Dove's Eye View

My Life, The Hollywood Edition

I just came back from a weekend in Los Angeles that reads completely out of character for me: movie stars, shopping, comedy shows, the beach.

The actress Camryn Manheim has been a friend of mine since we were in third grade and her father hired my father to teach engineering at a university in central Illinois. We lived down the street from each other for four idyllic years, until both our dads got jobs on opposite ends of the country. Our parents remained close friends and we kept our relationship going through college and afterwards in New York, when our lifestyles seemed to diverge. She went on to big successes in the theater and then in television and the movies, and while she has always been open and welcoming, I felt shy about invading her world. Now we have children the same age, and as we grow older our shared past means more than the differences in our life circumstances. After my first bout with chemo, Camryn invited us to visit her in L.A. - a memorable vacation. Picture below from April 2005, when my hair first started to grow back.

Last Monday Camryn invited me to Venice Beach for the weekend, so I flew down on Friday. The first thing she did was take me to an exclusive Hollywood restaurantfor a party sponsored by Coach bags. The point of the event was to create buzz for Coach, tied to the Golden Globe awards which had already been canceled. We went anyway.

Now let me tell you that the Dove carries a Victorinix messenger bag in black, with plenty of gear hooks on it: room for books, notebooks, pens, money, snacks and occasionally a cel phone. This bag is the preferred Bay Area software geek commuter gear and is a hand-me-down from my husband. When I want to be stylish I carry a two-year-old red leather pocketbook I bought in a discount store. Camryn gave me a black and red Kate Spade bag (she has more stuff than she needs - vendors give her things - and she shares with her friends) to carry to the party so I didn't feel like a big Bay Area computer dork. However I would never buy a Coach, Spade or Prada bag unless it were on sale at the consignment store for $20. I will spend good money on shoes because they are equipment for the feet, but I won't throw money at a handbag.

We ate great Italian food and sat around in the tent watching the hired papparazzi photograph Mandy Moore, Wilmer Valderrama, Debra Messing
and Milla Jovovich. Debora Messing, who was brilliant in the series Will and Grace, is a friend of Camryn's so I got to meet her - she's a lovely person.

The most interesting moment was in the parking lot, as we waited endlessly for our car to arrive; a gaggle of marauding papparazzi huddled at the edge of the driveway, and when Mandy Moore appeared they swooped down, darting around the Coach flacks and waiters to point their cameras in her face. She immediately turned and hid amongst her entourage, who escorted her to her car (a black Prius) while the photographers jostled and shoved. The photogs looked like either skate punks or L.A. gang members. The frenzy was both alarming and ridiculous - as the papparazzi swarmed poor Mandy, children across the street in a schoolyard played kickball. Surreal.

That night, Camryn invited her close friends for an intimate card game with Chinese takeout food. One of the card players is a comic actress who I recognized from Saturday Night Live - she was hilarious, of course, but the whole gang kept me in stitches. I have not laughed so hard and so long since graduate school. All my aches and fatigue from chemo seemed to dissolve, and I stayed up until midnight.

The next morning I walked alone to the beach, where I saw Angelica Huston walking her dogs. She looked me in the eye and smiled. I was staggered. Is that really Angelica Huston? And why is she smiling at me? I think she was acknowledging my chemo turban... rumor has it that she, too is a breast cancer survivor. She's also handsome and classy.

Saturday night Camryn told me we had tickets to see her friend do some standup comedy. I envisioned a supper club with beat-up black walls and patrons stumbling over my knees. The comedienne was Kathy Griffin, and the venue was the Kodak Theater, where they hold the Oscar ceremony. We had fourth row, center orchestra seats. The place was sold out - 3,000 people - and unimaginably grand. A 6'9" drag queen in full length glitter approached Camryn and we all made friends - I hope she sends me the photos soon. So many regular people come up to Camryn as she goes about her life, telling her how much they love and respect her. The Kodak theater show was hilarious - I screamed with laughter at Kathy Griffin - and really enjoyed seeing the fans mob Camryn. We went backstage and milled about looking at people who looked at us to see if we were "somebodies." But the best part was carousing with Camryn at dinner and during the show, enjoying her friends and laughing.

I stayed up too late every night. I sat on the third floor balcony and admired the canals, palm trees and Santa Monica mountains. I walked around Venice and sat on the beach. I ate lunch at Mao's Kitchen "Chinese country-style cooking with red memories." I rode behind Camryn on her little moped to Venice's main shopping street. Try to imagine me riding behind Camryn Manheim on a sage green Indian motorcycle, wearing a helmet over the clever spiral knit skullcap my sister-in-law made for me. At midnight Sunday I tried on Camryn's wigs from her L-Word gig and we ordered a white/silver version for me online. (She sent me home with a loaner, short and blonde, that I must return in case she goes back on the L-Word.) I told her about the video installation traveling the world with my father talking about impermanence, so we looked at a Youtube video excerpt and wept to hear my dad reminding us of our transience on this planet.

(watch to the end to see my father)

Camryn said as I packed up yesterday morning "You just don't seem sick." Laughter and good friends cure all ills. As long as I don't listen to my doctor, I don't think I am sick. In fact, I feel very, very well.

Dad in the Slammer

penitentiary_id014
Originally uploaded by bedouina

My brother found and scanned this ID card from the US Penitentiary at Lewisburg, PA, where my father taught Existentialist philosophy to prisoners like Jimmy Hoffa and Morton Sobel.

Why was my father teaching contemporary religion when he was a professor of engineering? Well, he spent a year on a fellowship at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley - the grant was to allow people in the sciences to study any aspect of religion they liked. My dad got into Kierkegaard in a big way. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in structural engineering at Virginia Tech, and landed a job at Bucknell University right out of grad school. Hence the Lewisburg, PA location.

"Atom bomb spy" and Communist Morton Sobel became a longtime family friend because of Dad's prison work. Helen Sobel used to stay with us when she'd travel by bus from New York City to visit Morton. In later years, when Morton was out of jail and we would visit them in New York, I was disappointed by his answers to my political questions. Communism didn't sound so great to my 14-year-old mind. And my brother never got a straight answer to the question: "Did you do it?" (i.e. pass secrets to the Russians). Doesn't change my feeling that the Rosenbergs were electrocuted for political reasons.

Jimmy Hoffa only attended Dad's class once. Guess he didn't think Kierkegaard was The Man.

Image of Bishop Salim Ghazal

Bishop Salim Ghazal holding my son, Joseph, in the monastery of Deir MKhalles, September 2000. My late father, Elias Abu-Saba, is in the left background. We had just visited with Father Salim during his Sunday tea hour, and he was about to go down to dinner with the brethren of his order, of which he is still the Superior.

This blog gets about twenty referrals a day from search engines, in which people look for images of Bishop Ghazal. His tour of the States must be prompting all the activity. Here's hoping they all try again and find what I believe is the only close up portrait of the Bishop on the Internet.

Tragedy in Blacksburg

The list of the dead at Tech includes at least two (so far) Arabic names: Reema Samaha and Ross Alameddine. Another Arab-American, Jamal Albarghouti, survived the attack and has been seen in the media discussing the celphone video he took of some of the shooting.

UPDATE: The Lebanese foreign ministry confirms that Samaha and Alameddine are of Lebanese ancestry. A new name added to the list, Waleed Shalaan, seems as if it could be Arab, as well.

My profound condolences to the Samaha and Alameddine families, and to all the other people mourning their dead in Virginia today.

Already we have seen a few comments on the internet about the ethnicity and national origin of the shooter. I posted a remark about this at Kevin Drum's site which I want to reproduce here:

My father arrived at Virginia Tech in 1957 as a foreign student from Lebanon. He went there to get a masters' degree - and VPI was cheaper than the other schools he got into - see Cal Tech.

Dad lived at International House in those days, which was full of foreigners. (that's how he met my mom, a student at a nearby women's college and a Southerner of nine or ten generations)

Looking at the list of the Virginia Tech dead, and the interviews with survivors, I notice several Middle Eastern names just for a start. There are also immigrants from all the rest of the world, including the Romanian Holocaust survivor who died protecting his students.

People who hate immigrants will of course use this tragedy as an excuse to bash immigration, but Virginia Tech has a long tradition of welcoming foreign students, and including many who are permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

You would have to find boxcars and send out battalions of troops to purge Virginia Tech of the non-native-born, and then you would still be left with the children of immigrants, people like me with funny names who maybe have an immigrant father. To get rid of all of them, you would have to purge people like Barack Obama. And you would have to decide which immigrants' children you're going to purge - Irish? Mexicans? English? Indians?

Oh yes, and how about all the professors who are naturalized citizens, or children of naturalized citizens with attendant "funny names"? I have a friend on the faculty at Virginia Tech who is an Arab-American, born here; his father, like mine, graduated from Virginia Tech. Shall we get rid of him, too? Probably a quarter of the faculty at most American colleges would have to leave.

And would such ethnic cleansing prevent future gun massacres? Not bloody likely.

Just saying. The logic of immigrant student goes crazy = get rid of immigrants really doesn't hold up.

(end quote)

My thanks to Blue Girl for linking to me, and welcome to those of you who found me via Kevin Drum.

Elias Abu-Saba Poems in Greensboro

My father lived for two decades in Greensboro, NC, where he taught architectural engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University (A&T). After he and my mother moved to Beirut in the early 90s, they continued to use Greensboro as their home base in the States for another decade.

During those years Dad wrote and read lots of poems! He attended many public readings in Greensboro and was active in the community. No party was complete without one of Dad's poems, often composed on the spot and inscribed on a paper placemat or styrofoam cup.

Now his work is being celebrated as part of Greensboro's month-long poetry festival. It appears that a dozen of his friends are going to read his poems on April 23. Mom has just asked me to choose my favorites from his enormous oeuvre.

If you click on the link, you'll see a handsome photo of him in his beret and a tweed jacket. Dearest Daddy! I still miss him.

Impermanence: The time of man

For Christmas, here's another story about my father, Elias Abu-Saba.

Dad had this friend, David Hodge, who is a filmmaker and video artist here in California. Mr. Hodge was doing a piece on Impermanence as part of an artistic tribute to the Dalai Lama, and asked Dad to give his thoughts in a long video interview.

Hodge used Dad's voice in an installation of 16 I-pods broadcasting the words of 108 people, playing simultaneously in a large room. Read about it here: Impermanence: The time of man.

Last May, months before his death, Mom and Dad got to view/hear the installation. Mom says that Dad was particularly articulate and that his words were really moving. He didn't know he was dying when he made the interview or when they listened to the whole piece; he was diagnosed with cancer two months later.

I hope I get to experience this unusual art installation devoted to impermanence and to peace.

My father did some amazing things in his life, but this one surprises me. Even after his death, he still gets to tour the world, talking, in an avant-garde performance piece using I-pods. That would be my dad, an earthy peasant poet immortalized in the latest technology. He had this paradoxical quality of being cutting edge and completely old-world at the same time. Part of him loved the land, olives, and history, and part of him loved computers, engineering, new architecture, and gadgets. Both of these aspects are very Lebanese. You can see this paradox at work in Beirut today - and all over Lebanon.

People are impermanent. Love the ones around you because tomorrow they will be gone. Everything changes, everything passes.

Merry Christmas, everybody. And Dad, wherever you are, we love you and think of you each day.

Update: read the comments for links to the virtual tour of the art gallery, and more info on the main show. The video installation is part of a large group exhibit including Laurie Anderson, Bill Viola and Jenny Holzer. I am just staggered.

Sunset From Mieh-Mieh

Sunset From Mieh-Mieh
Originally uploaded by bedouina.

No sunsets are more beautiful than those from Tell Mieh-Mieh - so said a poet once imprisoned in the British jail on the western heights of our town. The poet Munif Moussa, my father's cousin, told me this quote over tea in my uncle's house.

Dad took this picture in September, 2005, on his last visit to Lebanon. He loved photos of sunsets and other gorgeous landscapes.

Here he is with his relatives that same month:

Elias Abu-Saba: SF Chronicle Obit

This is the obituary my mother placed in the SF Chronicle for October 5, 2006: Elias Abu-Saba.

The picture was taken in a gelateria during their Italian vacation last year. It's her very favorite picture of him...

Lebanon or America? Poem by Elias

Ghassan Abdullah, of Ramallah, Palestine, comments that my father once gave him a poem:

In reply to my question about identity between Lebanon and the USA, he recited to us a lovely poem he wrote about that, which I still circulate to people in the same dilemma. He talks passionately about his love and longing for the homeland, with all its shortcomings, and contrasts that with wanting to be with his grandchildren, and about the better roads and rule of law in the US.

Mr. Abdullah kindly sent a PDF of the poem, which you can view here. It's in Arabic, and written by hand. I can barely read it because I am so illiterate in Arabic, but I can tell that it has lines that say "Here I have a house, there I have" some other noun. "Here I have mountains, there I have...", and so forth.

If any of my Arabic-literate readers can make out this poem and care to translate or summarize, please be my guest. I have no way of telling whether it's a good poem or not, but it resonates for Mr. Abdullah, who only met my father once.

Thank you so much, Ghassan Abdallah, for sharing this with us. It means so much to me to know that a stranger treasures Dad's poetry, and circulates it among his friends. And you are from Palestine, moreover. My father would be so happy.

Memorial in California

Memorial service for Elias Abu-Saba in Alameda, California

Sunday, October 8, 2006
4 p.m.
Buena Vista United Methodist Church
2311 Buena Vista Avenue
Alameda, CA

Please join my mother, brother and me in the church hall for light refreshments afterward.