Watching "Klute" 50 years Later, In New Hampshire

The movie "Klute" somehow escaped my notice. It was released in 1971, when I was in medical school, and not going to a lot of movies, which, in those days was the only way you saw movies, going to a theater, lining up along a New York City street and seeing it when it was in the theater for a few weeks.

But now there are many ways of seeing movies--streaming them and even borrowing the CD's from the library, which is what I did, right here in Hampton, New Hampshire, which seems about as far away from New York City circa 1971 as Pluto is from Earth. And I was living in New York City in 1971, so I remember what that was like, and recognized those places.

Jane Fonda plays a call girl, Bree Daniels, and within minutes of the opening she provides a clinic in great acting, as she is seen in a "meat market," of beautiful women auditioning for a photo marketing campaign to launch a new cosmetic line, and the three marketers work their way down the line of women sitting in chairs, and comment on their faces, hair color as if the women were not even in the room.  

A few scenes later, she is in the apartment of a man who apparently is casting about for an actress for a movie or possibly a play, and he is so self absorbed, he takes a phone call while she waits for him to return his attention to her, and several emotions flow across her face: annoyance, desperation, disappointment, hopelessness, as she realizes she is not really in contention for a part in whatever project he may or may not actually ever launch, but she is simply a toy to his outrageous ego.

Whether intended or not, these two scenes go much further to explain the psychology of what drives Bree to sell sex, to hold men in her web, than any of the interminable sessions with her psychiatrist, where she tries to explain her choice to be a prostitute, or as we would now call her, a sex worker.  Surely, the dehumanization, the casual cruelty of auditions for modeling gigs, acting parts, the rejection, the utter disregard for the hurt inflicted in the ambitious, desperate, driven women appears far more damaging to the women than selling themselves for sex, where at least they are desired and tacitly reassured they are wonderful in some way. 

Whenever I hear people talking about how degrading it is for women to be "forced" into prostitution I think, well, I'm sure for some women it may be, but for others, it may be almost empowering, uplifting even. Who knows? The picture of a call girl in "Klute" at least raises the possibility the choice of "the life," may be a complex one.

The few sex workers I've interviewed struck me as fairly satisfied women, and they did not express any regrets. In fact, when I lived in New York it was the flight attendants (then called "stewardesses") who seemed to be enjoying the freedom of brief "hook ups" the most. And they did not typically get paid for sex, beyond wine and dinner. It was just fun for them, part of flying and living in New York, and maybe a shot at "marrying up."

But the real stunner in Klute is a totally unexpected scene.

This is 1970, when $50 is a lot of money--likely about $500 in today's money, which is what Bree gets paid for having sex. The whole idea of call girls is so titillating to 1970 tastes you can sell an entire movie on the idea of women making a living by selling sex. Sexual repression was so dense in those years it is hardly possible, now 50 years later, to apprehend it. 

Bree explains, through the contrivance of sessions with her psychiatrist, how making a living by getting paid for sex allows her to achieve a sense of control of her life: she can earn enough money to afford an apartment on Park Avenue "with leather furniture," and she has a sense of professional accomplishment as she manipulates the fantasies of uptight, "square" men, who could never admit to fantasizing about sex. Mostly, her clients are "family men" out of town, doing business in New York City and looking for an exciting sexual adventure.

The writers, both male, believe they are inside the head of call girls, and they have Bree tell us she feels very little physical pleasure while having sex and has absolutely no emotional reaction to her clients--she is rewarded with money, and with the sense of power and control she obtains manipulating the men.

How true this was for real call girls of that era, we may never know, but it feels reasonable and true in the film.

But the moment that left me thunderstruck comes after we have followed Bree as she  arrives at the office and shop of an "old man"--we are told later he is 70! 

She arrives in a slinky dress and tells this ancient about her recent trip to Cannes, for the film festival (which we know is all fiction, and of her encounter with a man--not a young man, because she is not attracted to young men--and how he seduced her and how she was consumed with desire for him. She slowly wriggles out of her dress and we see Klute, the private detective who is pursuing her, watching her from another room.

Later, Klute throws this encounter with the old man client in Bree's face as an example of her callousness. And she says there is nothing wrong with her relationship with this client. In fact, she insists there is nothing morally wrong with having sex and getting paid for it by any of her clients, as it hurts nobody and gives satisfaction and pleasure to the clients--a revolutionary idea in 1970. 

But this man, in particular, she says started working when he was 14, in the same fashion dress making shop he now owns, has not had more than a week's vacation in 60 years, and after his wife died, started paying Bree to arrive at his shop, where they drink wine and she arouses him with her tales of seduction, but he never touches her.

How Far We've Come 

Her feeling of complete sympathy for this man, not condescending sympathy, but actual empathy, is so apparent it is shocking. He is the one person in the film to  whom Bree clearly feels a strong emotional attachment,  and in telling his story and defending him Bree transforms from an avant garde sex worker to a thoroughly admirable human being. 

Suddenly, Bree is no longer simply an object of fascination, titillation, but she becomes an agent of possibility, the possibility of human connection. She is someone we can care about, someone we have to care about because she cares about this old man so ardently.

The rest of film is competent, if a little too simplistically resolved, but you never get bored, but what drives the whole thing, for me at least, is the unexpected and shocking revelation about Bree and her feeling for the old man. The scene flashes by, but it is not rushed. It is simple, straightforward and entirely revelatory.  Fonda carries it so smoothly, you think you are no longer watching a movie, but a documentary.

Better to Be Lucky?

 

Chance favors the prepared mind.

--Louis Pasteur

"Better to be lucky than smart," a man who had bought a track of land near the Amtrack rail yards  in Southeast Washington, D.C. told me. Nobody thought that land was worth much, given its proximity to noisy locomotives, but the price was low and he had some cash, and he bought it and it made him a millionaire.

I, on the other hand, have had a slew of lucky opportunities thrown in my path over the years and simply failed to act on them.

It's a little like that famous story about the man who looks to Heaven and cries out to God, "I've been faithful to  you and done good works all my life: Why have you never allowed me to win the Lottery?" And the clouds part and God's voice thunders out,  "Moishe, meet me halfway...Buy a ticket!"

Around 1992, when my younger son was about 7, he crashed into my room, and I was busy at my desk, but he was hopping from one foot to the other in one of his agitated states which had earned him the sobriquet, "Toad" after Toad of Toad Hall, who was forever jumping from one spasm of enthusiasm to another. 

We had been early adaptors of computer technology in our house. I bought a TRASH 80--the radio shack computer which allowed for word processing and despite being strapped for cash, I had purchased early computers as soon as a new advance was made, and Toad had inherited one, which he exploited in the basement and he explored the internet daily. 

Now he was highly agitated, demanding, "I need your credit card! NOW!"

"What for?"

"I need to buy a domain name!"

"And what is a domain name?"

"Uggggh. It's what you call your website. It's how people find you on the web!"

"And do you have a website?"

"No, but I need this domain name. Two actually."

"And what would you do with it?"

"Hold it and sell it!"

"How much?"
"Thirty five dollars...each."

"That's a lot of money."

"It'll be worth it!"

He dragged me down to the basement and I watched him plink in the information to whatever site he had found, and when the moment came, I allowed him to enter in my credit card numbers, sure that somehow I would be sucked into some con scheme to owe $10,000 to some Nigerian prince. 

He bought two domain names: "Business.com" and "Business Help.com."

Now, did I  consult any lawyer to find out what this latest gambit of my son might mean? No. And I knew plenty of lawyers--we lived in the Washington, DC suburbs. In fact, a friend was an SEC lawyer. I knew FEC lawyers. I knew people who wrote for the Wall Street Journal. But, no, I went back upstairs to whatever it was I was working on...some novel no doubt, and forgot all about it.

Until, a few weeks later, this son announced, triumphantly, someone had offered him $1,000 for the domain name, "Business.com"  

"Wow," I said. "That's quite a return on investment!" He agreed to sell for that but a little later, I told him, why not ask for $2,000 and then you could buy a really good computer. So he did, and they quickly agreed. Some in my family thought that reneging on the original price was unethical--after all, a deal is a deal, but I said this is the computer age, after all, there was not even a paper to sign your name on. And if they were willing to pay $2,000, then that's what the name must be worth.

In 1999, the domain name sold for $7.5 million and in 2007 it resold for $350 million.

So, chance fell upon two unprepared minds, in the case of my son and me.

Knowing next to nothing about business and Wall Street, I had for decades told everyone I knew, "If you ever hear about a company which comes up with a drug which really works for obesity, for weight loss, buy it. It'll be the only drug which 50% of Americans will buy, and they'll need it for the rest of their lives."

My neighbor, across the street, works for Lilly and she told me about a drug, Trulicity, which helped in diabetes but also caused weight loss. I was familiar with the class, the GLP1 agonists, which had been around since the late 1990's as Byetta, a protein isolated from the saliva of Gila monsters. It was the progenitor of the class and it worked reasonably well, but it was a twice a day injection and it could improve blood sugars, overall, as measured by a test called hemoglobin A1c by a point, which amounted to a 10-15% improvement in blood sugars. There was some minimal weight loss. Then came,  Trulicity, which was once a week, which was better, and it maybe lowered the glucoses a little better, but it was no significant advance.  I had patients on it, but I never pushed the dose as vigorously as my colleagues. Then the next generation came out: Mounjaro. This one was lowering the A1c by two, sometimes three points, and the weight loss was impressive, at least in some patients--80 pounds in nine months. 

But did I rush out and buy Lilly stock? 

Of course not. My mind was not prepared. 

I had a friend, Michael, who sunk $90,000 into Amgen when he heard they had come out with a drug called granulocyte stimulating factor, which prevented the wipe out of white blood cells in patients being treated with leukemia. But leukemia is actually a rare disease, and the patients would only need to be on it for a few months, so how much sense did that make? Never mind, Michael said and he invested and he made $1 million over a year on that gamble. Later, a lawyer I knew told me about a patent infringement case he had worked on brought by a Japanese drug company against Amgen which could have sunk Amgen beneath the waves in the midst of its dizzying rise, but fortunately for Amgen and for Michael, the case was resolved. Michael, of course, had no idea about that risk. He was lucky. And he was smart, as it turned out.

This time, I watched my neighbor, who had stock options in Lilly buy more at $131and she watched it  rise to $833. But did I buy a ticket?

Nope.

Truth be told, I seem to have enough money for now and what difference would becoming a millionaire make to me at my advanced age, when I am just hoping for a long slow, graceful slide into that end runway? The most important thing now is health, not money. And as the song goes: All your money can't another minute buy.

I would love to launch my favorite fantasy project, though. 

Visiting Florida, a few years ago, I noticed men on bicycles with tennis rackets slung over their backs headed to the club for their 5 PM martinis. And I thought: This is what they were looking forward to? This is retirement?

Michael, the guy who bet big and won big on Amgen, told me, when he was 27 that he wanted to retire at age 54 with enough money to do whatever he wanted. And I asked then, as we were both beginning our careers, why he would even think about retirement? What's the point? We should be imagining what our careers would be, what we would do, what we would accomplish. For him, it was business. How to earn enough money fast enough. His father had owned a grocery store. Now Michael had an MD degree and it was all about how to cash in and cash out.

Oddly enough, the big surprise was that for all our obsessions with our careers, it was something else which swooped in and provided the big reward in life: I had two kids. 

And they turned out to be the best thing ever to happen to me.

That was something my mind was totally unprepared for, but I was lucky, I guess. 

Onism: On Being and Nothingness

 

What would it be like to be in his shoes?

--Aaron Burr of Hamilton in "Hamilton"

Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body that experiences only one place at one time

Probably one of the most fundamental attractions of reading or watching fiction is the magic of being transported from seeing the world from behind your only  set of eyes to seeing it from the eyes of another human being, even if that other human being does not and has never actually existed.

If you really think about it, each person in your life, each passerby, each enemy, lover, friend, teacher, boss, child has his own story in which they are the main character, the protagonist and you are just a bit actor--a realization some call "sonder," as in someone else yonder.

On at least five occasions, I think more, I have briefly exited this world and disappeared and then returned, having no idea where I was during that blank interval: Once during general anesthesia for surgery, when I woke up to the smiling face of a Black nurse in the Recovery Room, and I was so happy to find myself back among the living I expostulated, "Oh, you are so beautiful!" And she laughed and said, "Welcome back."

Another two times, I was watching someone draw blood on a patient and simply lost consciousness--that was before I went to medical school. Another time, later, I did the same while someone was drawing my blood and I disappeared into that black void and yet another when I was knocked unconscious in an auto accident.

On each occasion, I experienced nothingness, no sensation, no pleasant or unpleasant sense, just nothing. No noise, sense of cold or heat, smell, touch, pleasure nor pain. Just zip. Nothing.  Blank. Gone boy. Absent without leave. 

It was enough to convince me there may be no after life. I arrived here on earth from somewhere, presumably, and I have absolutely no memory of that nothingness and likely, may well be, headed back there.

Unless, of course, "I" will get recycled. As everything in the current universe where I "live" seems to be cyclical, that reincarnation would make a certain sense, and if there is "justice" or even sick humor in the universe, maybe, if I secretly loathe say, Black people or Indians, I will come back as a Black woman or an Indian.  Somehow that notion has appealed to me, so I have striven to not loathe anyone, to think of how it would be to have to live life as a very obese Black woman or a starving Hindu. 

Even writing novels has not allowed me to escape the single porthole view of life--even trying to imagine a new or different life, I always am drawn back to my own experience and cannot really create a new perspective; I find myself only a journalist, not a real novelist. I have never been able to create a new imagined existence but simply return to my own life experiences. As Fitzgerald said, "Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Sometimes I wonder about patients with "gender dysphoria" who feel they have been born into the wrong body, the wrong gender. Is their problem an intense longing to experience an entirely different life? One of the things I can least imagine, really do not want to imagine, is  what it would be like to be a woman, to have sex as a woman rather than as a man. Or to be Black and to adore whiteness, blonde hair, white skin. To be really short, or to be deformed or sickly. Or to simply be a child and have leukemia and be trapped in a hospital, unable to refuse treatment. 

Or, as William Styron imagined, to be a mother in a concentration camp, and watch the SS guards carry off your baby.

The fact is, much as one might long for a different, better, more exciting life, there are so many alternative stories from one's own story which would be so much worse.

Lola, in "Damn Yankees" was the ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island before she made a bargain with the devil and was instantly transformed into the most dazzling seductress in the world. But, for all the Hell she lives, she remembers that other hell before she made her bargain.

And what a blessing to have been born in the mid 20th century, before computers, the internet, Amazon, Wikipedia, to know how cumbersome life could be before our current high level of technological living, to be able to appreciate all this having been at the before and now to have the after--as our grandchildren cannot, because they never lived without these conveniences. 

But wouldn't it be something to be able to alternate between one existence and another or several others and to be aware of that other self you can occupy? Or maybe, like the heroine of Outlander, to be aware of the different existences you lead as you travel back and forth and time and place? 

Now there's a Netflix series I'd watch.

Looking Back 50 years

 

On board the Elba Viking ship with my brother, some discussion of our time at Cornell University Medical College has been inevitable. He was 5 years ahead of me, and some of the faculty and graduates his of his class were still there when I arrived at the New York City school.  Our class 50 year reunion is approaching and although I'm being more or less required to attend I intend to say nothing or as close to nothing as possible there.

But that does not mean I'll not be thinking about that experience.

Foremost in mind is Bertrand Russell's remark, "The trouble with life is, the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt." That certainly describes many of the students and faculty at CUMC. There were, to be sure, many brilliant folks, but they tended to be the quiet ones: Jerome Posner, neurology; Maria New and Julianne Imperato-McGuinley,pediatric endocrinology; whoever it was who taught our first year physiology course; Henry Masur, Charles Jarowski, my residents; Kathy Foley, my neurology chief resident. 

In sum, I learned more the four years in college and certainly more the 50 years since medical school than I learned of enduring value at Cornell, but the four years in medical school were essential and necessary.

The annoying part of Cornell was it provided a home for people who thought they could substitute arrogance for erudition and get away with it. What they really taught me was that being in power did not mean you were either the best or the brightest.  Many big organizations likely taught the same: the Army, the US Congress, scores of big businesses.

Cornell had too little real innovation--there were no Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page/Sergei Brin types there, people who changed the basic stratum on which life gets lived. The ethos there was not to question but to fall in line, and that does not advance knowledge very well. 

Having said that, real innovators are rare and when I left Cornell for Yale School of Medicine, I found a few innovators, but the school and the hospital which supported it showed what happened when discipline and values of self sacrifice were too lax. Georgetown Medical School taught me what happened when the leaders at the very top were incompetent and the Brown Medical School taught me what a fledgling, underdeveloped school, newly hatched lacked.

So Cornell was good at what it did, but it suffered from a lack of true confidence. It was a place of posturing and pomp, but it managed to accrue the virtues of trying hard, maybe the vice of trying too hard, and in the end, it provided what it promised: a good start.

On Gifting Art

 

When I was a new faculty member, I was asked (directed really) by some senior faculty members  to contribute $50 to a retirement gift, a painting, for a faculty member I barely knew. The faculty showed me the painting and I thought it was pretty awful, but I wasn't being asked my opinion, and in fact, it was pretty clear I was supposed to ooh and ah, which I tried, unsuccessfully I imagine, to do.

The thing about art, paintings in particular, is that it is so personal, you really should not give it as a gift.

It puts the recipient in the position of having to accept it and proclaim how pleased he is, when, in fact, it's entirely possible he will be appalled.

I've been given the occasional birthday or Christmas painting, but in one case it was by an artist I liked, although, as is true for most artists, there are paintings you may like less.

You are pretty safe giving me a Van Gogh, for example, even one I haven't seen before like this one,

but had you given me an early Van Gogh, when he was in his brown and dark potato eaters phase, not so much.

I have given paintings as gifts, but only when I knew the recipient could easily discard it or hang it in her garage and I'd never be the wiser.

In general, it's like presenting a woman you think beautiful and attractive to a man and telling him she is his new wife. Tastes differ. 

A Tree's Tale: Yankee Daring Do

 

I have a fraught relationship with the trees in my yard.

Click to see Rope

We moved in to a new street in old Hampton, New Hampshire 16 years ago and one of the first things I discovered is that I could not simply take out my pick/axe and dig a hole and plop in a tree.

For one thing, the builder had buried all the electrical wires underground, so we have no street poles or lamps and the gas lines are buried as are the cable wires and the underground watering system. So, the first thing I hit with my pick axe was a water sprinkler head.

After that, I had Dig Safe come out and mark all the spots to avoid which left precious little spots for planting.

Obadiah Youngblood, Pink House Drinkwater Road

The Live Free or Die state, you cannot simply buy and plant a tree because you happen to crave that tree. I had always loved Norway maples, which have these really cool maroon leaves, but the Horticulture Department at the University of New Hampshire did not share my love and got the state to outlaw these trees as "invasive species," which cannot be sold in or transported across the state. Complaining bitterly to my neighbor, he laughed, "Well," he said. "The UNH faculty are called tree huggers.'"

But then, a few weeks later, I got an urgent phone call from this neighbor, "I'm at Home Depot," he said. "They've got three Norway maples. I don't think they know what they're selling. Do you want to get them?"

We drove over in his pick up truck and bought all three and I got two for my back yard and I managed to plant them without hitting anything explosive in my back yard, on the edge of the woods which run up to the yard, woods protected by a watershed law.  

Those trees are my pride and joy and they leaf up every Spring and I love them. I also note that the middle school landscaping includes a long line of Norway Maples, which some how got planted despite the prohibition. In fact, these trees are only ever seen in landscaped areas, never in the woods around town. A pretty tame invasive species.

I also planted a London Plain tree, because I admired how New York City uses them, although I managed to plant it on my neighbor's property, but she just shrugged it off, saying, "It's a pretty enough tree."

But then, there was the blue spruce pine. I loved the blue needles and I managed to find a spot which did not run afoul of wires or gas lines or water lines, right next to the house. In general, I do not like trees near a house, but this was just a little Christmas tree, only in blue green and it was about 6 inches in circumference and about six feet tall. That was 16 years ago. Now, it's about 25 feet tall and it blew over in the high winds we had with the last storm.

It was on its side and I went out to inspect it and to start cutting it up with my bow saw. I was saddened to do it. The trunk at its base is at least 3 feet around and the shape has always been symmetrical and lovely. It was like having to shoot a work horse you'd had around the farm since it was a young colt.

But my neighbor appeared with his huge pickup work truck and said, "I think we can pull her up again."

"Even if we could get it up," I said. "Wouldn't it just fall over again?"

"We had some trees do this in our backyard and we drove in stakes and ran lines to them and they took root and survived."

So we threw a rope around the top and ran the line to one of the Norway maples in the backyard and pulled the spruce upright and it's stayed up for 8 hours so far.

I'm just hoping the rope doesn't cost me my Norway Maple.

But so far, we've got one upright tree and one support tree.

Micaela Blei: Hope for America in a Lego Crime

 

An ordinary day. Driving to the Lowes in Seabrook, New Hampshire and this comes on the radio. 

I'm three minutes out from the store's parking lot and by the time I got there, I knew I was not leaving the parking lot until this lady, Micaela Blei, has finished her story. 

Not just that, but I'm laughing, sitting there in my car, with the motor running, because I'm afraid if I turn the motor off the radio will stop and I'll lose this story. 

So I'm polluting the environment, listening to this story.

Laughing.

People are walking by  and looking at me, but I'm helpless. 

I'm just hoping she gets to the end of the story before the parking lot passers by reach security in the store and they all descend on me.

Never heard of this author, Blei.

What have I been missing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQCdDAR6BZI

I've sent it to my friends and family.

They are probably coming for me now.

ADDENDUM:

Okay, I've heard back now.

"Oh, it's sort of cute," and "Tell you sons: They'll remember Legos."

No, actually. That is not what I'm talking about.

What makes this story so good is what Ms. Blei leaves out: Hemingway made a big deal about how the stuff you omit is every bit as important, if not more important, than what you put in. 

You do not know what the Lego jewel thief looks like. You do not have a name to place his background. She tells you only he is sour and bright. That's it. The rest of him you get from his actions. You know he is head of the Black Hole Boys, and this is important to him. You know he treasures the spaceship he made and he tries everything he can to avoid its destruction, even when he is caught. 

And the teacher tells you so much about herself: her capacity to observe the Black Hole Boys. Her delight in the nerdy passions, their wonderment about black holes and speculation about whether there could be a black hole so big it could swallow other black holes. They have that capacity to take things to the next step, as George Carlin mentioned about the kid who asked if God is all powerful could he make a stone so big even he could not move it. And she sees the ethical dilemma she can foist on her 8 year old student, and she declines to "frame" a student for the "crime" of hoarding jeweled Legos. She resolves the missing jewels without resort to crime and punishment. She knows about the spirit of the law.

Listening to all this, I thought of a parent/student conference I attended with my wife and my son's 5th grade teacher. This teacher looked 100 years old, burnt out. She said our son did not know his multiplication tables and so he was not doing well in math.  I asked her if she drilled multiplication tables in class. No, she said, that is up to the students to learn at home. I mentioned all my friends who went to Catholic schools knew their multiplication tables deeply and it was the last thing they ever forgot, even when they got demented or had strokes. They drilled the tables in class relentlessly.

She said, well, that's Catholic schools. The lesson plans for Montgomery County public schools came from the County and did not include drills in multiplication tables. That was for homework in Montgomery County.

I asked her how many boys in her class had troubles with multiplication tables and she guessed about 20 of the 32 students. "So," I said, "Roughly 60% of the boys are behind?"

"Yes."

How many of the girls had trouble? "Oh, maybe one or two. Not many."

"And, by the time they are in 10th grade, of the best math students, how many are boys?"

"Oh, I couldn't say."

"Well, let me ask this another way: Do you think 60% of the boys are behind in math by the 10th grade? Do you think of all the math classes only 40% of the good math students are boys?"

"Oh, no," she said. 

She did not get my point. Ms. Blei would have got my point.

At the parent/teacher conference for my younger son, in middle school, we were told he was an average student, actually just below the median on the bell curve. My wife wanted to know what we could do to improve that. "Oh, well, you know, you can accept it. He's just not going to be his older brother (who by that time had become an academic star, despite his trouble with multiplication tables.) You just have to celebrate him for what he is, for what he can do."

It was all I could do to keep my wife from throwing something at this teacher. "My son is a very bright!" she insisted. 

The teacher smiled a sympathetic, if condescending smile.

I observed, "You know, we just got a call from the teacher who does the literary magazine. He said they had selected this kid's epic poem, in the style of the Iliad, for the magazine this year."

"Oh," the teacher smiled, clearly not seeing how this was relevant and maybe concluding she ought to get closer to the phone so she could call security. "Well, that's nice."

"Yes," I agreed. "I had no more idea he had written an epic poem than you did. When I read it, I was surprised how he had taken the style of the Iliad we had read as a bedtime story, and transmogrified it into the playground battles and the anger and conflict he found in middle school."

"Well, I'll look forward to seeing the magazine," the teacher said,  "It comes out in May."

She had no more idea what was going on in the heads of her students than the traffic cop out in front of the school, and likely less than the school bus driver. 

She was no Micaela Blei.

So, that's what caught my attention.

By the way, we transferred our slightly below average younger son to a private school, despite my reservations about abandoning public schools, and, after a rocky start, he eventually thrived, and he went on to become a vascular surgeon and he is now asked to speak at the school as a returning alumnus, who the school holds up as a success. 

If they could transform this slightly below average kid into a vascular surgeon, they must be a good school.

I'm pretty sure his arc toward success would have come as no surprise to Ms. Blei. 

She would have seen him past the rough spots.