Leni

Leni Riefenstahl was a major force at St. Martin's Press, the small house that was quickly becoming a midsized one during my apprenticeship. She'd become our shot at entering the grown-up world of bestsellers about infamous personalities from history that give a house prestige and win awards. The attention over a hardcover edition drives sales, and a major hit is something a house can make a profit from for years, which meant everyone who could get involved did so most vocally. 

I was first introduced to her in the art department. One of my friends was jealous that another art director he considered less talented was designing the cover, and in our back-stabbing world of "celebrity" designers, you're only as good as your last cover design. It wasn't lost on me at the time that we mirrored her world of uneasy alliances made in service to art and design, because she'd worked as a filmmaker during Hitler's regime. 

After the hardcover edition went to paperback, my friend finally got to revise the design to meet his standards, and that's when we talked about Nazi Germany; at his computer, while he colorized her cover photo. He told me he could relate to her conversion to fascism (!!) through the carefully fabricated military outfits. "How seductive it must have been to a poor farm kid back then", he said to me as the son of Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry business. The leather boots, those sharp shoulders on the jacket that fit just so...

Huh. That's....eerie, dude. The first "Leni" art director would come out of the closet years later, after dumping his very masculine wife and their adopted Asian baby, before my friend finally came out as ADHD and OCD. On the heels of those twin disclosures, I could finally see what kind of monst...er, person, would be attracted to stage sets full of blond boys in matching military dress, and just like then, I still don't like what I heard as an excuse for genocide through collusion. What horror!

It brought me back to the importance of authenticity, and how very important it is that we tell the truth about our histories, hard as that may be. For my family, we finally got the happy ending we were seeking, not that we had sat around waiting for validation from anyone. My father's family had told us the truth about our Acadian Metis origins as the first generation of Europeans to intermarry with the Micmac people of Nova Scotia, because that's exactly what my dad's East Asian/Native American DNA reflects: the time period of first contact in Canada between 1780-1600s. BTW, my little native percentage showed up as a Yakutian from East Siberia before our ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge many moons ago.

And so it was no surprise to me that I remembered hearing the art directors talk about Leni Riefenstahl's fake autobiography, because it was said she had her birth certificate forged so she could profit from Hitler and the Nazi Regime as an artist. So, that isn't actually in the book? I had to know our culpability. The art director told me the editor wanted it in the epilogue, but he'd been shot down. Well...what is it? "She lied about not being Jewish, and he's Jewish, too." Oh. That's kind of big deal. 

As I wrote this piece to you, I thought about my part in the process when I relieved myself of debt from a honest lifetime spent on basic food, clothing, and shelter, bought at the time with my bargain salary of $19,500/year. I know I've paid it back in full, and then some. 
The real question is: have you? 

Magic

A horror show. No, not a fake movie: the real deal.

Every year my aunt Marilyn gave us the worst gifts should could get away with, and that was the point. She had responsibilities an an adult she hated. She gave one son to her mother to take care of, then left her daughter by another father to drugs, jail, and prostitution, hiding behind the falsely fretting, hand-wringing, long-suffering mother posture. It was sneaky and clever, which was also the point. She wanted to be seen as devilishly smart, like the thief who can't get caught, locked in a childish game of cat and mouse with life that included the people around her who were closest to her. She had a wild teenage past, complete with bad tattoos and a stint as a Go-Go dancer, with lurid white vinyl boots and the also-requisite bad attitude that fell flat with the laissez-faire Acadians in her clan, pragmatic and slow to anger, every single one of us. Wayward youth? So what! Same, man! And ain't that the world we were dealt? Ho hum.

In response to our sangfroid demeanor, she upped the ante to get the attention she wanted. And so, she embarked on a career as a petty antagonist, with her barbs and pat, trite, oft-repeated quips, her rapid-fire, snappy replies, and her nearly constant smoking and drinking. It still didn't really bother us, though, because we love a raucous bon temp, too! What's next? She had a genius IQ that she hid out of laziness and spite, choosing to become my father's ever-dependent. When she lost a job, he had her go to a bank (my dad started in business as a banker), where they promptly sent her to a facility for IQ testing, which, unfortunately for her schemes, came back genius level. They told my dad that she could do whatever she wanted, but that she chose not to. She could have any job at the bank, but she chose the easiest one of all: a teller. She liked being easy, and that's what she did, over and over again, in full view of us.

It was the same with our so-called "Christmas gifts", or birthday presents, or school graduations, or weddings, or...you get the point. She had to make an appearance to save face by honoring her benefactor's kids (my father), but how best to subtly show her disdain? Aha! Tacky presents. Eureka! It wasn't something you could necessarily prove in a court of law, but it delivered the intended bad effects upon the recipient, with just the right amount of bitchy, clever pettiness, the exact affect she wanted.

And so it went, the same bad joke every year: ugly wool sweaters that immediately caused our skin to itch, which my mom backed up by forcing us to wear in front of her as a "thank you" that was really a "fuck you" without the gesture or words to prove it. Huh. Clever, girl. 
If the scariest horror movie that year was an evil puppet gone psycho, she sat there at the table, smoking and listening to us talk about it, so she could buy a ventriloquist dummy for me that she could pass off as a beloved relic from her youth: "Oh, Mortimer Snerd! I loved him!", from a show none of us kids had ever heard of. She laughed when I said it gave me the heebie jeebies at night (because that was the point), so I simply solved the problem by putting it in the back of my small bedroom closet with a blanket over it. Done. It went away eventually at a garage sale, just like her pin cushion that was the shape of a Victorian woman's expensively shod foot, knowing that I didn't sew regularly as a hobby, because I had so many others that she could openly ignore.

She pretended not to know me, just like she neglected the birth connection she shared with her offspring. We were disposable, and she remained angry that she was never center stage until the day she died from a slow suicide of cigarettes and alcohol, refusing until the very last day she struggled for breath on this earth, choking on the kitchen floor of the house my father bought then gave to her after he moved on, refusing to quit her bad habits even after the diagnosis was delivered with an oxygen tank for her to breathe with, and oh, the horror of that, forever depriving us of someone who could be the funniest, warmest soul you ever met, delivering a big loss we all keenly felt, the power of her final hurt put upon us for the rest of our lives. 

Long may she rest in the peace she never found nor gave to those she was supposed to love the most and hold onto the hardest. She was my father's only sibling in the world, a man who paid dearly for her every sin with generosity and faithfulness without ever getting the genuine, heartfelt "thank you" he deserved for his consistent, regular attendance and filial duty to her, by leaving him alone in a world he chose to excel in, because he chose to live. 

Amen to you, my faithful who are also "The Faithful", during this time that is our continued Holy Week.
 

A horror show in a box cleverly disguised as a "gift".