From Teeth to Toes

Yesterday I lost a tooth. It was no surprise really. I was told twenty years ago that I had two baby teeth clinging against all odds to the cliff of my lower gum. Neither tooth possessed roots long enough to take root, nor were there ever any adult chops lying in wait.


Despite countless warnings from more than a mouthful of dentists, I not only continued to chomp down on popcorn over the years as if it were the source of life itself, but I did not have the good sense to stop at the kernels. Instead I lustily cracked them between my tender baby teeth like a woman lapping at a dirty pond located right beside the vast, clean and burbling source of France’s bottled water. I’m an idiot.


I got twenty extra years out my toddler teeth, for which I should be grateful. But I’m not. I wish I had twenty more. Especially after my dentist told me that the price of his implants are cheap at $3,000 a pop. In a desperate bid to change the outcome of my visit, I asked him, mournfully, rhetorically, how exactly toothlessness was going to enhance my new romance. I was hoping to elicit enough sympathy to spark a heroic tooth-saving effort. Not skipping a beat, my dentist offered his sage advice instead, like he’d been moonlighting as Dear Abby his whole professional life.


Dentist: “Your new man will take care of you, you’ll see. And if he doesn’t, then you’ll know he’s not right for you.”

“Except he won’t,” I said.

“Sure he will,” he said, encouragingly.

“No, actually, he won’t. He’s out west on a mountain. Skiing.”

He had no answer to that. But, later, he did try again, god bless him. He advised me to tell my new man not shove his tongue too deeply into the place where my tooth used to be. I think he was making a joke. But I was too busy thinking that my new guy’s tongue would not likely share a hotel lobby with me, never mind a mouth! There was really no other option. I’d have to dump him. Not the dentist, the new guy. The only thing worse than fearing you are liked for the wrong reasons – like because you have a pulse – is fearing you are liked out of duty! And worse than duty is obligation from someone you barely even know (except maybe carnally). You see, I can’t really call this guy a boyfriend quite yet. We are currently in that strange, not-yet-relationship phase of two people who knew each other as friends a decade ago, fell out of touch, reconnected recently and then decided to see if there could be more. That phase. That very, very, very fragile phase. So, although we feel familiar to each other, the truth is, we are effectively strangers (despite having made it past each others’ border guards).


As I sat on the streetcar with a wad of gauze the size of a pillow wedged into my very own Grand Canyon, mouth cranked open so wide that I could not deny I had become, for all intents and purposes to my streetcar mates, a mouth breather, I concocted a number of creative ways to let my beautiful new man go. I can't let him martyr himself on the alter of my new deficiency. He deserves better. He deserves teeth.

But I won't do it until he gets home. Just because I now have Mariana’s Trench in my mouth does not mean he should not enjoy topping a mountain. Why should my wee personal tragedy stop him from wrapping his ski-hill-toned thighs around the side of a mountain like she’s his bitch?


Yesterday morning I was going to write a post exploring the concept of “fashion backward.” But the dentist changed all that. When I got home I popped three blue Advil, downed some soft Ricotta cheese and went to sleep. This morning, however, I realize that writing might distract me, so I'm going to forge ahead as planned.

What is "fashion backward", you ask? It's that item in your closet that is not old enough to be considered retro but not new enough to be fashion forward. While shopping for an 80s ensemble at Value Village last Saturday to wear to an 80s party I’m attending this Saturday, I spotted a pair of red Steve Madden shoes so fracking cool I had no choice but to claim them as my own the way a mother, nose pressed to the maternity ward window, zones in on her baby without the aid of its identity bracelet.

I was so thrilled with my new shoes that I could barely contain myself when, the next day, K and P were gobbling up the food I’d made them for brunch, providing the perfect opportunity for me to prance around in my Wizard of Oz purchase. Look at me! Look at me!

Their reaction was twofold.

Number 1:

Number 2:


K confirmed later that day, when I could trust myself not to cry while inquiring if the problem was that the shoes were simply not old enough to be cool yet, that yes, that was the problem. By way of illustration, she informed me that she had had a similar pair of shoes three years ago. Hence, not long ago enough to command retro allure. Obviously, she no longer wears them. I remember a fellow artist saying something similar to me in my studio when I expressed a wish to paint something from the 1990s. He said that era was not far enough in the past to have retro caché. In other words, my shoes are not old-cool, they are simply uncool.

Although I get it, I don’t feel it. Because the truth is, I love these shoes. I love their bluey-red hue, their lace-upityness and their cute snub noses. I love their square jaw. And I love how they feel. It’s like this: I did not learn to love Led Zepplin until long after their hey day. But would a Led Zepplin lover fault me for loving Zep now? What difference does make when I learned to love them? Isn’t it only important that I love them?

I can’t keep up with fashion in anything – from shoes to painting to music. So I’ve stopped trying. In my little corner of the world, I am stubbornly clinging to my own brand of un-fashion the same way Superman spun the globe backwards to reverse time and the death of his true love. I was not able to reverse time to save my beloved tooth, but I’ve definitely stopped time at the place where my Steve Madden shoes are fashion-Liz, thus always "in". In my world, the only one that really matters, I call this style, "fashion present"!

Seriously Gobsmackingly Great Book

Some books hit you upside the head. Others split your sides right down the middle. This one does both. I'm not even half way through it and I want to buy a copy for every person I know. That's right, I'm extolling the virtues of a book I'm not even finished reading. That's how I-don't-even-have-an-emphatic-enough-word good it is. It has already delivered more hilarity, more poetry and more ass-kick writing than most of the books I've ever read. I can't buy you a copy, unfortunately, because I'm broke but I urge you to run out and buy your own. For those of you who can't read mirror images, the book is called A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz.

Like a poltergeist jonesing for a little play time with the living, this book threw me on the floor where I laughed myself silly, and then pinned me there with gut-wrenching tales of bizarre sports-loving-related crimes and more-crazy-than-your-own family dramas. It's told with such tenderness and wit-sharpened insight that I'm convinced the point at which the Jewish diaspora and the Criminal diaspora intersect at the bottom of the earth, where no one is really looking (i.e. Australia), is the point at which the right alchemical ingredients and conditions exist to yield what every book lover seeks: gold.

This book could not have come at a better time. I have been struggling to find something to blog about for the last two weeks. No matter what I did – even brunch with amazing French people


who know how to make the perfect brunch food (high-end baguette with pear and double-cream brie and some kind of dijon and honey sauce, all topped with pecans and then grilled) . . .


. . . and, of course, the perfect latte . . .


. . . and every item colour coordinated because the French are born speaking fluent Style . . .



– I still came up empty for a post. It seemed my mind had gone on vacation but forgot to tell me where it went and when it was coming back. Also, I’ve been sick. Also, I’ve been happy. Depression practically writes itself. But contentment would rather do other things, like eat out, watch Peep Show and stay in bed – with company.

As a so-called writer, however, it's my job to do my job regardless of how I feel, the same way actors and CEOs fake their way through their depressions and recessions in order to get the job done.

So, taking a page from Steve Toltz’s book, I will do as Toltz’s protagonist, Jasper, does and let someone else do the talking. Normally I would say this approach to posting screams cop out, but I know my instincts are right in this case because I simply cannot do the book justice. Toltz is too fucking smart.

Like the inexplicable but compelling stuffed bunny sitting on a shelf of the furnished apartment I am renting . . .

. . . I will let Toltz's unexpected and riveting story stand as its own illustration of the weirdly-hypnotic thing that it is.

A little context: Eight-year-old Jasper (who is eight in the same way I am internationally famous – his hilarious, world-weary storytelling belies his true age) hands a great deal of the storytelling over to his eccentric father, who tells Jasper a story about the coma Jasper's father was in for four years in early childhood. During this almost-dead state/time, Jasper’s father saw and heard things he could not possibly have seen and heard. By way of explanation he tells Jasper, “when there aren’t any waking hours . . . for months or even years . . . it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach . . . right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stories of things that were left there by previous generations.” Here’s some of what he saw:

I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you’d better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper “I don’t think you’re going to make it” and all the shrugging midnights say “Better luck tomorrow.” I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend . . . I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think “I’m attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.” I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian café. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backset. . . . I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn’t kill . . . . I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking “Culture’s one thing, but this is getting expensive.” I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. . . . I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the forgeries of great paintings but no forgeries of great books. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns . . . I saw inside all the mouths and it’s really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird’s-eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads . . .

Later in the book, Jasper's father describes Paris:

But Paris -- beautiful poor ugly opulent vast complex gray rainy & French. You see unbelievable women, umbrellas, beggars, tree-lined streets, bicycles, church spires, Africans, gloomy domes, balconies, broken flower pots, rudeness that will ring through eternity, aimless pedestrians, majestic gardens, black trees, bad teeth, ritzy stores, socialists moving their hands up the thighs of intellectuals, protesting artists, bad drivers, pay toilets, visible cheese smells, witty scarves, shadows of body odors in the metro, fashionable cemeteries, tasteful transvestites, filtered light, slums, grim, desire, artistic lamp posts, multicoloured phlegm of passive chimney smokers, demented cobblestone faces in terrace cafés, high collars, hot chocolates, flashy gargoyles, velvet berets, emaciated cats, pick pockets running away with glittering entrails of rich German tourists, & great phallic monuments in the squares & sex shops.

. . . but why is it that when I hear someone make a great philosophical argument I get the same feeling as when I see someone has put clothes on his dog?

Photo credit: My friend Philippe took the bunny photo.