I'm Not Giving Thanks For...

I routinely have a lot to give thanks for on Thanksgiving, and this year is certainly no exception. Last year, Thanksgiving fell on the day after my 35th and last radiation treatment—perfect timing I thought… until I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table unexpectedly unable to eat anything from the beautifully-arrayed plate of food before me. In the months to follow, I felt as if I was the roasted turkey. This year, thanks to family and friends and love, and the loving care of doctors and nurses, I will feast.

Ungracious as it may sound, today I find myself thinking contrarily of what I won’t give thanks for. Many will take that as a definitive sign that I’m feeling better. Wanting to share my skewed perspective with you tells me I am. But before I do, I want to touch on a few of the high points of Thanksgivings past.

For 37 years, we lived in an apartment with a large-as-life, premium view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Families, the children the guests of honor, crowded at our oversized windows as float after float and balloon after balloon floated by, so close you felt you could almost reach out and touch something or someone in the parade. One year, I did something almost as unlikely as that. The revival of “Brigadoon” was a Broadway hit and its star, Martin Vidnovic, was perched atop one of the floats. I called to Marty, only once, from my window. And through the din, he heard me, looked up and saw me, grinned and waved. “Been too long,” I called, “let’s have lunch.” “Name it,” he said. “Russian Tea Room, next Wednesday. 12:30,” I responded. “We’re on,” he shouted. Neither of us bothered to confirm and both of us showed up as planned.

In April of 1984, I brought a sizeable sampling of Thanksgiving from Manhattan to Tel Aviv via “the balloon man” and four of his towering Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, leading to one of the most comically bizarre episodes of my life. You can read it on this blog, but then please come back for what “I’m Not Giving Thanks For….”

As a rule, I don’t write when I have nothing to say. Too much has already been written, and, for that matter, said and sung, and if I don’t have anything new to say, or can’t think of a new way to say what may already have been said, I don’t. Having something new to say calls for passion, or something akin to it, as well as insight.

I haven’t been passionate about anything the past month except two Broadway dramas, the exceptional “Other Desert Cities” and the mercurial “Seminar.” I haven’t been angry about anything (not even anything Republican!), nor offended or indignant. In truth, the GOP has given me great pleasure this month thanks to the presidential candidates debates. I’m giving profuse thanks for them Thursday—and every day from now until election day 2012.

I’m not giving thanks for—or to—the 12 hopeless members of the failed special Congressional committee on deficit reduction. Nor, for that matter, do I have any thanks for anyone in the United States Congress. I think they should all go home for Thanksgiving and stay there.

I have no thanks in me for Texas, all of it, nor Arizona—not for the grief they’ve given us (as in U.S.). Ditto, the calcified and dividedly doctrinal Supreme Court, at least 5/9ths of it. In the larger picture, I’m not giving thanks, this year or any foreseeable year to the U.N. for what it’s become: the United Nations of Hypocrisy.

I’m not giving thanks for a living person anywhere in the world who has, in any way, betrayed the trust of children. Or for those who robotically repeat the euphemisms of journalists, jurists and sermonizers, hollow terms like endangerment, exploitation, trafficking, abuse. A child doesn’t have to be moved from one place to another for the offense to be child trafficking. Leaving a child with no choice is slavery, plain and simple.

I have not a shred of appreciation or compassion for any entity or organization that power has corrupted… or greed has infested and infected. “Corrupted” chiefly includes nightstick and pepper-spray wielding police, but doesn’t exclude unreasonably unruly mobs; autocrats, but also arrogant caucuses and sociopaths. The latter, “greed,” encompasses peddlers of gilt-edged schemes they wouldn’t sell to their mothers—in most cases. And other sociopaths.

I’m withholding thanks to professional sports organizations and outrageously-overpaid athletes until they get their Ps and Qs—profits and salary quotes—in order. Not so long ago, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered and basketball player Latrell Sprewell rejected a $21 million offer to extend his contract for three years as insufficient, because, said Sprewell, "I got a family to feed."

I’m not giving thanks to an Arab Spring that is metamorphosing into a bitter-cold Arab winter, contagious with unrest and pandemic in potential.

No thanks to or for Jon Corzine, Bernard Madoff, Mel Gibson (self-destructing is not enough), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talk radio hosts, or anyone named Newt.

Last, but not least: thanks but no thanks to the nation of sheep the U.S. has hastened to become. Either Erasmus, Anouilh or an English proverb (I’m not giving thanks for the lack of reliable attribution.) says, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Beware the Cyclops who emerges to lead the bleating masses.

And this is me not being angry, offended or indignant. Happy Thanksgiving.

Mickey Mouse's Pass-over in the Holy Land

In hostile hands, it could have been a blood libel: Mickey Mouse Decapitated In Israel for Passover! All said and done, there was no denying he was in two pieces.

An Israeli producer had asked me to add the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons to a large package of performers I was bringing to Israel for a children’s festival during Passover. [See: “Once Upon a Passover” immediately below.] On Thanksgiving Day eve, I walked eight blocks north from my apartment to a cordoned-off Upper West Side, Manhattan block where a lot of industrious people spend all night once a year spreading out the large, flat balloons on the street and inflating them gradually with helium. Under the glow of lamppost lights, I found The Balloon Man who, with Mrs. Balloon Man, supplied “Mickey,” “Goofy” and the rest of the Disney/Looney-Tuney balloony-cartooney spectacle to parades and fairs.

I asked Mr. and Mrs. if they’d like to go to the Holy Land—with their balloons. Two days later, from their home in deepest Virginia, they said yes. I learned they’d never been out of the country and needed passports, their first. The balloons had their own travel demands. They were bulky, fragile and costly, and had to be crated for cargo and fully documented for customs. Above all, I was forewarned, they required a LOT of helium. My production partner Shalom and I gave the Israeli production people the helium specifications down to the cubic centimeter. Taking no chances, we phoned and faxed them repeatedly in advance to remind them: no helium, no balloons in the air.

The Balloon Couple got to Israel on time and without incident. But “Mickey” and the three additional balloon “characters” we had agreed on transporting were detained by customs in almost every country, so it seemed, they passed through between the United States and Israel, and their anxious proprietors were concerned. It was like watching nervous parents waiting at the front door at night well past curfew for their tardy children. Early every morning, Mr. Balloon Man would wake one of our Israeli drivers to take the lengthy trip with him to the airport to claim his precious balloons, which were not there yet. Afternoons and evenings he would eat—foods he had never before seen, but was conspicuously consuming. When he complained of acute diarrhea, Shalom instructed one of our drivers to find him some Kaopectate. It’s possible the directions on the label were in Hebrew. We learned he guzzled the entire bottle. He had no need for a john for days.

We weren’t happy with the hotel The Balloon Couple were in, so we started working on moving them to a better one. As for the helium, when we asked we were confidently told ain ba’ayah, “no problem.”

The balloons finally arrived! Now they were only stuck in Israeli customs, but after several more superfluous trips to the airport, they were “sprung.” The crates were carted out to the park where the week-long festival would take place, and we summoned the helium. Ain ba’ayah, we were told again. Fifteen minutes later, a man arrived carrying a can about the size of a football and proudly presented it to us. “Where’s the rest?” we asked innocently. There was no “rest”—not in the vicinity, not in all of Israel. We would have to send to England for it and, we learned, it would take a week to get it. That would be the day the festival ended.

Instead of four glorious balloons sailing high above Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park, we were relegated to the grounded head of one balloon—of Mickey Mouse—anchored and protected from assault, at Mr. Balloon Man’s insistence, by a wooden fence on all four sides—and further guarded by his wife on a folding chair inside the fence.

We moved them to a new hotel, into a suite with picture windows overlooking the Mediterranean. We encouraged them to let go of their disappointment over the balloons, as we had, and to enjoy themselves. You’re in the Holy Land! See it! We never mentioned food again.

Evenings, I had musicians asking me, more than once, when “this holiday” ended and they could have bread, egos of every age and assortment to massage, and two under-aged break-dancers from our company sneaking out of their hotel at every opportunity to a local disco to hustle $20 bills from customers intrigued by their novel moves.

While the Mrs. was on guard, nature called. Trustingly leaving her purse on a fence stave, she abandoned her post. Everywhere in Israel, signs constantly remind people to “Be Aware of Abandoned Packages.” Someone alerted the bomb squad. The Mrs. emerged from the ladies room to witness a robot crossing the field en route to dismantling or dousing her purse. (We saved it.)

While everyone else was singing and dancing by day and breaking matzoh by night, the Balloon Couple were idle—and reclusive. As they lounged on the couch in their suite enjoying a sunset on the Mediterranean—after he recited a litany of how difficult and disappointing the trip had been for them—he said to her, “But honey, we have to give these people credit. They’ve gone out of there way [sic] to make us comfortable.” And as the words were coming out of his mouth, an upright body, arms and legs splayed, mouth open and contorted, hurled past their window. Hysterical, the Mr. called the hotel operator who, in addition to having trouble deciphering his southern accent, already knew, amid the pandemonium, what he was frantically trying to tell her. The body had plunged through the lobby ceiling and onto the lobby floor. We later learned it was the body of a United Nations soldier who was stopped on the top floor and asked by a hotel security man if he was a guest of the hotel. The upset soldier hoisted and threw a courtesy shoe-buffing machine through a plate glass window (overlooking the Mediterranean) and followed it out the window.

Our Balloon Couple, who’d presumably never seen worse than a patch surgically attached to Bugs Bunny’s behind, was inconsolable. Our Israeli producer was sympathetic and concerned. “What can we do for them now?” he asked me. I said, “Get them the fuck out of here.”

Callous? No, quite the contrary. For their sakes, I felt, let them go home. I knew at this point nothing in our power could make it up to them. Nevertheless, we tried.We arranged for them to have a weekend on us in Rome. We later learned they never stopped, in all likelihood never got off the plane, went straight through to Virginia. We never heard from them again. I said we brought two people to see the Holy Land and probably made anti-Semites out of them. The Revenge of Mickey Mouse?