizing" Ryan as his running mate pretty much confirms my theory that the Republican Party no longer welcomes its former moderates. However, I doubt that the selection of a vice presidential candidate has much, if any, impact on who people vote for.

International politics: The first American company to open a franchise location in Libya is Cinnabon. This makes perfect sense if you think about local tastes. That is, of course, what makes it all the more surprising.

Women and the Olympics: There have been lots of stories this year about women and the Olympics. It was not until I read an article by Sally Jenkins in today’s Washington Post, however, that I learned a particularly appalling bit of history. In 1976 Margaret Thompson Murdock was the first woman shooter to make the American team. She tied with her team captain, Lanny Bassham. The rules prohibited a shoot-off, so Bassham was given the gold and Murdock the silver. To his credit, he pulled her up on the podium with him, but sheesh!

Story swap: There was a bonus story swap at Eve’s house Saturday night. We started outside around the fire pit, but moved inside when it began to rain. (The rain also prevented viewing the Perseids.) There were several travel related stories and lots of interesting conversation. This reminds me that I should someday put together a piece about places not to eat Chinese food, starting with Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. A particular highlight for me was Jake’s impassioned explanation of why donkeys might be chickens, which made his lawyer father proud of him and has the rest of us laughing hysterically.

Not laughing over traffic:: The Virginia Department of Transportation was doing their usual weekend work, otherwise known as how to screw up my drive home on the Beltway. What annoyed me the most is that the sign indicating that 3 of the 4 lanes were closed was after the exit I could have taken to avoid the mess. Of course, being Virginia, if they actually put up a useful highway sign, they would have to plant a tree immediately in front of it.

Pearl yarn: I got a notice from one of m local yarn shops that they had some of the Zealana pearl yarn, a limited edition created for the 30th anniversary of Vogue knitting. This is 50% crushed pearls, embedded in tencel, and only 500 skeins were made. Each skein is numbered and comes in a presentation box. If you think I could pass this up, you don’t know me very well. I was over there right when they opened. That was a good thing as they only had 20 skeins and I was number 18 in line. It is gorgeous and I think it was worth the 40 bucks. Not that I know what I am going to do with it. The best idea I heard from one of the other lucky purchasers was a bridal veil, but I am not exactly in need of one of those, alas.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: I’ve wanted to see this musical for some time, so took advantage of a production at Elden Street Players in Herndon. I found this very enjoyable. David Yazbek’s score suited the plot (based on the movie) well. In an earlier era, "Like Zis, Like Zat" would have gotten some radio play and "What Was a Woman to Do" would have had some life as a novelty piece. While the early set-up introducing the two con men is a bit longer than it needs to be, the book is funny, with several fairly subtle jokes. The performances were good, too, especially by Tom Flatt as Lawrence and Janette Moman as Muriel.

Travel planning, part 1: Helsinki: My annual birthday excursion this year is a long weekend in Helsinki. In the course of researching what to do, I have discovered a number of bizarre possibilities, some of them related to the city being the World Design Capital for 2012. Those include a walking map highlighting fonts on various signs (and, yes, I am enough of a geek to have downloaded the map), an exhibit titled "Flush: Design of Public Toilets," and an iron age market. There is also an event described as "urban festival brings together design and traditional Finnish rug washing piers." Even without the special events, Helsinki has some oddities, like a Hotel and Restaurant Museum. As someone who has driven out of my way to see things like the world’s largest towel (at the Cannon Towel Visitor Center in Kannapolis, North Carolina) and the water tower of the town of Joe, Montana, I expect to be in my element. (I’ve also downloaded walking tour brochures and directions to the largest yarn shop in town.)

Travel planning – part 2: Israel You may have read about the cheap fares that were available for a little while last week, due to a contractor failing to load fuel surcharges into an on-line system. Since I had already been looking at fares to Israel, I snagged a ticket. I have lots of planning yet to do, of course.

Travel planning – part 3: I also got frequent flyer tickets for Ozfest next year. This was fairly complex because I wanted to do a few things on the way to Perth and back. I’ve got one ticket (using United miles) to Singapore and back from Hong Kong. And I have another ticket (using American miles) from Singapore to Perth and Adelaide to Hong Kong. I’ll have almost a week in Singapore, which should allow me an excursion to Malaysia, too. I plan to take the Indian Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide. Finally, I will have a few days in Hong Kong, which should be enough time to eat lots of dim sum. Or maybe look for traditional Hong Kong rug washing piers.